QUESTION ASKED: “So why is that tape — which to me just sounds like Trump being Trump — the straw that broke the camel’s back?”
Or the one that seems to be, anyway. So many people seem honestly surprised that he said those things. Is the surprise a pose? If so, why this, why now? It’s a very offensive tape, but to me it’s not more offensive than so many of the other things he’s said, the things that at first made me think his candidacy was a joke, and later made me think I was in a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake up. This is the candidate who said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” — and I’d begun to believe he was right, that he was popular because he said outrageous and offensive things and refused ever to back down.
Why is this different? Why would it change anyone’s mind about Trump? If, like me, you see this as “just more of the same,” why do you think other people are reacting to it as if it’s different? Is it because his comments were about sex? Is that the ultimate American taboo?
Why was Mitt Romney’s perfectly defensible 47 percent comment the straw that broke his campaign? Because the media coordinated its distribution as part of a massive simultaneous carpet bombing. Recall the moment in Citizen Kane when Orson Welles’ Hearst-inspired character asks one of his editors, “Mr. Carter, here’s a three-column headline in the Chronicle. Why hasn’t the Inquirer a three-column headline?”, and is told, “The news wasn’t big enough.” As Kane replies, “if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”
Scott Adams wrote yesterday that “I assume that publication of this recording was okayed by the Clinton campaign. And if not, the public will assume so anyway. That opens the door for Trump to attack in a proportionate way. No more mister-nice-guy. Gloves are off. Nothing is out of bounds. It is fair to assume that Bill and Hillary are about to experience the worst weeks of their lives.”
But as a newspaper cartoonist, he of all people should know that Bill and Hillary’s DNC-MSM enablers buy their ink by the boxcar load, unlike Trump’s. And they’re perfectly prepared to cut their conscience to fit this year’s fashions* if it serves the party’s interest.