The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Fire Under All of This Smoke is … Barely Enough to Light a Cigar’

Posted on | October 2, 2016 | Comments Off on ‘The Fire Under All of This Smoke is … Barely Enough to Light a Cigar’

So says Jazz Shaw of Hot Air in addressing the “October surprise” of the New York Times report on Donald Trump’s taxes. What the Times seems to have done is to extrapolate from the documents it mysteriously obtained to guess about what might be found in documents it does not have. They assert that, because Trump reported major losses of business income in one year, therefore Trump could have avoided income taxes in subsequent years. This may be true, but we don’t know.

Donald Trump Tax Records Show He
Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly
Two Decades, The Times Found
— New York Times

As news of Trump’s taxes broke, he goes
off script at a rally in Pennsylvania
— Washington Post

Some comments on the New York Times
story about Donald Trump’s tax returns
— Bronte Capital

Donald Trump Tax Returns Reportedly
Show $916 Million Loss in 1995
— ABC News

The New York Times Paid No Taxes in 2014
— Breitbart

The New York Times risked legal trouble
to publish Donald Trump’s tax return
— Washington Post

Those are today’s headlines at Memeorandum, and CNN’s going wall-to-wall on it, as if Trump were a cop who shot an unarmed black man. The unmistakable pro-Clinton cheerleading at CNN is the tip of a massive iceberg of liberal media bias in this campaign, which is arguably the secret of Trump’s success so far. Trump appeals directly to voters who don’t trust the media, so that whenever the media report something negative about Trump, his basic answer is always, “See? Media bias!”

Whether or not this will be enough for Trump to win the election, however, is the important question. The latest Fox News poll has Clinton leading by 5 points, 49%-44%, and the Real Clear Politics average of national polls show Clinton expanding her lead from a virtual dead heat on Sept. 19 (when it was Clinton 44.9%, Trump 44.0%) to 2.5 points (47.5%-45.0%) now. How much faith we can put in polls is always a matter of dispute, but the closer we get to Election Day, the more likely the polls actually do predict the vote. What the polls cannot predict, however, is whether some event between now and Nov. 8 — for example, a major terrorist attack — might cause voters to shift toward Trump. There are limits to how far media bias can help Democrats, and this election may yet demonstrate that fact. We shall wait and see . . .



 

Category: Donald Trump, Election, Hillary Clinton, Media Bias, New York Times

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