I admit it. I doubted the day would ever come. I despaired. I cried in my beer. I began to doubt myself, maybe all of “them” were right, and “we” were the ones with our collective heads up our asses. And then “The Miracle”.
Just another night at the office on the Trump Disaster Channel, better known as the network media. It was day three of the “second amendment solution” never ending story, the media gleefully playing the clip over and over again, and finding new ways to dissect this corpse while the Trump surrogates were reduced to reading names from the Portland ME phone book to defend him, nothing else was working, let’s try hypnotism.
Then the bombshell! Trump, speaking at a rally in Florida calls Barack Obama “the founder of ISIS”, and just for gratuitous good measure he calls Hillary the co-founder. The networks have to cut to break to let the anchors run to the bathroom and change their Depends. A new outrage to cover! Different shit, same day in other words. A political version of “lather, rinse and repeat”.
And then, just when all seemed darkest, the moment I’ve taken to calling “The Miracle”. It started, amazingly enough with Don Lemon on CNN. His panel were sitting around, ridiculing Mein Furor for the absolute audacity of his ridiculous claim while the Trump surrogates thumbed through a thesaurus foe creative new ways to bullshit when Don Lemon said,”Now wait a minute folks, just wait. There may be a method to this, after all, Trump got exactly what he wanted. Now we’re sitting here, talking about his latest absurd assertion, but guess what we’re not talking about? His much more serious ‘second amendment remedy’ remarks and the serious threat of violence they presented. Trump got what he wanted, he changed the subject, regardless of how ridiculous the new one is”. (paraphrased)
A heavenly light suddenly flooded the set. Cherubs flew around on stubby little wings, dropping flowers and pennies from Heaven, and an angelic chorus swelled up in the background. Finally, a media moderator with a goddamn clue! Who’d a thunk it?!?
I admit, it was a ton of fun using sarcasm in the above description, and hopefully you enjoyed it. But this is a serious, possibly game changing moment. Trump finally blew it. He became so outrageous with something he said, that it forced the media to see what we’ve been seeing all along, Trump uses absurdity to turn the subject from his more serious screw ups, to stop the bleeding. If the media takes this to heart, and continues to use this new litmus test on future Orange Julius verbal farts, life just got harder for Trump and his surrogates. If the media starts to actually examine and determine the merit of the statement, and discard it as a head fake, it will be harder for Trump to make more serious mistakes go away.
All except for Fox of course. While Chris Cuomo of CNN rode Rudy Giuliani like a thrill ride for thirty minutes, Fox gave him free and unfettered rein. And three times back to back, Sean “the Manatee” Hannity had “medical experts” on his show to look at facial expressions and the hand movements of Hillary Clinton on tape to try to determine if she had a medical or physical defect. At this point, I think it’s Hannity who should be under strict psychiatric evaluation, not Clinton.
So, in closing let’s just hope that this miracle, like a virus can spread to other networks, and that anchors and moderators will use a little common sense in deciding what’s an actual issue, and what’s a distraction. It can only bode ill for Der Trumpkopf if they do.
Thanks as always for reading!