Vin Suprynowicz

Under our Nov. 21 post, “They expected to be ‘discussing access,’” John Taylor comments:

“I am far from a Clinton supporter, as I am sure you remember. And I am even less of an MSM supporter, again as you well know.

“But I am most disheartened by DJT’s interviews and advanced choices for key positions in his administration. So far, it has been a parade of dedicated neo-cons and “war on –” cheerleaders. If he is to hold his power base, he is going to have to be a non-pResident, not just another Oval Office Oligarch.

“As I’ve said repeatedly elsewhere, so far it appears, I believe, that his only purpose in ‘draining the swamp’ was to loose the alligators.”

Thanks, John. Many of us share at least some of these reservations.

Of course, we’ve never advanced Donald Trump here as a libertarian messiah. In politics, grownups know there will always be compromises and outright failures.

On balance, even the ballyhooed “Reagan Revolution” didn’t really downsize government or get the regulators or taxmen out of our hair, very much, for very long.

Can Trump do better? The big concern now is whether Mr. Trump is so hazy on his principles and his specific goals that bad advisors of the big-government school can get aboard and start sidetracking/compromising the agenda before it even gets rolled out.

He starts with some negatives. So far as can be determined, Donald Trump has always been wrong on the War on Drugs. (That is to say, he wants to lock up even more people for even more decades in the hopeless and counterproductive effort to stop us from exercising our Ninth-Amendment-protected right to buy, sell, produce and consume extracts of any and all plants given to mankind by God for our use — Genesis 1:29.)

Of course, while LP standard bearer Gary Johnson favored taxed-and-regulated marijuana, he and his gun-grabbing Republican running mate, that guy from Massachusetts, stridently declared they were all in favor of continuing to lock up users and sellers of EVERY OTHER recreational of entheogenic or self-administered plant extract in the Cornhole Palace for the rest of their lives. (The “Party of Principle”?)

Donald Trump’s first instinct to solve domestic economic problems by applying tariffs is dangerous (see Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression.) He seems unaware of the systematic efforts to force ranchers, miners, loggers, and other private uses off the Western lands – which the Founders never envisioned being half “owned” by Washington City in the first place. (Though he does at least seem to sense the self-destructive insanity of using “environmental protection” as a cat’s paw for blocking development of the nation’s vast energy reserves.)

Et cetera.

And the appointment of Betsy Devos of the Amway fortune to head the Dept. of Education is certainly curious. Candidate Trump advocated “getting Washington out of education.” To return to local control -– to community schools and lots more home-schooling -– the obvious first step would be to shut down the Carter-era federal Department of Education, entirely. Is Ms. Devos –- a champion of the uniform “Common Core” curriculum who favors “public-private partnerships” to continue administering the same old coercion-based government propaganda camps — a caretaker dedicated to overseeing the disassembly of this bureaucracy? Doubtful.

Still, as my old friend Rick Tompkins says, if every bad thing that’s ever been alleged about Donald Trump turned out to be true, we’re STILL way better off now than if the Clinton gang were in the process of installing the usual Tutti Frutti gang of anti-American globalist thieves, incompetents and Marxist hustlers in the executive branch.

(Yes, “incompetents.” Why on earth have Barack and Hillary got us at the edge of a war with Russia over Syria? Are they stupid? Are they Muslims, or in bed with Muslims? Are they paid off by the Saudis? Oh, wait . . .)

On the bright side, Donald Trump appears to be approaching in a serious and “businesslike” way the staffing of his cabinet with (primarily) folks who he believes can and will take charge and execute his agenda (including immigration enforcement and reducing both taxes and “Green” regulations on job-creating business) — as opposed to the usual process which seems to have come down in recent decades to “OK, that checks off your two blacks, your two women, the NARAL lesbian, and the Mexican. But we’ve still got to fit in an Asian. What about that Chinese mayor who both Dianne and Barbara are pushing? Where could he do the least damage? Transportation?”

The main point to remember about what we’re hearing, though, is that the Mainstream Press did not take its fully discredited partisan liars out behind the barn and shoot them on Nov. 9. Instead, they’re still shrieking like hyenas, anxious to discredit Trump and anyone associated with him as a “racist, misogynist Hitler.” And this is still the filter through which most of us get a lot of our national “news.”

Is Trump the Bumbler in fact “all over the map,” continually contradicting himself, etc.?

To some extent, yes. *I* have trouble figuring out why he says some of the things he says. Though we should begin to grow suspicious when the MSM argues he’s BOTH Bozo the Bumbler in the floppy shoes, AND a dangerous neo-Hitler who’s about to send out his brownshirts to round up all the blacks and Jews and put them in camps. (When in fact they can’t even come up with the FIRST PIECE of evidence that any of his hotel properties has ever discriminated against members of ANY race or religion, required blacks to use the service entrance, blocked women from advancement into management, ANYTHING.)

Remember, Trump rope-a-doped the whole political-media establishment into thinking Hillary couldn’t possibly lose to such a bumbling clown -– which may be why they didn’t bus MORE non-English-speaking illegal aliens to the polls. ( http://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/oct/29/unions-flex-muscle-in-nevadas-high-stakes-senate-r/ )

‘CLEAN IT UP’

But I do want to explain something here from the perspective of someone who worked many decades in the newspaper business.

Newspaper reporters often complain to each other that it’s hard to get polished, professional politicians to “level with us,” to speak off the cuff, in an informal manner, like regular people. Instead, they often sound like Stepford Wives, good-looking programmed robots repeating the same memorized “talking points,” word for word, over and over, rather than responding differently to nuanced questions.

It’s almost as though they have an “audio response control center” that hears the word “immigration” in the questions and says Aha, cue programmed immigration response “A”: “Obviously, we need to secure the border, but meantime compassion demands that for those who have arrived here without documentation and especially for their innocent children . . .”

Well, there’s a reason they act like that, and the reason is us: the press.

Quite a few times, in my 40 years in the business, I’d turn in a story with verbatim quotes from an “everyday citizen,” a “man on the street” who was unused to talking to reporters but who suddenly found him or herself the focus of attention after the poor sap rescued a drowning child, saw an airplane crash, whatever. An editor would hand it back to me, saying, “Clean it up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Clean it up. Your quotes make that person sound like an idiot.”

“It’s verbatim.”

“I know that. But this is a person who’s not used to being quoted. When they see this in print tomorrow and they know all their friends are reading it -– maybe the only time they ever get their name in the paper except for when they die — they’ll be embarrassed. No need to make him/her sound like an idiot. Clean it up.”

So I would. While attempting to retain SOME of the colloquial flavor of that “local yokel’s” speech patterns, I’d “clean it up” so it sounded more coherent. Some of the interviewee’s remarks stayed in quotation marks, some would be paraphrased, but what the reader ended up seeing was “what he meant to say,” without all the false starts, hiccups, and malapropisms.

This goes on all the time, because transcribed word-for-word, the speech of the average person -– who’s not an English professor or a skilled orator or politician -– can sound like the babbling of an idiot. They speak in sentence fragments. Um, er, ah, um, you know, you know, you know. Their speech trails off. They stop in the middle of a sentence and go back to try and correct their own grammar or syntax. They use hilariously wrong words that sound SORT OF LIKE what they mean. (“Who was the first owner of that autographed baseball? What do we know about its Providence?”) They utter half-formed thoughts that aren’t really their own, perhaps trying to summarize differing opinions they’ve heard on a subject but without clarifying “Those last two sentences were more of what I read in that position paper I referred to earlier by Doctor Whosis, they’re not necessarily my own conclusions.”

In this regard, Donald Trump is not a polished, experienced politician. A SYMPATHETIC transcriber — say, one of his own speech-writers — will write down what he says, but then automatically start editing it to be more direct, coherent, and consistent. The best “prepared speeches” are often the politician’s own words, but “cleaned up.”

The press is not supposed to be overly “sympathetic,” of course. They’re supposed to be neutral. Their main goal is not to “clean up” a politician’s remarks to remove anything potentially controversial. But their main goal SHOULD be to inform their readers, accurately, of the gist of the speaker’s evident meaning. It is NOT their job to try and make the speaker sound as stupid and self-contradictory as possible, playing “gotcha” by taking out of context and highlighting what amount to colloquial verbal tics.

And I submit part of the reason Donald Trump seems to be self-contradictory — “all over the map” on some topics –- is not just that he’s feeling his way and, yes, sometimes shifting or clarifying his positions based on new evidence and new expert input (though there’s some of that), but that the press is neither sympathetic (which they’re not obliged to be) nor even neutral, but rather still more than 90 percent actively, sneeringly, foam-at-the-mouth hostile, gleefully scribbling down any sentence fragment that tends to make this man — who was just elected by the majority of the people in the vast majority of the states, all of whom had PLENTY of chance to see him at his worst — sound like a fumbling idiot.

For instance: Has Donald Trump really said the Clintons and their gang will get away scot-free with all their felonies -– known, admitted, and highly likely?

Or -– once Barack Obama and his “pardon pen” are retired — did the “Let the nation heal now” message carried by Kellyanne Conway two weeks back leave room for the FBI and a less politicized Trump-Sessions Justice Department — not to mention the IRS, which may have something to say about the way non-profit foundations are administered — to follow the Clinton Foundation and Weiner laptop evidence where it leads?

(For one thing, one would think the concept of every congresscritter and cabinet officer in Washington having his or her own billion-dollar “non-profit foundation” bribe-processing center — “Oh, you’ve donated a million? Why yes, the Secretary would be glad to meet with you now” — would seem a bridge too far, even to today’s Swamp Creatures. And if that laptop contains the kind of sex-with-children data that’s been alleged . . .)

Rep. Darrell Issa predicted the latter, speaking to Fox News on Nov. 25:

“I think it’s important that the president do essentially what he does, which is get out of the business of prosecuting,” Issa said. “But at the same time he’s appointed or proposed appointing an attorney general who has a long record of doing his job. And so when we look at Jeff Sessions in concert with FBI and other organizations, they need to do their job, and I think that’s what the where the balance of the next president is going to come is reestablishing the independence of the Department of Justice.

“If he doesn’t do it, Congress will certainly push for that, but I think you are going to find a president who says let them do their job, stays out of it, and certainly doesn’t — you know, he hasn’t said she’s innocent. That’s a decision that needs to be made by the professionals.”

See: http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/11/25/issa-predicts-trump-wont-interfere-ag-fbi-decisions-future-hillary-investigations/ .

GONE SOFT ON GLOBAL WARMING?

And what about the recent report that Trump, in a meeting with reporters from the New York Times, backed down on his quite correct campaign position that “catastrophic man-made global warming” is a fraud. (Hint: the polar ice caps haven’t shrunk a bit in decades; there’s been no net global warming recorded in 17 years; in order to create this impression the liars simply adjust — “cool down” — the data from 30 years ago.)

Did he really say that? Was Trump just lying about all this populist, conservative stuff to get elected, whereas he’s now reverting to a typical lying New York Democrat who “believes in man-made global warming”?

Maybe not. Read the transcript of the whole exchange from which that sentence was extracted:

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/24/no-donald-trump-hasnt-suddenly-gone-soft-global-warming/ .

Yes, I wish Mr. Trump had been more strident in shoving their “global warming” lies down their throats. But I would say this shows Donald Trump attempting to be polite and conciliatory, open to other views and evidence, but by no means changing his position that we need to substantially reduce the financial burden imposed on U.S. manufacturers in pursuit of the chimera of “reversing climate change.”

In fact, it’s the mainstream media who have been pushing the “fake news” of catastrophic man-made global warming for the past 18 years –- while candidate Trump’s statement that it’s all a plot to harm our industries while India and China sign “climate deals” that they have no intention of keeping -– a point he REPEATS IN THIS INTERVIEW -– remains completely accurate.

(Antarctic sea ice has not shrunk in 100 years: http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/11/24/antarctic-sea-ice-has-not-shrunk-in-100-years/ .

No global warming in 18 years: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/04/no-global-warming-at-all-for-18-years-9-months-a-new-record-the-pause-lengthens-again-just-in-time-for-un-summit-in-paris/ .

Gore said polar summer ice would be gone by now: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/wrong-al-gore-predicted-arctic-summer-ice-could-disappear-2013 , or http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2738653/Stunning-satellite-images-summer-ice-cap-thicker-covers-1-7million-square-kilometres-MORE-2-years-ago-despite-Al-Gore-s-prediction-ICE-FREE-now.html .

NASA has fudged climate data: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/24/german-professor-nasa-fiddled-climate-data-unbelievable-scale/ ;

Tokyo first November snow in 54 years: https://www.yahoo.com/news/tokyo-gets-november-snow-first-time-54-years-062423340.html .)

So: Did Donald Trump -– who could have retired in luxury at age 70, or easily “bought” a lesser public office by running as a Democrat in New York City -– just weather the worst, most despicable and irresponsible electoral shit-storm in U.S. history in order to carry a conservative, patriotic, anti-globalist, anti-Political-Correctness, shove-your-multiculturalism-up-your-ass agenda across the goal line — just to cave in and govern like a Bush or some other RINO come January?

I don’t know. In politics, it’s always wise to expect a fair amount of betrayal and disappointment.

But it seems a little premature to give up on him quite yet, while he’s still holding tryouts and hasn’t even suited up his team for their first game.

After all . . . he’s fooled them before.