Pew research is fake news? OMG OMG you better go tell Nate Silver!
It’s not hard to fathom at all. Neither evil nor stupidity are in short supply among the American right.
You might be whooshing me, but if not, I just don’t see it. If she runs for the Senate, like others are saying, she’ll probably make a career of that. Of course I don’t know her, so what I’m saying is just a strong gut feeling.
I can conceive of lots of people being true believers. I unfortunately found out a couple of my ex coworkers and a childhood friend are after reconnecting with them on Facebook.
But the true believers get their news from Fox, Breibart, InfoWars, and so on, while thinking of mainstream media as fake news. Sanders works directly with the President. She knows the truth. Yet she willing shills for him anyway. Decent people wouldn’t do that. Some people will put up with some level of wrong doing for the greater good (or what they believe to be the greater good). But Trump is running our country, financially, morally, and internationally into the ground. Given the fact that she KNOWS this, I have a hard time thinking that she believes this is what’s best for the country.
Edit, I’ll add most of the religious right have done a 180 on Putin because, while he’s a dictator who kills opponents, even those in other countries, and meddles in our elections, he got an anti gay law passed, so that makes him OK in their book and they tend to overlook everything else. So there’s a tiny chance Sarah thinks that Trump running this country into the ground will improve it, but I really, really, really doubt it.
Can someone point me to where anyone claimed that all Trump supporters are unintelligent? What I see is someone saying they can’t wrap their head around why anyone who is intelligent could possibly admire Trump. That’s not saying they don’t exist, and it’s about people who admire him, not merely those who voted for him or still support him.
I will admit that I have actually looked online for intelligent reasons to support Trump in any way, and I cannot find a single one. It’s not a bubble issue. If these people won’t explain themselves, then is it any wonder it’s hard to understand?
I actually do think there are intelligent people who admire him. Thing is, they aren’t good people. So they are smart enough not to explain, since they know that revealing how evil they are would make them look bad. They admire Trump because he was able to get away with being so evil. They admire him because they admire the evil traits he has, but they are smart enough to know that they are not in a position to be able to openly admit admiring those traits. And, of course, there’s probably a whole lot of cognitive dissonance. Point is, they enjoy having a useful idiot in charge, and can use their intelligence to justify it to themselves.
Sanders is, of course, fairly unintelligent and not a good person. There’s no reason these have to be separate groups. I mean, you have only to watch her communicate to see that she’s not the brightest bulb. But then the indifference (at best) that she shows clearly shows a lack of morals. She’s not as bad as Trump, as that would be difficult to achieve. But she is a lying weasel. She’s just developed some coping mechanisms for that which allow her to do the same for Trump–even though it’s clear that sometimes even he is too far for her, which is when she just pretends it didn’t happen, rather than attempt even a farcical spin.
As for her plan: sure, I could see running for office being something she wants. I do question whether being connected to Trump will not be a millstone on her neck, though. I don’t think we can extrapolate from current Trump support to the future. Even if the Republicans remain pointed in a Trumpian direction, I don’t see Trump himself being well thought of once the whole R loyalty thing no longer applies.
Does she know the truth, or just what he tells her?
Sure, but you can like Trump and believe in his agenda and still be aware that what he said three hours ago doesn’t match what he said an hour ago doesn’t match what’s shown in the photographs. Likewise, I don’t think that many of the people in Congress or Trump’s administration are unintelligent, they’re just willing to sell out their ideals for political and personal gain. Plus the number of people who are too scared of the GOP electorate to make a peep when Trump lies and contradicts himself four times in an hour.
Sanders knows that she’s constantly lying for Trump but she’s willing to be used in that manner to advance her personal agenda and the GOP agenda. Her personal credibility and integrity are worth less to her than money and political goals.
If that’s true then I would ask what kind of people want to be in Mensa?
If only you hadn’t personally introduced the distracting topic to the the thread, huh? What a conundrum. For the 3rd time, who are the people in Mensa that you know voted for Trump? You made the assertion, prove it or retract it.
In my passing experience with Mensa it’s “people who are willing to pay an annual fee for validation of their superior intelligence”.
Which is not to say that they aren’t nice people nor that there aren’t positive social aspects of the group, and obviously local subpopulations will vary in personality, purpose and activity level. But in general smart people are just as capable of manufacturing false narratives about reality to bolster their preferred worldview as anyone else. I’d be surprised if Trump support within the Mensa membership didn’t roughly correlate to Trump support in the general population.
What do you mean by “support for Trump”? I don’t doubt that a lot of very smart people voted for Trump. There are plenty of smart people who support his policies. But I haven’t heard anybody yet who I would consider highly intelligent (who doesn’t have their own agenda) praise Trump as being a good president, a good leader, or even a good man. The people I know who voted for him think he’s an idiot but they really hated the alternative.
I’ve known enough smart people to know they can be pretty dumb. People compartmentalize.
(I have a hard time believing anybody can have posted on the Straight Dope for any length of time and not realize this.)
That said, a smart person would have to compartmentalize hard, and also be taking their information from very limited restricted sources, to think that Trump was good for america - unless they took the approach of just deciding that Trump was good from america, and build their narratives using that as an irrefutable premise. Logically speaking, when you find a refutation of an irrefutable premise that just means the contrary evidence has been disproven. Fake news!
This is of course assuming that they care whether Trump is good for America. In the case of Sanders she very well might not. If she has personal motivations for doing what she does, the fact she’s knowingly supporting an incompetent traitorous moron wouldn’t be an issue.
e.g., Ben Carson. How can you be a neurosurgeon and be that clueless?
I think she’s just a dyed-in-wool Republican and blindly accepts it all on faith with no critical thinking.
Surely she’s at least noticed all the lying and flip-flopping though.
Handwaved away by the same hand that handwaves away the Bible.
I’m also thinking she’ll go to Fox (or even CNN) as an anchor or pundit.
Above and beyond the unappealing idiotic moosh that pours from her mouth, I find her face really distracting – something is oddly asymmetrical/slightly wandering eye? Or maybe she just has weird facial expressions that a pro could coach her out of?
Greta Van Susteren isn’t beautiful, but such a good reporter that Fox hired her away from CNN and MSNBC from Fox.
I don’t think Sanders is at risk of that happening to her due to her status as a good reporter.
I just remembered senator Bob Corker’s comment about Trump having a cult like following among most congressional Republicans.
And of course cult members throw logic and reason out the window. So it’s possible SHS is part of the cult herself. In addition to hoping that this job leads to something bigger.