Friday cheap shots: Baseless Rhetoric

Image via the Toms River Patch.

Now we know what the price of Christie's Trump endorsement was: cash (via WNYC).

At a rally of about a thousand people at the armory in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Thursday, Governor Chris Christie introduced the guest of honor, saying: "Let me bring you the next President of the United States, Donald Trump!"

But this was no ordinary political Trump rally. Tickets cost $200 a person, and the money was used to pay off Christie’s debt left over from his presidential campaign.

WNYC's Matt Katz says that with about 1,000 people attending the rally, that went a long way toward wiping out Christie's $250,000 debt. And that wasn't all. 

"Before the event, Trump did a roundtable fundraiser that cost between $20,000 and $25,000 a person, There were about 18 people there," Katz said. "That money was actually used to pay off Bridgegate lawyers that the state Republican party had hired after they got hit with subpoenas more than two years ago. There’s a half-million dollars owed to those Bridgegate attorneys. And now, thanks to Trump — who six months ago campaigned against Christie by saying he knew about Bridgegate — that debt is mostly paid off."

And what Trump gets out of it is a representative of the "conservative establishment" he can victimize in public, to his (pained) face:

Douthat on what bigots can teach us

Mayor Sadiq Khan of London (newly elected in the "biggest individual mandate in British history") poses for a selfie in a lovely, typical London crowd. Photo by Daily Mail. 

In what seems to be a kind of collateral damage from the Trump campaign, Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has really gone full troll; there was that crazed column a few weeks ago where he urged us to pay more attention to neo-reactionaries, monarchists, Falangists, and advocates of Empire (cafeteria-style, just picking up on the good ideas and leaving the anti-Semitism in the steam table), and today he's giving us the generalized version, "When the Wrong are Right".

It's all about those Trump voters, of course; the undereducated, underemployed white working class. Douthat accepts the conventional wisdom that those are the people putting Trump ahead in the Republican primary contest, and accepts the premise that they are a bunch of racial bigots, and then asks:

What happens if the bigoted sometimes get things right?

I'd guess for those questions on which bigots are generally right, non-bigots tend to be right too, so that the bigoted view isn't that important. It doesn't make much sense to imagine questions where you'd only be able to get a correct answer from a bigot in the dictionary sense, that is from a

person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially :  one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance

since he or she, being unreasonably prejudiced by definition, is clearly less likely to be right on any particular point where others are wrong than a non-bigot, whose mind is subject to change in the face of evidence. How do you like that Jesuitical logic, Ross?

A question that needs to be re-addressed here is whether the Trump voters really are more or less equivalent to the undereducated, underemployed white working class at all, which a lot of us including me seem to have tacitly accepted without wondering if there's any evidence for it; because Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has done some modeling from exit poll data that calls it into question: