{"id":19269,"date":"2016-09-08T11:35:30","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T18:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19269"},"modified":"2016-09-15T11:02:31","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T18:02:31","slug":"celebrity-gets-tongue-bath-big-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19269","title":{"rendered":"Celebrity Gets Tongue-Bath, Big Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

I watched NBC’s Commander in Chief Forum<\/a>\u00a0last night. It was even worse than\u00a0I expected:\u00a0Matt Lauer\u00a0treated Clinton like a hostile witness, Trump like a celebrity. I guess that’s what they mean when they say the media grades\u00a0Trump on the curve: celebrities aren’t expected to know much, and it’s somehow unfair to call them out the same way you’d call out a politician.<\/p>\n

Where to even start with Trump? Three months ago\u00a0he complained about Japan<\/a> not paying enough for American military protection and not having a bigger military of its own. Why, you’d\u00a0almost think\u00a0he’d missed history class the day the\u00a0teacher\u00a0explained that as part of Japan’s surrender in 1945 it agreed to\u00a0pay for building and maintaining American bases on its\u00a0soil\u00a0(which it does to this day) and to have only\u00a0a\u00a0token self-defense military of its own, too small to threaten its neighbors.\u00a0But Trump’s lack of knowledge about our military relationship with Japan\u00a0didn’t seem to bother anyone else; god knows his other displays of ignorance are so magnificent this\u00a0one\u00a0seems trivial in comparison.<\/p>\n

I’ll tell you where I start … and end … with Trump:<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

He’s a birther. What else do you need to know?<\/p>\n

There probably isn’t a Facebook or Twitter user out there who hasn’t unfriended or blocked some obnoxious asshole or another. So far the only ones\u00a0I’ve blocked have been birthers. I messaged\u00a0each of them before pulling\u00a0the plug, telling them I couldn’t be friends with racists. Each of them responded with a variation of this: “I’m not a racist,\u00a0I just\u00a0have legitimate concerns about Obama’s citizenship.” Sorry, you’re a racist and we’re done. And I have always been done with Trump.<\/p>\n

Are the debates, if Trump doesn’t make up some excuse to\u00a0weasel out of them, going to be a repeat of what we saw on NBC\u00a0last night? One of the scheduled moderators, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, has already lowered the bar by saying it’s “not my job<\/a>” to challenge what candidates say during the debates. If I thought for a minute that meant not challenging anything either<\/em> candidate says, I might take heart that the\u00a0moderators will at\u00a0least be even-handed. But you watch: they’ll challenge and fact-check Clinton on almost everything she says … not-challenging will apply only to Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump won’t talk about his birtherism<\/a>. Journalists and reporters have decided to go\u00a0along with that. When’s the last time you heard any\u00a0of them\u00a0ask Trump about it, to his face? Prediction:\u00a0if Clinton brings it up during the debates, the moderators will try to shush her. And then they’ll ask about her emails.<\/p>\n

Tell you what, if I were\u00a0Hillary I’d seriously consider not answering any more email questions.\u00a0I’d say what Trump says about his birtherism: I don’t talk about that. See how far that gets me. What the fuck, the media’s in the tank for Trump anyway.<\/p>\n

It’s all down to voters, particularly those of us\u00a0who won’t let\u00a0the media pull the wool over our\u00a0eyes. Let’s pray there are enough of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I watched NBC’s Commander in Chief Forum\u00a0last night. It was even worse than\u00a0I expected:\u00a0Matt Lauer\u00a0treated Clinton like a hostile witness, Trump like a celebrity. I guess that’s what they mean when they say the media grades\u00a0Trump on the curve: celebrities aren’t expected to know much, and it’s somehow unfair to call them out the same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16,8,827,414],"tags":[1984,2168,2024],"class_list":["post-19269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics","category-social-media","category-tv","tag-clinton","tag-debates","tag-trump"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19269"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19325,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19269\/revisions\/19325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}