08-17-2016, 09:03 AM
(08-14-2016, 08:52 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-14-2016, 01:21 PM)playwrite Wrote: Again, when the Rightess bring these up in their Gist Gallop, there is no time to go back over all of them and correct them with the facts and context. My hope is that as this Gish Gallop ShXt goes on and on into the Hillary Presidency, people will finally catch on and discard the tactic - just like we are discarding much of the other rearguard actions (gerrymandering, voter suppression, Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, corporate campaign financing, etc) of a dying political force at least at the national level.
You are allowed to hope, but people will continue to believe what they want to believe. The Gish Gallop stuff reminds me of Clinton 42's time in office. The Republicans pushed scandal the whole time. It was to a great degree ignored. Clinton 42 was the teflon man, nothing truly fatally stuck, yet the image of the Clintons as tainted persisted under the "if smoke then fire" theory. Hillary is still tainted by the sheer persistence of it.
If Trump continues to sink his few remaining hopes, the Republicans will have few cards to play other than Gish Gallop. I'm inclined to think Trump will not only make himself look foolish, but by implication anything that touches the Republican path. But this is only true of those who haven't truly bought in to the Republican path. We still have a few die hard partisans here, and there are many more of them out in the wild. They won't vanish. Even assuming a regeneracy does develop, they will sip tea and cuss out "That Woman in the White House" for the duration. While Trump might leave a majority out of the Republican's reach for some time, if you aren't going to win a majority, Gish Gallop could allow them to cling to a rabid base. If there is only one card left in one's hand, one plays it.
I'm not underestimating the power of values lock. I doubt it can stop something like a regeneracy indefinitely, but FDR and Lincoln remained anathema to some right up until they died and were sainted. I'm not expecting things to be much different in our time, not that I think Hillary is fit company for the true grey champions, nor that this crisis will seem like as key a transformational period as FDR's and Lincoln's.
That's probable true, but part of the general populace grasping the Gish Gallop frequent use will be the added bonus of grasping that it will still work, and likely continue to work, with 35% of the population that will itself continue to shrink.
What one should recognize at this very moment, however, is we don't need to either win over or compromise with the shrinking 35% for a transformational period- we only need to defeat them as a national political force, and that is already underway.