Trump's Handling of Speech Mess Speaks Volumes

thepilot.com:

You know, I kind of feel bad for Melania Trump.

She seems like a nice enough lady, despite her choice of spouse, and I’m sure she only wanted to help. I’m sure she didn’t mean for a speech which was supposed to be a nice, warm ’n’ fuzzy moment in her husband’s campaign to reveal just how inept and amateurish that campaign is.

At first, Madame Trump’s speech was pretty standard stuff, and a welcome change from a night when we had already endured the ghastly spectacles of, among other things, Chachi from “Happy Days” and a third-tier soap opera star from Italy telling us what’s wrong with America, followed by Rudy Giuliani screaming at the top of his withered lungs like a lunatic on a street corner.

She noted Trump’s loyalty to his family, which must have come as a bit of a surprise to the two wives he’d divorced before her. She asserted Trump’s respect for his former rivals, like “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and the guy whose brother lied us into the Iraq War. And so on.

Then things took a strange turn. Political reporters and pundits who were watching began to realize that, hey, parts of Madame Trump’s speech sounded awfully familiar. And sure enough, a side-by-side comparison of Monday’s speech and Michelle Obama’s speech during the 2008 Democratic National Convention revealed that someone had lifted entire paragraphs from that older speech. We’re not talking about “common words and values,” as Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort lamely tried to assert. We’re talking the exact same words and phrases in the exact same order. We’re talking clear plagiarism.

Now, this may seem like a small thing, easily laughed off, and believe me, I laughed as hard as anyone. Then I started seeing the Trumpista reactions to the situation, and it set me to thinking, which is always a dangerous thing. For one thing, they couldn’t seem to settle on who had actually written the speech. Mrs. Trump claimed she’d written it herself, with “only minimal help” from the campaign. The campaign, however, released a statement saying that Melania’s “team of writers took notes on her life’s aspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.”

Finally, staffer Meredith McIver came forward and fell on her sword. She said that Mrs. Trump, who’s “always liked” the First Lady (oh! the heresy!) had read her some of Mrs. Obama’s speeches, and neither Ms. McIver nor anyone in the campaign had checked the final draft against their “inspirations.”

Consider this: The Trump campaign sent the woman who would be First Lady out to make a major speech, apparently without any vetting. That speech contained passages that were clearly cribbed from not just any speech, but from a major speech given at an event that a substantial number of the reporters, commentators and other political junkies watching had already seen and would most likely remember. Then, incredibly, they couldn’t get their stories together on who’d written it.

The whole thing speaks of a level of fumbling and incompetence so great that one has to doubt if these people have enough sense to pour water out of a boot even if you printed the instructions on the heel.

But what about Hillary Clinton, you say? Wasn’t her handling of classified information “extremely careless,” in the words of FBI Director James Comey? Isn’t that worse?

First, we don’t know how Trump and his people would handle classified information, since he’s a political novice who hasn’t had to do it very much, but this level of carelessness with what should be simple stuff doesn’t bode well for his competence with complex information.

Second, “you’re just as bad as me” doesn’t make you better. Third and most important, in his later testimony, Comey admitted that even the “very small number” of Clinton’s emails he’d referenced were not properly marked “classified” in the headers as such emails are required to be by the manual controlling such things. Instead, the designation was indicated by a little letter “c” somewhere in the body of the email. Comey told Rep. Matt Cartwright it would be a “reasonable inference” for Clinton to believe that “the absence of a header would tell her immediately that those three documents were not classified” — a detail almost universally ignored by the so-called liberal media.

The Republican party, this past Monday, spent an entire evening trying to frighten us into voting for Donald Trump’s Daddy State policies by yelling at us that the world is a terrifyingly dark place, full of monsters — then proceeded during the course of the night’s keynote speech to show us they’re too incompetent to handle a softball political convention speech. It doesn’t inspire confidence.

Is Trump Trying to Take a Dive?

 Opinion | thepilot.com

OK, is Donald Trump actually trying to lose this nomination?

I’ve floated this idea a couple of times as a joke, as the GOP’s Gift That Keeps on Giving goes from outrage to outrage, doing and saying things that would be career-ending gaffes for any other person running for the presidency.

Using profanity in stump speeches, attacking a highly decorated former POW for being a POW, admitting that George Dubbya Bush lied us into the Iraq War, etc. etc. … you’ve got to admit, it makes you wonder.

And yet, nothing seems to dent Trump’s armor. The Trump Chumps just love him more. So he keeps ramping up the madness. But it would be crazy to suggest that he was deliberately trying to throw the election. Wouldn’t it?

And then …

This past Monday, Stephanie Cegieleski, former communications director of Trump’s Make America Great Again SuperPAC, wrote an “open letter” to Trump supporters.

She tells of being told when interviewing for the job that Trump’s run was a “protest candidacy.” He had no actual plan or even desire to win, the interviewers told Cegieleski.

“The Trump camp,” she says, “would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12 percent and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50 percent.” She says she was initially “excited for the change to the debate he could bring.”

But then she began to notice that the man not only has no knowledge of policy, but also lacks “the humility to admit what he does not know — the most frightening position of all.”

The turning point, when she finally broke with him once and for all and decided to write the “open letter,” came when Trump responded to the brutal terrorist attack on Easter Sunday in Pakistan by taking to Twitter, detailing the casualties (and getting the numbers wrong), and proclaiming “only I can solve.”

That was the moment, Cegieleski says, when she realized that the monster she helped create (her words) had broken loose.

He may have started with the “desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman,” but “his pride is too out of control to stop him now.”

So can Trump actually do anything now to derail his crazy train? He certainly seems to be still trying, what with stunts like posting an unflattering picture of Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, after a pro-Cruz SuperPAC tried to turn Utah’s Mormons against Trump by spreading a picture of Trump’s supermodel wife kinda nude (meaning that she was nekkid, but tastefully arranged so that the naughty bits were hidden).

Wives, everyone agreed, are off-limits — unless wingnuts are circulating pictures of Michelle Obama Photoshopped to look like a baboon.

Then Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was arrested and charged with battery after surveillance tapes showed him manhandling a female reporter after a Florida rally. Trump, with his usual charm, demanded to know, “If she was being assaulted, why didn’t she scream?”

In a normal campaign, this would have been a serious blow. As you may have noticed, however, this is not a normal campaign. Assaulting an uppity reporter, a female one to boot? That’s not going to hurt Trump a bit. Because, as we’re told over and over, people are angry.

People are so enraged that promises have been broken by the Republican “establishment” that they’ll back someone who promises to be straight with them.

Maybe that’s true. But the problem for Trump is that the promises that people are so upset about are ones that that very “establishment” knew were never going to happen in the first place.

They knew from the get-go they weren’t going to repeal “every word of Obamacare.” They knew they weren’t going to shut the government down until Planned Parenthood was defunded.

They knew they weren’t going to defund Homeland Security over the president’s executive orders on immigration. They didn’t have the votes, and most of them weren’t crazy enough to shut down the government.

So what happens if, God forbid, Trump gets the White House and the angry Trump Chumps discover that, no, Mexico isn’t going to pay for a border wall and we can’t make them? What will those angry people do when we truly can’t deport 11 million people?

What are they going to do when torturing people results not in an end to terrorism, but more of it? What are they going to do when the man who boasts about being the world’s greatest deal-maker starts cutting deals on things they hold sacred?

I don’t know, but I know I don’t want to find out. Trump may or may not be trying to derail his own campaign, but somebody better do it, and soon.

Ready To Do What It Takes? Not Hardly

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Folks, I am going to tell y’all a secret, something that will shock and amaze you. It’ll rock your world and possibly cause you to question everything you thought you knew. In fact, if you’re not sitting down while reading this, maybe you should.

Sometimes I actually agree with Robert M. Levy.

I know, I know, it surprises me too when I look across the page at my staunchly Republican fellow Pilot columnist, read the piece next to mine, and go, “Hmmm, he may have something there.”

Oh, it doesn’t happen all the time — in fact, probably not most of the time. But I agree, for example, that we shouldn’t be undercutting the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, even as we disagree on how bad it is. Bob seems to think it’s terrible; I find it merely mediocre. But we both agree that the alternative of no deal at all is worse.

I also agree, to a point, with his assertion in last week’s column that there’s a power vacuum in the Middle East that’s making it easier for ISIS to commit atrocity after atrocity, and creating a refugee crisis of a size and urgency not seen since World War II.

The question I’d like to address in response however, is why. Bob seems to blame President Obama. I don’t think that tells the whole story. And no, I’m not blaming George Dubbya Bush, either — at least not entirely. I think the problem is bigger and wider than any one president or party.

Bob’s column recalls the spectacle of “American and Allied forces liberating Paris” and of the days when “America became the liberator of the free world as kisses were exchanged in Times Square.”

So far, so good. But remember what it took for us to do all that. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked America almost overnight onto a war footing. As civilians lined up to sign up, our homeland standard of living changed drastically. Auto plants switched from making cars to making tanks and other war machines. New tires became nearly impossible to get. Kids collected scrap metal. Gas and foodstuffs were rationed. Buying war bonds became a patriotic duty.

And then, when the last German and Japanese soldiers had laid down their arms, we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into rebuilding their countries, because we knew that impoverished and broken countries were ripe pickings for the Soviets.

Can you imagine something like that happening now, in response to ISIS? Dear Lord, when the president endorsed a voluntary national public service program, he was accused of trying to create a new SS. His wife endorsed healthy eating and exercise, and suddenly right-wing pundits were screaming about “tyranny” and declaring it a sacred American right to raise a generation of roly-poly little couch potatoes.

We can’t even conduct a military training exercise in the Southwest without a pack of loonies — some of them in the U.S. Congress — taking to the airwaves and Internet to declare that it’s an invasion of the U.S. by its own Army. Oh, and support for “foreign aid”? Fuhgeddaboutit.

You want a World War II level response to ISIS butchery? You’re going to need a World War II level of citizen participation, sacrifice, and yes, money. And We the People haven’t been ready to do that for a long, long time.

It didn’t begin with the Obama administration. It didn’t even really begin with the George Dubbya Bush reign of error, although we did see quite a bit of the same unwillingness to even ask the people for sacrifice. Even after 9/11, Dubbya suggested we should just go about our lives, go shopping even. In the run-up to Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure, we were assured, falsely, that “Iraq will pay for its own reconstruction” (Paul Wolfowitz), and that it was doubtful that the war would last six months (Donald Rumsfeld).

But, no, it didn’t start with them. It took years of short, easy-to-win conflicts against laughably weak opponents like Panama and Grenada to lull us into the feeling that the projection of American power and leadership is something that can be done on the cheap, something we could watch from our La-Z-Boy recliners before flipping over to watch “Jeopardy.”So the next time someone compares ISIS to the Nazis and demands that “American leadership” be used to defeat it, take a moment to think about what it took last time and ask them: Will you, personally, make the kind of sacrifices Americans had to make to defeat that enemy? Are you willing to pull together, even under a president you didn’t vote for, to make that happen? If not, then maybe in the words of the old saying, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

2015: The Year In Preview

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Once again, we look into our slightly cracked crystal ball for our annual tradition of fearless predictions for the year to come. Without further ado, we bring you 2015 in preview:

JANUARY: Sony finally allows the wide release of the Seth Rogen/James Franco film “The Interview.” North Korea immediately issues a public statement: “We threatened the U.S. over THIS piece of crap? Man, do we feel stupid. This is more embarrassing than the time we invited Dennis Rodman to dinner because we thought he was LeBron James. Face it, as a government, we’re just not that bright.”

FEBRUARY: Following the lead of the right wing’s insistence on calling torture “enhanced interrogation,” the Mafia announces that it has hired a PR agency to rebrand “armed robbery” as “enhanced wealth acquisition.” Not to be outdone, the National Football League announces that its new behavior policy reframes “domestic abuse” as “enhanced spousal negotiation.”

MARCH: North Korea unleashes its long-dreaded retaliation for the Sony film “The Interview” in the form of a 90-minute feature film called “Obama Is a Big Doo-Doo Head.” At the film’s premiere in Pyongyang, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and Sen. Ted Cruz appear as guests of the North Korean government, but strongly deny serving as technical advisers on the picture.

APRIL: A new hacking scandal erupts when a group calling itself “The Sons of the Big Easy” breaks into CBS’s computer network and releases thousands of embarrassing emails and digital copies of unreleased shows. The group claims that the attack is retribution for Scott Bakula’s awful attempt at a Louisiana accent in “NCIS: New Orleans.”

MAY: Russian President Vladimir Putin announces that he’s formed an “exploratory committee” to consider a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. “Republicans say nice things about me,” Putin says. “Rudy Giuliani is talking about how I ‘make decision and execute quickly,’ and Sarah Palin likes the idea of me ‘wrestling bears.’ They want leadership? Putin give them a bellyful of it.”

JUNE: Republican lawmakers, who hold a majority in the House and Senate, announce a major policy initiative. “We’ve decided to change our practice of not doing anything and blaming it all on President Obama,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tells “Meet the Press.” “After the summer break, we’re going to start doing nothing and blaming it all on Hillary Clinton.”

JULY: Christmas decorations and promotions appear in stores, as Christmas-themed commercials begin running on TV. Everyone complains, but they buy the stuff anyway.

AUGUST: First lady Michelle Obama rolls out a new campaign to promote the eating of junk food. “Candy, sugary sodas, Twinkies three times a day, and lots of Mickey D’s,” the First Lady says. “That’s the secret to a healthy, happy life.” Congressional Republicans and Fox News immediately go on an outraged crusade against the movement, which they call “yet another attempt by the Imperial Obama Presidency to control every aspect of our lives.” Fox begins promoting salads, low-fat foods, and drinking lots of water, while the Republican caucus gives up sugar, white bread and potatoes. Waistlines shrink across the nation, and obesity-related illnesses take a prodigious drop. “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out,” the first lady says.

SEPTEMBER: Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush formally announces his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination. Bush vows not to back down on his support for immigration reform and the federal Common Core standards, even though those issues are unpopular with conservatives. “I’m willing to lose the primary to win the general,” a defiant Bush says, repeating earlier statement he made to the online magazine Politico.

OCTOBER: The Jeb Bush campaign issues a retraction of his “willing to lose the primary to win the general” promise when someone explains to him how the primary system works.

NOVEMBER: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz attempts to stop President Obama from pardoning the White House turkey by going to the Senate floor for a marathon reading of the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asks the office of senate legal counsel for an opinion on whether the Senate can involuntarily commit one of its own members.

DECEMBER: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat all experience a massive decline in users after Santa announces he’s going to start using social media to help compile the “naughty” and “nice” lists. A young woman identified only as “@SexyAllie 999” explains to The New York Times why she deleted her Snapchat account: “Like, I don’t know if sending some random guy a picture of my, y’know, breasts is, like, something that will get me on, like, the naughty list? But, I mean, I’m not, y’know, taking any chances.”

As we like to say at this season (with a hat tip to poet Ogden Nash): Duck! Here comes another year!

The Hot New Fad For the Right Wing Asshole On The Go

This is, I guess what you'd call the "Director's Cut" of this week's column,  since I can't say "asshole" in the paper. Even though it's exactly the right word).

Imagine, if you will: You’re driving along the road, minding your own business, when you pull up behind one of those great big pickups that would be very useful hauling feed and seed or towing a horse trailer, but which is way too clean and unscratched to have ever seen an actual farm.

As you prepare to pass this wheeled behemoth, your car is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of choking black smoke that causes you to weave dangerously. As you fight your way clear of the blinding cloud, you see the truck pulling off and faintly hear the derisive laughter of its occupants.

Congratulations. You’ve just encountered some Good Americans who are patriotically protesting against Obama’s fascist nanny state by engaging in a practice they call “Rolling Coal.”

Are you the kind of “conservative” who thinks that the first question that needs to be answered when analyzing a political position is, “Will this annoy liberals?”

Are you the type of person who, if the First Lady comes out in favor of something like, say, healthy meals and exercise, immediately starts howling that your rights are being violated worse than those of Jews in the Holocaust and declare your intention to stuff as much junk as possible into your face because that’ll show them, by golly?

Are you the type of person who’s decided to shop every week at Hobby Lobby, even though you’ve never shopped there before and you don’t actually have any hobbies, but you want to show those danged feminazis that you’re not taking any of their guff?

In short, are you a typical right wing asshole?

Well, you could always run for a Republican congressional seat. But if that seems like too much trouble and/or expense, then maybe Rolling Coal is for you.

Get yourself a big ol’ truck, go to an Internet site like Dieselhub.com or one of those magazines aimed at truck aficionados, and order you some “smoke switches,” “aggressive tuners and modules,” and “special injectors” which will, and I quote, “trick your engine into thinking it needs more fuel.”

This will allow you to blow out a huge cloud of black smoke on command when you encounter, say, a Prius or other hybrid. (You can even get a sticker along with your gear that says “Prius Repellent.”)

But don’t stop there. You can also use your new gizmos to smoke people with liberal bumper stickers. Or bicyclists. Be sure to use your smartphone to record your hilarious encounters with those enemies of all that is free and good about America.

Then you can join the Coal Rollers on YouTube, where your fellow freedom fighters have posted videos of their blows against The Man, a category which includes the aforementioned Prius drivers, liberal bumper sticker displayers, and cyclists, as well as cops and pretty girls walking by the side of the road (because nothing gets a woman hotter than having acrid toxic gases blown in her face by a truck the size of small aircraft carrier).

Of course, you knew that once a few brave souls began spewing The Black Cloud of Liberty in everyone’s face, Obama’s Islamocommiefascist Iron Fist of Doom was going to come down to crush it the way the Chinese crushed the flowers of freedom in Tiananmen Square.

The jackbooted thugs of the EPA have issued one of their fatwas, saying, “It is a violation of the Clean Air Act to manufacture, sell, or install a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device.”

Translated into American, that means that after-market devices intended to increase fuel consumption and belch clouds of pollution into people’s faces are regarded as illegal by Obama’s EPA. This is how freedom dies, my friends.

If there’s one silver lining for the right, it’s that the Republicans in the House finally may have found the grounds for bringing the Articles of Impeachment they’ve been feverishly fantasizing about for so long. I mean, to heck with requiring some sort of “high crime or misdemeanor” as grounds to impeach. You just do NOT mess with a man’s truck.

Wingnut Media Fails Once Again

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

By now, we’ve all heard of the egregiously racist things spouted by L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling to his trophy girlfriend in a recorded phone conversation that was recently released to every media outlet, with the possible exception of the “Sesame Street News Flash.”

Immediately, right-wing media leapt into action, their crack investigative teams digging hard for the answer to the most important question of all: How do we turn this into an attack on the Democrats?

“Racist Clippers Owner Donald Sterling Is a Democrat,” blared a blog post on the National Review website. “Report: Clippers Owner Caught In Racist Rant Is a Democratic Donor,” said Fox Nation. Right-wing icon Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report told us that “NBA Sterling is a Democrat,” while Tucker Carlson’s vanity project The Daily Caller claimed “Race Hate Spewing Clippers Owner Is Democratic Donor.”

All of this, it seems, was based on the fact that, as The Daily Caller put it, “Between 1990 and 1992 Donald Sterling made a $2,000 donation to former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, a $1,000 donation to current Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as a $1,000 donation to the recalled former governor of California, Gray Davis.”

Got that? A multibillionaire makes donations of his pocket change to three Democrats 22 years ago, and suddenly he’s a “Democratic donor,” for purposes of right-wing smear campaigns.

I suppose they were desperate for something to latch onto after the debacle in which rising star Cliven Bundy turned out to be not only a freeloading welfare rancher and domestic terrorist, but a racist nutball as well — but only after he was embraced by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rand Paul.

Now, of course, they’re backpedaling on their support for Bundy faster than Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he’s gone over the edge of the cliff, while the wingnut media scramble desperately to find someone to take the heat off. I guess Donald Sterling looked like the perfect target.

Problem with the Sterling-as-Democrat charge is that, according to California’s voter registration rolls, it turns out that the creepy old dude’s a registered Republican and has been since 1998. Oops. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to make an issue of Sterling’s party affiliation — huh, guys?

Once again, members of the right-wing media have fallen flat on their faces in their desperate attempt to support one of the most absurd Republican tropes: “We’re not racist. Democrats are the real racists, because of Robert Byrd. So there.”

Apparently, the party whose supporters wave signs showing President Obama as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose, a party that courts the support of a washed-up rock star who calls that president a “subhuman mongrel,” a party that has no problem with its most prominent talk show host referring to the first lady as “uppity” and playing songs about “Barack the Magic Negro,” a party that embraced a candidate who told Iowa primary voters, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” (even though there are more white than black welfare recipients) — apparently it’s very important to that party to distract from the pervasive racism in its own current ranks by convincing the American people that it’s the Democrats who are the real racists because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, Southern Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act 50 years ago (although most Northern Democrats supported it), and Sen. Robert Byrd was in the KKK before most of us were born.

Forgive me if I don’t find this argument convincing, especially after the years since 1964 — those years that brought us the GOP’s race-baiting “Southern Strategy,” giving us gems like Bush the Elder’s Willie Horton ad (AHHH! SCARY BLACK MAN!) and Jesse Helms’ infamous “White Hands” spot (“You needed that job, but the government said it had to go to a minority”).

I’m not saying that all Republicans are racists or that there are no racists in the Democratic Party. Clearly neither of those is true. I’m saying that an awful lot more racists seem to find a welcoming home in the GOP, and that the first step to solving your problem is to admit that you have one. It’s a simple truth the Raging Republican Right doesn’t seem to have learned.

Donald Sterling is now banned from the NBA for life. It’s a pity that the GOP doesn’t have the same backbone to deal with its virulent racist wing.

RNC shells out $150K for Palin fashions During Financial Crisis

Jeanne Cummings - Politico.com

The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.


Makes John Edwards' 400 dollar haircut seem like pretty small potatoes, dunnit?

And it gets better. They actually spent more money on makeup for McCain's old mug than they did for makeup for Caribou Barbie:

The make-up artist to the wannabe-stars is getting paid beaucoup bucks to make McCain, 72, more telegenic.

Tifanie White, who reportedly has done makeup for the shows "So You Think You Can Dance" and "American Idol," was paid a total of $8,672.55 in September by the McCain-Palin campaign, according to the campaign's latest monthly financial report filed this week with the Federal Election Commission. She was paid $5,583.43 the previous month, records show.

We asked McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers whether McCain was happy with the American Idol make-up artist's work, and whether Ms. White also does makeup for McCain's naturally telegenic vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin. Rogers replied via email, "No comment."

Oh, and as it turns out, the reports of Mrs. Obama's lobster dinner at the Waldorf? Hoax.

The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation.

See, guys, there's this thing called "Fact-checking" that you might want to look into before you print something some campaign shill whispers in your ear. I know it's a lot like work, but it's kind of important.

Liberal media my ass. Our biggest problem is lazy media.