Apr. 9 - In a post about the establishment media’s reaction to an eclipse-related Donald Trump ad yesterday, Ace of Spades spoke of the left’s “tactical autism.” (He also calls it “feigned autism.”)
Donald Trump released an amusing ad in time with the eclipse. It’s funny, it’s self-effacing by being ironically grandiose.
Of course the left has employed its favorite mode of expression -- Feigned Autism --to claim they don’t understand the “bizarre” ad. They claim they don’t understand that the ad is intended to be silly.
(…)
I’m so, so sick of the Tactical Autism. If you really don't understand basic things, what the f*** are you doing working for a media which claims to be able to understand complicated thinks and to be able to explain these things to an audience?
(That’s all sic by the way — Ace and I clearly have the same editor.)
“Ironically grandiose” is obviously in the eye of the beholder, and I’d call it self-parodying rather than self-effacing, but that’s small ball stuff that has nothing to do with Ace’s larger point, with which I wholeheartedly concur.
Here’s the ad itself (starts at 0:12):
The ad opens with text proclaiming “THE MOST IMPORTANT MOMENT… IN HUMAN HISTORY… IS TAKING PLACE IN 2024” over an image of the sun being eclipsed by a silhouette of Trump’s head in profile.
That’s all intermingled with various shots of excited people staring up at the sky in eye-protective glasses and goggles.
So serious.
That gets you through most of the ad, then around the 1:15 mark the legend reads “WE WILL SAVE AMERICA,” and we get shots of various smiling and ethnically diverse Americans—I assume they’re Americans—coming faster and faster until they fade under the original Trump head silhouette. Voices chant, “USA! USA! USA!” The end.
Ace quotes the (UK) Independent (this article):
On Sunday night, Mr Trump posted a bizarre campaign ad on Truth Social where his own head takes on the role of the moon -- blocking out the sun and plunging America into total darkness.
[...]
Some social media users were somewhat baffled by the message in the campaign ad: that Mr Trump will block out the sun and plunge the entire Earth into darkness.
Bizarre?
If it’s not your style of humor, fair enough: call it a failed attempt at humor or something like that. But when someone tells a joke—an obvious attempt at humor—and you don’t find it funny, that doesn’t mean the would-be joker was being serious. It just means you didn’t like (or get) the joke.
Imagine a comedian opening his set with one of the oldest jokes in the world:
“Heya folks! What a great crowd! Hey, listen, I just flew in from Cleveland—and boy, are my arms tired!”
Can you imagine someone expressing bafflement and confusion over the comedian’s premise?
“Why would his arms get tired on a commercial flight? That joke makes no sense!”
That’s the “tactical autism” Ace is complaining about: the pose of being too stupid to understand the message was not literal. The pretended imbecility required to believe that the Trump campaign wants Americans to think Trump will use his massive head to deprive the earth of sunlight.
They know it’s not literal. They know it’s just a goof.
And we know they know.
That same UK Independent ran an article about Americans’ exasperation with higher prices back on February 25. The paper carried a lot of water for the Biden administration, but nowhere more conspicuously than here:
The White House has also attacked “shrinkflation,” whereby a company, rather than raising the price of a product, instead shrinks the amount inside the package. In a video released on Super Bowl Sunday, Biden denounced shrinkflation as a “rip-off.”
It was a bizarre video for the Biden people to have released on Super Bowl Sunday. Shrinkflation was, after all, a consequence of Biden’s own inflationary policies. What’s more, the president had made news by having declined to do the traditional softball Super Bowl interview: it had raised questions about his hardiness that the thousand cuts of the very short shrinkflation spot did very little to assuage.
Plenty of people on social media thought the ad was bizarre, dishonest, and stupid, but the Independent somehow managed not to run a story on it. All it got was that reference to “a video released on Super Bowl Sunday” in an article that came out ten days later.
Tactical autism indeed.
These are surely the same sort of people who thought it was a hoot when a 2012 Michael Moore ad for Obama featured senior citizens threatening to tear the country apart if Obama lost (“I want the Republican party to know, if your voter suppression throughout this beautiful country enables Romney to oust Barack Obama, we will burn this motherfucker down,” says one sweet old lady).
That ad, it’s worth noting, is virtually impossible to find on YouTube now. (But here’s a cotemporaneous article about it to prove it was a thing.) Strange that an Obama ad by a prominent leftist and featuring pre-emptive “election denialism” and threats of violence would have found its way off the internet, isn’t it?
But never mind the cognitive dissonance: our poor unfrozen caveman journalists are frightened and confused by Donald Trump’s sophisticated political messaging. Humor? Irony? Hyperbole? Self-parody? We didn’t have such things while hunting wooly mammoths across the frozen tundra!
Old ladies literally threatening violence and destruction if Romney ousts Obama: that was obviously intended as humor. Trump’s head blotting out the sun? My god! He’s going to end all life on the planet!
Whenever news outfits attribute a statment to “some social media users,” you know you’re reading a point they themselves wanted to make but needed to dress up in some kind of objectivity—meaning they forced some poor intern to scour social media posts to find what they need.
Some social media users believe that establishment media journalists are malevolent or stupid. Or both.
Mostly both.
I like “tactical autism,” but the tactical use of feigned mental impediments goes well beyond autism.
What’s the DSM diagnosis code for Jon Stewart’s famous “clown nose on, clown nose off” method of operations? Some variant of bipolarity?
“Ha ha ha, lighten up everybody, I’m an entertainer, just going for laughs, don’t take it so seriously! Whoops, hold on, something’s happening. . . Wait! My penetrating and incisive insights are a critical part of Americans’ news intake!”
Is it tactical ADD that lets them notice things on the right they never seem to observe on the left? For example, all presidents—all of them— wrangle with the limits on their power imposed by the Constitution. When it’s a Republican, the establishment media seize up with SCSS (Sudden Constitutional Scholar Syndrome) and express outrage at the president’s dangerous overreach. It’s a Constitutional crisis! When a Democratic president does it, the media either ignore it completely or tie themselves into knots explaining how the president is being stymied by that darned old Constitution and all its dusty, musty old dead-white-man language.
(Look at today’s coverage of Biden trying to get around his unconstitutional attempt to “forgive” student debt as an example of the latter; look at virtually any coverage of anything Donald Trump did as president for examples of the former.)
That the partisan media play these stupid games is bad enough, but in our brave new world the complicity of Big Tech then ensures that the stupidy gets pushed out as the official reality. (Do a Google search on “Trump eclipse” to see what I mean.)
It’s dishonest and stupid, but does it work? The ghost of Harry Reid reminds us:
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has no regrets with falsely accusing Mitt Romney of paying zero taxes for ten years during the 2012 presidential elections.
“So the word is out that he has not paid any taxes for ten years,” Reid said on the Senate floor in August 2012. “Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”
Under criticism and repeated denials by Romney, Reid later put out a statement backed by an “extremely credible source,” which turned out to be billionaire Jon Huntsman, Sr, the father of the former Utah governor and Romney rival, according to Double Down by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. PolitiFact rated Reid’s allegation “Pants on Fire.”
When asked about his comments in a new interview by CNN’s Dana Bash, Reid, who recently announced he would retire in 2017 after his term is up, rebuffed those who said his attacks were “McCarthyite.”
“Well, they can call it whatever they want,” Reid said. “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
Spoken with a shit-eating grin, obviously.
Reid must have already known he was dying when he said that, because a magician never shares his tricks—not if he expects to perform in the future.
But the real lesson there is that it did work. He lied and lied and lied, the media reported his lies without challenging them, and the lies became part of the landscape.
Just like Adam Schiff lied and lied and lied about the evidence he’d seen of Trump’s collusion with Russia—and oh, how the establishment media loved to let him shove his bug-eyed face in their cameras and carry on about all that “EVIDENCE!” he’d seen with those big old googly eyes of his, so that everyone knew all about all the evidence that was bound to come out any day now, really, any minute, probably tonight or tomorrow. . . until it emerged that Adam Schiff had said, in closed testimony while under oath, that, well, gosh, now that you mention it, no, he wasn’t actually aware of the existence of any such evidence.
But by then it didn’t matter. It had worked.
Bizarrely, if you can believe it, none of the establishment outfits that had been serving up nightly doses of Adam Schiff’s Evidence-o-Rama! bothered to correct the record.
It’s said that Cicero once wondered aloud how soothsayers could keep a straight face when they met one another.
How can today’s journalists?
It’s bizarre.
It was on this date in 1963 that an act of Congress granted Winston Churchill honorary U.S. citizenship. His mother was an American citizen, born and raised in Brooklyn, but she’d never gotten around to filling out all the paperwork to make him a dual national. Churchill was the first person ever granted honorary American citizenship, and one of only eight people ever to have been so honored—one of only two to have been alive to accept it.
On this date in, 1865, Rober E. Lee officially surrendered at Appomattox Court House, thereby ending the U.S. Civil War and forcing generations of American schoolchildren to learn how to spell Appomattox.
Today is the birthday of Hugh Hefner (1926), Leopold II (1835), and Charles Baudelaire (1821).
Happy Tuesday!
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