Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Yeah, you're referring to a completely different event.
I'm referring to the one... wait for it...
I was referring to. You know. Cause I'm the one who made the reference.
You asked about people bringing it up in 2012 and thereafter. Sorry you need to frantically move the goalposts to avoid admitting you're wrong but them's the breaks
I was speaking about people in the media Joph. I even prefaced it with this comment:
gbaji wrote:
When was the last time you saw anything about this on a news channel, panel discussion on a political show, etc?
I was quite clearly speaking about the impact of such statements and the degree to which they were taken seriously.
Quote:
Despite now pretending that we're talking about a single event in 2016, you actually wrote:
Do you recall anyone making this an issue during the 2012 election? Nope. I'm sure you can dig up the occasional fringe person digging up the old claim
Yes, I found a person. And you can try to dismiss him as a fringe lunatic but he's the so-called fringe lunatic who leads your political party so, uh, have a ball with that argument.
Hehe. Um... He didn't write the story Joph. He read it, likely thought it was funny, as as part of his "stir the pot" bit I spoke of earlier, tweeted it. None of this at all tells us what Trump personally believed at any point along this. You do get that it's quite possible to link to an article that you find interesting or amusing, and not yourself believe in whatever said article/blog/whatever is saying (or even particularly care)
What's funny here is that I don't think you and I are as far off as you may think on this. The difference is that you see Trumps tweets and see a moron who believes in crazy conspiracy theories and can thus be dismissed as incompetent or whatever, all the while laughing at his "side". But I see Trump saying or repeating things as a deliberate means to change/shape the topic of discussion, or to build up the perception of something, even if it's unfounded. I don't think he at all believed or even cared about whether Obama was actually born in the US or not. He found value in raising the issue, so he did it. And if tweeting out articles about Obama's biographical data from 2007 and older saying he was born in Kenya, or theories about his birth certificate being a fake gained him something, he did that too.
Which is why I keep saying he's acting a lot like a liberal. Guess what? I also don't think most Democrats really care about racial diversity, or women's issues, or minority causes. They play lip service to these things because there's value to them in doing this. I could assume that all those politicians standing on the steps of congress making a big show of doing "hands up don't shoot" were actually just that stupid and got played by an obvious lie. But I give them credit for being smarter than that and conclude that they found political value in adopting the slogan and repeating it, so they did it. You think that Hollywood celebrity really cares about global warming, or starving kids in Africa, or whatever the cause of the moment is? Nope. It's great PR to make a big show of caring about those things though.
Trump is doing the same freaking thing. I've been trying to explain this to you for like a couple months now, but you're just not getting it. You're so caught up in trying to frame him in the stereotypical "dumb conservative" model that you're totally failing to see what's actually going on. It's dangerous and actually dumb to make the mistake of assuming that when politicians do this it's because they are honest true believers in <whatever> and can be judged based on that. I honestly have no clue what Trump thinks, or what he believes. I do think, however, that he's made a ton of money, built up a lot of success, and landed himself the presidency, all while doing those things that you think make him look stupid. Guess what? I thought the same thing during the primaries. I figured out that I was wrong somewhere along the line because what looks like random insanity somehow managed to obtain for him exactly that which he wants. We can all sit around and pretend that's just dumb luck, but I happen to think that's a bit foolish.
You're also still laboring under the false belief that I'm at all a fan of Trump. I'm just hoping that whatever crazy things he's doing actually result in some conservative positions being adopted along the way. I've already accepted that he's a Liberal in terms of methodology (which I hate frankly). That's already done, and there's nothing you or I can do to change that. What you keep trying to frame as me defending him, is really me disagreeing with your dismissal of him. SNL skits aside, he's not actually dumb. He's just very very good at getting people to misjudge him and then takes advantage of that fact.
So yeah. Don't do that. Just a suggestion.