Mathoms From the Land of Trump

 Snow on my car in Laramie after a surprise storm last week.

They don’t occupy a world of facts, do they?

Trump angry at allies conceding he lost debate

Washington (CNN)Donald Trump is angry that his aides and advisers have conceded to reporters — largely without attribution — that the Republican nominee struggled in his first presidential debate.  —  In a conference call …

The bully was holding forth loudly at the “continental breakfast” at the Ramada in Laramie, Wyoming. “Hillary ought to be in jail!” he opined at a volume level quite inappropriate to noon, let alone six in the morning. But he didn’t care. He was a failed professional baseball player from Louisiana, according to his loud braying. He was in Wyoming to kill something that couldn’t shoot back, probably an elk or a deer, but I don’t keep up with the slaughter  calendar.

The Fix Is In

I am not prone to conspiracy theories — even though I uncovered at least one national conspiracy.  I have seen enough of the world to know that, while small men have their delusions of grandeur and of being the captains of everyone’s soul, the force of history — for want of a better term — has ideas of its own and always wins an arm-wrestling match, no matter how drunk you get it or how you might try to cheat it. Which is the only notion here that gives me hope.

But look at what the “news” is at the top of Memeorandum as I speak:

Donald Trump Wants Peter Thiel On The Supreme Court, Sources Say
The Huffington Post

Donald Trump has made it clear he will nominate Peter Thiel to the Supreme Court if he wins the presidency, Thiel has told friends, according to a source close to the PayPal co-founder. Trump “deeply loves Peter Thiel,” and people in the real estate mogul’s inner circle are talking about Thiel as a Supreme Court nominee, a separate source close to Trump told The Huffington Post. That source, who has not spoken to Trump directly about Thiel being nominated to the Court, cautioned that Trump’s offers often fail to materialize in real life…

This notion is absurd, is not going to pass muster in Congress and serious adults would relegate it to the “joke” section of any news reporting. Instead, it dominates the “news” today. Why?

Because there is a media conspiracy to elect Donald Trump, whether intentional or not. And it scares hell out of me.

How To Mainstream Conspiracy Theories 101

I turned on CNN and there was Wolf Blitzer, breathlessly (and I mean that literally) reporting the TigerBeat conspiracy theory while showing a rather ambiguous video over and over again with the chiron “CLINTON STUMBLES” and “BREAKING NEWS.” And this:

Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign
Chris Cillizza / Washington Post

Hillary Clinton falling ill Sunday morning at a memorial service on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will catapult questions about her health from the ranks of conservative conspiracy theory to perhaps …

Notice that the first sentence of this scrofulous story is not a news lede, but, rather, a soothsayer lead. This NOT journalism “will catapult the propaganda.”

And this is how c0nspiracy theories — no matter how dubious, no matter how corrupt, no matter how questionable — are walked into the mainstream press by the Rightie blogosmear.™

And it is a fundamental betrayal of the press corpse’s social contract with their consumers. 

Belabor Day

Time to belabor what OUGHT to seem obvious, but you know how that goes in the land of the grave and the home of the brie.

The Brie

The phony false equivalency showed up this morning with an outlier poll on CNN which gave all the talking heads the vapors and allowed them to pretend that this is a horse race, when, in fact it’s a whore’s race, and by that I mean “media whores” in the sense of Les Moonves’ infamous, this election may be bad for the country but it’s GREAT for CBS!  Well, I see BS all right:

Poll: Nine weeks out, a near even race

Washington (CNN)  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll….