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And it’s an outrage and once again underscores my thesis that there is the Clinton Standard and the Trump Standard-and the Normal Politician Standard.

The Trump Standard is that the media treats that which would be a felony for a normal politician like a misdemeanor if committed  by Trump.

The Clinton Standard is that the media treats that which would be a misdemeanor if committed by a normal politician like a felony if committed by the Clintons.

I don’t have any doubt about this-do you? And if Lesly Stahl had failed to ask Clinton about being a co-conspirator-if she were one-Stahl would never hear the end of it from her Beltway brethren and sisthren-is that a word?

Indeed, just mentioning it would not have been enough-the rest of the media would have demanded that be the main event-90% of the questions would be follow ups on it. Comparatively, Stahl conducted a very gentle interview in which he was able to say things like this:

I’m the President and you’re not.

Vox’s Yglesias points out that the interview showcased his gross ignorance and wild dishonesty. 

That it did and I find this very telling:

“Trump’s 60 Minutes interview once again reveals gross ignorance and wild dishonesty.”

“Little new ground was broken in an interview that was both bizarre and bizarrely familiar.”

Ok but if little new ground was broken that also doesn’t reflect very well on Lesley Stahl. It means one of two things: either she should either have pushed him much harder or not done the interview at all. Because if little new ground was broken that’s a win for him. He got his dishonest talking points out there and she wasn’t able to push him effectively on them.

Two years after their bad coverage handed Trump the election the media is still failing to hold him accountable. Chuck Todd for his part-who in 2014 made the prescient assertion that ‘I don’t think the American people have Clinton fatigue but the press does’-had mostly dreadful commentary on Sunday about how ‘Trump is winning.’ He pushed hard on the false media narrative that the Kavanaugh fight was a win for the GOP. That’s far from clear. There are a number of things that suggest the opposite.

Nate Silver:

Chuck seems unable to differentiate between Trump winning and claiming he’s winning-and telling the whole world he’s winning. For Todd these are all the same thing. Beyond that Todd has his cloying narrative of utter false equivalence-anything Trump does allegedly the Democrats do as well. The idea that something is not normal doesn’t seem to exist in his worldview. That the GOP has been the increasingly sociopathic partisan outlier over the least 25 years totally passes him by. 

Even Chuck’s MSM buddy Steve Kornacki gets it that the GOP has been the aggressor-see his actually very good book on the last 25 years of American politics.

Trump also told Stahl that it really doesn’t matter if Dr. Christine Ford was telling the truth or not-we won. 

Again, if Clinton said that about an accuser of her husband or any Democrat not only would the GOP and mainstream media be demanding she be impeached by nightfall, so would the Left and so would everyone in the Democratic party itself. But keep singing your phony song Chuck: both sides do it. 

P.S. To throw my own two cents-as someone who’s not a polling expert on the polling: There has been a lot of talk about the possibility that the Dems could have a huge election wave in the House and yet lose ground in the Senate. This is plausible based on how tough the map is for them-so many Dem incumbents in Red states Trump won by a lot.

And don’t get me wrong that’s certainly quite possible but it’s also possible, that depending on how big the Dem sweep is in the House, it could sweep the Senate into Dem control as well. I mean if the Dems win 50 seats they have a good chance of also taking the Senate-the coattail effect. Nate Silver has also pointed out that while the odds are very good for both a Dem House and a GOP Senate the combined chance that either the GOP retains the House or the Dems win the Senate is over 50%. So you can say that the chances that either the GOP wins the House of the Dems win the Senate is more likely than not.

So which of these two scenarios is the more likely in light of the fact that this is a Dem wave? It seems much more likely that the Dem wave is so steep that it carries the Senate along with it. It’s notable that the CNN poll didn’t show a change in voter enthusiasm. I’ve suspected all along that the Dem base is so outraged by the corrupt and vile process by which the GOP ‘plowed through’ a credibly accused sexual assaulter, serial perjurer, partisan hack, who was selected by Trump to protect him from the Russia investigation that it would actually impress on us Dems the importance of winning not just the House but the Senate. Even as engaged and fired up as I have been as a Democrat, I had previously not seen the Senate as a huge priority-perhaps the icing on the cake.

UPDATE: In the end, of course, the Democrats did have their wave winning 40 House seats. They did lose 2 Senate seats though this reflected how bad the map really was for them. The 2020 map will be much better.

But again, the reason for the narrative about the Kavanaugh fight being good for the GOP was: the GOP kept stating this was so and the media just covered the GOP ad hominem assertions like stenographers and then they themselves started talking as if this is a fact-though there was no evidence of it and now the evidence clearly refutes it.

This is what the Nation said about Todd’s talk of ‘Clinton Fatigue’ back in 2014:

“The Media Are Suffering From ‘Hillary Fatigue’

“But it’s really their journalism that’s tired.”

Four years later we see where their tired journalism has taken us. Both sides do it. 

I’m sure Todd would have said that about Hitler and the Social Democrats in 1932.

Sure Hitler’s very bad. But are the Social Democrats too radical in their opposition? Do they risk alienating moderates in the heartland?

FN: As a historical matter the SDs certainly wen’t nearly radical enough, a big part of the picture was a leftist opposition to Hitler who largely abdicated and appeased him.

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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