Fox News sees which way the wind is blowing.
…it looks like the number one cable news station in the country is taking his side…
“If you listen the comments in total, he’s not critical of John McCain the war hero, he’s critical of his Senate record,” co-host Steve Doocy said. Responding and agreeing was co-host Geraldo Rivera, who was not as enthusiastic as Doocy, but did say that Trump would need to at least clarify his remarks. Later in the show, co-host Brian Kilmeade interviewed former Ronald Reagan advisor, agreeing that the situation was “blown out of proportion.” Kilmeade continued to defend Trump, saying that “he went on to say 4 more times that he was a war hero.” This statement was looked into closely by Politifact, and they concluded that “Trump literally said McCain is a hero five times, but never without caveats,” and rated the claim “Mostly False.”
With all the fire coming at Donald Trump since his comments this weekend against Sen. John McCain – one of the leaders of New York’s Vietnam Veterans Plaza tells ABC News Trump “has not been a bad guy to us.”
Vincent McGowan, who has been with the organization since its inception in 1983 and currently sits on its board, says that if it wasn’t for Trump, the project in lower Manhattan would have never happened. McGowan says the property downtown was gifted to the veterans by the Koch administration but they had no money. Trump committed $1M in a matching fund and they “couldn’t have built it without him…”
McGowan confirmed his organization has turned to Trump several times over the years. In 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, the group asked for the Donald’s support for their parade. Trump gave the group $175,000 and allowed organizers to use his helicopter to get around the different parts of the city quickly. “He’s like a guy from the corner who made out well,” says McGowan who added the organization honored Trump in 2005 as their Friend of the Year.
McGowan recalled a particular experience a few years back, a staff sergeant had just retired after 10 years of service, wanted to see New York but was down on his luck. McGowan called Trump who gave the veteran a tour of Trump Tower, took him for lunch and then handed him a check for $10,000 to jump start his education.
Now the McCain situation. You know, the McCain situation is interesting to me for a whole lot of reasons. There’s a conventional wisdom out there, and this is generally how it goes. Public figure, slash, candidate, slash, political figure, makes politically incorrect statement that offends somebody.
The Washington establishment and media react in outrage. The media then replays whatever the offensive comment was over and over and over, news stories never ending about the outrageous statement that the public figure made. And then the establishment gets together with the media, and they all demand that the public figure immediately apologize, beg forgiveness, and either withdraw from whatever the public figure is seeking to accomplish, or to stay in properly chagrined and rendered irrelevant.
That conventional wisdom plays out practically every time this circumstance happens. And the reason it does is because people make the mistake of assuming one thing, and that is this. They make the mistake of assuming that the collective outrage of the Washington establishment and the media is reflective of American public opinion. That’s an automatic conclusion that everybody draws.
Vox has been preaching about this (and is writing a book on it now), detailing this SJW attack cycle. Trump has, by not backing down, and attacking even harder, given America a primo lesson in dealing with the SJW-faux-outrage attack cycle.
In doing that, Trump is making himself more than a mere candidate. He is fundamentally hanging the nature of our dialog and our citizenry. Citizens are seeing amygdala strengthened by the conflict stimulus Trump is creating and presenting, and our dialog is seeing political incorrectness (ie truth) being normalized, as opposed to demonized, as it previously was.
Just to drive the point home, you have this:
People are alternately freaking out over a new poll from the Washington Compost and ABC that shows the Trumpinator just had a huge surge in support.
From the poll:
Trump’s frontrunner status, moreover, reflects the crowded GOP race. He leads the 16-candidate field with 24 percent support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are registered to vote, up sharply from 4 percent in May. While enough for a lead, that also means 76 percent prefer someone else, or none of them.
Scott Walker has 13 percent support, Jeb Bush 12 percent, with the rest in single digits…
Among groups, Trump’s advanced since May by 7 points among college graduates, but just to 8 percent, underscoring his weakness in this group. But – at least until Sunday – his gains otherwise were broad, up, for example, by 16 points among Republicans, 23 points among GOP-leaning independents and 20 points among moderates and conservatives alike.
He’s at least numerically ahead, as a result, across many key groups.
Brendon Eich, meet Donald Trump. The difference is, Donald was unapologetic, and Donald is doing this on the national stage in front of everyone, and changing our debate and our nation in one fell swoop.
Have no mistake, though. This is timing as well. There is a temptation to see Gamergate, the Hugos, and Trump as unrelated. Not so. They are related, by an undercurrent of anger motivating the good to act. That undercurrent is amygdala activation being produced by economic conditions, which I am sure will be visible in the real, unadjusted Misery Index curve for this time period. As these conditions manifest in anger, they produce events which further fuel the rise of the amygdala. Anger begets conflict, amygdalae become conditioned to conflict, and less prone to freak out when confronted with mere reality. Suddenly it is the reality-averse who provoke anger.
The tide is changing, and r is now turning into K. We are right on the cusp of the tipping point. Pay attention, because this is the pivotal moment in history, which will produce the amazing things in the next two decades which will be talked about for centuries.
We are blessed to see this firsthand.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
I’m loving this. If Trump was to get control of illegal immigration, stop the erosion of American manufacturing and bring the endless wars we have to conclusion he could make a total tatters out of anything else he did and we would still be ahead.
On the McCain furor, Bill O’Reilly got Trump to say “certainly if there was a misunderstanding I would totally take that back,” but that’s as far as he went. Many voters are tired of temporizing politicians who are always calibrating their words.