August 24, 2016

A lady at yesterday's Trump Rally in Austin Texas wasn't what they mean when they say "Keep Austin Weird."

This moment in time is during one of the speeches prior to Trump's appearance on stage. One of the Trump surrogates is driving the Hillary hate message.

"Lock her up!" the woman yells at the press pen. "When are you guys gonna wake up!"

The surrogate then says "Americans come first."

The woman in the video is...shall we say... enthused?

"We do! We do!" she says, pointing to herself. "Not corrupt Hillary!"

The man appears to be saying ""She's the Wicked Witch of the West, and she is melting."

The crowd starts booing as the surrogate brings up Barack Obama. But this is, for the woman, an opportunity to boo those in the press pen. "Booo the media! Shame on you! Shame on you!" etc.

While I see reactions like this as definitely dangerous and a horrible infringement on a Constitutional free press, there is a part of me that wonders if

...the non-Fox media had been willing to call out Fox News as a lying piece of doo doo Republican propaganda network, instead of being collegial and careerist in their pursuit of "the view from nowhere"...

and

...Fox News itself hadn't lied to their own viewers for years about Obama and Democrats, most egregiously promising them that Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide in 2012...

if this lady wouldn't be a bit more sanguine about poll numbers and the media's role in reporting the likely election results accurately.

Even Fox News says so. Dana Perino and Greg Gutfield, now off the Roger Ailes leash, admit as much here. (Transcript via Fox.)

ERIC BOLLING: They're insane with the polls. Just look what's going on. You're looking at a Trump rally and there's 12, 15,000 people. (CROSSTALK) And then you look at Hillary Clinton, and you have, I don't know 1500, 2,000.

(CROSSTALK)

PERINO: That's a real disservice.

BOLLING: That's the poll, 82 days out.

PERINO: It's a real disservice to.

BOLLING: To whom?

PERINO: . his supporters to lie to them that those polls don't matter. You cannot take 12,000 people at a rally that are your definite supporters and they're going to show up and say the polls are wrong.

BOLLING: She doesn't have that?

(CROSSTALK)

GUTFELD: The one person sitting at home still cancels it out.

PERINO: It's not fair.

(CROSSTALK)

BOLLING: Here's why polls shouldn't matter or shouldn't ever matter. You pick up the phone and you say, who are you going to vote for? That person on the other end of the phone says, well, I'm going to vote for Hillary Clinton.

(CROSSTALK)

BOLLING: You're not out there voting. The people getting out in the street and going to a rally, those are the people who have been up off the couch and go hear something and go say something.

(CROSSTALK)

GUILFOYLE: You're saying they're motivated?

BOLLING: Size of crowds is more indicative of the following or even polling.

(CROSSTALK)

GUTFELD: I would say a person sitting home getting up to vote cancels out the person there. It's the same value.

PERINO: That's exactly what they said in 2012. The people that supported Romney were told the polls are wrong, Romney is going to win. They were so mad and disappointed.

GUTFELD: Yeah, they stopped watching because they thought we lied to them.

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

GUTFELD: And we deserved it. Juan.

WILLIAMS: Kellyanne Conway this morning talking to Bill and Martha said the polls are right, but they think that the polls can be turned around.

(CROSSTALK)

GUILFOYLE: She's a pollster.

BOLLING: No one's saying.

(CROSSTALK)

GUILFOYLE: She's a pollster.

BOLLING: Snapshot in time.

(CROSSTALK)

WILLIAMS: I'm saying there's a consistent pair. It's not this poll, that poll, it's all the polls. So here's the thing that strikes me. You go from Lewandowski and go to Manafort and you say, we are going to pivot. We're going to have a more serious structured campaign. He has given up on that. Now, he's saying I want to get back to Trump being Trump, and I'm going to bring in a bare knuckle street fighter like Bannon.

(CROSSTALK)

GUILFOYLE: More like Corey Lewandowski.

WILLIAMS: I have had it, forget Manafort. Manafort now is window dressing. And it seems to me he's doing exactly what Greg is talking about. He's talking to his base, he's firing up his base. He's not doing outreach to people, and forget women, forget Hispanics, get everybody.

Discussion

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