2016 Dec 21^st

Today we have two right wing columnists to counter; there is the “newbie” (for the local paper at least) Michael Barone and an old favorite, our Moral Majority VP friend, Cal Thomas.

The Detritus, on Dec. 14^th commented on Barone’s column as follows: 
And now for Barone’s most laughable comments, “Exit polls show that Trump …ran slightly better among non-whites than Romney did in 2012, This apparent regression to the mean, to voting more like the national average, undercuts the theory that…non-whites will remain overwhelmingly Democratic forever.”--- Ah, how wonderful is the power of distortable statistics.

Trump did get 33 percent more of the African American vote than Romney got. Of course Romney was running against an African American and Trump was running against a Caucasian woman. That should make a difference, but 33 percent? That’s a lot. But let’s look more closely:  Romney got just 6 percent of the African American vote; Trump got 8 percent of that vote, that’s an increase of 33 percent all right. But looked at another way Romney lost 94 percent of African American voters while Trump lost just 92 percent of it. That’s a measly 2 percent smaller loss; whopee for Trump! The bottom line here is that if you are going to lose 90 to 95 percent of the vote of a growing population your party is in trouble.

So what’s new today in Barone’s right wing world? His latest epiphany is that money no longer matters so much in politics. He makes this nonsensical observation on the basis that Hillary Clinton spent far more than did Donald Trump and she still lost. He doesn’t mention that while Trump won the Electoral College vote he lost the popular election by well over 2.8 million votes. Still his people believe he has a mandate because they are sure the popular vote loss was due to the vote of millions of illegal aliens.

It is true that Hillary Clinton spent far more than did Donald Trump, but Barone conveniently overlooks all of Trump’s “freebies.” In just one week, from Oct 30 to Nov 5, Trump held 21 rallies, every one televised by all of network television, and Trump paid nothing for that coverage.  The coverage was by the same “mainstream media,” that Trump insisted were scum.

In August and September of this year Trump held 59 of these hour long rallies making the usual vague promises with no explanation of how he would achieve them, and insisting that Clinton should be in jail. He paid not one dime for any of that TV time. What do you suppose those 59 hour long commercials advertising himself would have cost him if he had to pay for them. If you get a free ride, of course money isn’t as important.

Then we have Barone complaining about the Clinton campaign “…spending the bulk of their ad budget on spots decrying Trump’s character and this bombardment was augmented by mainstream media talking heads expressing horror at his latest outrage”

Clinton’s commercials against Trump usually consisted of Donald Trump’s own words. That’s all she really needed. Barone, do you remember Trump saying, on camera, that he could grab a woman’s privates and because he was rich and famous, the women wouldn’t object? That was out of Trump’s own mouth. Clinton couldn’t manufacture anything more damaging to Trump than Trump’s own utterances. That none of his comments damaged him tells you a lot about his fans.

Tomorrow I’ll get around to our Moral Majority boy’s misleads.