Wednesday, June 7, 2017

BloggeRhythms

Vividly clear evidence of the dwindling impact of the mainstream media can be seen in an article by Tim Marcin @newsweek.com reporting that President Trump’s “approval rating is, at least for the moment, a hair better then where President Bill Clinton stood at the same point in his first term.”

“Different polling outfits put Trump at varying levels of approval, but the RealClearPolitics average had him at 39.8 percent Tuesday, while the weighted average from FiveThirtyEight had him at exactly 39 percent. Not great numbers, but still better than Clinton. On Day 138 of his presidency, just 37.8 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to FiveThirtyEight.”

Factors blamed for Clinton's low approval at the time included a poor economy, the beginnings of an ethics controversy over the White House travel office and his allowing gay people to serve in the military under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. 

At the time, Clinton said: "And whenever you try to change things, there are always people there ready to point out the pain of change without the promise of it, and that's just all part of it. If I worried about the poll ratings, I'd never get anything done here."

Thus, what’s interesting here is that while Clinton eventually became one of the nation’s most popular presidents, when starting his first term he sounded an awful lot like President Trump at present.  

Then Michael Goodwin writes @nypost.com today about the upcoming testimony to be delivered by James Comey tomorrow, with the stakes being “enormous” for both he and the POTUS. 

Goodwin begins by explaining: “Comey left office with few admirers and even fewer friends because of his suspect conduct in last year’s election. Republicans thought he went soft on Hillary Clinton’s ­email case, and Democrats thought he was too hard on her.

“Out of office, Comey’s no longer in a position to collect secrets and dole them out based on his own judgment and interests, and is likely to find he has lost the institutional benefit of the doubt from both sides. Instead of blithely asserting his integrity, he’ll have to answer questions with facts, and some of those questions will be hostile, as they should be.”

As far as Trump's concerned, “The stakes are monumental. The day is shaping up to be the most important event of his presidency.”

“Any damaging testimony Comey levels will make it that much harder for the president to push his stalled agenda through Congress as more Republicans pull further away. With his already-low approval numbers, additional declines could put his party at risk in the 2018 midterms.

“Then there is the immediate legal risk. Comey clearly aims to damage the president by accusing Trump of asking him to pull the plug on the investigation into former Trump aide Gen. Michael Flynn.

“Perhaps more important, Comey also will be asked why he thinks he was fired. I assume he will cite the Russia probe, and claim he believes that Trump fired him to stop the investigation.

“If true, that will be the headline of the day. And if he offers evidence beyond his opinion, Katie bar the door.”

So, step-by-step, Goodwin has made his case regarding how damaging Comey’s testimony can be to Trump, much of which is based on Comey’s opinion of what transpired between himself and the POTUS. 

And since it’s been expected from the start that there is no tangible “evidence” to present, Goodwin should go back and reread his opening paragraphs: “Comey left office with few admirers and even fewer friends because of his suspect conduct in last year’s election. 

"Republicans thought he went soft on Hillary Clinton’s ­email case, and Democrats thought he was too hard on her.

“Out of office, Comey’s no longer in a position to collect secrets and dole them out based on his own judgment and interests, and is likely to find he has lost the institutional benefit of the doubt from both sides. Instead of blithely asserting his integrity, he’ll have to answer questions with facts, and some of those questions will be hostile, as they should be.”

Which means that Comey's testimony will most likely fall into a category that Bill Clinton’s wife calls a “nothing burger.”

And then, an indication is seen that a political reporter may be catching on to the POTUS’s methodology for keeping the MSM otherwise occupied as he pursues his agenda.

This morning, the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein hints "there may be a method to President Trump’s madness in constantly feeding the far-left conspiracy that he is a secret Russian operative."

A sample of misdirection came from  a Breitbart News report that: “On the morning of May 12, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed that he had instructed federal prosecutors to begin pursuing lengthier prison sentences for drug offenders.

“It was a draconian change in approach that flew in the face of a growing bipartisan agreement on sentencing reform.”

However, “The move was then largely buried under an avalanche of Donald Trump-related news.”

“Just hours after Sessions’ policy was revealed, the president tweeted that he may have taped conversations with his recently-fired FBI director, James Comey. With less than 140 characters, Washington was abuzz again over Trump’s potential ties to Russia, which Comey had been investigating.

“This is a defining feature of the Trump administration: While scandal and squabble, palace intrigue and provocative tweets suck much of the oxygen out of the room ― and leave the impression of mass government disfunction ― a wide array of fundamentally Trump-minded reform is taking place.”

So, we now have others who’ve finally figured out how the POTUS has been manipulating the intellectually-limited leftist MSM. Something that’s been disclosed here from the time the POTUS first took office.

Which leads right into another topic mentioned often, regarding how tactics employed by the Obama administration toward its rivals may very well come back to work against it.

Pam Key writes @breitbart.com today that Senator Rand Paul said, “I’ve sent several letters to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee and also the White House asking political figures: were presidential candidates unmasked by the Obama administration? If the Obama administration used intelligence for political purposes, this is a really, really serious abuse of power and must be investigated. There are rumors swirling about Susan Rice. There are rumors now swirling about Samantha Powers. So we need to know. Were they actually looking into people’s phone calls for political purposes? If that happened, really, we have to do something about it. We cannot live in fear of our own intelligence community.”

Which suggest that this line of questioning is only the tip of a very big iceberg soon to be disclosed. Stay tuned.

That’s it for today folks.

Adios

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