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OK, fair warning: we’re in week 10 or so of this lockdown thing, and the men of GLoP are getting a bit punchy. Add to that some technical issues and being a punching bag in certain quarters, and well, you get a very shall we say, eccentric show. How so? Well, as you’ll hear, we abandon the first take and start the show all over again about ten minutes in. And in the interests of transparency (and comedy) we left our screws-ups in (well, most of them). We cover a range of topics (including this YouTube video tracking hit TV shows of the past 60 years) and go down a host of tangents — too many to list and spoil here. What we can tell you is that you’ll laugh, you’ll marvel at some middle aged juvenile jokes, you may be offended, and you’ll definitely learn a lot about fly and zipper technology. We did.
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So your position is that Joe Biden is a formidable candidate?
My position is Trump has a decent chance of signing on for anther four years because his opponent is Joe Biden.
JPod talks about how self-absorbed the 60s were, but doesn’t appear to remember how the Obama supporters were also all about “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Perhaps the point is that defeating Trump may not require a high degree of formidability? But if that’s the case, then it sure seems like Biden may also be perhaps heaven-sent.
Agreed the Boomer generation ruined everything, but you need to be more specific… it has always annoyed me that later boomers get lumped in with the early boomers. The generation born from 1946 to 1964 went through hugely different experiences. Those old enough will count the assassination of JFK as the tremendous shock of their youth, but at least a third of the “boomers” so defined wouldn’t even remember it (I was 3)… Someone born in 1964, who was 5 years old during Woodstock, should not have to apologize for the destructiveness of the 60’s counter culture. If you were born in 1946, Elvis was a revolutionary figure… if you were born in 1960 Elvis was an incredibly famous Vegas lounge act…
Amen to that.
But they do have to apologize for the generation they begat.
My position is too often, the President is his own most formidable opponent. Convince me otherwise.
Yes, Progressive are not crazy about Biden, that’s true. But I’m fascinated to know how you are so sure Progressives “don’t really dislike Trump as much as they pretend.” Because I live in a deep blue state in a deep blue town that is chock full of Progressives. I talk to them all the time, and they can’t stand Trump and would vote for ham sandwich if it were the Democratic nominee over the President.
To that end, no chance they are voting 3rd party this time, in part because they saw what Jill Stein did to HRC in some swing states and in part because the 3rd parties are likely going to sit this one out. Why? Because the don’t want to have any part of a second Trump term (except for the Libertarians — although they will be relegated to obscurity now that Amash is out).
Ok, boomers
And what are you?
My position is, to Trump’s amazing dumb luck thank you God advantage, the (D)’s have nominated the one human being who may be a worse candidate than HRC and who appears to have even more dirty laundry than both HRC and Trump combined being strewn around the yard at the perfectly wrong time.
I’m certainly open (hopeful even!) that Trump can beat Biden. Lord knows, much stranger things have happened. But since Trump can’t stop stepping on his own….foot, this is far closer than it ought to be. And the problem with dumb luck is you never know when it’s going to run out.
I know what you were really thinking, and all I’m going to say about that is that it has to be pretty long for him to step on it.
Trump stepping on his own foot is, and has been for a good long while, dog bites man. That’s why negative commentary focusing on his latest outburst strikes me as grasping at low hanging fruit by those who already dislike him. This is intensified in the days immediately after he does something dumb like the Scarborough rant.
But there is evidence that this too shall pass. He has been providing grist for the “look what he said” mill since the ’16 primaries. It’s certainly sensible to wish one could perform a gaffe-erectomy on that part of Trump prone to saying embarrassing things, but that’s not how a personality works. His prospects for ’20 will be determined by the degree of an economic rebound and the extent to which the Dems are able to generate turnout for a most uninspiring candidate, not by whether the soccer moms like what he said about Joe Scarborough.
Hey Franco! Long time, no comment.
A generic disclaimer. Of course you aren’t an expert, and likewise for myself. Is Karl Rove and expert? You could say that, maybe, but no one’s impressed. Certainly not I. So even experts aren’t taken very seriously. Not Mike Murphy not Nate Silver, not anyone anymore. Even Dr. Fauci has managed to expose the sham of ‘experts’. I always saw through the whole ‘expert’ thing. Like UFO’s, they exist, but it’s hard to prove definitively.
The only guide we can use is how often they’ve been right before. The Harvard degree, the PhD, it’s not what it used to be.
So you just use your memory and read what people said. Some part of my brain ( a small part – but it’s crowded) is keeping score. I also weight recent predictions more favorably. Things are linear and cyclical depending, but recent matters.
The people who were wrong never came to terms with why they were wrong. It never was a real exploration. I know it’s not easy, but if you are in the business of studying politics and people, you have to understand them.
So myself, being no expert, drove through Michigan in late September of 2016 (experts fly). I saw a lot of Trump signs. Anecdotal information, you say? Yes, but if you understand the media like I do, you know they can be wrong. Very wrong. By accident, by negligence, by bias, or by intention.
I had a choice, to balance what I was seeing and hearing and reading, with what the media was saying.
So I predicted ( humbly) that I thought he had a good chance of winning. Quite a few people I admire had the same premonition. Interestingly, many people who I believed were providing poor diagnoses for years were also very wrong about Trump. Then they proceeded to be wrong in their assessment of the aftermath, grudging ‘acceptance’ of Trump’s clear victories, continuously and grossly misunderstanding the man’s character, unable to comprehend the radical shift in the zeitgeist of conservative voters. They seem to have the fantasy that Trump supporters were dazzled and hoodwinked by the Reality Star Flim-Flam Man.
But what has been revealed is Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and many other Republicans, and operatives and pundit enablers were the real film-flam men. They held the franchise!
The clown, the foole, the joker, has revealed the truth.
And thus the reaction.
The GLoP guys have said many times on this very podcast and elsewhere that they got the election wrong, That said, it’s been widely reported that until about 9PM on election night 2016, Trump himself thought he was going to lose. So we should all give ourselves and everyone else some slack for an incorrect prediction.
I’m not so sure. Anyone can make wrong predictions, and indeed most people do. What can an “understandably incorrect” prediction even mean, really? Especially if you’re talking about people who are usually wrong about their other predictions too. Does “sure I was ALSO wrong THIS time, but so was almost everyone else!” really provide any cover?
But “prediction” can also be oversold. For example, if you had 20-whatever “predictors” in 2016 and each one “predicted” that a DIFFERENT one of the 20-whatever initial GOP candidates would end up winning, that doesn’t necessarily mean the one that happened to turn out correct was any more prescient than the others. No more than one person in a hundred million who happens to guess the lottery numbers that happen to win, is somehow more prescient than all the others who were “wrong.”
This too may pass, but the cumulative effect of so many things passing adds up. And there have been so many. And the tragic thing about them is that the vast majority of them were totally unforced errors (like the Scarborough thing).
I love this.
I’m not trying to punish anyone for a wrong prediction. I’m merely saying I trust their analysis less . But the point was and is, they and you seemingly, don’t yet know why!
They have closed minds and in a way it’s quite insulting to someone like me who has a brain and is conscious.
“widely reported” …. something Trump thought… so the wideness of the reportage… is a function of what?
It’s a function of media laziness, narrative seeking, low hanging fruit picking, echo chamber of highschoolesque conformity.
Trump himself thought he might lose. Of course he did. It’s stupid to be overconfident. Trump knows that. It’s also stupid to signal to others you have any doubts about your abilities to deliver. This is simple stuff needed in the real world.
Acknowledging someone was wrong is not the point at all. It’s understanding why. Or at least trying to understand. Do you understand why taking the last cookie affected your little sister? And we are getting back something like , yeah, but I’m not seeing that. It’s not recrimination at all, it
The rivalry between Bill Paley and David Sarnoff was real and deep. During the radio era NBC ruled the roost. They had a better lineup of stations and ad agencies coveted program slots on their schedule.
The advent of television changed that. Unlike radio, TV stations are more equal in their coverage range. And Paley was going to do anything and everything to put CBS on top. He used tax law to lure big name talent, something Sarnoff would never do.
The bane of Paley’s existence was Bonanza. It consistently rated in the Top 10 and prevented CBS from going 10 for 10. Legend had it that at one Monday morning meeting when the ratings came out Paley threw the report in the trash and yelled, “That bastard always has to have one, doesn’t he!”
@franco you can trust their analysis as much or as little as you want. Fine by me and everyone else. But let’s be honest — that’s not what this is about. You and many others don’t like anyone who doesn’t pay total fealty to the President. And that’s fine too. But maybe just don’t get so bent out of shape every time you hear them express views you’ve known they hold for 3 plus years now? And especially the ones suggested in this show, which were exceedingly brief and mild.
You know, I have followed a lot of the conservative media over the years and my memory of what conservatives were saying is very different from yours. There were lots of misapprehension about nominating John McCain, but wishful thoughts that he would be better than Barry. For Romney there was happiness that he mopped the floor with Obama on the first debate and then disappointment over his low energy overly polite behavior in the second and especially the third debate.
As far as I have seen conservatives have had clear vision on what the issues and shortcomings of the Republican candidates. But they gritted their teeth and got behind the nominee. When it came to Donald Trump the issues and shortcomings were so extreme that gritting their teeth and getting behind the man lead to muted support at best. Was that wrong? Hindsight is 20/20 but in hindsight I still think Ted Cruz would have been a far better president.
Have we gotten good things from Trump? Yes we have and if you had asked me three months ago if I was going to vote for the man’s re-election I would have said yes. As much as I despise the President’s character I believed the positives outweighed the negatives. Do I still believe that with some of his most recent behavior? I’m really not sure. And pretending that our “great leader” is a man of character is something I just can’t do.
The assumption that Cruz would have beaten Hillary may be misplaced. It’s useless to believe that Cruz WOULD HAVE BEEN a far better president, IF he had won, when there’s a very good chance that he WOULDN’T have won.
I really like Cruz, but I am not sure he is up to the media game like Trump is. I think today Left media would have crushed Cruz like an empty beer can.
Over 50 comments in less than 12 hours?
What happened now? Did Jonah start naming all the various body parts that he would forfeit to make sure Trump is not re-elected?
Meant to post this yesterday. Screen shot from the (third) recording of this episode:
Is it me, or is Rob starting to look like Andy Rooney?