TheSun: “He posted on Facebook: “Our brother Robert, who became our brother Alexis, who became our sister Alexis, who became our brother Alexis, passed this morning September 11, at 12:32 am. He was surrounded by all of his brothers and sisters, one of his nieces and several other loved ones.”
* Hugh Hewitt ran from it like a whipped puppy. No mention of Machado’s background, just pleas for Trump to ignore her entirely (implying that his meanness to her was essentially indefensible) and to try to refocus on other issues. Hewitt was doing his show early in the morning, though, before Drudge put up its Machado link, so maybe tomorrow will be different.
* If I were in Steve Bannon’s loafers, I’d be reaching out to Bobby Abreu for an endorsement of Trump. I’d even have them do a presser where they autograph baseballs and talk over their best exercise tips. If B.A. feels like giving the inside scoop on Miss Housekeeping, so be it.
* Will Rahn is Peggy Noonan’s son who previously worked for the Daily Caller. I don’t know how he got to be a digital editor at CBS News, but I don’t think he is representative of the mainstream media.
* CNN and the NY Times ignoring any aspect of Machado that doesn’t fit Hillary’s narrative is why I have my doubts that the average woman is going to hear the aspects of the story that do not match Hillary’s narrative. Even wikipedia has been cleansed to fit it.
The right wing sites that are covering the full story are almost entirely visited by right-wing males. They will get the true story. Most women won’t.
The fact that censorship is not fully here yet means that the true story of Machado has leaked out and it doesn’t give the ‘Trump was a meanie to Machado’ narrative as much legs in the mainstream press. However, Hillary can keep running the ads and many women will not hear the full picture.
It is nice though that CBS has reported on it. Will others follow? I imagine it is no coincidence that the CBS reporter is a male. I doubt we will see any mainstream media female reporters breaking the full story.
* I remember this story from way back. At the time, I read a human interest story in some newspaper on dead tree. The story said that there was a Miss Universe that gained a lot of weight and she was told to lose the weight in 6 months (or whatever) or she will lose the contract. And she managed to do it. There was a short interview with her where she shared her diet tips (basically, eat nothing for 6 months.)
Nowhere in the story it was suggested that her employer was wrong in warning her about the weight. Those were simpler times.
Hillary’s play is that women will sympathize with Ms. Machado and punish Mr. Trump. But this works only if the victim is sympathetic. If she is not this may backfire big time. If Ms. Machado comes across as a b-ch the women will turn on her, because no one will judge a woman harsher than other women.
Chateau: “In Post-America, fat-shaming is a mortal sin while cheating on your fiancé, being filmed on camera having illicit sex, driving your boyfriend’s getaway car from the scene of a murder, threatening the life of a judge, bearing the bastard spawn of a drug lord, and happily lying while under the direction of a presidential candidate and a colluding media about your “20 years of humiliation” from experiencing a gentle and encouraging chiding about your weight are trivial details that should not reflect poorly on an attention whore’s character.”
* Time for the campaign commercial:
“CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman “Miss Piggy.” Then he called her “Miss Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.
CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado.”
[Announcer]: Who is Alicia Machado?
1. Miss Universe who gained 50 pounds after winning title, managed to keep it because Donald Trump came up with a workable solution to the problem.
2. Alleged to have driven a getaway car from an attempted assassination at a funeral, but she couldn’t have, because she had not one, but two, alibis.
3. Threatened to kill a Mexican judge for charging her boyfriend with murder.
4. Had sex on a Spanish reality TV show, ruining her relationship with another man to whom she was engaged.
[Insert film clip of Alicia, with “oooh, tenges la pinga divina” — it will pass, because the FCC doesn’t know Spanish, either]
5. Dated and had a child with a notorious Mexican drug lord, and we have proof that the child was born in this country, and is a US citizen by birth …..
[Insert visual of Miami birth certificate]
So who is Alicia Machado?
She’s a new American Citizen! And
“CLINTON: She’s voting in November!”
Don’t let Donald Trump shame America over being overweight. Let’s find a better way.
Clinton-Machado 2016.
* Did anyone else notice that during the debate, Hillary said, “So we’re now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy…” I heard this and confirmed it with the transcript.
“On the precipice” definition: The brink of a dangerous situation. A headlong fall or descent.
Perhaps an inadvertent truth from Hilltron?
* You know what Marvin Gaye’s father’s last words were to his son?
“Now you’re gonna listen to one of my 45′s.”
* His trans dad who killed him got off lightly. Six years suspended and five years probation.
* OT: Overton Window
First Douthat links to Steve with implicit approval…
Clinton’s Samantha Bee Problem
Then Robert Draper links to VDare!
How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media
First they ignore you, then they denounce you, then they hyperlink to you, …
* So now Trump is pissed and next time he is not going to listen to his advisers. Whether this will backfire or not I don’t know, but in the next debate I would bet you any amount that Trump is going to go after Hillary hammer and tongs and the moderators too. Trump won the primaries by being Trump, not by being “Presidential”. Anyone who wants a conventional figure is already voting for Hillary anyway. Trump has to sell himself as the change candidate.
* Steve, you noted the bitter resentments of the female writing staff on Law and Order populated the criminal casting as Rich White Men who as we know are always engaging in violence. And not the kind of “sexy domination” like the Tsarnaevs that led nurses to fist-fights over who would take care of Bob Dylan Tsarnaev.
Hillary lecturing White men plays well among White women. Its why Trump cannot win and the route of politics is a non-starter. Most educated White women are objectively anti-White, as much for personal disappointment in the men around them as anything else.
Rather, White men should take a page from Black activists. BLM and other stuff made a giant pain for Democrats until the desires of no policing at all for Black people is met. I would not advocate mass civil disobedience but rather various actions designed to inflict as much political pain while being distributed and deniable.
That means unearthing every unflattering thing about political leaders, their families, and social connections and making them public in the most humiliating time and fashion. It means disrupting events by technical and social means, it means a constant level of pressure and pain until elites figure it is easier to give White men what they want than fight.
* Hillary has not cracked 50%, neither has Trump. He has the winning hand. Trade, immigration, healthcare, breaking up the status quo are all his issues. He should be pounding that message into the ground 24/7. Every day he squanders defending himself over a personal attack or slight is wasted opportunity to put out the message that will resonate.
He has to understand that every big time politico will get bogus political attacks just like businesses get bogus lawsuits slapped against them all the time. He needs to remind himself that when a business gets hit with a ludicrous lawsuit, the CEO doesn’t drop everything, investigate the claim, accumulate evidence and then personally lead the defense team in court. No, when a business gets such a lawsuit, they turn it over to their hired gun law firm to take care of.
It’s the same for these bogus personal attacks. I still plan on voting for the guy, but this does show bad judgement.
* Your comment is eerily similar to what the similarly obtuse Alan Rapaport wrote in the NY Times today: “Fact-checkers have found no evidence that Ms. Machado, who was featured in Playboy, appeared in a sex tape. Her critics may be referring to a risqué scene that she appeared in on a reality television show.”
And indeed, this is what everyone is referring to. Nor was it merely “risque”: it was a real or faux real act of sexual intercourse on a Spanish reality TV show, replete with language from Alicia about how she loves being “f***ed like a perra“, and extolling the taste and the divinity of her partner’s penis.
In the same vein, the Times headline reads: Donald Trump Bashes Alicia Machado Again, Alleging a ‘Sex Tape’ (Without Evidence), and the article also quotes a tweet from Hillary, “What kind of man stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?”
The fundamental dishonesty of how they are handling this has got to get through to them at some point.
* I can see the argument that Trump shouldn’t be pursuing this Machado thing, but should focus instead on the issues.
But, of course, it’s been Hillary and the media who have been pushing at this as hard as they can, including even a New Yorker cover.
My instinct is that for him to push back hard is a very good thing to do, given all the variables, the fact that he still has over a month before the election, and the general facts of the case.
Machado as a spokesperson and icon for Hillary is completely indefensible. Shooting down her integrity is a slam dunk on a basket 5 ft high. It just requires of Joe Citizen a google to see how corrupt she is. And the chutzpah required of Hillary and the media to use her as an icon is just breathtaking — they really do think there’s no accountability when it comes to shaming people for allegedly politically incorrect behavior.
The Machado case shows not only Hillary’s vicious unfairness and incompetence. It shows how the media — including even the formerly august NY Times — is exactly as bad. You can’t put a pin between Hillary’s campaign and the media at this point, and this case illustrates like nothing else.
* Here is Vox’s desperate attempt at spin, under the headline “Donald Trump’s nasty, false tweetstorm against Alicia Machado proves how easy he is to bait”:
Trump’s mention of Machado’s past probably refers to the fact that she was once accused of threatening to murder a judge and driving a getaway car in an attempted murder. She was never charged with anything, but she doesn’t dispute the allegations, saying this week, “Everybody has a past. And I’m not a saint girl.”
The “sex tape” rumor, on the other hand, is completely false. Snopes looked into it and found that while Machado did once pose topless in Playboy and was portrayed having sex during a Real World-esque Spanish reality TV show, the footage from the show wasn’t explicit:
However, the so-called “sex tape” stemming from that incident, which is nothing more than some grainy, night-vision footage of a couple of covered figures writhing in a bed, hardly qualifies as explicit. And reality television being what it is, the scene the tape depicts was quite possibly staged or fabricated.
* I think Trump’s tweets were necessary and effective. Let’s remember the time line here.
Monday: Hillary, at the very end of the debate, rolls out Miss Piggy Machado, meant to be a death blow to Trump.
Tuesday: Consensus is that Trump did not lose the debate, and that polls show him edging upwards. The Hillary Camp (aka MSM) rolls out a series of pre-fab articles about Alicia Machado.
Wednesday-Thursday: The Alt Right (and the British Press) begin presenting answers to the question, “Who the heck is Alicia Machado?” The following series of revelations is almost entirely shut down by the MSM, who prefer to continue discussing Alicia as a victim.
Friday: Early AM, Trump sends out his tweets. The MSM _must_ respond to the content of Trump’s tweets, and as a result the cat is finally let out of the bag in all media, albeit barely landing on its feet as a result of the furious spinning, and here we are.
We can get back to pointing out Hilary’s incompetence tomorrow. Meanwhile, we can put Alicia in the same basket with Harambe and Pepe: the Untouchables of 2016.
* I’m no Trumpista, but it must be said: the election is rigged against Trump. The bad mic, the biased moderator, and the unflattering lighting constitute the proof. Almost makes me vote for the buffoon.
