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Saturday, December 05, 2015

Bullshit By Numbers

After being spurred on by a headline from tomorrow regarding yet more Trump bafflegab, I felt compelled to once again take a bullet for y'all, and listen to the full rally to see if there was even a little bit of context or elaboration. Let's begin with the nonsense in question:

Republican front-runner Donald Trump promised his approach to terrorism would be "so tough you don't want to hear" during a raucous rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.

With nearly half the 50-minute event devoted to audience questions, Trump talked up the value of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques and told a questioner he would take a very different approach to terrorism than President Obama.

"We are going to handle it so tough," Trump said. "I would handle it so tough you would have no idea."

Okay, well, suppose you give us some idea, genius. That's kinda how this is supposed to work. Put it this way -- we want to hear, we would like to have an idea. Quit sounding like a twelve-year-old scaredy-bragging about he's like rilly rilly gonna kick yer ass like soooo fuckin' hard, you don't even wanna know. And his dad can beat up your dad.

He also said the attacks in Paris and shootings in San Bernardino could have ended differently if the victims had been armed.

"If the people in Paris or California, if you had a couple of folks in there with guns, and that knew how to use them, and they were in that room, you wouldn't have dead people, the dead people would be the other guys," Trump said.
You mean like armed security guards or cops? They didn't have any security at the Bataclan?

Two of the six security agents on duty that night were stationed at the main door, and they rushed to open up the emergency exits when the first shots rang out. "Didi," who was overseeing security at the Bataclan, told French daily Le Monde that the attackers fired at the security team and shattered the glass windows in the entrance of the hall.

So the first five minutes or so are about how awesome Mister Man is doing in the polls. Of particular note is how he's kicking the shit out Hitlery in the head-to-head polls, how it's not even close. Well, the flaming lie-berals at Real Clear Politics seem to disagree.



Now, maybe I'm not so good at readin' all them complimicated numbers there, what with my EmmBeeAyy and all, but that chart seems to indicate that only the Fixed Noise poll puts Trump ahead at all, and then only by one point more than the margin of error.

Possibly even more telling is the chart below, where Hillary's most recent uptick is more than Trump's. The point her is not to say that Clinton is going to kick Trump's ass should the GOP lose its collective fucking mind and let this gaping asshole be their nominee -- it's probably not an exaggeration to say that as many people despise Hillary Clinton as will vote for her. That's really going to be the question for 2016:  can the Democrats round up more people to vote for her, than the Republicans can rally to express their loathing for her? It's going to be a close call, and it may not even matter who the GOP nominee turns out to be. There seem to be more people who hate her than like her, so the challenge is to motivate the people who can live with her.

But the fact of the matter is that Trump is neck-and-neck (please, no wattle jokes) with her at best. And with eleven months to go, and plenty of gaffes and missteps from all the candidates to come, it's way too soon for anyone to be pulling a Babe Ruth and pointing for the stands.

The pacing of this rally is blessedly short, as Trump actually just has less than a half-hour of his usual boilerplate riffs, with the rest of the time turned over to a Q&A session with members of the audience? Do the questions and people all sound heavily pre-screened and/or medicated? Reader, you know they do.

28:30 What the fuck does "local, beautiful education" mean? I'll actually agree with him that Common Core sucks, and the education system in this country sucks, but leaving all decisions up to local school boards would be national suicide. Already the blue states have to essentially subsidize the "graduates" of the Jebusland schools, who think that people rode dinosaurs, and couldn't do simple math if their oxy-addled lives depend on it.

29:22 -- When asked what he'd say to Obama, Trump unleashes his played-out-seven-years-ago "You're fired!" catch-phrase, as if Obama was trying to stick around for another term. Once the idiot asking the question asks her entire question, which was how Trump would have "handled" the San Bernardino terrorist attack, we see that this is the question that leads into all of the aforementioned responses. And of course there is no

31:40 -- This moron has no question, just a verbal blowjob. She just needs to tell Trump that he's "tapped into the American consciousness," and indeed he has -- these people are just as empty-headed, venal, and full of themselves as he is.

32:20 -- Sweet jebus, it just gets worse. Another female who sounds like her blood type is gravy, leading into her whinge about referring to "illegal aliens" as "undocumented immigrants" with a predictable lunge into the War on Christmas babble. If any of these loons had an IQ over 70, they'd be just smart enough to be ashamed of themselves.

35:00 -- Trump has a sideshow, a couple of fat 'n' sassy black women who spend a couple minutes shrieking about their support for him, because they have a YouTube channel (of course they do) and have gone viral. And it apparently cannot be cured with even the strongest of antibiotics.

It goes on like that. The only thing missing is that you'll find yourself wishing that the camera would pan out to the individuals "asking" "questions" of their hero. There is a certain perverted desire to see what sort of inbred mutant willingly makes a fool out of themselves to this level; most of them sound like they just quit eating lead paint chips.

Take an hour and see for yourself. I know, I know, it's easier to ignore and watch something fun. But if common sense is going to return and we get rid of this fucking buffoon, we need to understand how appeals to his audience -- and more importantly, we need to start figuring out the mouth-breathing idiots who support him.

One thing that Trump is correct on is that this nation's treatment of its wounded veterans is a goddamned disgrace, and it needs to improve. The VA is a clusterfuck on wheels, and anytime you have veterans who are homeless, or are killing themselves because they can't get proper treatment, it's unacceptable. Tying all that to the issue of illegal immigration (if we can give illegals welfare, schools, and health care, why can't we make sure veterans are taken care of?) may be easy-meat opportunism, but you can see why it's effective.

Even Trump's proposal to "take their oil" (he includes Afghanistan in this mix as well, hilariously) and "give" it to the veterans and their families can easily be deconstructed as ham-fisted demagoguery. How, for starters, is that going to happen, does Trump think that there'll just be a fund set up to warehouse the profits and funnel them directly to Our Heroes? Yeah, it's completely impossible that some skeevy Halliburton types would skim off the top for themselves, and completely monkey-fuck the whole thing.

But again, you can see why it resonates, especially with a crowd that asks no questions. I seriously think that Trump could pull down his pants, start whacking his shriveled old-man dick until it finally emits a wisp of powdered milk on the lectern, and they'd all stand there and watch. To call these maroons "sheep" would be a grievous insult to ruminants everywhere. I mean, from what Ted Nugent says, sheep actually protest a bit when you fuck them. (Seriously, fuck Ted Nugent.)

The trick is that with all of Trump's flashy promises, he never says how he's going to pull any of this off. How is he going to make Mexico pay for a 2,000-mile wall? How will he force companies like Nabisco and Ford to not move manufacturing facilities to Mexico and other countries -- and to that end, why does he neglect to point out that the reason they do that is because the health care system in this country is a gruesome joke? He can lie all he wants, and they'll never challenge him on it, even when you give them the actual numbers, the actual reasons.

One good sign from this rally is that Trump got interrupted and heckled throughout. A lot. Those people deserve respect, because as past events have shown, they are putting themselves on the line, at risk with a bunch of belligerent retards who will probably kick the shit out of them in the parking lot when the cameras are off. Trump does instruct the crowd to leave them alone, which shows that he's learned the cameras are on, and people are watching the brownshirt antics. Hang on, the primaries will tell the truth about what kind of nation we're becoming. And it's looking worse all the time.

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