{"id":54914,"date":"2015-08-24T06:00:25","date_gmt":"2015-08-24T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=54914"},"modified":"2015-08-23T23:01:02","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T04:01:02","slug":"horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=54914","title":{"rendered":"Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you listen to, read, or talk to me, you know I’m not a Donald Trump fan. Very, very, not.<\/p>\n

But over the weekend, I listened to\u00a0NPR’s “On the Media” program. \u00a0It’s NPR’s in-house out-house of media “criticism”. \u00a0I listen because it’s a fairly reliable barometer of the narcissism of the mainstream media elite, and because it’s a bottomless font of material.<\/p>\n

Anyway – they ran a work of (intentional) fiction yesterday<\/a>; a smug, sanctimonious, self-righteous, intellectually entitled fictional look back at a Trump presidency (adapted from an article in The Atlantic<\/em>, or as we in the know call it, “American Progressive Project).<\/p>\n

It’s narrated with smug unctuousness by one of NPR’s stable of voice-over people that can affect that perfect, detached, smug “NPR accent”. And even if you don’t like Trump – and I do not – you have to think “whomever the front-runner would be, they’d be doing the same, exact bit of fiction”.<\/p>\n

And it started me thinking.<\/p>\n

One of the current mainstream conspiracy theories is that Trump is a Pat Buchanan or, worse, Ross Perot figure, working the field to get ready for a third-party candidacy that, at best (Buchanan) dilute the GOP nomination process, and at worst (Perot) doom a GOP candidate.<\/p>\n

But what if it’s the other way around? \u00a0What if Trump is merely playing this for big publicity, using his big turbocharged mouth to bring lots of attention to issues that’d be\u00a0trayf\u00a0<\/em>for a legitimate candidate to broach, if not discuss…<\/p>\n

…and soak up all the biased media’s hatred, allowing the real candidates to duke out the endorsement battle unmolested by Nina Totenberg and CNN and the rest of the Democrats’ PR firms?<\/p>\n

A stretch? \u00a0Sure.<\/p>\n

Implausible? \u00a0Maybe.<\/p>\n

Impossible? \u00a0Who cares?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you listen to, read, or talk to me, you know I’m not a Donald Trump fan. Very, very, not. But over the weekend, I listened to\u00a0NPR’s “On the Media” program. \u00a0It’s NPR’s in-house out-house of media “criticism”. \u00a0I listen because it’s a fairly reliable barometer of the narcissism of the mainstream media elite, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-16","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54915,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54914\/revisions\/54915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}