Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
400,000 in U.S. dead from Covid-19, just as I predicted
Back in August, I wrote:
[T]he cost of a bozo in the White House is 170,000 dead from the virus, and America’s international reputation shattered. The hypocrisy of Trump supporters who railed on and on about how you shouldn’t vote for Hillary because four Americans died in Benghazi, but the same Trump supporters are totally unconcerned about 170,000 dead from the virus. And with Trump at the helm, 170,000 is likely to become 400,000 before he leaves office.
The cult of Trump
For more than a decade I’ve been writing, from time to time, about the psychology of belief, and how people believe what they believe because other people believe it, and not because they know whether or not it’s true. Other people often means other people in their social group, or tribe, rather than all other people in general.
Until now, I’ve usually been critical or people in mainstream media or elite liberal circles believing in untrue stuff, or people believing in religion. But unfortunately, I now have to call out the fact that what one may call the red tribe has now gone all-in on believing that the election was “stolen” by the Democrats because of massive “fraud,” without any evidence that this is true.
Trump has somehow gone from being a real estate developer to reality TV star to politician and now to cult leader. (The general definition of a cult includes veneration of the cult’s leader, and belief in stuff that’s considered nonsensical outside of the cult. The cult of Trump is a secular cult; it doesn’t involve the belief in anything supernatural.)
I want no part of this cult. Any of my readers who are cult members should just leave and stop reading or commenting.
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Also, I don’t know how people can think that the electoral process is biased against Trump when Trump did way better than expected based on polls or logical thinking about the electorate. People who rightly called out Democrats for not accepting that Trump beat Hillary are now doing the same thing to Biden, but at a ten-times amped-up level.
If only Trump hadn’t discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, giving a big advantage to the other side (you want your supporters to vote by any which way possible), he might have even won re-election.
As Lion predicted, Biden wins election
I’ve been waiting for things to settle down a little before I wrote my I-told-you-so post. Since way back in 2019 I’ve been saying that Trump would not win re-election.
Part of the calculation was that polls were so in favor of Biden that, even if Trump beat the polls by a substantial amount, he would still lose. It turns out that Trump did beat the polls by a substantial amount in some states, so once again the polling industry did a crappy job. I’m going to have to side with conspiracy theorists here. The polls could only be so bad because the pollsters intended them to be bad because people like to vote for a winner, so creating the perception that Biden was winning would bring out more votes for Biden.
The above probably explains why the media never fully acted like Biden had the election in the bag. They probably knew all along that the polls were rigged to exaggerate Biden’s lead over Trump.
Another part of the calculation that Biden would win was that the mainstream media had given up on being nonpartisan, and would do everything they could in order to ensure a Biden victory. And that too is what happened.
Even though Trump did much better than I expected, he did less better than it seemed on the night of the election as more mail-in ballots have been counted. Trump may have doomed his re-election with his insistence that his supporters not vote by mail. As a candidate, you want people to vote for you by any which way they can.
At the end of all the counting, Trump lost the big-three rustbelt states of PA, WI and MI which he won in 2016, plus also probably lost GA and AZ, two states that have voted for the Republican candidate for president for longer than some people voting last week have been alive.
If only Trump had taken the virus seriously, he probably would have won another four years in office. But it’s a testament to the power of cult-belief that so many people voted for him anyway despite how bad he’s been and how he has continually lied and bullshitted about the pandemic.
Once again, Lion’s prediction was correct, Biden won the debate
Right after viewing the debate, it was hard to know that Biden won, because Trump’s bullying of both Biden and Chris Wallace gave the impression that Trump won some sort of battle of machismo.
But based on the latest NY Times polling, using the only scoring system that really matters, whether voters are more likely to vote for one of the candidates after watching the debate, Biden won.
Voters want a President like Mitt Romney and not a President like Tony Soprano, even though Tony Soprano could beat up Mitt Romney in a street fight. Not to say that Biden came even close to Mitt Romney’s presidentialness, but not looking senile was all he needed to win, and he succeeded.
Trump has the virus, what next?
For starters, we don’t know the full extent of the outbreak. If the President, the First Lady, and Hope Hicks have all caught the virus, the outbreak is probably bigger than just the three of them. I think the story will inevitably grow bigger over the next two days.
Then the second unknown is whether or not Trump’s Mr. Magoo luck holds out. Two weeks from now, I can certainly imagine a healthy Trump saying that the virus is no big deal and that we need to open up the economy ASAP.
If Trump is hospitalized, then I don’t see how he can win the election. Although, even before today, I didn’t see any way for Trump to win the election. But the defeat will be that much bigger.
And if Trump dies, then a lot of people will have schadenfreude and it will be a poetic end to his presidency. I’d certainly be glad if Mike Pence runs the country for the final three months before Biden takes over. Pence is far more competent than Trump. I can’t imagine Pence making fun of people for wearing masks.
Of course, the ultimate in Mr. Magoo luck would be if Biden caught it from Trump at the debate and gets seriously ill while Trump doesn’t get ill, and Trump wins the election he otherwise would have lost.
UPDATE
Trump is in the hospital, so I think his Mr. Magoo luck has finally failed him.
Looks like I was right after all, Biden DID win the debate
According to an exclusive poll, Biden won the debate “convincingly.”
The poll surveyed debate watchers but then weighted the demographics of the survey group to the population of likely voters in November. Most pollsters don’t do this, which ends up skewing their results toward Democrats because left-leaning college graduates are disproportionately likely to watch debates.
But even with the more Trump-friendly weighting, the poll shows a clear win for Biden and, not coincidentally, a fairly overwhelming sense that Biden’s conduct during the debate was more presidential.
Another Lion prediction came true.
OK, so I was wrong, Biden didn’t win, except that he did win the long game
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I think that most of Trump’s prole super-supporters (the kind who go to his rallies) who watched the debate are thinking that Trump won because he talked louder than everyone else in the room and proved that he has more energy than “sleepy” Joe Biden.
But maybe some of the college-educated voters, who voted for Trump because they traditionally vote Republican, watched this and decided that they can’t take another four years of a clown in the White House.
I’m in the “get the clown out of the White House” crowd, even though there’s little there that would specifically want to make me vote for Biden other than that he’s not a clown. I’m specifically annoyed that Biden refused to answer the question about packing the Supreme Court, which I think was one of the most important questions in the debate and was an opportunity for Biden to indicate that his presidency would be a return to normalcy.
Everyone in the MSM and Biden too think that the worst thing they can say about Trump is that he’s a “racist.” It’s like a kid in kindergarten thinking he really tore down another kid because he said that the other kid has “cooties.” Nevertheless, Trump could have answered that a lot better. I don’t think that “stand by” was meant for the Proud Boys, but merely that he meant to say some other more important stuff about Antifa first and then get back to condemning people, but he lost this train of thought because Trump is as bad as Biden when it comes to speaking coherently for more than a minute at a time.
One thing that Biden did well is say very firmly that he’s the Democratic Party now and not radical leftists. And he did come out firmly for NOT defunding the police.
Also, Biden didn’t debate poorly enough for anyone to be able to prove that he’s senile. In fact, that he was able to remember some obviously canned responses proves that he’s not senile, because Alzheimer’s disease is specifically the loss of short-term memory.
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Prediction: Biden will win the debate
Remember the Lloyd Bentsen-Dan Quayle debate? Notice the smile on Bentsen’s face when Quayle predictably compared himself to “Jack” Kennedy, and Bentsen knew that he would get to clobber him with the zinger his debate-prep people prepared for him and Bentsen had practiced.
This Associated Press article should worry Trump supporters. Trump is barely doing any debate prep, while Biden has probably been doing little else. Trump is very predictable in the things he brags about and the insults he hurls. I am sure the Biden has several Lloyd-Bentsen-type zingers locked and loaded. The mainstream media will then surely amplify it to deafening proportions, and for 24 hours we will hear nothing on CNN except for how Biden really crushed Trump.
But wait, isn’t Biden supposed to be “senile”? That’s what you believe if you live in a right-wing echo chamber, but there don’t seem to be any leaks from the Biden camp about Biden being too senile to debate. I predict that Biden’s “senility” will turn out just like Hillary Clinton’s supposed “illness” back in 2016. Four years later, there’s still no sign of the mysterious malady that was supposed to have her on death’s door.
Democrats are projecting again
Right now, MSM is full of articles in the nature of “OMG! Trump isn’t going to concede that Biden legitimately won the election.”
But that is exactly what Democrats have been doing for the last four years. They never accepted that Trump legitimately won the election. They tried to push electors to change their votes. Before Trump even took office, they were dreaming up a strategy to impeach him. He’s not the legitimate president because he didn’t win the popular vote (even though the system set up in the Constitution for selecting the president has nothing to do with the popular vote). His winning the election was blamed on James Comey, on Russian spies, on anything except that voters in key swing states liked him better than Hillary Clinton. And to the extent that they sometimes grudgingly admit that some voters did like him better, it’s only because those voters were racists and deplorables or otherwise motivated by evil thoughts and desires.
The Democrats are right that it will be bad for America if Trump and his supporters never accept Biden as the legitimate president, just as it has been bad for America that Democrats never accepted Trump as the legitimate president.
The coming October surprise
There have been a lot of articles in the MSM recently worrying about Trump coming up with some October surprise. They’re especially worried about the announcement of a vaccine, which they think would allow Trump to say that he beat the pandemic and he’s a hero.
Unfortunately for Trump supporters, that particular October surprise is unlikely to happen, because all of the big vaccine makers have gotten together and agreed that they aren’t going to apply for approval with the FDA until November 4th at the earliest. Of course, that’s not exactly what they said for public consumption, but CEOs of big corporations don’t want Trump to win the election and they have now joined the anti-Trump team. They don’t care that Trump massively cut their taxes, Trump’s prole-stink is too strong for them to hold their noses and do something that would help him win.
Going back to the topic of the MSM worrying about an October surprise from Trump, we have seen over and over again that liberals tend to publicly fret over Trump doing something that the liberals know their side is doing. So if there’s going to be a big October surprise, you can be sure it’s going to come from the liberal MSM and not the Trump side.
The only hope for Trump supporters is that the MSM is too stupid to understand the difference between a good October surprise and a bad one. Liberals continue to be fixated on racism, sexism, homophobia, and think the biggest possible killing blow would come from something having to do with Trump saying things along those lines. Liberals thought they beat Trump with that stuff four years ago, but it turned out the proles don’t give a crap that Trump said some locker-room talk in private. Why would they vote against Trump for saying the same kind of stuff that they’ve said themselves in private? The prole whites are sick and tired of political correctness.
The recent revelation that Trump called soldiers “suckers” is an example of an effective type of story. The prole whites love the military (because they really are suckers just as Trump said, but they don’t want to hear it), so it’s certainly going to hurt Trump with his base.
So far, the retired General Kelly, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, has remained silent about confirming or denying the story, but that’s an example of how Trump has set himself up to fail. There are so many people that used to work for Trump who now hate him. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that Kelly or someone else close to his stature is going to come out with some pretty salacious info in October.
Lion of the Blogosphere 