Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: The election is just over three months away and, despite rarely leaving his basement, presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden continues to hold a commanding lead in public polls. But let’s right up front ask the question the media dare not ponder: Just how accurate are these polls, all of which except one were dead wrong in 2016? I want to take you back four years and listen to what John Heilemann, widely viewed as one of the mainstream media’s sharpest political analysts, said about the polls the morning after the 2016 election.
John Heilemann: Polling is broken, like in a profound, deep way. The Clinton campaign was really genuinely convinced up until 8:30 last night that they were totally fine in Pennsylvania, they were going to win Michigan, they were going to win Wisconsin, they were going to be fine in Colorado, that they had the whole thing in hand and genuinely confident about that. Their numbers were as messed up as the public polling is. And it’s not just America, obviously Brexit is a really good example, but there’s a bunch of examples in Western Europe.
Tim: What that says essentially is that the way polling was always done is no longer reliable, because there are so many voters, particularly pro-Brexit in England and pro-Trump here, who either refuse to participate in the polls or will deliberately give a deceptive answer. It seems in the current racially supercharged environment, voters are more likely than ever not to give honest answers for a fear of being targeted by the left. But here we are four years later, and the same John Heilemann, who admitted polling is broken, is now so convinced from the current polls of an inevitable Joe Biden victory that he went on MSNBC and said the president sending federal troops to cities where Democrats in charge refuse to stop violence is little more than a strategy for stealing the election.
John Heilemann: This is authoritarianism. These are paramilitary units. These are the kinds of things that we have seen in tyrannical authoritarian regimes in Third World countries throughout the second half of the 20th century. I don’t want to be overly alarmist about this, but I think this is the time to be alarmist, knowing where Donald Trump stands right now politically, understanding where we are headed in this election. I think we are looking at potentially a trial run for a genuine attempt, through intimidation and potentially through force, to try to steal this election.
Tim: What paranoid leftist statements like that achieve, if you think about it, is lay the groundwork for the left to challenge any kind of Trump victory by claiming he stole it somehow. You’re hearing the same thing all over the left, that Trump will try to either steal the election or, in the case of the nation’s most powerful Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), that after his certain defeat Trump might have to be removed from the White House like a cockroach.
Nancy Pelosi: Whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving. Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn’t mean we won’t have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly elected president of the United States. It has nothing to do with the certain occupant of the White House [who] doesn’t feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there.
Tim: Of course, the laughable irony in all this is that the left has spent the last almost four years utterly refusing to accept the legitimate outcome of the last election. So they are now engaged in more of their famous projection, projecting onto others that which they are guilty of themselves.
A corresponding election strategy for the Democrats is to allow the violence and chaos in the streets of multiple major cities to go unchecked, unpoliced, hoping that the voters will blame Trump for their failure to keep cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Portland safe. Already the leftist mayor of Portland, OR, says Trump sending federal agents to guard federal buildings, federal property in Portland is fascistic, but Republican Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton used historical context to put the lie to that.
Tom Cotton: The federal government cannot allow anarchists and insurrectionists to destroy federal courthouses, federal buildings, or other federal property. These insurrectionists in the streets of Portland are little different from the insurrectionists who seceded from the Union in 1861 in South Carolina and tried to take over Fort Sumter. Just like President Lincoln wouldn’t stand for that, the federal government today cannot stand for the vandalism, the firebombing, or any attacks on federal property. It is right to send federal law enforcement in to defend federal property and federal facilities.
Tim: One wonders if the Democrats’ presidential standard bearer, Joe Biden, will say something, anything, about the destruction going on across our urban landscape. But he apparently believes staying silent works to his advantage, a strategy that’s working for now because the media refuse to question him about it, even as we now put together that Biden has held a grand total of one press conference in the last 100 days.
Biden apparently believes one of the ways to increase his chances for victory is to declare that we should teach our kids more about Muslims, as he did in an appearance from his basement last week directed at an Islamic organization.
Joe Biden: I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done so far. Thank you for taking the time for watching today. Look, one of the things I think is important: I wish we taught more in our schools about the Islamic faith … Muslim American voices matter to our communities, to our country, but we all know that your voice hasn’t always gotten recognized or represented or the recognition it deserves.
Tim: Joe Biden making a play for the Muslim vote is like no candidate we’ve ever seen. And believe it or not, there was actually a second Joe Biden sighting in the same week on — where else? — MSNBC, where the former vice president, who has done nothing during the entire COVID crisis, now throws rocks from the sidelines at President Trump.
President Trump: No country has ever done what we’ve done in terms of testing. We are the envy of the world.
Joe Biden: I think he’s right. No country has ever done what we’ve done: walk away. There’s no leadership here. He actually has zero, zero. He surrendered. He talked about you, remember, early on, this is going to go away in a few days. This is going to be gone tomorrow. You’re going to wake up and it’ll be gone. He talked about how we were going to be in a position where we were going to be able to lead the world, et cetera. He was going to be a wartime president, fighting this virus. Well, he raised the white flag. He has no idea what to do … I’ve never seen a president who has been so self-serving in the conduct of the office.
Tim: Notice what you didn’t hear there: any solutions, any alternatives, any plan of his own, and, of course, no mention of how the single most significant move Trump made in this crisis, shutting down travel from China, was attacked by Biden for being xenophobic. Will the voters believe Biden could have done better than Trump with a pandemic? Who knows? We’ve never had people vote in the midst of a pandemic before.
Finally, if you watched that long interview with President Trump by Chris Wallace on Fox News the previous weekend, you’d probably understand better than ever why Mr. Wallace has become so widely disliked by conservatives and Fox viewers. Yes, he’s likely left-leaning, and, yes, he’s desperate for the approval of the Trump-deranged elite media, we know that. But rarely if ever have we seen a journalist interview a president and devote almost 10 minutes of it to himself.
Chris Wallace: Some people were surprised when you agreed to this interview to sit down with me, especially because of some of the mean tweets that you’ve said about me. But here’s the question: One of your beefs seems to be that I put Democrats on the show and I ask them questions. I guess the question I have is, don’t you understand it’s my job? … You sent one tweet after I interviewed Nancy Pelosi. In the interview, I asked her specifically [about promoting tourism in Chinatown while the virus was spreading] … watch the James Comey interview I did in December. You couldn’t do as tough an interview with Comey.
Tim: Chris Wallace mentioned I, me, or my ten times in 34 seconds! The fact that Chris Wallace even continues to be employed at Fox News is a testimony to how much Fox News has changed since the death of the man who made it what it is, Roger Ailes.
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Read more from Tim Donner.
