Jophiel wrote:
It's adorable that Gbaji parrots Trump and then insists that it's only because he's such a free thinker
You have a bizarre definition of "parrot" going on there.
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Trump didn't make this issue up. He just put it front and center and applied a catchy label to it.
No, you guys already had a label for it as you cried about "liberal media bias" for years and years. What Trump did was intentionally conflate the separate issue of completely false news stories to convince a bunch of soft-minded people that "liberal media bias" was equivalent to making up stories from whole cloth.
Yeah. He's calling out the media by equating their bias to full out "fake news". Some of us, who apparently don't have "soft minds", got this on day one. It's the equivalent of calling a newspaper a "gossip rag" back in the olden days. You didn't get this?
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This was done with the express purpose of delegitimizing news sources that Trump was opposed to because they were running (truthful) negative stories and, if you can convince a bunch of sheep that the Washington Post is "fake news" then you don't need to bother rebutting the actual stories. You fell for it, Gbaji. You fell for it HARD. You're still falling for it as your tortured explanation for why this doesn't count shows.
Fell for what? I got what he was doing and saying right off the bat. I've treated the Washington Post with a massive grain of salt for a couple decades now, as have most conservatives, so I'm not sure what you think changed in my/our mindset here. We didn't decide that those news sources were illegitimate because of what Trump called them. Trump called them "fake news" because he realized how well this would resonate with a conservative base that already views them that way.
You've got the cause and effect completely backwards Joph. As I've pointed out many times, Trump is not a great conservative. What he does do well is identify what people already think and want and then tie into that. He adopted his language to what conservatives wanted and have been waiting for many years for their representatives to be bold enough to say. It doesn't go the other way around. Conservatives don't have a negative view of the mainstream media because of Trump. We had that well before he came on the scene. He just put that front and center.
Again. He adopted his language to conservative views, not the other way around. I'm honestly puzzled how you could think otherwise, given that myself and many conservatives have been bashing the media for so long for this very reason.
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That's a bizarre strawman. I never said it was specifically because it was Trump, I said that you're only eating it up today because Trump fed it to you.
That's a pretty narrow distinction though. So it's not "because it was Trump" but "because Trump fed it to you"? Um... What?
I'm not "eating it up today" for any reason other than I've been waiting for a Republican to be strong enough to come out and say this for years and years now. Surely you recall how many times we've had a discussion were I'll say something like "this is how conservative view this", and you'll respond by pointing to quotes from GOP members not saying those things, or using softer language, or whatever. I'll then respond by pointing out that they say things that way because they're trying to be politically correct, or are afraid of backlash, bad media coverage, etc. And you'll respond with some snarky comment about how weak the Republican politicians must be if they're afraid to say what they really think. We've had this same exchange at least a dozen times on this forum, on a variety of topics, from border security, to media bias, to school choice, to global warming, and most famously to the aborted investigation of Fannie and Freddie (where the GOP backed off investigation out of fear of being labeled anti-poor and anti-minority by investigating programs that were designed to help those folks become homeowners). You remember that, don't you?
So now, we've got a Republican politician attacking the tool normally used to bash Republicans who dare to step outside the normal PC boundaries, just like you've argued in the past they should do, if they had the courage to do so. And instead of recognizing this, you're running off on a tangent insisting said politician has somehow brainwashed us all or something. Its funny because you've many times bashed the GOP for being afraid to take on the media. Well, you just got your wish. How do you like it?
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Absolutely the messenger didn't really matter (face it, this was really a Steve Bannon invention, not something Trump brainstormed). What mattered was having enough people dumb enough to fall for it. But, as the saying goes, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
What I find most interesting is that absence of any argument that the mainstream media *isn't* biased as we claim.
Isn't that the core point here? I'm not sure what you think we're "falling for" here. We're falling for someone saying the very things we've wanted GOP politicians to say for decades? If I have to "fall for" that, then sign me up. Wow. Someone finally is saying what I've wanted them to say. I must be a complete fool to fall for that one!
Seriously? Again, you've got the directionality backwards. Trump's saying the things that conservatives want to be said, not the other way around.
Edited, Oct 3rd 2017 7:05pm by gbaji