Lap Dogs of Democracy

"It was 2016 all over again today ... the same mistakes are being made" -- @lawrence 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/CxfddzLjuX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2024

     These days, I think more and more of the late Eric Boehlert's book, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. As with Norm Solomon, who'd written an even more scathing book called War Made Easy, Boehlert had the media pegged for its right wing bias and stenographic tendencies.

     Then Lawrence O'Donnell last night put a finer point on it and excoriated the entire MSM, including his own network, MSNBC, for its craven and supine posture toward Donald Trump and his "presser" at Mar a Lago yesterday. In the hour and five minutes that Trump spoke and answered questions, it could be more than plausibly said that nothing factual or honest fell out of his filthy maw.

     And at no time did the media even try to fact check him either on the spot (God forbid) or in the studio. Of course, it could be advanced as a defense that Trump always spews such a fire hose of lies, exaggerations and falsehoods that it's literally impossible to stay on top of them without talking over him from end to end, as Mary Trump said in yesterday's Substack. In fact, this was Dr. Trump's best paragraph of the entire article:

     "During the 2016 campaign, I was quite frankly horrified by the billions of dollars in free coverage the media gave Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton was giving important and substantive policy speeches, network cameras were trained on empty podiums and planes idling on the tarmac waiting for Donald to show up."

      Ergo, since we all know (or should know) that Trump is genetically incapable of telling the truth about anything, perhaps the answer is to stop giving him oxygen. But Trump is the GOP candidate for president so if the MSM refuse to cover him and his litany of falsehoods, they would appear to be derelict in their responsibilities.

     The trouble is, they already do.

     Mar a Lago yesterday was a classic case in point. With little advance notice, Trump announced from his money pit Truth Social that he was doing a presser at Mar a Lago on Friday. And Trump's army of stenographers was out in full force and respectfully watched him do his air accordion bit. Meanwhile, that same day, yesterday, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz headlined in Glendale, Arizona what's been called the largest political event in the state's history. Think any of the major networks were there, like CNN?

     Guess again, bub.

     Despite the fact that 20,000 people came to hear Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz, you think CNN could be bothered to show up? Or how about the Nevada rally today that drew 12,000? Or the rallies at the other battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin? If it wasn't for social media and word of mouth, you'd hardly know Kamala Harris was running for president.

     When they did remember there's a Biden administration, the press did its best to hound Biden on his cognitive faculties. They passionately implored Biden to drop out of the race then...

    ...then...

    When those vicious corporate cunts finally got what they wanted, they became the dog that finally caught the car.

     So now that there's a new Democrat in the race, a woman who'd immediately become the Taylor Swift of politicians, one with the greatest sidekick any presidential nominee ever had, they apparently didn't get the memo that Kamala Harris threw her hat in the ring about three weeks ago and setting the country on fire and hauling in record crowds.

     It could be a legitimate failure on the part of network anchors and print journalists. But what's likelier is that the executive douchebags who run those networks and newspapers (Yes, Arthur Sulzberger, I'm looking right at you) are sending down The Word from on high that they're to put their greasy thumbs on the scales and give the crazy orange man with the maxi pad on his ear a free pass and to either hound Joe Biden out of existence or ignore Kamala Harris.

     And, despite the incredible numbers being put up by her campaign, the hundreds of millions in donations, the huge crowds, the enormous number of volunteers and first time voters being registered, the polls show that Harris is barely moving the needle, that she's losing in certain battleground states, or that she and Trump are still running neck and neck in this race.

     But there's a serious disconnect between the numbers the polls are giving us and the actual numbers put up by the Harris-Walz campaign. And one gets the impression that no matter how well Harris does drawing in crowds, gets volunteers, raises money, as far as the grand poobahs of the polling punditocracy goes, she's running in place.

     It's all bullshit, people. Look, I've been saying for years the old truism that the closer you get to an election, the more accurate the polls get got defenestrated after 2016. And, whether it's due to political bias (Like Rasmussen) or flawed methodology, the pollsters will tell you anything you want to hear. The numbers are always so all over the place that they're utterly worthless.

     Trust your eyes, trust your guts, trust your central nervous system. When Harris and Walz kick off their tour to a crowd of 12,000 in Philly and JD Vance draws 200 across town, it means something. When Harris attracts 18,000 in Detroit and Vance does a presser in an empty parking lot in front of a police station, it means something. And when Harris pulls in record crowds in battleground states like Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin while Trump seeks succor in a friendly crimson red state like Montana, it means something.

     And, as all auguries are of good fortune and if Harris and Walz don't seriously stumble between now and November 5th, they will win in a landslide and the pollsters will be humiliated yet again.