Dilbert watches the impeachment hearings . . .

…so you don’t have to. Scott Adams’s (Dilbert creator) tweet via Lifezette:

“If you can’t watch the Democrats’ impeachment argument, I summarize them here: Blah, blah, muh documents, watch this hoax video, blah, blah, muh documents.”

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Dilbert and Trump

You and Scott Adams probably have had similar experiences. The Wired blog has an article/interview with him on to promote his latest book, and it starts off:

After expressing support for Donald Trump in 2016, Dilbert creator Scott Adams estimates that he lost about 30 percent of his income and 75 percent of his friends. He says that that level of political polarization has created a climate of genuine fear.

“People will come up, and they’ll usually whisper—or they’ll lower their voice, because they don’t want to be heard—and they’ll say, ‘I really like what you’re doing on your Periscope, and the stuff you’re saying about Trump,'” Adams says in Episode 389 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “They’re actually afraid to say it out loud. They literally whisper it to me in public places.”

Adams blames the current climate on social media and a clickbait business model that rewards sensationalism over fact-based reporting. Since the technology is here to stay, he says we’re going to need new societal norms to help foster a calmer, more constructive political discourse.

Yes, but this gets us into another major issue contributing to the political polarization, i.e., emotions on one side vs critical thinking on the other.  Adams expands on that point in an earlier book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, pictured above.  More of the Wired Scott Adams interview is here.

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President Trump is a dope?

cartoon by A.F. Branco at legalinsurrection.com

At The American Spectator, Dov Fischer traces the sorry history of the liberal media branding a (D) President as brilliant, and an (R) President as a bumbling moron, regardless of the factual record. Then Fischer gets to President Trump. I am posting the paragraph because it’s a handy and concise summary of the first year of his Presidency:

But is the President stupid? It depends. Without any prior political experience, he defeated a field of serious Republican candidates for the nomination and then defeated a former United States Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, Yale Law grad with half a century of political experience for the Presidency. In a year, he has set the economy booming with a huge nationwide increase in consumer confidence, a soaring stock market, sustained economic growth exceeding three percent for consecutive quarters, muted unemployment, a record number of successful appointments of federal appellate judges, and much more. He has revived the energy sector, deregulated the economy, honored promises from approving the Keystone XL and Dakota oil pipelines to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, induced allied world leaders to start paying their fair share of NATO costs, sharply reduced illegal immigration along our southern border, restored civil liberty protections to college students accused of assault, promoted charter schools and school choice, enacted the most overarching tax reduction in the past thirty years — perhaps the most ever — and advanced an ambitious agenda for his second year. So, if that is the mark of stupid, then this guy is a dope.

The most recent attacks on President Trump’s unfitness for office or stupidity or [fill in the blank] prompted Trump’s response on Twitter, branding himself as a “stable genius.” Which, as Scott Adams of Dilbert fame pointed out, was sheer genius itself, because Trump’s detractors will keep referring back to his tweets, endlessly mocking him as a “very stable genius.”

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Mr Speaker on Fake News

Photo credit: painepubllishing.com

Speaker Newt Gingrich’s latest emailing is titled “The Republican 2018 Surprise: Victory.” A short extract:

[Scott] Adams, the author of Dilbert, has a list of 20 political opinions and predictions made about President Trump and his Administration, which were just plain wrong. He suggests if you were wrong about 15 or more of these assertions, you might quit talking about politics while Trump is in the White House. By Adams’s standard, most elite "analysts" would have to be quiet, because they have been so consistently wrong about Trump.

As I listened to the end of the year "analysts," I was struck by how little they know, how little they have questioned their own mistakes, and how mutually reinforcing their false information has been.

These are not analysts. These are liberal propagandists. Much of what they assert is just plain wrong. Fake news is, sadly, an accurate term. And the topic about which they have been the most fake is the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Newt predicts a GOP win in the midterms. But that would not be enough. I can’t help but hope that in the process of draining the swamp, members of the UniParty, including those with an (R) after their name, are exposed as the corruptocrats that they are. 

Newt’s column is online here.

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Update on Richard Cordray and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Dilbert (Scott Adams) cartoon via powerlineblog.com

Clarice Feldman closes her Sunday column at American Thinker with this summary:

Probably the most important development this week is the effective end of the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), a power grab by Democrats led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, which gives a single director who can only be fired for cause by the president (a structure designed to operate outside Congressional or executive control) power to regulate mortgages, credit cards, and retirement and pension investments -- in sum, all consumer financial transactions. Warren originally wanted to run this outfit, but when it was clear she’d never get Congressional approval, Richard Cordray became the one-man credit czar. Last October the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that placing so much power in a single commissioner not answerable to the president was unconstitutional.

The Obama Administration sought en banc review by the entire Circuit Court Panel.  In March, the new administration reversed the government’s position. The entire panel heard the case in May. While the decision in that case is still pending, Cordray this week resigned, and the president appointed in his place OMB chief Mike Mulvaney as interim head. Mulvaney strongly opposed the creation of this bureau. The President thus has now put in place someone who can be counted on to undo the Democrats’ machinations to control all our financial transactions by the fiat of a single man. By their own hands, they created a situation they are powerless to undo -- just as by tarring Judge Moore with suspect accusations they open themselves to the same treatment. 

Richard Cordray has not yet confirmed his candidacy for Governor of Ohio, but the Cincinnati, Dayton, and Cleveland media expect him to announce soon.

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Primal Screams and Mass Hysteria

art credit: MaliaLitman.com

We all had a good laugh over the anti-Trump “Screaming Helplessly at The Sky” temper tantrums last week, but in a sense, the Scream Fests are not funny. There is something on the order of mass hysteria going on here. It's a year after the election, and adults are still stamping their feet and wearing stupid pink hats and screaming in genuine outrage.

I’ve come across a few think pieces on the phenomenon. Victor Davis Hanson examines the various “hysterias and frenzies” we have been witnessing:

Human nature is prone to a herd mentality and the politics of excess. Groupthink offers a sense of belonging and reinforcement to most people. Democracies in particular in their radical egalitarian culture and exalted sense of self-righteousness are particularly prone to shared frenzies. 

Richard Fernandez, Mr. Belmont Club, summed up his take on the Primal Scream-a-thon:

What they were mourning was not some conservative's sublunar fallibility, but their own. Whatever happens now, the progressives have lost decades of "gains," not to the alt-right, which is nothing special, but to the realization of their own human frailty. 

  

Last summer, Dilbert / Scott Adams wrote about the “mass hysteria bubble” and how he defines it:

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

I thought I would post these links, since we live in crazy times, and maybe we are not the crazy ones. All three articles are worth the read.

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