One of the interesting things about what’s happening in American politics is how the chattering skulls are struggling to understand it. In fact, they are not really trying to understand it. Their efforts are much closer to denial than genuine interest. They feel threatened, so they try to jam the bad news into a box they have labeled “bad think” hoping that will make it go away. At least it fits into their comfortable worldview, even if it is still stinking up the place.
The Trump story is the most obvious example. The crooks and hustlers of the Conservative Industrial Complex see him as a dire threat to their cozy lifestyles so they have been churning out copy “explaining” why Trump is evil and his voters are stupid. The hope being that people don’t want to be thought of as stupid so they will go along with the assertion that Trump is Hitler.
I don’t think guys like Matt Walsh are sitting around thinking it through. He’s not that bright. It’s a visceral reaction to dis-confirmation. Red Team leaders were supposed to wave their banners and the Red Team supporters were supposed to respond with the team cheers. Suddenly those people are at another rally, singing different cheers for different people and different banners.
There are two possible explanations for this unexpected event. One is the people running Red Team have failed in some way. They either have a bad product or they failed to know important things about their customers and supporters. The people are walking off because they don’t like what Red Team is offering.
The other answer is that the people are stupid or gullible and the guy leading them astray is evil. In this case, Trump is casting a spell on stupid people like the Pied Piper. Human nature being what it is, it’s no surprise that the response from Red Team has been to blame magic. The evil spirit called Trump has put the whammy on them.
Reality is something different. The problem both American parties face and what mainstream parties face all over the West is the dilemma of the turd sandwich. One side of the political class offers the voters a turd sandwich on rye. The other side offers a turd sandwich on whole wheat. Both sides lecture us nonstop that voting is our moral and civic duty. Therefore, we must eat our turd sandwich.
Of course, there would be riots in the streets if it is said candidly so both sides of the political class ignore the filling and focus on the bread. We are repeatedly told by Team Whole Wheat that rye is poison and only lunatics eat rye. Team Rye tells us that wheat eaters are bigots and want to put rye eaters in chains. Their hyperbole aside, there is a very real difference between rye and whole wheat. No would deny it.
In a mass media culture, you can keep a lot of people busy shouting back and forth over trivia, like rye versus whole wheat, to keep the analogy going. What’s going on right now is a big chunk of voters has decided to look at the filling. They don’t like their turd sandwich and they have no interest in debating which type of bread is better. The trouble is the menu at the political deli only has turd sandwiches.
That’s what the boys and girls of the commentariat cannot fathom. They ticked all the right boxes on their way into the club. They memorized all the arguments and they know how to tell you rye is better than wheat or wheat is better than rye. They are filling in all the right circles so everyone is supposed to fall in line. They just can’t understand that it’s not the sales pitch, it’s the product. The public is just not interested in their turd sandwich.
That’s why the pathological Trump bashing has had so little impact. In fact, it has probably helped him more than hurt. He represents a rejection of the party and its pitchmen in the media. The fact that they hate him is his best asset. Voting for Trump, for most people, has become a vehicle to express their disgust for what the party has been feeding them for 25 years.
If you are on the party payroll or you work in conservative media, you really can’t face that reality. You have to keep believing that it will once again be a debate about the merits of whole wheat versus rye. That’s why they keep trotting out new arguments for why Donald Trump is a fraud, evil or about to implode. That’s why they have gone all-in on a guy like Marco Rubio.
Otherwise, these self-proclaimed intellectuals and opinion makers have to face a terrible reality. That’s the fact they are not, in fact, intellectuals or opinion makers. They are just hired staff in paper hats selling turd sandwiches for the people signing their checks. That’s a lot to ask of people who think a lot of themselves but lack the sort of introspection required to admit error.
Pingback: "The Turd Sandwich Salesmen"
I’m laughing so hard, I pulled a muscle. I love this place! You nailed it pal.
This was a delicious article!
Pingback: Super size me! | The zombie apocalypse survival homestead
Pingback: The Scene | Western Rifle Shooters Association
Pingback: Thursday morning links - Maggie's Farm
I’d argue that people hardly care one way or the other whether the GOP is with Trump or against it. They aren’t going for Trump because they’re against the GOP. They’re going for Trump because he isn’t seen to be going along with political correctness. He dared to take on the seemingly all-powerful pc-brigade on illegal immigration from Mexico and on the wisdom of importing lots of Muslims from countries where a lot of Muslims rather like Jihad.
It isn’t that they’re angry with the GOP.
Then, when people on television complain about Trump for the very reasons they like Trump, they like Trump even more. At least, that’s the way it feels to me because I rather like Trump for these reasons.
So I’m not buying into the idea that the public is fed up with the Conservative movement. It’s fed up with the candidates they come up with.
I like Trump for those reasons too. But I doubt he’d be having the success he is right now if the GOP hadn’t spent the last 7 years engaged in Failure Theater in Washington. No one expects a 100% success rate. But when voters do their part and give the Republicans first the House and then the Senate, and the voters STILL hear nothing but whines and excuses about how it’s just too hard, then I think people are willing to convert their admiration for a shit-disturber like Trump into actual votes. He wouldn’t have gotten where he is if the GOP hadn’t made it perfectly clear that they regarded this holiday from responsibility as an acceptable plan for the future.
But we’re basically in agreement. I know next to nothing about the GOP and I expect most other Trump supporters know even less than I do about it and care even less. Now, the GOP can view all this as a slap in the face (and hopefully learn from it) but it’s an inadvertent slap in the face, whereas some people seem to think it’s all about trying to give the GOP a slap in the face.
It’s just that his support is coming from different directions. Some of it is from people who maybe didn’t vote Republican before: union people, blue collar workers whose jobs have been outsourced, or whose jobs have been lost entirely because of free trade/loss of manufacturing. Those people probably don’t know or care about the details of what the Republicans have been doing over the last 10 years or so; they’re responding to someone who is addressing their immediate concerns. But longterm, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives (the kind who frequent political blogs like this!) ARE seeing Trump’s arrival as another episode in the unfolding decline and fall of the Republican party. They would say that they’re looking at a bigger picture than the disgruntled workers and marginalized lower middle class white Americans. Neither view is wrong, it just depends on what sort of history the voter is bringing along with him.
No, we know all we need to know about the GOP — it is time for it to die.
It would seem many Americans have felt that for a long time they’ve really only had two choices; rye or whole wheat. Either way, the filling was going to be the same. But by giving them the option of rye or wheat, at least they had a decision about what was going to get shoved down their throats.
From just about every indicator, the politics of both Republicans and Democrats seem to have done very little to improve the life of the average American citizen, but has continued to favor wealthy elites of both parties. Thus moving the middle class further down the ladder while the upper 1% continued upwards.
One need only look back at your last four presidents so see how it’s worked out so far. Bush Sr. got the ball rolling with NAFTA which opened the flood-gates of off-shoring American jobs just like Ross Perot warned about. Then Clinton supported and signed into law more financial deregulation legislation than any other president and implemted the Affordable Housing Act which provided “no-down payment, anyone who can make an ‘X’ on a loan form can have one” housing loans which you all got to pay for when the market collapsed. Then Bush Jr. showed up and sent brave young Americans into the Middle East to find WMD that turned out weren’t there and resulted in completely destabilizing the entire region. A mistake everyone is still paying for with global state terrorism and especially for Americans who 14-years later are still bringing home dead and wounded. Then Obama showed up on the scene. I suspect everyone in this forum knows everything he’s done wrong from Obamacare to giving nukes to Iran.
Since 1989 when Bush Sr. came into office, an entire generation of Americans have been sucking down either rye or whole wheat. And looking at the current menu, it doesn’t look like the filling is going to change anytime soon.
Karl, I think there is a large spiritual component. America, like Germany, has experienced a great increase in material wealth over the last 25 years. In general, we should be happy and most of us are happy. It’s that sense, however, that the people in charge don’t like us very much. There’s also the very really fact that a substantial number of Americans have not enjoyed the last 25 years. Simply putting them on welfare feels wrong, but no one in charge seems to care about that.
@ theZman – You are right! The joy of work is the true nature of man at a spiritual level. The reward of one’s own labor brought into being with one’s own two hands brings spiritual satisfaction and personal reward that even money itself can’t provide. From the potters wheel to the blacksmiths forge, to the farmers field or a woman’s hearth and home. Created ourselves, human being are by nature creators who do so through the expression of work.
For men, it was work in fields, or in the mines or on the assembly line. For women, it was a the pride of a well cared for home, bringing up healthy and happy children and tending to the needs of her family. Some may think this a chauvinist male viewpoint, but history will back me. It was always this way. There was a time when no man took pride in being idle, and no woman tolerated someone else raising her children. For both men and women, work is the measure by which we value ourselves and our perception of how others value us.
Work is the purist survival instinct since man came into being and it will never change. Since the dawn of time and as each generation endured, they strove to make life better for their children. Not by making work easier, but by making life better.
A man who is denied work is worse than a slave because he is deprived of his own creativity and self worth. Even a slave in ancient Egypt could look up at the pyramids and say – “I built that!”
Grüß – Karl
First, hideous and gross sandwich idea. Bleck.
Second, for all of this election’s bizarreness, you must admit that this is the same old same old. Let me point out that once again the media is choosing the candidate for the Republicans.
Maddening.
Yes, it looks quite different this time around due to the exciting atmosphere surrounding Trump. If one looks beyond that, however, it is the media elite giving Trump all the air beneath his wings and starving the other campaigns of oxygen. So what if they are saying bad things about him when they cover him. They cover him nonstop. Then the people, dutifully and predictably, love him more and swoon over his bludgeoning their hated media.
Of course the media people know all this.
Only difference is that the Trump supporters feel delighted about it this time. They feel as if they are actually pulling one over on the media elites. The establishment wants Trump to win, he is their guy and has been forever.
So they see that the way to promote him is to play along with his “media bashing” and pretend to be appalled by his blunt talk.
He will govern as the establishment has always governed. His supporters are being played for fools by the media and the establishment. Bah.
PS I loathe the media with the heat of a thousand suns.
So you are happy with the status quo then. What are the chances your vote is dependent on a candidate being polite and non-threatening to your sense of decorum?
Hey Turk, not happy with the status quo at all, no. And maybe I’m not crazy about Trump when he is behaving childishly. But I do really care for masculine men, I sure do. And there is a lot that I like about Trump. But did you misunderstand me? I suspect that Trump is actually an establishment candidate. I also believe that the media always wields its immense power to select the republican nominee and that this year it is doing the same with Trump. So we think we are happily choosing the rebel candidate, but we are being played for fools. That is, the media actually WANTS Trump. I also believe that while he’ll be entertaining, Trump, himself, probably will yield nothing more than the status quo. In other words Trump is just an outlandish other flavor of bread. This is just an idea that occurred to me. I was asking myself why Trump is getting so hugely much more media than other candidates. The answer that occurred to me is that the media wants Trump and he is one of them.
What’s blowing the chattering class’s minds looks like math, as in math don’t lie, and what I read about people who call themselves the Treepers, as in III%. It’s the Up Your’s Party. That silent majority Trump mentions. I think it is in part the Tea Party reformed, and people who really have had quite enough of the political class. Think about it, the Tea Party plurality didn’t just evaporate into thin air. Because that is what it is, a plurality. Very difficult to stop a plurality, almost impossible, (never mind an armed one). I think it is a plurality that is beginning to figure out it is a plurality. The motive power of a movement which is grass roots once it reaches a critical mass become self generating.
But numbers, math, don’t lie. And neither does a plurality. If you check out the numbers, both the Republican and Democratic primary vote tally’s show all of the candidates are actually receiving the expected number of votes based on past historical values. In other words, the pants suit, Cruz, Rubio et all are getting the votes the punditry predicted they would receive. And would be winning and losing based on those scientific estimates. What is screwing with their science,(science like globull warming), and their heads, is the votes Trump is receiving are outliers in standard political science modeling. They have no experience in understanding where all these voters are coming from. To them these Trump votes do not exist.
But the idiots are dumber than a box of rocks, they created those Treepers, they created Trump. Think about it, how they all, from every quarter of the political class, these clowns disparaged and besmirched, denigrated and shit on the Tea Party, went after it with the IRS, DOJ, OSHA, you name it, every Lois Lerner and alphabet agency swat team payroll patriot was sent out by obama and his regime to terrorize their political enemies. Hell they even raided Gibson Guitar using some specious archaic bullshit importation law from the 1800’s to intimidate “Right Wing Extremists”.
I’m saying this is only the beginning. Trump is the great fuck you. It isn’t Trump becoming POTUS, it is the beginning of a movement that has an instinctive sense peaceful redress is very close to being replaced with violent rebellion.
Who with a reasonable sense of reason and caution, and basic grasp of history hasn’t in a private moment not considered in this time we live in violent revolution against those in the political class with a chain saw destroying the foundations of this Republic may come to pass?
You better be voting for Trump regardless. Revolution would tear this great nation apart, split it asunder. It would be a civil war unlike anything in history. This shit going down, it is not only the last chance for peaceful recourse, it is the last opportunity we got to conduct our national affairs as civilized people.
We blow this, there is no going back except swimming up a river of blood.
The Tea Party was THEIR (the GOPe’s) last chance, and they blew it. Before the Tea Party coalesced, the talk was all of forming a third party. But the good soldiers in the Republican Party pleaded and cajoled not to do something so ruinously hasty. Instead, they said, the GOP was a perfectly good party, all you had to do was “take it over from the inside”. So began all those lectures on how to start at the lowest level, electing good solid conservatives, and before you know it, the GOP would be a conservative powerhouse. The poor, trusting conservatives went for it, only to find their victories at the polls grabbed and pocketed by an amoral establishment machine that took every Tea Party winner and branded “Property of the GOP” on his butt.
Ace is right when he said that their problem is sheer greed and refusal to share. Their “coalition” with conservatives consists of “We get everything we want, and you get nothing.” And they expected it just to carry on forever, like a perpetual motion machine run for their benefit.
Right. I agree whole heartedly.
Thinking there is something even more to it, it goes deeper than that. Secession. People seceding from the influences of the political class.
Seceding from the bankrupt policies, the lies, the dissimulation, most of all seceding from the treason of values and principles and the incessant meddling in our affairs.
But most of all, the Tea Party was withdrawal of consent. That is secession in itself.
Consent and secession are very powerful things. So is a plurality. And we have Mr. Trump, he is now part and parcel of a growing plurality, a plurality of people who have cast aside the political class, rejecting it, withdrawing consent for it, seceding from the status quo.
Imagine how dangerous this is to the political elites, the danger it could grow into proportions they with all their wealth and influence are helpless to control.
I believe this is both consequences unintended of unconstitutional usurpations, and the corruption both moral and monetary that is a saturated condition of our government and its benefactors.
It is no wonder Trump and the Treeters are disposed by the 5th column and political elite.
In order for a new system to arise, the existing system has to fall. And Trump is a guaranteed wrecking ball; regardless of whatever he does in office. Nothing is worse than what is already in place.
One more time
The political filth and their corporate media whores have no idea how deeply they are despised and distrusted.
The bubble they live in has ten feet thick titanium walls.
Can’t it be that they do know? And that they are using that hatred to manipulate people to enthuse over Trump who is one of their own? Neat trick, play the electorate for fools by promoting Trump with nonstop media coverage. All publicity is good publicity. Especially in this case where it is known that the people don’t trust the media.
That’s what I think is going on.The MSM knows that we are inclined to like anyone they hate, and that calling people stupid just makes them more stubborn. These attacks serve to distract from the other guy who is against illegal immigration, but has an ACTUAL CONSERVATIVE RECORD -Cruz.
When the media want to kill a story, they just ignore it. Cruz is the one getting the “ignore ” treatment, combined with some lying attacks and worst of all being equated with Rubio.
The media and the republican establishment are together smothering Cruz’s campaign. I just re read the Cruz resume. A true conservative with a track record: http://www.youngcons.com/ted-cruzs-resume-is-very-impressive-should-make-him-standout-amongst-other-candidates/
What’s funny about this is that, at least as far as I can tell, there seems to be a qualitative difference between the turd salesmen on the right and the turd salesmen on the left. The guys on the right show some glimmer of awareness about what’s going on, though they’re in deep denial over it. At some level, they seem to understand that bumper-sticker slogans are not reality. Most have at least some contact with life outside the elite bubble, so they have fewer illusions about what the world is like beyond the walls of the manor.
The folks on the left just seem to have no clue. Since they have the ability to seal themselves off more completely than righties can, they lack any natural reality check for their enthusiasms. Ergo, many of them really, truly believe the slogans, so their panic and confusion is much more genuine.
Want proof? See the comments.
It’s a HuffPo satire about a future President Trump insulting the “Holy Koran”.
Believe it or not, literally half of the comments are Democrats saying “This is terrible!” and the rest of them trying to verify that it’s not true. They really believed it. They really, really believed it. Oh My Gods.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-slansky-/president-trump-was-just_b_9294918.html
“…a future President Trump insulting the “Holy Koran”.”?
Holy Smokes, but wouldn’t THAT be a HAM sandwich, rather than a turd sandwich?
SPAM sandwich, there fixed it for you. LoL
Actually, it’s a bacon sandwich! (in the HuffPo ‘article’)
just noise in your data. they are all selling poo.
Okay, you’ve convinced me! We’ll hang them on the right, last!
Everything you say is spot on, but the problem is that Trump is yet one more lying sack o’ ****. There’s no way around it, we are truly screwed. Tim
At least Trump unapologetically tells you about the shit in the middle. I’ll take one less big lie any day!
Know how to tell when Hillary and the rest lying? Their lips lips are moving!
turd peddlers (like jonah Goldberg or Krauthammer) have as much effect on my voting choice, as words have on a torpedo. I am locked onto their ship and plan on sending it straight to the bottom.
Kinda reminds me of Obama’s go-to argument (which was Kerry’s before him, and Clinton’s before Kerry, and yea verily unto all the generations of modern Democrats) — “the people love our policies; we just failed to adequately explain how awesome they are.” Always the messaging, never the content. Seems like Obama was out there giving a “major speech” every other week. And when that doesn’t work, they complain about media bias.