So David Duke — yes, that David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard and current Trump superfan — has a new theory about who was responsible for slipping a paragraph of Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech into Melania Trump’s RNC speech on Monday.
Well, actually, it’s a very old theory, which to folks like Duke seems to explain basically everything in the world that they don’t like: Jews did it.
In a post appearing on the neo-Nazi Internet tabloid The Daily Stormer, Duke declares that Melania’s “plagiarism” — he puts it in scare quotes — was too obvious to be anything but “intentional sabotage and treachery.” You know, the sort of thing that the evil JEWS allegedly do all the time.
Nobody could have been so stupid as to make about five or six common quotes out of Michele Obama’s Demo convention speech just a few years before and put it Melania Trump’s speech and not think it would get exposed!
This is a con job, sabotage, political character assassination plan from the get go! …
I would bet a gefilte fish that this was sabotage. I would also bet a bagel it was orchestrated by an Israel Firster who wanted to damage the American Firster.
Damn, now I want a bagel. A nice fresh toasty bagel, smothered with chive cream cheese.
What’s more, Duke alleges, the EVIL JEWS somehow possessed Melania’s voice and FORCED her to tell reporters that she wrote most of the speech herself.
[I]t seems as though the operative set up Melania, by leaking it to other Jewish media insiders who repeatedly asked her about the speech before she gave it prodding her to suggest that she came up with most of it but was helped a little by the speechwriter.
Sorry, I don’t have anything to add here. I’m still thinking about bagels.
The whole thing is patently ridiculous anyway. Let’s see, Melania and Trump are pummeled for plagiarism for copying the common language of a Michelle Obama speech written by another speechwriter. One speechwriter plagiarizes another. Who the hell cares anyway?
Of course, that’s easy to answer. A vicious corrupt lying Zio Media who are going all out to destroy Donald Trump just as they are setting out to destroy this nation with a flood of immigrants in their bid to divide-and-conquer!
Zio Fingerprints are all over this one.
Zio? Are anti-Semites today so lazy they can’t even be bothered to type out the word “Zionist?” Seriously, I expect a little more effort from a former Grand Wizard.
:-))))) sadly all too true …. (pssst, Alan, seen the latest figures for people signing up to vote in the Labour leadership election under the new rules, despite all attempts to retrospectively disenfranchise members and price it way, way out of the reach of so many? About 180k. I couldn’t believe it)
@ Opposablethumbs
Yeah, but as one Labour MP rather tactlessly put it, £25 is only 7p per day spread over a year so if people really cared they’d cough up.
Must confess I’ve really gone off JC for all sorts of reasons, but the fact is he’s going to be re-elected so this seems all a bit pointless. Note that none of the real heavyweights even bothered challenging; they’re all hanging back until the general election after.
I’ve just got a massive sense of déjà vu. It’s just like a reboot of Militant and Michael Foot. Still, 80s reboots are all the rage these days 🙂
*digs out Adam Ant and Sister of Mercy CDs*
@Scildfreja
Nate Silver gave Trump a 0% chance of winning. The statistical model had it no lower than a close race since basically the beginning and switched to a landslide after NH and SC. Sometimes, Nate writes checks the numbers can’t cash, but the numbers are fine. And his chances in the general weren’t ever really in the basement. The race was always gonna get closer as we trudged towards November. If it stayed 80-20 or even 70-30 the whole time, then I’d be suspect of the numbers
I mean, you are the resident STEMLady, Mistress of Data (I say with nothing but glowing admiration), so I won’t presume to tell you what models to trust, if any. Try not to worry too much about Murica. The kids will be alright. Probably 🙂
@alan
I have paid my £25, I’m not worried really, I’m just glad I got a vote. Jeremy is our best hope for returning Labour to its roots. I think the £25 thing has been implemented to lose Jeremy the youth vote. He has a huge amount of support amongst youth, actually next week my IMT branch are going to make some ‘outreach’ inroads into our local college. One of our comrades I saw yesterday, a young guy in his twenties was frustrated he can’t afford to pay to vote. Labour have not had any respect for the proletariat in this stupid decision, but at least Jeremy is on the ballot. But now some idiot is contesting that. I think the billionaire old boys club has fallen out of favour for reasonable (not Nazified) working class young people. It’s so refreshing to see a nice older man who grows green beans and photographs man hole covers and buys his shirts from charity shops. He’s real, the polar opposite to Cameron and May (Maggie 2.0). Her PMQs debut was awful today. Jeremy was quiet and calm and she showed herself up as a juvenile school bully. Now, I don’t agree with everything Jez says, he is a ‘reformist’ – but I’m a revolutionary. He’s a breath of fresh air in the squalid old boy’s club. Owen is a puppet of Big Pharma, and no ones even heard of him. Why we are expected to vote again for a leader who was already chosen by the people is absurd. As for your mention of Militant, I welcome their return. And I welcome a leader who knows how to cook a marrow and doesn’t want to kill people.
@alan
I actually voted for David, not Ed in that leadership election, I don’t know my reasons now it was such a long time ago. It would have been a mistake, but I was not as well educated then. I was thankful to Blair for my opportunity to pursue higher education, something which would have been difficult now as a school leaver without the A Levels to go to uni. I got into university on a full grant after studying ‘Access Courses’. I don’t think such a thing exists in the same way now, it was offered as part of the ‘New Deal’ so I had my fees paid, travel paid, and as it was less than 16hrs, I got my JSA as usual, no sanctions or ‘workfare’, for which I am eternally grateful.
@wwth
MLP is on Netflix, and lox is delicious. 🙂
Well, if you like that sort of thing, I suppose. I do, obviously.
@ Virgin Mary
It’s certainly interesting times politically. I originally thought that we’d end the year with a ‘Purple’ party (or parties) in the middle and a socialist (slightly Trotskyist) party on one wing and UKIP on the other. But it’s impossible to predict 20 minutes ahead now!
So many things have happened. The referendum is like “Oh, yeah, I vaguely remember that” 🙂
Is it just me or does that photo of Duke look like the Zen Master in those dumb Steak ‘n Shake ads? I already didn’t like those ads, but now every time I see them I’ll get squicked out by the resemblance.
@Axecalibur,
Here’s the most recent predictions from 538, Nate Silvers’ predictions website:
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
(Great website by the way, lots of good, solid stuff on it)
If you don’t want to click through, the breakdown is 61.8% Hillary, 38.1% Trump, 0.1% Johnson. Scroll down for lots more detail. Especially interesting is the “Tipping Point” lookup, that indicates how likely any given state will be a decisive vote in the electoral college. They’re headed by the usual battleground states, but there’s a pretty long tail.
Go look into those states specifically and it gets scary. There’s a large undercurrent of support for an anti-establishment candidate in those areas. Hitting up their local newspapers for the concerns they have will be helpful.
Down at the bottom of the page: there’s a 75% chance that Hillary will pick up a state that the Democrats lost in 2012. Great! But there’s an 80% chance that Trump will pick up a state that Obama won in 2012. That suggests he’s got more momentum.
(It gets a bit scarier when you include the economic forecast in. Trump takes a few percentage points from Clinton in chances-to-win, and there’s more of a chance that he’s going to win more states)
He needs to pick up everything that Mitt won, plus 4 of the battleground states, to win. Unlikely? Sure. Impossible? Heck no. 38% sounds ballpark-ish to me.
(Note: Nate Silver and 538 have been pretty wrong over the past primaries, so I think his models are sorta broke. He’s not factoring the scary populism of Trump, I think, though how you can account for that I’m not sure. So don’t take his numbers at face value. Unfortunately, he’s been wrong in the complete wrong direction. This worries me, a lot.)
@Scildfreja
Yo, I’ve been glued to the forecast since the end of June! I would never fully trust any 1 source, especially for statistical sorcery far beyond my meager understanding. If it’s way too clever for me, there’s a good chance it’s also just a bit too clever for them. And ‘polls plus’ is def scary af
I was around in 2012. I saw how scared people got at Romney winning, only for his campaign to implode on itself by late September. I’ll foolishly hold out hope for my fellow citizens for a while longer at least
Anyway, thanks for the analysis. You always have the best comments 🙂
It’s funny how every presidential cycle, Minnesota is light blue for when we always, always go for the Democrat. In 2004 we were even considered a true battleground state.
Actually, he didn’t use models for the primary process at all, basically just guessed. He [i]does[/i] have models for the general. He did an interesting postmortem of his primary coverage, worth a look if you haven’t seen it.
Hee! Statistics are most certainly too clever for them, whoever “they” are. Nate Silvers’ very good compared to most pundits, because he trusts numbers more than instinct, so he doesn’t get fooled as much by the usual human errors. That leaves him vulnerable to methodological problems, though.
I think that’s what the problem was this time around, compared to 2012. Previous elections have been all about who has the most money, who plays the political game the best, etc. This one really bucked that trend, so it wasn’t captured in Silvers’ models. Nor was it captured by the gut instincts of most pundits, given that their instincts have been honed on business-as-usual establishment politics. This really isn’t that.
My best source for predictions has been, so far, Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks. They’ve been wrong on a bunch of stuff, but their hosts disagree right on the show – best, most cogent arguments for and against Hillary vs Bernie I’ve seen have been between Cenk and Ben Mankiewitz. In those arguments you can tell that they aren’t just banner-carrying for their favourites, but they’re instead really deeply passionate about choosing the right candidate for progressive values.
Cenk is also uncannily good at predicting this stuff. He predicted Trump being a credible candidate over a year ago, before the first primary, and he said that Trump would be the nominee way back in October. He was right, for the right reasons. He also frequently makes other predictions, and he’s almost never wrong. It’s uncanny. He’s very data-driven, but he’s also been in the game long enough to develop instinct of his own. He’s not always right, but when he says “I’m gonna make a prediction” I sit up and take notice, ’cause he’s been right too many times to discount it.
TYT isn’t perfect by a long shot, but if you want scary-accurate forecasting, I haven’t found much better.
(When they were announcing that Trump was officially the nominee yesterday during their live show of the republican convention, Cenk said that he didn’t have any predictions for the general yet, but admitted that he was terrified. That on its face is enough to give me the willies)
Looking at the figures on 538, these are the two most hopeful ones to me
Clinton wins popular vote 66.4%
Trump wins popular vote 33.5%
and
Clinton majority wins at least 50 percent of the vote 21.7%
Trump majority wins at least 50 percent of the vote 7.4%
@Orion, huh! I didn’t know that he was going completely off-the-cuff for the primary. I always figured he had stuff behind it. That makes more sense – he’s only human, and he’s as prone to bandwagon bias as anyone else.
I’m still not nearly as confident in his models as I was in 2012, though. This is a super-chaotic situation this time around, and I’d be surprised if the typical poll data captures that. Unless he does some polls of his own, I don’t know how he’d catch that…
Mmm, qualitative analyses. Nothing quite as mind-boggling.
It’s worth pointing out that Nate Silver has eaten a fair amount of humble pie over how badly he got the primaries wrong, which is to his credit.
I am suspicious of a statistical model being applied to Trump, because there is very little data on insurgencies this powerful occurring inside parties this weak. In this situation I think the intuition of an experienced political insider is probably more useful than any amount of clever maths.
In Canada, the Liberals (Democrat-equivalent) are the red-coded party and the Conservatives (Republican-equivalent) are blue-coded so I tend to get quite confused when I look at American politics in colors because it is the exact opposite to what I am expecting.
@ Alan,
IF it could be spread over a year, yes. Trouble is, it has had to be stumped up in a lump sum at very short notice; anyone on minimum wage or unwaged or on state pension or on invalidity benefit or a fair few other comparable circumstances will either struggle very badly to do that or won’t be able to at all. I know several people in those circumstances! Including one who became a full member recently – when it said on the website that “you can vote in leadership elections” – only for that to be changed retrospectively. Having rules about who can vote is fine, obviously, but changing them retrospectively?
When he wrote “Zio,” I immediately thought of the Phantasy Star 4 boss.
@alan
I consider myself Trotskyist, basically IMT is a retread of Ted Grant’s Militant, but instead of us being the bogeymen it is is who are standing by our democratically elected leader. In Foot’s time it was the Militant Trotskyists who were being hounded out the party. Now the enemy is the right wing Blairite ‘Red Torys’ (I hate that term , they are wiping their arses on the red flag) and their disgruntled dissatisfaction with Jeremy’s stand on Trident, academisation of schools and ‘austerity’ (which is for us, not them, they are still quaffing their Moët and feasting on swans stuffed with fois gras and truffles, in their designer suits and John Rocha leopard skin shoes) the Ukippers basically after Brexit no longer have a purpose other than to gang up with the BNP and other scaremongering, racist Fascist groups (like the Trumpettes) we are seeing clashes of antifas and Nazis all over the UK, mostly among disenfranchised unemployed young men who are attacking the ‘other’ rather than the elites who have really robbed them of their livelihoods.
I had a conversation with a confused friend about this recently, that centrist politics is basically dead, after the faux pas of the Lib Dem ‘Gordon the Gopher’ party, Nick Clegg’s non policies on tuition fees and his and his parties fiscal conservatism, basically most ignorant proles think that Liberal Democrats are a ‘third way’ for people afraid of the Left Wing and visions of Stalin, Mao, flying pickets and Arthur Scarghill, and are scared by Fundamental Conservatism and its religious connotations and imperialism. Someone said once ‘compromise is the art of never getting what you want’ this is right in this respect. It’s hard to explain especially to people aux fait with the two party US political system that Liberals are right wing as well. Like Gore Vidal pointed out, it’s a one party system masquerading as a two party system. The myth of democracy. The party in the middle will be an orange or yellow party based on Libertarianism and Randite fiscal policies.
It would not surprise me if the deposed right wing blairites teamed up with the centrist liberals and Torys to make a new party, whilst Momentum, with its core of activists ‘trots’ and unionists become the new (old) left. Whether this will lead to revolution is anyone’s guess. I suppose you could consider the Wilson plot, if Corbyn does become PM, maybe a military coup will be launched by MI5 to remove him and install a military leader from the ruling class in his place (maybe Prince Charles?) then we would be in an autocracy, so this would trigger a revolution.
@WWTH, yeah, those are the nicest ones. I really do hope she wins. I mean, I supported Bernie while he had a good chance, but I’m not so unhappy with Hillary that I want to see it all burned down. A lot of the charges against her are trumped up nonsense.
(Berned down? Trumped up? aheh heh)
Hillary deserves to win in a landslide. Trump deserves to be bankrupted by the process, and in the end so humiliated and defeated that he needs to have all of his properties liquidated and flees the country in disgrace.
Here’s hoping! You can do it, America!
@EJ(TOO)
Agreed! We don’t have good models of this sort of populist chaos. Basic statistics wedded to sharp minds that are not biased in favour of the continuation of politics-as-usual are needed. Not because I’m anti-establishment (even though I am), but because that bias is going to be hugely damaging to the predictions made.
Well, so much for escapism…
I’ve been watching old episodes of Deep Space Nine again. There’s a pair of episodes in Season 3, “Past Tense”, where Sisko, Bashir and Dax wind up in the terrible times of… 2024, where America has just given up on the social problems and unemployment and dumped everyone into the Sanctuary Districts.
Whee.
@Scildfreja – But not to Australia! Okay, okay, we inflicted Murdoch on the world. But we don’t want Trump!
It’s apparently hard to get accurate polling that reflects actual turnout when it comes to primaries. So primaries are really hard to predict. A general presidential election has a ton of polling and more likely voters actually vote. So it’s much easier to predict how a general will go. From what I remember, Nate Silver very accurately predicted the 2008 and 2012 general. I’d go by that track record more than his primary predictions.