Matt Lauer basically handed Donald Trump a glide-path to the White House. Never challenged him, never fact-checked him in real time, did just the sort of hard-hitting interview you\u2019d expect from the Today Show\u2019s resident Very Serious Journamalist. The same brilliant mind that skims Wikipedia in real time to try to describe participating Olympic nations was helpless in the face of what appears to be Trump\u2019s MO for the rest of the campaign: just spew so much bullshit, rapidly and repeatedly, that it becomes impossible to dispute or challenge everything just on the sheer volume.<\/p>\n
This was inevitable. The national press corps has been in the tank to hate Hillary for a quarter century, and though nobody wants to talk about it, it\u2019s a big part of the reason Obama made it to the nomination in 2008. Now, with a genuine sociopath at the top of the GOP ticket, they\u2019re bending themselves into pretzels trying to find ways to make it a close race, to avoid calling a spade a spade, to make it seem like Donald Trump isn\u2019t an outrageous deviance from the norms and values and processes of American electoral politics. On any given day, he says or does at least two or three things that would have been a torpedo at the waterline for a Dukakis or Dole or Gore, and yet the volume of shit is such that the press corps has gone numb to challenging it.<\/p>\n
This is necessary, because the GOP is going to need a serious airing-out after this race. If Trump loses 45 states and Evil Hillary becomes President, there\u2019s going to be a thoroughly bloody reckoning as to how the party let this happen, and a lot of people will find their futures in a burning heap of feces. So Trump has to be retconned in real time into a viable candidate, just for the sake of preserving the careers of half the Republican party-in-organization.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re going to put it down the memory hole. If Hillary wins, the whole \u201cbuild the wall\u201d thing is going to be glossed over as just another Dean Scream or Gore Sigh or Binders Full Of Women. There will probably be some other turn of phrase like \u201ctea party\u201d to re-launder the GOP\u2019s Confederate base for another go-round in 2018. Ted Cruz will run on exactly the same platform in 2020 and almost certainly win, given that the New York Times would rather see ISIS conquer Manhattan than a fourth term of Clinton presidency.<\/p>\n
The one consolation is that once HRC\u2019s time is done, we almost have to move on. It\u2019s like the frustrating college quarterback: there\u2019s going to be someone else in four years no matter what. But then, we thought that\u2019s what Obama was going to be, too.<\/p>\n
Heads Scotland, tails Ireland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Matt Lauer basically handed Donald Trump a glide-path to the White House. Never challenged him, never fact-checked him in real time, did just the sort of hard-hitting interview you\u2019d expect from the Today Show\u2019s resident Very Serious Journamalist. The same brilliant mind that skims Wikipedia in real time to try to describe participating Olympic nations … <\/p>\n