Coyote Blog

It is hard for me to parse the news on Trump.  I made it clear I thought he was an egregious and unsuitable candidate in advance of the election, but I would like to evaluate what is going on in the Administration based on actual facts rather than my preconceived notions.

What makes this hard is that the whole Russia thing the media is obsessed over is almost certainly total BS.  It is, to my eyes, the Obama birth certificate of this election (sort of Karmic given Trump was about the last man standing after Joe Arpaio in publicly supporting the whole birth certificate thing).  It is not just me who thinks the Russia thing is absurd, Glenn Greenwald, certainly no friend of Republicans, agrees.

So given that the #1 story about Trump is probably completely bogus, is all the rest?  Is Russia representative of a general trend in poorly sourced attack stories on the Administration, or is it a distraction from substantial and real problems that are getting less play.  I have been suspicious that the answer is the latter and Megan McArdle has reinforced this opinion with this devastating wake-up call to Conservatives:

But for connected conservatives in DC, the media isn’t the only source of information about this administration. I’d venture to say that most of them have by now heard at least one or two amazing stories attesting to the emerging conventional wisdom: that the president either can’t, or refuses to, follow any kind of policy discussion for more than a few minutes; that the president will not be told no, or corrected about anything, forcing his staff to take their concerns to the media if they want to get his attention; that the infighting within the West Wing is unprecedentedly vicious, and that those sort of failures always stem from the top; and that his own hand-picked staffers “have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him.” They hear these things from conservatives, including people who were Trump supporters or at least, Trump-neutral. They know these folks. They know, to their sorrow, that these people are telling the truth.

They can also compare what they’re hearing to what they heard, both on and off the record, during the last Republican administration. Even in Bush’s final days, when the financial crisis was in full swing and his approval ratings hovered around 25 percent, there was nothing like this level of dysfunction inside the White House, this frenzy of backbiting leakage.

So even though they agree with conservative outsiders that the media skews very liberal, and take all its pronouncements about Republicans with a heavy sprinkling of salt, they know that the reports of this administration’s dysfunction aren’t all media hype. They have seen the media report on their own work, and that of their friends; they know what sort of things that bias distorts, and what it doesn’t. Washington conservatives know that reporters are not making up these incredible quotes, or relying only on Democratic holdovers, or getting bits of gossip from the janitor. They know that the Trump administration is in fact leaking like a rusty sieve -- from the top on down -- and that this is a sign of a president who has, in just four short months, completely lost control over his own hand-picked staff. Which is why the entire city, left to right, is watching the unfolding drama with mouth agape and heads shaking....

So what conservatives here know is that the freakout in Washington, which looks from afar like a battle between Trump and “the establishment,” is actually one side screaming in amazement as the other side turn their weapons on each other.

Read the whole thing, as they say.  During the campaign, I took an analogy from WWI in which the Germans were being dragged down by an Austro-Hungarian Empire that could never seem to win a battle even against small or dysfunctional armies like Serbia, Russia, and Italy.  The Germans joked in black humor that they were shackled to a dead man.  Similarly, I wrote last year that in nominating Trump, the Republicans had shackled themselves to a suicide bomber.  I actually underestimated the problem -- I thought he would just lose the election big, but now he is blowing up the Republican agenda in a much more thorough way.

I got a spam email today that linked to this article:

The statistics are alarming. One out of every five children is solicited for sex online but only 25% of parents ever hears about it.

According to cyber investigators, the average child predator is a white male between the age of 25 to 45, middle to upper income. He maintains a professional job, sometimes in a career involving children, and uses the computer to reach his victims because of its perceived anonymity and access. That means that, as parents, we have to be proactive and involved in what our kids are doing online, whether we want them using them or not.

Really?  One in five?  Does this pass any kind of smell test?  Let me put it this way:  If someone gave you a small team of middle age white males and made it your job to contact 20% of the kids in America, do you think you could do it?  My guess is that you would have to resort to Santa Clause logistics to figure out how so few people could contact so many.

It is just incredible to me that the media will reprint any number whatsoever from an activist.  This is the post-modern "fake but accurate" impulse once again.  If you asked the media person, they would say "Yeah, its probably exaggerated, but its for a good cause."

Update: Just to head off the obvious comment.  I am sure that it occurs, but this occurrence rate is absurd.