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12 Responses to GOP Convention Wrap-Up
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At time of writing, polls show the race for the presidency to be tight. General consensus seems to be that whoever wins, the 2012 election will be won by a bat squeak.
Yet to many, especially those of us on the right, it seems peculiar that Obama is still remotely in the race. With high unemployment, minimal GDP growth, a 100% increase in food stamp costs, and out-of-control spending, many conservatives are asking how just under half of the American population can possibly want more of the same.
While it is not possible now to get into the many reasons certain people will vote Democrat in November, I propose that all polls, not just left-leaning polls, may be being strongly misled by their data, and Romney/Ryan may actually have a huge lead not seen in polls.
It is my contention that this is due to a mix of the infamous Bradley effect and what is known in Britain as “the Shy Tory Factor,” with both coming together to exaggerate just how popular Obama is in America.
The Bradley effect is a much-debated polling distortion that is easy to demonstrate but difficult to prove. The idea that when a black or minority candidate is on the ticket against a white candidate, certain voters may lie under pressure from a pollster, worried about being seen as a racist for choosing the white candidate over the minority, sounds highly plausible. The consequence, should the Bradley effect be in play, would be a skewed poll indicating that the minority candidate is in better political shape than his or her opponent.
Some argued that while it may have been a factor in the past, it was not a factor in the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was elected convincingly, just as polls predicted.
Yet this dismissal may be premature. A closer look at the statistics shows that predictions for how much of the white vote Obama would win were strongly exaggerated by polling companies. For instance, a CBS poll near election day predicted that McCain would win the white vote by a mere 3%, and on election day the Republican actually brought in 12% more of the vote than the Democrat. Had it not been for an unusually high turnout among blacks and minorities, Obama’s landslide would have been a lot closer.
Therefore, there is no reason why we cannot expect at least a similar Bradley effect this year. In fact, it could possibly be even stronger — after all, the liberal smear that those who oppose Obama are racist is one that really took off since Obama took office, specifically with the rise of the Tea Party. This could serve only to magnify the Bradley effect, as some white voters may feel ashamed of being seen as sympathetic to a “racist” organization.
Yet there is another factor that, mixed with Bradley, could radically distort the numbers — and it is a concept not known in America, but known very well in the United Kingdom. Called “The Shy Tory Effect,” it could be the little-known variable that could be hiding a landslide for Mitt Romney.
The concept was coined after the British general election of 1992, the result of which stunned the pollsters, the politicians, and the media. After 13 years in office, the ruling Conservative Party was Thatcher-less and divided. Led by their extreme Welsh socialist leader Neil Kinnock (the same Neil Kinnock whose speeches Joe Biden had already ripped off), the left-wing Labour Party were firmly ahead in the polls. Britain was drifting toward a socialist authoritarianism that they hadn’t experienced since the 1970s.
As election day approached, Labour held a chunky lead, causing Kinnock to yell giddily into the microphone in his final speech to the Party before election day, “We’re all right, we’re all right” repeatedly, to rapturous applause.
It seemed Labour had it in the bag. The only exception was the cool and collected Tory prime minister, John Major, whose internal polling suggested that things were not as they seemed.
As the results came in on election night, Labour started off celebrating. However, by 10 o’clock, the BBC’s exit poll predicted that Labour might not win, but there would be a hung parliament, which would still probably cause Kinnock to be prime minister of a coalition.
Yet the final result was a total shock — a comfortable win for the Tories, losing a few seats, but picking up the highest total number of votes for any political party since 1951. Left-wing pundits couldn’t explain what had happened.
The explanation for the gap between polls and reality was eventually named “The Shy Tory Factor.” Since the ascension of Thatcher to Downing Street in 1979, the Tories had been presented as a nasty, evil party that wanted to destroy communities in their war against the miners, gut health care, and take money from the poor to give to the rich via the poll tax [i]. Does this sound familiar to any Americans at all?
While the policies of the Conservative Party were popular, the media and the screeching left had helped turn the Tory brand into a toxic one that many people didn’t want to be associated with in spite of their secret support. Therefore, when polled, the shy Tories answered Labour, but voted Conservative.
Although this happened twenty years ago and in a different country, I propose that the important characteristics that make up the Shy Tory Factor are present in America in 2012. According to the mainstream media, the Republicans want to deny people health care, throw Granny off a cliff, and generally reduce the country to a Dickensian nightmare when the rich get richer, and do so by pulling bread out of the mouths of the hungry. Mixed with the aforementioned labeling of Republicans and Tea Partiers as racist, this is quite a suppressive combination.
While this blend of the Bradley effect and Shy Tory Factor may not affect voters in red states, in purple states it is not difficult to see why those intending to vote Republican may not wish to publicly identify as so, even to a pollster promising anonymity, in fear of being judged as the new Jim Crow.
The other note worth mentioning is that, in the Shy Tory Factor, the only person who knew of its existence before the election was the leader, whose internal polling is usually more accurate. Could this be why Obama’s team seems to have gone into panic in recent weeks? Do they know something the polling companies don’t?
The Bradley effect has been influential, if at all, only by a few overall percentage points. But if it is wrapped up with an American version of the much more powerful “Shy Tory Factor,” we conservatives may be in for a treat in the form of a massive landslide come the first Tuesday in November.
My top two picks for VP, Susana Martinez and Condoleezza Rice, were on display last night and both were in fine form.
Christie and Martinez in 2020.
Liberals love to talk about rape — at least those who are apologists for the abortion industry do. When GOP Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin did his best Joe Biden impression and inserted both feet into his mouth over abortion, “legitimate rape,” and the shutting down of the female body, liberals across the U.S. were falling all over themselves to paint Republicans as heartless Neanderthals and further the “war on women” narrative.
The Democrats have now gone so far as to turn the Democrat National Convention into an “abortion-palooza,” as Ed Morrissey of Hot Air puts it. The lib love-fest will feature such speakers as Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund; Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America; and Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student who spoke before Congress in favor of federal funding for birth control.
Liberals claim that Akin’s words were demeaning to rape victims, yet for decades they have shamelessly used rape as a political tool to further their pro-abortion agenda. Of course, like-minded members of the mainstream media have been all too willing to help out. GOP candidates such as Todd Akin are often asked something like the following: “If a woman was brutally raped and would be emotionally traumatized by carrying to term, would you allow her to have an abortion, or would you force her to have the child?”
Few fumble the answer as badly as Akin did, but many conservatives struggle for the appropriate reply. It is not a difficult answer, if one has true convictions. In fact, there are multiple ways to respond.
One good reply would be to answer the question with a question. (This was a tactic that Christ, Himself, often used.) For example: instead of killing the innocent child in the womb, why not execute the rapist? A follow-up would be: do liberals (or others) who support abortion in cases of rape also support the execution of rapists?
Another retort in the form of a question could be: why compound one evil deed with another? Rape is a horrific evil, but so is the taking of an innocent life. Liberals act as if an abortion is like getting a tooth pulled. One of the great lies of the pro-abortion lobby is that there are no consequences to having an abortion. The truth is that, just as with rape, for many, an abortion is a very traumatic experience.
In fact, a woman who would be “emotionally traumatized” by carrying to term a child conceived in rape would almost certainly be “emotionally traumatized” by killing it. It is a devastating thing to know that one has been responsible for ending a life — especially the life of one’s own child.
Of course, another great lie of the abortion industry is that the fetus is not really a living human being. Life in the womb for a baby is as well-documented as anything in science. (Isn’t it ironic that liberals love to tout themselves as rational champions of science, yet they ignore science in the abortion debate?) With ultrasound and doppler machines, as well as other technology, one can monitor the life of a baby in the womb from very near conception until birth. With the new (4-D) ultrasound machines, one can see with amazing clarity the baby in the womb. Babies can be seen grasping things, sucking their thumbs, and responding to stimuli.
At around week 8 of a pregnancy, which is shortly after most women even realize that they are pregnant, a baby can be seen on ultrasound. By then, every organ is in place, and bones are forming. One can see and hear their little hearts beat at around 150 beats per minute, pumping their own blood, which is often a different type than the mother’s. By weeks 9 and 10, teeth begin to form, fingernails develop, and the baby can turn its head.
At week 12, nearing the end of the first trimester, the baby can grasp objects placed in its hand. In addition, all organ systems are functioning; the baby has fingerprints, a skeletal structure, nerves, and circulation. Also, all of the parts necessary to experience pain are present, including the nerves, spinal cord, and thalamus.
In spite of all this, the pro-abortion cry is still “it’s the woman’s body; she can do what she wants with it!” As I have demonstrated, abortion is far from this simple.
The bottom line is that rape is not a moral justification for abortion. There is no shame in this position. As Christian apologist Greg Koukl puts it, “[i]f the unborn child is not a living person, then no excuse for abortion is necessary. If it is, then no excuse for abortion is adequate.” Nothing good is accomplished from creating another victim in the terrible case of rape. As clichéd as it sounds, abortion truly does stop a beating heart.
Trevor Grant Thomas: at the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason. http://www.trevorgrantthomas.com
If “golf” and “Chicago” now are code words for black people, what does the media make of this? Very little it seems, since the offender is a Democrat.
An Assembly candidate whose campaign sent mailers using the word “negrohood” to residents in his Sheepshead Bay district apologized Wednesday – calling the racially tinged language a “typo.”
“As the candidate, I take full responsibility for this inadvertent error and I am sorry to anyone who was offended by it,” Ben Akselrod, who’s running in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary against Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz, said in a statement.
The Friends of Ben Akselrod sent the mailers last week, claiming that his opponent “has allowed crime to go up over 50% in our negrohood so far this year.”
Rick, can you imagine if a Republican had said that?
The Republican Convention has turned into nothing more than a pep rally. All rhetoric and no details. Lots of promises but no details about how to fulfill those promises. Lot’s of talk about fixing things but not one word about how to fix anything. That’s because the Republicans either don’t know how they are going to fix the problems that they talk about or that the way that they are going to address whatever problem they are talking about is a way that you won’t like. But all of you need to read between the lines in what it is that the Republicans say because we already know what it is that they intend on doing. Just what is the Republican economic plan. The Republican economic plan is to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich and cut other taxes for the rich. Doing this Romney, Ryan and ALL the Republicans say will create jobs. But we already tried this in the Bush years and since the days of Reagan and it hasn’t create jobs but just more wealth for the rich. Consumers create jobs by buying things. the rich already have enough money to buy things and already own most of the things that create jobs. A good economic plan makes it so that more people can buy things! A fairer America makes it so that more people can buy things! A righteous America makes it so that everybody can buy things! The Republicans believe in an America that only the rich can buy things and the rest of us are on our own! The Republicans talk about ideas but they have not shown their ideas because they have run out of ideas that doesn’t consist of voodoonomics! The Republicans also want to unnecessarily increase the military budget, cut or gut as many regulations and environmental laws as possible, and make abortions illegal. If Romney, Ryan and the Republicans run our government then every time you have sex you will have to worry that what you are doing is going to burden your life forever as you will be forced to conceive every conception you make! Many Women AND MEN will have to end their dreams, their hopes and rearrange their future as they prepare for a child that they didn’t plan on and couldn’t afford. Many women AND MEN and grandparents and family members and ALL of us taxpayers are going to have to chip in and help raise lots of children that weren’t exactly in our plans. Then because of the deficits that the tax cuts for the rich and military increase will cause Romney, Ryan and ALL the Republicans will be cutting the budget more than what the Ryan budget plan calls for. These additional budget cuts as well as the Ryan budget cuts will make life harder for these new parents and their families as well as ALL of the poor class and the middle class and ALL of the CURRENT RETIRES because ALL the government programs and benefits will be on the Republican chopping block! These are the things the the Republicans don’t talk about at their convention or ever but it is something that ALL of you better think about because it will affect ALL of you unless you are rich. Face reality folks, Romney, Ryan and ALL the Republicans are sick and tired of paying taxes and helping you. They want to do everything they can to make themselves richer and tell you that you are on your own!
Ryan as well as Romney are liars! They both will lie about anything and most everything in order to get your vote. Deception is the name of their game. Conning you into believing what isn’t is is now the way Romney, Romney and ALL the Republicans run their campaigns. If we can’t even trust them as candidates then how can we trust them to run our government. Now we have to look at everything they say and make sure that we understand just what it is they would really do about what it is they said they would do. Ryan and Romney lie about what President Obama would do about welfare reform. Romney lie about what the effect of the $713 billion in medicare cuts that President Obama AND Ryan proposed, Romney and Ryan lie about what Obama meant when he said that ALL of us Americans helped built ALL of the businesses in America by giving companies the opportunities to exist, get their employees to work with public transportation,roads,bridges and more, educate their employees, provide police and fire protection, provide water and sewer and providing many other things that taxes are required to provide. But we all know that Republicans hate paying for the things that makes America great because we all know that Republicans hate paying taxes. Romney and the Republicans do all they can to avoid paying taxes and Romney and Ryan are out to bring us a government that insures that the rich will be paying a lot less taxes because the truth of the matter ios the Republicans are sick and tired of helping us Americans! Think about all of this before you vote. This election isn’t only about the weekly job numbers. It’s about righteousness, fairness, a right to vote, a right to an abortion, a right to equality, a right to equal pay for equal work, a right to an unbiased Supreme Court, a right to get a college education at a reasonable price, a right to get health care for your children until they are 25, a right to get health insurance no matter what. a right not to lose your health insurance once you change jobs, a right to have good regulations and environmental laws and regulations to protect ourselves against ripoffs from Wall Street, the rich and polluters and many other rights that Romney and the Republicans want to take away. Vote for President Obama and the Democrats because they got your backs unlike Romney and ALL the Republicans who got the rich people’s backs!
Ron, take a breath, and take your meds today.
What will ObamaCare do to the next Clint Eastwood?
Rachel Maddow has the answer: “he’s 81″, so what more needs to be said?
Since when did Communists not like old people?
The answer: forget about families: what good are old people to the state?
Therefore, Eastwood’s wasn’t performing; he was simply “bizarre”, even by the standards of a Gay Communist Party littered with fifth-rate millionaire actors too stoned on an endless supply of garbage roles, high-end booze and expensive drugs to care what taxes are.
Guess what, punks:
The oldest are still the wisest.
Earned wealth still speaks freely.
So, in the “wake” of Clint’s act, it is reasonable to ask:
Do you still feel lucky, punks?
Last week a line was crossed, and full blown insanity manifested itself in the formerly-mainstream media. My friend JMH is a model of a temperate media consumer, but watching the coverage of the Republican convention, she could not contain her fury:
Something just snapped today, when I read about the race baiters at MSNBC not even airing any of the Convention’s minority speakers. Even if Artur Davis weren’t black, how is it a non-story, when the guy who seconded Obama’s nomination ends up with a prime time spot on the GOP Convention stage? Ditto for covering Ted Cruz, who pulled off the most spectacular extremist Tea Party upsets of campaign 2012. It’s not just MSNBC either; NBC “curated” both of them right out of “some of the notable speeches” in Tampa.
I know, I know. I know. But it’s the brazenness of it all that just stuns me, and keeps on stunning me, no matter how prepared to expect it I should be by now. Today, however, I’m also stunned by just how deep the reservoir of my own anger about it has become. It’s so blinding that I can’t even concentrate on anything else.
That was early in the convention. There was much more to be furious about as the coverage continued.
Yahoo Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian, formerly at ABC where he produced this famous and fact free ambush of Sarah Palin, mistakenly thought he was off mic when he said Ann and Mitt Romney had no problem with African Americans suffering as a result of hurricane Isaac. They’re not concerned at all. “They’re happy to have a party with black people drowning,” As it turned out, Mitt Romney headed out to flood stricken Louisiana at the close of the convention, and only after that became known did Obama cancel his fund raising plans elsewhere and head out there, too.
In fact, Obama has a history of ignoring all citizens suffering from catastrophe. In 2009 when an ice storm killed 42 and left millions of Americans without power or water or shelter, Obama hosted a lavish Super Bowl cocktail party with $100/lb Wagyu beef appetizers. Worse, as Chalian was leveling that mendacious, hate-filled charge, Obama was chatting online on Reddit with his supporters, not flying to the scene of the destruction.
On hearing Chalian was fired, PBS’s Gwen Ifill whose outrageously biased moderation in the 2008 debates set a new low, rushed to his defense:
gwen ifill ?@pbsgwen?One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God’s gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid?11:32 AM – 29 Aug 12 · Details”
https://twitter.com/pbsgwen
Like JMH, Roger L. Simon was astonished at the degree of the media’s racism and called it pathological:
Racism is stalking the Republican Convention in Tampa. But it’s not from the Republicans. It’s from the mainstream media.
First it was MSNBC treating convention speakers Artur Davis, Mia Love, and Ted Cruz like nonpersons. And now it’s Yahoo! Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian getting caught on an ABC webcast saying Mitt Romney would be “happy to have a party when black people drown.”
Chalian, not surprisingly, was fired almost immediately when the word got out, but the climate in which he would make such an insane statement is very much alive and well. Why would anyone dream of saying such a thing in a semi-public situation if he didn’t feel safe and among friends?
The left/liberal need to think Republicans and conservatives racists is more than just projection. At this point, it is nothing short of a mental illness. It is so far divorced from reality, it has to be pathological. No longer are these people able to observe reality with anything close to impartiality. We are not in the world of politics, ladies and gentlemen. We are in the world Freud, Jung, Adler, and people bouncing off walls.
He’s right of course.
How divorced from reality is the claim that Republicans and conservatives are racists? Bgates corrects the media narrative.
41 voting members of the House of Representatives are black.
39 of them are Democrats. (Those numbers would be 42 and 40 save for the death of a Rep in March.)
Given that Democrats famously spurn color blindness to embrace affirmative action, how many of those 39 do you suppose come from majority-white districts?
Did you guess four?
Meanwhile, there are two black Republicans in the House. They were elected from districts that are 82% and 75% white, whiter than any district that sent a black Democrat to the 112th Congress. Apparently an overwhelmingly white electorate is no bar to a black candidate – so long as the overwhelmingly white electorate is also majority Republican.
Tammy Bruce offers up a plausible theory to explain the media’s insanity, insanity so widespread even the occasionally more temperate Juan Williams was shamefully swept up in it:
I knew the liberal establishment would have a meltdown swathed in violence and depravity as they realized they were being rejected, and that time has arrived. Just after last night’s RNC convention liberals wasted no time attacking the women they see as a threat. The truth of the matter, of course, is that liberals destroyed their own bizarre vision for the future with actions that most of America is now rejecting. Instead of looking in the mirror, they’ve chosen to target Mia Love and Ann Romney, two obvious conservative superstars who have appeal across the political and socio-economic spectrum.
The first indication of how vile liberals will get comes from Juan Williams who called Mrs. Romney a “Corporate Wife” last night after he speech. Talk about ‘coded phrases’! A ‘corporate wife’ is a phrase used on the left for a woman who has married for money and plays a role so she’ll continue to get money. In other words, a lying whore. Both Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly sounded shocked. Immediately after that remarkable speech last night that’s where Williams went. I then saw tweets with the same general message. This had clearly been a messaging decision prior to Ann’s speech. I don’t think they counted on the speech being as distinctive and as strong as it was.
Besides being pathological, the media approach is clearly coordinated , and understandably so given the incestuous relationships between so many in the media and the Democratic party detailed by Erick Erickson at redstate.
I wonder if any of these people have noticed that the Republican Party has more elected Hispanic Congressmen and Governors than the Democrats?
It is not an accident that the media, immediately after the Democrats started pushing out the War on Women, began running stories about the GOP’s hostility to women. It is now not an accident that the media, led by NBC and the Politico (which also partnered on that pathetic GOP primary debate), would peddle out the GOP and race stories.
It is far too much to be a coincidence that the Politico and NBC have ties, sometimes in the same bed, to Democrat and leftwing activists and then hop out of bed on the same page as the Democrats’ talking points.
Well, if they watched the convention on the networks, and not CSPAN, convention viewers might have missed Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Susana Martinez’ stirring speeches. Watch this video to see how NBC covered some yammering by Democrat shill Andrea Mitchell instead of the first three minutes of Sen. Rubio’s barnburner speech.
Quite frankly, criticism of Obama is not racism no matter that people like Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Matthews hear dog whistles of racism in everything. (Matthews laughably went so far as to suggest he lives in D.C. and therefore has a firsthand knowledge others don’t of blacks. In fact, he is paid millions of dollars a year by NBC to spew his mad commentary and lives in a very white affluent suburb in which with 2,000 residents there are a total of 10 black residents.) So out-of control is Matthews that after the RNC wrapped up, he got into a 2 AM public verbal altercation in Tampa, asking a group of Republicans if they were at a “douchebag convention.”
Since we now know that half a million dollars in Stimulus money was funneled to MSNBC for commercials on the Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann shows, advertising Job Corps training that produced no jobs, MSNBC henceforth should be known as “The semi-official Obama Administration News Agency,” much like Al Ahram in Egypt.
Investors Business Daily’s cartoonist Michael Ramirez ran a cartoon of a dog labeled “Media” making love to Obama’s leg. Come to think of it maybe that’s a true picture, a metamorphosis that explains why so many of them hear “dog whistles” of racism that the rest of us cannot hear, drawing that notion from language that in no rational way warrants that characterization.
The media madness this past week truly was beyond parody. If you doubt me read this exchange between MSNBC’s Martin Bashir and Lawrence O’Donnell in which reference to Obama’s golfing is said to be a “racial double entendre” suggesting that he’s like Tiger Woods “famous for chasing cocktail waitresses”.
(These two cuckoos aren’t alone. If you want to see how idiotic P.C. language codes are becoming check out this historically inaccurate explanation by a highly paid Department of State official as to why terms like “rule of thumb” and “hold down the fort are racially insensitive and should be avoided. It’s impossible not to laugh out loud until you realize how much tax revenues go to pay him and others like him to peddle this ahistoric claptrap.)
As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto reminds us:
[quote] Obama’s journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician’s actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn’t say that. Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: “We don’t like black people.”
It’s television manufacturing a virtual reality, which is to say unreality, a dangerous state of affairs. Sultan Knish has written the most brilliant essay explaining this . Here’s but a tiny sample. You really must read it all:
The people who decided to make Obama popular did so through constant repetition that translated into the peer pressure of the trend. Obama became a trending topic and everyone followed along because in an unreal world, you follow the unreal leader.
Obama is fake, his popularity is fake, but it’s also real, because fake is now the ultimate reality. The purveyors of fakeness have demonstrated their ability to transform the unreal into the real through manufactured consensus. By insisting that something unpopular was popular often enough, they made it popular. And by insisting that something popular is really unpopular, they did the opposite. [snip]
There is a very specific category of people who are uncomfortable with the way things are and for the most people these are the people who have ongoing forcible contact with realities that don’t go away when the talking head begins jabbering, the memes begin spewing and the trending topics trend. These are the people who work for a living outside the bubble, who know that external safety nets are unreliable and that they are always on the edge of something… even if they don’t always know what. [snip]
When all the bubbles of rhetoric pop, there are still the hard unpleasant realities to deal with. Bailouts and money pits can only bury them for so long. Governments sending money to banks and swapping worthless commodities that only exist in the theory of a theory only work for as long as people believe in them.
Even an unreal economy reported on by an unreal media cheering on an unreal leader can only run for so long until reality punches through the illusion, the curtain falls, the magicians scramble off the stage with rabbits and doves tucked into their pants, and everyone wakes up to realize that the dream is over and we realize that we are entering a world where the stories no longer matter and history is about to begin.
Tune out the media or find yourself either enraged or lulled into unreality — brainwashed as it were. You can watch important events on CSPAN and easily access transcripts and videos of speeches and debates online. Time to stop the insanity provided by the media intermediaries and keep your mind clear.
For some time now, professor Glenn Reynolds, known to many as Instapundit, has talked about “preference cascades” I think the insanity of the media is triggered by their sense that a preference cascade is building up in the US which will wash them and their political clients out to sea.
What is a “preference cascade”?
As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. In a totalitarian society, the dissenter fears that if he speaks up, his will be a lone voice, easily squashed by the enforcers of the regime. When dissenters realize they are not alone, and the true strength of their numbers becomes apparent, “invincible” regimes vanish with astonishing speed.
The same effect can occur without brutal oppression, when fear of ostracism and ridicule cause people to suppress their own doubts. This kind of preference falsification requires strict discipline from the makers of opinion. Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a “Fresh Air” listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.
Why do I think the media manufactured consensus is unraveling and the cascade begun?
I see signs of it everywhere. There was the 2010 wipeout of the Democrats in Congress and statehouses. There was the massive consumer Chick-fil-A response to the boycott movement, Obama’s campaign staff has had a hard time meeting fund raising goals and filling the stands for his appearances. This week — respecting his speech at the DNC convention — they are even resorting to giving tickets to the event away free in bars.
And this: Voter ID in the polls is grossly oversampling Democrats. And even Democratic pollsters are giving away the game. Polls showing Obama in the lead are, I believe, phony as his make believe large twitter following which it turns out is mostly an online audience he paid for.
Here’s Stephen Green:
Democracy Corps – that’s James Carville and Stan Greenberg’s polling outfit – has Romney up 16 points with independents.
16 points.
Voter ID typically runs low-to-mid 30s for Republicans and Democrats alike, leaving the remainder as Independents. What’s that mean? If Carville and Greenberg have it right (and many other polls show Romney way up with Indies), it can mean only one thing: Democrats are being oversampled, and grossly.
Admittedly, voter ID is a tricky thing to measure, and trickier still to sample. But most polls I’ve seen have had D samples the same or higher than in 2008, when Black Jesus was still bringing us the hope and change and lowering the oceans and all that stuff. And they’ve R samples the same or lower than 2008, even though the GOP managed to flip 63 House seats in 2010.
The game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you from playing.
It could be just me — after all I never watch television — but my thought is that a convention that begins with a jummah call to Moslem prayer and features Sandra Fluke demanding we pay for her contraceptive costs is not going to turn this around for the President or his media friends.
Mitt Romney the devout Mormon, may have lowered his standards to win this Presidental election. For decades The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) – The Mormons and its faithful church members have taken a strong, and very vocal unalterable stance against gambling in any form including lotteries, sweepstakes, racetracks, and casinos. Sheldon Adelson (CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation and Venetian Macao Ltd.) son of a Ukranian Jewish immigrant (also financier of Romney’s recent visit to Isreal), and his wife recently gave $10 million to the pro-Romney super PAC named Restore Our Future. Adelson the Las Vegas casino magnate has pledged to spend $100 million to defeat Obama. Adelson’s very large contributions can easily make Romney a shoe in for the President of the United States. It will probably be after Romney officially wins the GOP nomination at the National Republican Convention in Tampa, Florida in August 2012 that the American public can expect this Super PAC money to be spent in massive negative campaign ads against Obama.
Mitt does not have to go negative to win this election. He has to simply spell out what his plans are, and remind the children in the room that Obama has been a horrible president on so many levels. Obama’s base is not excited like they were in 2008…I like Mitt in a landslide-despite the DNC and TeamObama trying like crazy to steal this election Chicago-thug style.
As the Democrats kick off their convention, perhaps they should heed the old saying that you are the company you keep. If this saying is in fact the case, the President and his party have some explaining to do.
President Obama and his party have chosen to grant Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, a prominent speaking slot at their convention this week. This endorsement of Ms. Richards and her enterprise follows President Obama’s making numerous campaign stops and running ads on behalf of Planned Parenthood. This support complements other high ranking Dems’ support of that same organization, including Nancy Pelosi’s enthusiasm over the connection between Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scouts.
This highly visible embrace and support is inconveniently timed with the release of new analysis that links numerous existing whistle-blower lawsuits — in California, Iowa and Texas — with strong statistical correlation demonstrating an anomalously solid link between Planned Parenthood’s government funding and the abortions it commits. This, of course, runs contrary to Democrat assertions to the contrary[i].
As the analysis concludes, the systemic fraud described in the whistle-blower suits is a potentially perfect explanation for the unusually high positive correlation. It is the hand that fits the glove.
If this analysis and its conclusions are correct, in Planned Parenthood the Democrats are embracing a far greater crime than mere cronyism and Solyndra incompetence. They are embracing systemic fraud and racketeering in violation of well-known federal laws.
Behold: The Democrat Party and the company it keeps.
In this highly polarized, contentious election season, the media frequently portrays the GOP as anti-woman and anti-gay. The desire of most Republicans to protect the unborn has been speciously transmogrified into hatred of women and a plot to control their reproductive systems and, ultimately, their lives.
It’s what prompted Code Pink to protest at the Republican National Convention with members dressed up as vaginas to graphically bring home what they perceive as a war on women by Republicans who they claimed want to set the clock back several decades, erase the progress made by the women’s rights movement, and relegate women to second class citizenry.
The ardent protests against Republicans and the concomitant apocryphal charges that they are anti-woman and anti-gay are par for the course. In actuality, Republicans are merely advocating for the sanctity of life and traditional marriage and do not demonstrate hatred against any group. However, to hold an opinion contrary to the leftist dogma of the day is obviously enough to spur public vilification and rampant allegations of malfeasance.
The anti-woman, anti-gay allegations Democrats use to characterize Republicans are all the more astonishing in light of the tolerance and accommodations that are conferred on Islam. While Islam is given a pass on these issues, Democrats freely malign Republicans who speak out about repressive Islamic doctrine or sharia, an ideology that is truly anti-woman and anti-gay.
It’s worth noting that the Democratic Party’s friendliness toward Muslims has prompted an extraordinary gathering in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Democratic National Convention begins on Sept. 4. As part of the pre-convention festivities, a “Jumah at the DNC” was held through Sept. 1 by the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs (BIMA), an Islamic nonprofit headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. The Washington Times estimates that “between 500 and 1,000 participants” attended the Jumah, while 20,000 had been predicted to attend the entire three-day event.
The opening prayer was led by Siraj Wahhaj, an advocate for an Islamic state in America, a “potential unindicted co-conspirator” in the first World Trade Center bombing, and a member of CAIR. Event co-organizer Jibril Hough has ties to Islamic terrorists as the imam at a Muslim Brotherhood-owned mosque in Charlotte. That mosque is listed by the U.S. Justice Department as an “unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in U.S. history.”
The Muslim-friendly Democrats have stayed mum on the subject of this ominous gathering in the shadow of their own convention. The silence is not surprising, given the recent Democratic response to an exposé on the infiltration of the U.S. government by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Six weeks ago, five brave members of Congress led by Michele Bachmann reported on the government infiltration and the MB goal to achieve a “grand jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” until “G-d’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.” Instead of registering concern about the well-documented strategy to Islamize America and impose sharia, Democrats accused the congressmen of Islamophobia and McCarthyism. Yet Democrats claim to stand for women’s rights, homosexual rights, and the separation of church and state, in direct contrast to the tenets of Islam.
The hypocrisy of the left’s defense of Islam is glaringly obvious when it comes to its treatment of women, which goes far beyond decisions about abortion and birth control. The left’s feminist sisters may think that Republicans want to repeal women’s rights, but the Koran (4:34) expressly states, “Allah has made men superior to women because men spend their wealth to support them.”
The Koran sanctions wife-beating with “[a]s for women whom you fear will rebel, admonish them first, and then send them to a separate bed, and then beat them.” Furthermore, Muslim women may be beaten for refusing sexual relations with their husbands.
Within the Islamic doctrine that Democrats are promoting and defending are provisions to devalue women by allocating half the share of women’s inheritances to men, valuing the testimony of a woman as half that of a man, and providing indemnities for death or injury of a women at half the dollar value of men. In Islam, women are ruled by male relatives — fathers, brothers, husbands — who restrict their movements, monitor their dress, and decide whom and when they will marry, the latter of which can be as young as six years of age.
A Muslim husband can divorce his wife by stating his wish to do so three times and is under no obligation to economically provide for her. He can have up to four wives and countless sex slaves, while a Muslim woman can be stoned for adultery, rape, or the appearance of impropriety.
As for homosexuality in Islam, homosexuality is considered vile and punishable by death. The applicable Hadith states that “if a man comes upon a man, then they are both adulterers,” and “[i]f a woman comes upon a woman, they are both Adulteresses[.]” “When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes”; “[k]ill the one that is doing it and also kill the one that it is being done to.”
No debate exists about homosexuality in Islam; the only point of contention is the punishment, which can be beheading, hanging, stoning, or throwing the person from the tallest building. These punishments are not unusual and are frequently meted out in Islamic sharia countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Somalia, and Mauritania.
It is the height of hypocrisy and irony that, although Democrats freely criticize the policies of Republicans as anti-woman and anti-gay and worry about a conservative agenda that will result in a setback of the gains enjoyed by women and homosexuals over the past several decades, they fail to address the greater threat Islamic doctrine represents. Democrats are silent about Islamic relegation of women to second-class citizenship and the life-and-death dangers it poses for homosexuals.
Clearly, the peril with Islam goes far beyond a choice on abortion and the recognition of homosexual marriage. The unlikely alliance the left has cultivated with Islam, not the left’s differences with the Republican Party, is the farthest departure from their espoused pro-women, pro-homosexual platform. As such, it represents a danger to all Americans.
As Bill Clinton once again takes center stage at the Democratic National Convention, let’s amuse ourselves by screening the vilest soap opera in American history: Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony.
This one’s got it all: two sham marriages, sexual perversions, and national treachery at the highest level. Naturally, the “mainstream media” refuses to inform you of it, but that’s why I’m here.
If you’ve scratched your head trying to puzzle out the complex inter-relationships between these glamorous grifters, stop scratching. I’m about to unveil a Grand Unified Theory that explains why Huma Abedin, the alleged Muslim Brotherhood asset who’s the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chose to marry disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner in an interfaith ceremony performed by matrimonial expert Bill Clinton.
America first learned of Huma Abedin in 2007, in a worshipful Vogue article titled “Hillary’s Secret Weapon: Huma Abedin Oversees Every Minute of Senator Clinton’s Day.” Featuring glossy photos of designer-clad Huma, the article rhapsodized about her “wrinkle-free” Prada suit, “flawless” skin, and “long, luxurious hair” with “bouncy waves you see mostly in shampoo commercials.”
The photo of Huma statuesquely displayed on a chair drew attention, as did the eyebrow-raising descriptions of Huma’s and Hillary’s mutual adoration. That attention intensified as Hillary became secretary of state and installed Huma as her top aide. Mumblings could be heard about the nature of their relationship and the unusual background of Huma, who grew up in Saudi Arabia.
Someday we may look back upon the intern scandals of the Clinton White House with amazement at our preoccupation with Bill, Monica Lewinsky, and cigars. The bigger scandal may have been in First Lady Hillary’s office, where Huma Abedin waltzed into her internship as a new college graduate, despite her screamingly obvious Muslim Brotherhood family ties.
Five Congress members, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, have raised concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the federal government, with special emphasis on Huma’s role at State. For their trouble, they have been hysterically accused of McCarthy-style witch-hunts, by everyone from Jon Stewart to John McCain to GOP honcho Ed Rollins.
Naturally, Barack Obama defended Huma at his annual Ramadan dinner, praising her as an “American patriot” to whom the American people owe a “debt of gratitude.” Surely, that settles it. After all, no one understands American patriotism quite like Barack Hussein Obama.
Nevertheless, despite all the elite venom hurled at Michele Bachman for unmasking Huma, the evidence against Abedin is overwhelming. Andrew McCarthy, Walid Shoebat, and Diana West have factually established that the Muslim Brotherhood is the Abedin family business, and that Huma herself worked in it for years, editing the family’s Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.
Now, let’s pave the way for Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin’s national joke of a husband, to make an appearance. Somewhere in 2010, the Clintons may have decided that their public embrace of Huma as their “second daughter” wasn’t quite cutting it anymore, and they needed to set up a more conventional-looking arrangement.
Enter Anthony Weiner, the bachelor congressman with a panting lust to be mayor of New York. I suggest that, in classic Clintonian fashion, a deal was struck. The Clintons would endorse Weiner for mayor if he would marry Huma Abedin.
The situation was win-win for everyone. The rumors about Hillary immediately subsided, which pleased Bill, who plans to make her president. Weiner gained the backing of the formidable Clinton machine, thereby sprinting to frontrunner status in the highly competitive mayoralty race. And Huma got to keep her top-secret security clearance at State, and look forward to the day when she could pray in the Ground Zero mosque, gazing down at the World Trade Center site as first lady of New York City.
If you don’t think the Weiner-Abedin union is a political deal, ask yourself: on what basis could it possibly be anything else? Shortly after their marriage, Weiner committed a Twitterectomy of his career, tweeting lewd photos of himself to young women around the country. But in addition to being a cheating pervert, Weiner is widely known as a nutcase, exposed in the New York Times for temper tantrums that left him unable to keep staff. And he has no money, thereby rendering him unable to provide Huma with the glamorous lifestyle she requires.
Most importantly of all, Weiner is not a Muslim. Huma’s religion allows Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women, but forbids Muslim women from marrying outside the faith. Yet Huma remained unsullied by honor killing threats from the usual Islamic enforcers; instead, the party line seemed to be that Huma’s marriage was adorable.
Even now, the outrageous Clintonian shenanigans continue. We’ve just learned that Huma, her unemployed husband Anthony, and their baby Jordan are moving into a $3.3-million Park Avenue apartment owned by a longtime Clinton crony and top Obama bundler. You and I may have to live within our means, but in Clinton World, such rules never seem to apply.
Now as Bill formally nominates Obama for a second term, both men are complicit in Hillary’s scandal that should be the shame of the nation. But what’s an historic disgrace to us is less than a shrug to them. Bill has been taking Saudi money by the barrel for years, and Obama admires the Muslim Brotherhood.
In fact, working with Hillary’s State Department, Obama has helped to install the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, using the “Arab Spring” turmoil to empower these sworn America-haters.
And now here comes the icing on the treachery cake: Obama and Hillary reportedly have informed Iran that they’ve abandoned Israel, leaving the only Jewish State to face a nuclear Iran alone. How proud the Abedin family must be of their little girl!
Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary is a formidable contender for president, but I suspect that that may not be true. For one thing, her appearance and behavior are both falling apart, as she drunkenly carouses in public with exclusively female friends. And for another, the American public may not be so forgiving as the Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony saga unfolds.