Slow learning media

 So... Trump is going to refuse later contributions from people who give Nikki Haley money. Riiight!

The first rule of evaluating a Trump statement, which the media ought to have figured out long ago is:

Is he bullshitting?

Because he's almost always bullshitting. He has no loyalty at all to the truth, but he's not always lying. Mostly, he's bullshitting, shining on, gaslighting. His bullshit tomorrow will often be just the opposite of his bullshit today. He'll say something like, "Thousands and thousands of Haley contributors have come over to MAGA, believe me."

Naturally, any time he says "believe me", you shouldn't.

Srsly, can you imagine this greedy, venal man refusing to take money from anyone? If George Soros had a stroke, entirely lost his open society principles, and offered money to the Orange Mussolini, you know if you've been paying attention and have half a brain in your head, that Trump would snatch it out of his hand in a New York minute.

After all, he's got a rape victim to pay. You don't think he's going to do that with his own money, do you?

Tied to the whippin' poll

Ever notice that the press covers polls when Joe Biden is behind but yawn and ignore them when he's ahead, as in the end of November?

One serious omission in the reporting on the remaining Koch brother's endorsement of Nikki Haley against Donald Trump is this: Koch picked Haley because he thinks Trump's a loser against Biden (again!), and he has (unreleased) polling to prove it.

Apocalypse never

Even the teabaggers are tired of teabagging.  Once Donald Trump jilted the birthers and other sordid wingy nuts and went back to his shitty, neo-feudalist TV show, even Nimrata "Nikki" Randhawa Haley, the wingnut governor of the wingnuttiest state, South Carolina, couldn't draw more than 10, I mean 8 teabaggers.  And who knows how many of them were simply luckless passersby.

Maybe the teeming hordes of blissful idiots all stayed home to wait for Jesus to rapture them.  No such luck, though.

Christ stood them up too.

Eight!  Though that's still not the single digit I'm offering them...

Total war

There is no blow too low for a South Carolina Republican when an election is at stake. Really, it was only a matter of time before the fundies there would attack the religious sincerity of Nimrata "Nikki" Haley.

These politicos are thoroughly tribal. They're not allowed to attack her off-white color any more even in the state that originated the great treason of 1861. She is a convert to Christianity, too conveniently they think, but they know that she's still the other.

It's almost enough to make me root for a wingnut libertarian. Well, maybe not almost - but as close as I get.

Mediaocre

On a daily basis, big media resolutely fails to pull back the curtain on the great and powerful Oz. The alleged Nikki Haley affair is a case of our credulous media's eagerness to accept bullshit with a bow on it as if it came from Tiffany's.

Will Folks is not a blogger. He is a political consultant who runs a rightwing news site. In any case, calling him a blogger (big-media-speak for pipsqueak upstart, by the way) is not informative. Doesn't everyone have a blog by now?

Folks is also not credible as a supporter of Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, the press dutifully prints his claim in every story. When he says he outed his alleged affair with Haley as a proactive step because the story was being shopped to the media, he can't possibly be credible. If he were really to try "getting ahead of the story," he wouldn't milk it for daily attention with promises of proof and death-of-a-thousand cuts delivery.

Folks has also claimed that he went public to protect the wife he married after the alleged affair. Surely someone in the editorial chain is married or has had an intimate relationship. "Honey, I had an affair with someone before we married, and I'm going to publicize it to protect you." Look, this is bullshit so runny you couldn't even tie a bow on it without first injecting drilling mud and huge amounts of concrete.

I have no idea whether Folks and Haley had sex. In fact, I have no idea what Folks is claiming and Haley is denying.

He says they had an "inappropriate physical relationship." Did she hug him a little too long? Did she spank him like a bad boy? Did he massage her feet with peppermint cream?

She denies having an affair. Well, what does she mean? Would it be o.k. if they necked a little but never did it? I'm sure her husband wouldn't approve, but would such a small dalliance count?

If they weren't both in the anti-sex base of the anti-sex party, I wouldn't care what they did. But I'd still care that the media is less concerned about finding out what's true than it is about repeating what everyone says and then shrugging - with both shoulders for balance.

We Americans have a political culture that seldom rises above the throes of puberty. Part of the reason why is that our media culture is about putting a bow on gossip and calling it news.