Ok! Although Florida will still do something dramatically stupid (no doubt), we now have to turn our attention back to how doomed we are.
Most people, by and large, don't spend a lot of attention on politics. There's been some research that it's around 4-10 minutes a week. Here's how this contributes to our current re-doomening.
THE DONALD, he who gets non stop attention from political pundits and TV news, while spending almost no money on advertising, has been pretty consistently doing the following:
1) Calling HRC "Crooked Hillary"
2) Saying that HRC lies
3) Saying that HRC is very ill, and hiding it
4) Praising the leadership of Vladmir Putin
5) Saying racist, mysognistic, homophobic, hateful, mean spirited, evil things
6) Turning over campaign leadership non stop.
He was so repetitive with points 1 to 3 that a lot of people sort of tuned it out. It is very similar to how he led the birther movement (the group that claims Obama is not American), or the group that says Obama is a secret Muslim. People I used to speak to door to door had heard those conspiracy theories so often that they kind of tuned them out after a while. There was no proof to back them up, there was a lot of proof to the contrary, so about 60-70% of the states just forgot about. The remainder get pretty brainwashed by media or local conservative leaders, and would agree that the sky was pink and Regan is still alive in Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity (American media moguls) told them.
Where this becomes a problem that could undo HRC is...SHE WAS MOTHERFUCKING UNBELIEVABLY FOR FUCK SAKE SICK AND SHE MOTHERFUCKING GODDAMN FOR FUCK SAKE DIDN'T TELL ANYONE.
(For the facts, here's a BBC story. We can all trust the BBC, right? http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37346293)
What happens next is going to be awful. For people who are busy leading their lives, and only spend a little bit of attention on this, they're likely to think "huh, Hillary is lying to us? Wow. Maybe Donald has a point. He can't be that bad, can he?". I feel comfortable guaranteeing that as Field Organizers and volunteers go door to door in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and other battleground states, they'll have completely reasonable people telling them "well, I was going to vote for Hillary, but now it turns out that Trump was right so I don't know what I'mm going to do. Maybe just stay home or vote Libertarian."
The moment a politician plays into the construct that their opponent has built for them, they can spend the rest of the election fighting their way out, and still lose, regardless of facts. John Kerry lost an election to George Bush because he was painted as a lying flip flopper, and it didn't matter if he actually was or not becuase Bush painted him into the corner.
Hillary may have just painted herself into the corner of being not trustworthy and not healthy. This may have been enough of a mistake to throw the stupid fucking election to Trump. Unbelievable, but true. She was already wildly unpopular, with polls showing that she was personally disliked almost as much as Trump.
And this doesn't even touch my next post, about how it turns out that she SENT CONFIDENTIAL EMAILS FROM PERSONAL ACCOUNTS, THAT WERE LABELLED (C). So yeah, there aren't storm clouds on the horizon. This is essentially a horror movie, and we're at the moment where the young woman has run into the forest to escape the killer, and it looks like she's about to get free.
Also, I hope Hillary recovers from her pneumonia soon, and the fact that she hid it from her staff doesn't imply it's something worse than pneumonia. And don't get me wrong, she was under no ethical imperative to keep us up to date on illnesses that are easy to treat, but it played exactly into the story that Trump built for her, which is such a batshitfuckinginsancecrazyasstupid thing to do.
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