Ok. I don’t know what a PR counselor does, but it sounds like a job where reputation matters. Especially with corporate clients. I would think that there would be parts of the publicist business where all parties understand that fidelity to truth is generally observed in the breach. I’ve heard that Hollywood publicists are like that: they routinely spread tissue-thin phony stories about their clients. “Angelina Jolie insists on doing her own stunts,” is one of my favorites. Somehow I seriously doubt whether movie insurers would sign off on that plan. Movie reviewers know this but report the hokum anyway.
Not to diss Jolie - it’s just business. She does fine humanitarian work and doesn’t humiliate herself with sock puppetry, at least to my knowledge. At any rate, are my impressions accurate? I honestly don’t know too much about this stuff.
A reporter reminisces about covering Trump in NYC during the 1980s: [INDENT][INDENT] It may have been this lie—or perhaps another; there were so many—that prompted me to call Cohn and suggest he give his client a lesson in media relations. There were rules, I insisted: You could say “no comment” or not return a call, but you could not directly lie, certainly not to someone’s face, and still expect them to continue writing about you. Cohn found this very funny, and told me not to worry, that Trump meant no harm: “He’s just very excitable.”
During the meeting in which he lied to me about Lincoln West, Trump said he didn’t pay much attention to the press. It was of little importance to him. This, mind you, during an interview with two newspaper reporters. A moment later, he pulled open a desk drawer and took out copies of a profile of him that had appeared in the Washington Post. Had we seen it, he wondered?
The most delectable part is that the reporter was a gossip columnist. For The New York Post, a tabloid not known for its steadfast devotion to accuracy. Calling Roy Cohn, of Joseph McCarthy fame, asking him to please, please have a discussion with Donald about ethics. Because he’s really crossing some lines here!
The problem of seeking and getting support from reprehensible people like Joe Arpaio is that eventually one should repudiate them or just let everyone know that one is happy to be joined to the hip with racial profilers and people that think that they are above the law.
Seeing how close Trump is to Arpaio then the longer Trump is not repudiating Arpaio will only lead for many to realize what Trump does really want for him and for America, to gain power so as to be able to disregard the law and to impose the same kind of authoritarianism as seen in Arizona.
The crime rate is down. And there is nothing sillier than characterizing “SJWs attacking everyone in sight” as a social problem, especially one on a level implicitly equivalent to crime.
What’s being said, basically is that some people think that crime is rampant because they don’t look at the actual facts and statistics, but rather believe the garbage propaganda being spread to keep them in a state of fear.
They long for the “good old days”, that their imagination tells them was crime free, and when they could indulge their bigoted, disgusting ways without being called on it.
They blame those who no longer tolerate racism and hatred towards gays. “That’s not fair!” they whine. “I should be allowed to openly hate and discriminate, like in the good old days, and THOSE PEOPLE had to just suck it up.”
This silly story clears some things up for me. We knew that Trump was a narcissist, and public brags about how many women he claimed to be dating apparently were news to Marla Maples. Unsurprisingly inconsiderate on Trump’s part.
What I didn’t appreciate was the extent to which Trump is an attention seeker. There’s no business or branding advantage for Trump to call gossip columnists out of the blue with that kind of song and dance. Apparently he wasn’t especially popular with the press. Trump simply craved attention. Eight months ago, I figured that Trump was conducting a branding exercise. These pointless phone calls from the early 1990s show how much he revels in having his name in the paper. Even if they make him look ridiculous.
Pitiful! Worthy of pity! Just the break Rubio needs!
Crime is down from its peak, but it skyrocketed in the wake of the counterculture revolution of the late sixties and is still higher than it was then. And for all we know the reason crime is down now is because of stricter sentencing guidelines and parole restrictions. I suspect it’s also due to the fact that people from high crime areas have begun to move to other areas of town where the commission of crime becomes more difficult.
And of course SJWs attacking everyone in sight is a social problem. It leads to anger and conflict and sets groups of people against each other and it may well result in a Donald Trump presidency. I imagine you would agree that would be a social problem.
Not many people lose their wallets or lives due to social justice warriors.
More generally, impressions of TV news form a weak basis for criminology conclusions. Crime started declining during the 1990s - it occurred faster in some places and slower in others. In New York City, violent crime peaked in 1990, 4 years before Willie Bratton appeared on the scene. If you have statistical evidence that parole restrictions play a role I’d like to see it.
I have statistical evidence. Toddlers exposed to higher levels of lead are more likely to have anger management, criminal and general intelligence issues when they get older. Taking lead out of gasoline led to reductions in crime rates 23 years later in the US: this effect is robust across states (who did this with different lags) as well as countries (ditto). There’s also solid medical evidence that lead has devastating effects on cognitive development.
Remember superpredators? Jacked up trigger happy teens with poor impulse control ready to overwhelm the cops and spill blood over the land. Didn’t happen. Instead crime declined. Because fewer toddlers and fetuses were being exposed to high lead levels one or two dozen years earlier.
Again, it is not as simple as you want it to be, in reality crime was almost as bad at the end of the 1930’s, and then there was no counterculture. There was a big drop in crime during the 40’s and it did go up during the 1960. After the 90’s we can see the current drop in crime that it is closer now to the rates seen in the 50’s.
As the counterculture was not seen approvingly by many in the civil rights movement and the leaders of the counterculture faded or died by 1975 you are demanding a causality that is not there. Around the end of the Vietnam war in 1975 many historians point that the counterculture disappeared.
The high crime rate that showed up in the 1960’s remained that way until the 1990’s, and that is one very important reason why pointing at the counterculture as the guilty party is only to talk about a very incomplete view of history.
There were however lead pipes dating from the late 1800s and lead paint dating from the early part of last century. (Ban on leaded interior paints began in 1950 in the US and the total ban took place only in 1978).
To be clear though, I’m not pushing a monocausal explanation.
Or alternatively: we’ll see a sudden drop-off in off-the-cuff foreign policy idiocy (like how fast he’d take out ISIS or encouraging South Korea to develop nukes), and he’ll need to explain the change in tone.
Jeb Bush attracted the best GOP foreign policy advisors: Cruz made do with Iraqi dead-enders as well as a few loons. But Trump really scraped the bottom of the barrel.
Some think that primaries between now and July don’t matter. I disagree. Even if they have suspended their campaign, there are plenty of Republicans on the presidential primary ballot who are not outsiders. Hell, you could vote for Pataki. I think it matters if a candidate as unserious as Trump gets 60% moving forwards (running against nobody), 40% or even (I can dream) 35%. Like most reality show contestants, he is fun to watch because he lacks a normal sense of shame or dignity. But that doesn’t mean the ordinary conservative has to sign up with that. “This is not political entertainment. This is politics.”
Just the break Rick Santorum needs!
ETA: Elendil’s Heir: Well, I suppose he is discrete about his taxes, if not his personal life or at least his fantasies of the same.
ETA2, from the Ezra Klein piece: [INDENT][INDENT]Trump lives by the reality television trope that he’s not here to make friends. But the reason reality television villains always say they’re not there to make friends is because it sets them apart, makes them unpredictable and fun to watch. “I’m not here to make friends” is another way of saying, “I’m not bound by the social conventions of normal people.” The rest of us are here to make friends, and it makes us boring, gentle, kind.
This, more than his ideology, is why Trump genuinely scares me. There are places where I think his instincts are an improvement on the Republican field. He seems more dovish than neoconservatives like Marco Rubio, and less dismissive of the social safety net than libertarians like Rand Paul. But those candidates are checked by institutions and incentives that hold no sway over Trump; his temperament is so immature, his narcissism so clear, his political base so unique, his reactions so strange, that I honestly have no idea what he would do — or what he wouldn’t do. [/INDENT][/INDENT]
I have to agree with the Huffington post on this one.
In their headline in the website they make the point that this move from the RNC chair is a dumb one: it infers that women do not care (or that the RNC thinks that women are not people? :dubious: ) and the Republicans are falling for the Trump method of ignoring women because Trump should know already that 7 in 10 women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
I expect a ration of bullshit in presidential campaigns, but you just have to love the obfuscation the desperate Pubbies are throwing up. The irony is so thick you can cut it:
Priebus comes up with an argument that, in almost as many words, is “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” in regard to Trump’s past.
I’m guessing women won’t be forgiving of that line…or, for that matter, anyone with a bullshit detector.
Next in the Bullshit Brigade is Jeff Sessions.
I won’t even quote Manafort’s bullshit…he lies all the time anyway. Suffice it to say that Trump told him it wasn’t him on the recording, and Manafort believes it. Yeahrite.
Well, now we know how the propaganda machine is going to roll. You have to give it to them, they’re doing everything to get their guy home. I just hope to Christ no one’s snowed by this crap (other than the Kool-Aid drinkers, for whom it’s unnecessary anyway).
