More than that, I feel like the Bullshit had a hard light shown on it and people got to see what they were stepping in. One big thing was Karl Rove doubting the call to give Ohio to President Obama. Let's start here:
So we have Karl Rove bringing in his own numbers and given who he is, I'm sure he's experienced enough to make some decent calculations on the fly. But he ends up running into the classic How I Want The World To Be versus How The World Really Is. During the clip, Rove argues that Romney closes a twenty thousand vote gap with only a few percentage points of polls added to the reported column. I don't think he realizes he's partly making the case against his argument. The Stats Guys probably could see some closing occurring as Romney blew one of his last, bigger, wads, leaving nothing left for when Obama pulled ahead with the Cleveland area votes. In fact, to Fox News' credit, they went and talked to the Stats Guys themselves to get the full dirt:
What I like about the response is how the Stats Guys, when asked to talk about Rove's theory, basically say there's no theory there to talk about. There's no 2004 exit-poll debacle, it's just straight raw numbers matched with historical trends. There comes a point when there's nothing left for spinning something... the fact becomes the fact.
Another part of the Bullshit to get illuminated in full ugly was Donald Trump, who basically melted down on Twitter as the election results came in.
Here are some highlights:
He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!
The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!
Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble...like never before.That's not a rational reaction to an election (and neither is an Obama supporter playing Queen's We Are The Champion or rolling around the interwebs rubbing in the victory). I liked Brian Williams briefly commenting on those tweets on this Huffington Post link. Right off the bat, Williams states that Trump has "driven well past the last exit to relevance." I'm glad he did. Sure, Williams prides himself on being in the business of news first, but here he got to mention, however under the radar, that commenting on Trump's tweets in the first place was a bit of bullshit, and the poster of said tweets was drowning in bullshit.
Trump, and people like Trump, have no place in our political discourse. There is no reason not to publicly shame them into either shutting up or contributing in an intelligent fashion (so most likely shutting up). Fox News should stop being the low self-esteem network and realize they can hold a right wing position without being a constant joke (honestly, I feel like that would do wonders for the current right wing in this country, and probably the country as a whole). Fox News should stop pandering to fringe Bullshit like Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are rigged for Obama, polling that favors Obama must be biased, etc.
As Fox News host Stephen Hayes said last night, "The polling was more accurate than it wasn't."
No, Stephen... no. Those who did correct polling and came back with answers the right didn't like (s'up Nate Silver?) were accurate, you just didn't like the results and then went all late-eighties/early-nineties Oliver Stone. That's not the polls being inaccurate, that's you being either stupid or crazy.
What last night revealed to the fringe right, on some level, is that, facts exist, they can be uncovered, and you actually have to deal with them. Last night it was the math behind polling, maybe tomorrow it can be the science behind climate change. I'm not saying the real fringe doesn't have the right to state that certain things are a hoax or statistical analysis has a left-leaning bias, they just can't be part of the grown-up discussion that wants to get real things done in this country.
I live in Jersey, and as everyone knows, we got with by Sandy last week. Real things need to get done in order to restore the tri-state area, just like real things need to get done to protect this area from future super-storms that are now more likely due to climate change. It's time to relegate the fringe back to the fringe so that we can move forward like a rational superpower in the 21st century.
I'll let Jon Stewart bring it home:
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