From Scott Adams's latest blog post:
If the latest groping/kissing allegations against Trump hold up – and I assume they will, based on quantity if not credibility – it won’t matter what Wikileaks says about Clinton. She will win easily.
If Clinton wins, you’ll wonder if this invalidates the Master Persuader Hypothesis. The short answer is no, because the concept doesn’t account for unknowns of this magnitude. If a meteor had struck Trump a day before election day, it wouldn’t say much about his skill as a persuader. The Master Persuasion Hypothesis worked splendidly until the double-whammy of the Access Hollywood tape and the “octopus” meteor.
Trump could still win, but only if some new and unexpected meteor strikes Clinton.
Surely Adams could have anticipated "unknowns of this magnitude": these were known unknowns, to use the language of Donald Rumsfeld and Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan. October in an election year is always the month for big, unpleasant surprises. With Trump's constant problems with women (remember his implication, during the primaries, that Carly Fiorina is ugly? "Look at that face!"), you'd think that some savvy person—savvier than me—would have anticipated women coming out of the woodwork in October. Put aside the cynical nature of these women's sudden appearance (and I'd agree with you that it's more about timing and strategy than it is about actual justice and women's rights), and the brute fact is that the ship of Donald has taken a hit below the waterline.
Will this be enough to sink his campaign? Depends. We're all experiencing a measure of scandal fatigue, I think. Adams makes the point that, for Trump at least, further WikiLeaks revelations aren't going to help his campaign:
2. Wikileaks has no meteors to offer. The Wikileaks misdeeds involve people who are not Clinton, and they involve issues that are boring and a bit complicated. The public will not be much influenced by them.
Unless there's hard evidence of Hillary having a Paula Deen moment, or advocating the utter destruction of the Kurds, or engaging in a bukkake ritual with a circle of superannuated congressmen, there's nothing to stop her momentum at the polls. Whether momentum at the polls translates into an electoral victory is a different story, but as long as people keep talking about polls, even if only to deny their significance, the polls will continue to matter.
Styxhexenhammer666, meanwhile, remains bullish on Trump. I remain unconvinced that Trump will win by a landslide, if he wins at all.
Final thought, from tweeter Dan McLaughlin:
Much as Trump deserves this, one must pause at the breathtaking chutzpah of Team Clinton's closing argument being sexual harassment.
In a just world, the Clintons would have been put away long, long ago.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/786342217841389568
ReplyDeleteTrump is taking on the entire establishment: The Democrats, the GOP, Wall $treet, the MSM, Hollywood and academia. They will do literally anything to take him out, and if a full-scale propaganda assault doesn't work, they may resort to more extreme measures.
Evidently there is at least one tape of $hillary using a very damaging slur about blacks. If it comes down to race versus sex, I wonder which issue would ultimately swing the election?
The next few weeks are going to get seriously insane.
https://twitter.com/WDFx2EU7/status/786394125209743361
ReplyDeleteLest we forget, the NYT is the same publication that helped the George W. Bush administration lie its way to the invasion of Iraq. Like Krooked Killary, it has the blood of hundreds of thousands on its monstrous hands.
Today its largest shareholder is Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who like $hillary Clinton is fully invested in Open Borders and the ultimate dissolution of American national sovereignty. Since when were non-American citizens allowed to interfere so directly in our own electoral process? (But that's precisely the point of globalism, isn't it?)
A final twist: What do most of the neocons who pushed for the invasion of Iraq (and who are currently gunning for Syria), Carlos Slim, Judith Miller and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the NYT, all have in common?
Let's just call them "rootless cosmopolitans" and leave it at that for now.
In my nightmare, Hillary touched me inappropriately, whereupon I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
ReplyDeleteHonk if you've had a similar experience ...
This is why the establishment hates Trump.
ReplyDeleteWikileaks is releasing a dumpster truck of dirt on the Clinton campaign, and yet the MSM are largely ignoring it. The NYT has been parroting the Krooked Killary line that Trump is a Russia-backed stooge and that Russian agents are behind all the recent email hacks without a shred a proof. They smeared Trump's previous campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as a treasonous Putin-connected crony because of his past consulting work in Ukraine, again without offering up any proof to back up such charges, and yet when evidence is released by Wikileaks that Clinton's own campaign chief owns 75,000 shares in a Putin-linked energy company, what do we hear from the NYT? Absolutely nothing about it at all, of course.
ReplyDeleteThe Fourth Estate in America is now officially dead, and I can't see how a modern democracy can survive without it.