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Wednesday, August 3, 2016

How Does Scott Adams Explain Trump's Latest Brilliance?

Phillip Bump:

"Best way to prove to me that you don’t have a good understanding of politics is to tell me that this week is all part of Trump’s plan."

https://twitter.com/pbump/status/760834615435227137
No matter how huge a mess of things Trump makes, Scott Adams can always be counted on to tell us it's all part of his fiendishly clever plan. So how does he explain the last week?

Adams does now admit he was totally wrong that HRC got a negative convention bounce.

My prediction of a negative convention bump for Clinton was totally wrong. Unless the polls were by phone...and spouse was present."

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/760463905428692992

Does he still stand by his prediction of a Trump landslide? Who knew Dilbert is a fascist? Adams is Trump's Goebbels.

Meanwhile, Reuters has Hillary's lead climbing to 8 points now-it was at 5 last Friday.

"New poll: Clinton 43%, Trump 35%."

https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/760791593322287104

Wow. Trump has 35% in August. The bump is totally towards Hillary as it was 40-35 on Friday.

Two polls that have favored Trump the last week show HRC with a bounce.

"Trump 45% (+1) Clinton 44% @USCDornsife/@LAtimes Daybreak Tracking Poll (8/02-8/03)."

https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/760829417308454912

It had Trump up by 7 a few days ago so that's a 6 point bump.

"Clinton 48% (+2) Trump 46% @UPI/@CVoter TrackingPoll."

https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/760828015555252225

They had Trump up by 6 a few days ago, so that's a 8 point Hillary bump.


28 comments:

  1. On Sumner's blog w/in the past few days both Harding (of course) and anti-Trump Kenneth Duda have called Trump a "genius."

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  2. He's polling at 35 percent in August. That's a genius?

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    1. To be fair I think Duda called him a genius during Dem convention when he starting asking Russians to hack the DNC... he may have changed his tune since then. Harding??? No way... he's a committed Branch Trumpidian.

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    2. Duda thought asking the Russians to hack the DNC is genius? Certainly doing it publicly was the opposite of genius

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    3. Even though Sumner himself is anti Trump a lot of his readers are pro Trump

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    4. Yeah, Duda thought that it was genius to take the spotlight from the Dems and reintroduce the idea of "emails" in a negative way with Hillary.

      Like I say, he may have changed his tune by now. I haven't seen further comments from him.

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    5. Yes I understand. Just saying Duda was utterly wrong on that one. Wow, what bad judgment or as Trump says judgement

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  3. O/T: Interesting post here about what happened in Kansas with darling to conservative purists and #NeverTrumper Tim Huelskamp losing his primary in a landslide to "Establishment" pro-Trump challenger:
    http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/08/03/kansas-primaries-yesterday-showed-possibly-irreparable-damage-trump-done-conservative-movement/

    Leon Wolf never mentions Huelskamp's name in that piece, but it must be what he's talking about. That's going to make Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Ben Sasse shit a brick... but of course they have time for Trump to crash and burn before they're up for reelection, so maybe if they stay the course they'll be experiencing "Drumpfenfreude" by then.

    But back to Wolf's article, check out this bit:

    "A certain narrative has sprung up about the Trump phenomenon that conservatives have been unwilling or unable to counter. That narrative is that unreasonable conservative anger over Republican failure to achieve impossible goals is what led to the rise of Trump. There's a surface-level appeal to this sort of argument, but it's lazy and incorrect. It doesn't even make factual sense - that voters who demanded an unreasonable amount of ideological purity would have been responsible for the least orthodox conservative in the entire field, a guy who had spent most/all of his life donating to Democrats and who openly mused about supporting Planned Parenthood, opposing the free market, raising the minimum wage, and speaking out both sides of his mouth on virtually every issue.

    Here's what's probably true: hard-line conservative anger (reasonable or not) is what led to the refusal of conservative voters to consolidate behind someone who would have been better suited than Ted Cruz to appeal to the moderate Republican voters who were needed to stop Trump."


    I think Leon is wrong as well. I think the "true conservatives" like him and Erick Erickson and Ted Cruz, etc, mistook all that seeming "hardline conservative anger" as actual conservatism: what it really was was anti-Obamaism. The Trump voters our there wanted to stick their finger in the president Blackenstein's eye because he's black and his name is "Barack Hussein Obama" and he's unbearably "uppity" with his fancy educated accent and he's in THEIR white house!!! The conservative purists were merely a convenient vehicle for poking Blackenstein in the eye... they promised to oppose Obama on everything and humiliate him by undoing his signature piece of legislation. The ideology didn't matter: what mattered was that the Black usurper with the funny name be punished for causing them racial and cultural anxiety.

    So when Trump came along and more directly spoke to their raw anxiety, they could ditch the "purity" vehicle which they never bought into anyway. Purity didn't matter to them: punishing Obama did.

    The poor conservative purists were left with heads spinning. They made all kinds of promises about humiliating Obama (and urban blacks and Mexicans in general) that they couldn't deliver on, but what they didn't realize was that it was about race and culture all all along, not ideology. So they are now left with their heads spinning thinking there was a legitimate conservative movement out there dedicated to constitutional purity. There never was!

    That's my theory anyway.

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    1. The promises they made that they couldn't deliver on they blamed "The Establishment RINOs and squishes" for. So why are their purity heroes going down in flames to angry populists who are supported by those same establishment RINOs????

      Well it's not about being a RINO. It never was. "RINO" meant "Republican who's not dedicated to punishing Blackenstein for being black!"

      So here the purists were throwing rocks at the RINOs with the mob on their side, but now "RINO" has been replaced by "cuck." And they're the cucks!! Lol

      Now the so-called RINOs are with the mob throwing rocks at the cuckservative purists.

      No wonder it's so confusing to the purists! They failed to grasp that it's been about racial hatred and anxiety this whole time.

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    2. I agree Leon is wrong. The base did expect too much.

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    3. I tweeted Leon a 140 character version of my theory. =)

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  4. O/T: Keeping on Sumner's good side, not challenging him on economics, and being anti-Trump ears me a lot of H/T's these days:

    http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31882#comment-1006958

    (of course I got that from Katy Tur who in turn retweeted that from someone else... but all that was right there in the tweet I linked him to)

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    1. Scott seems very impressed with Scott Alexander's posts on Trump (which I haven't read yet... but the links are there).

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    2. Scott Alexander not Scott Adams. I once showed Sumner an Adams post-before our fearsome dustup.LOL-and he was not impressed with him

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    3. Yes, Alexander. Here's one he says is "brilliant":
      http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/

      It's in size 1 font on my monitor, so I'll read that later.

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  5. Ben Howe talking about a "madman" with access to nukes:
    http://www.redstate.com/aglanon/2016/08/03/must-see-madman-finger-nuclear-button/

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  6. Ben Howe is a conservative willing to admit that #NeverTrump means you have to vote Hillary

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    1. Amen to that! I'll tweet him some encouragement when I get home today.

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  7. Another long time Sumner commenter (dtoh) I haven't seen much of recently makes and appearance and comes out threatening to vote for Trump like a petulant child... because feelings (specifically how mean lefties make him feel at dinner parties! Booo hooo!):

    "I’ll probably vote for Trump. Of course you can’t say that in public. If I said I supported Trump at a dinner party at my sister’s house (who, BTW Scott, lives in your neighborhood), she’d lose all her friends.

    This kind of intolerance on the left is one of the reasons I’m emotionally tempted to vote for Trump.


    http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31882#comment-1006964

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    1. Scott had a pretty good comeback to that tantrum.

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  8. Mike, Sumner keeps trolling his commenters with Nazi references (he likes how they become unhinged when he makes one in regards to Trump).

    But considering this line from Jennifer Rubin:

    "One does sense that things are spinning wildly out of control. Bone spurs got him out of Vietnam, but he’s trapped in a campaign that was never intended to go this far. Under assault every day and trailing in the polls, Trump increasingly sounds, well, hysterical."

    It occurs to me that four-student deferment and bone-spur purple heart recipient Trump pales in comparison to Hitler: Hitler was actually wounded on the field of battle.

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    1. Indeed. Trump is less a man than Adolph Hitler. At least as a candidate

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    2. That Huelskamp loss was a nice setback for the Freedom Caucus

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  9. Hilarious!:

    http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/08/03/wait.-reince-priebus-just-say-vote-trump/

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  10. Berman also harps on the nuclear weapons angle:
    http://theresurgent.com/lets-review-for-trumps-sake-nuclear-weapons-are-bad/

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  11. Yes, Trump is perfect for the LBJ strategy.

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