by JackRiddler » Fri Jun 28, 2019 7:43 pm
BS, the google search interest says little, not with more data, but it's interesting. The graphic shows rankings of five (not 10 or 20) and no absolute numbers. It may or may not be telling that someone bothered to make a graphic so simplistic, as if designed to tell an implicit story.
Here, let me tell an explicit story:
NBC THE APPRENTICE 2020: AMERICAN NOMINEE EDITION
Notes on Round 1, Day 2 and the Google Aftermath
Dated: 27 June 2019
Zen masters, if you turn off the quackers playing analysts on TV and close tabs on the online political gossip sheets, do they keep yapping? It's bad enough the corporate media organized the order of battle through polls that can adjust results thanks to the construct of a "likely voter" set. Or that they made this about personalities in the first place: two years of tedious soap opera punctuated by gladiatorial death matches. There's your democracy.
On game night, corporate wants to hog the time. They use it to promote a whole stable of stars from several news network owned or allied with NBC. They get to open the show with "How are you going to pay for the unicorns?" They throw sternly worded softballs to their favorites of the moment and slap the second tier with gotcha questions. Hey, they're your friends! Chuck and Rachel, like Hepburn and Tracy as treason inquisitors. They get to harangue everyone amiably for 120 minutes, minus the commercials from Pfizer and McDonald's.
But it's never enough. Afterward, they keep at it, explain what your lying eyes and ears really perceived, sort the winners and losers for you. (ONE OF YOU IS IN -- AND ONE OF YOU WILL BE OUT! AUF WIEDERSEHEN!) Never with an agenda in mind, of course. Heaven forfend.
Not too many participating in the show -- as hosts, as candidates on the stage, or as spectators -- are willing to admit that this has always been a kind of Fantasy Football talk-radio crossed with Game of Thrones fandom, and usually ends up having about the same impact on political reality: yours, or the world's. (WHO WON?! WHO'S NEXT?!) This was always true, I say, yet never as obvious. How many will tell you that none of this will change a thing, that is, if you are not also organizing as a popular movement for change that intends to struggle and build and endure beyond and apart from elections? Spoiler alert: At least one of them is saying that clearly, and seems to mean it, while another is believed to mean it.
So, who am I going to tell you "won" last night's Round 1, Day 2? I'm going to tell you there are more important questions, but let's start with the Google search rankings. If nothing else, these show who among the many relative unknowns are being discovered and piquing interest among a larger circle than before. Becoming better known may or may not help them, but it is a prerequisite for getting ahead if your name is not already Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, or Elizabeth Warren (whose arrival at the top recognition level was the most recent).
By the Google search measure, two winners were clear. Tulsi Gabbard exploded to capture 40 percent of searches for candidates' names on the first night, while Kamala Harris was the most searched on the second. Each attracted her peak attention by producing the most dramatic, cathartic scene-stealing of her respective show. For both, this involved the sudden on-air decapitation of an aggressive blowhard. Gabbard's attack on Tim Ryan for wanting to extend the Afghanistan war for a second generation (and for being generally clueless), and Harris' on Biden for his history of working with and praising leading segregationists (and for being generally clueless) were both emotionally genuine and positive highlights. But both moments really stood out for making the respective tall-man targets stagger around like a Marvel movie villain about to yell NOOOOOOOO and turn into dust.
Regarding Harris, however, I must ad the caveat: as phony as Harris otherwise is. Sorry, fans! Truthfully, I have enjoyed the overnight conversion of her and several other long-standing leaders in the corporate donations league-tables into firebreathing trustbusters. There was no doubting the passion in her story of being bussed to school as a child. The attention may cease to do her good, however, once it turns to her record. Gurgling in his blood, the expiring Biden scratched her with his sole poignant line for the night: "I was a public defender, not a prosecutor!" That was a good epitaph for his career, but he had already chiseled a better one into stone with "O, my time is up?" Then falls Caesar! Now we shall see whether Prosecutor Harris' flesh wound develops an infection.
Also interesting: Harris and Kristin Gillibrand were both auditioning for Bernie's Best Friend, the latter with so much enthusiasm that I half expected her to pull out pom-poms: "Give me an M, give me a 4, give me an A, Medicare4All, I wrote Bernie's plan, hooray!" As a potential season champion, Harris was much more reserved, of course. Gillibrand seemed to be pitching more to the hope of a Veep spot and the college students she will need to build an organization, while Harris used her excellent range to speak to the mothers of the world. I counted three parables about a mother and a child in peril, two explicit, one implicit, each truthful in facts and resonance. This is a welcome shift from the usual presidential rhetoric about the implicitly Christian Family Father and Joe Sixpack the Forgotten Man.
But what is a parable, or even the perfectly executed outburst reminding us that real people are not worried about wonkery but food on the table, without a genuinely strong corresponding policy and the intent and means to do it? Gillibrand actually proved more substantive. On questions of Empire, Harris tipped her bellicose hand with a side-comment assaulting the Korean peace process (literally the only good development Trump has involved himself in, even if it was to hog the credit). During the speed-round, in which contestants must name the very first among all the countries that Trump has kicked in the groin that they hope to kiss and make up with once they are Prezident, Gillibrand actually said she would work to restore the Iran deal, because the current situation is so dangerous.
Sanders summed the show up with concision, not that the corporate spinmeisters and freelance cadre of neoliberal meme-ers and me-me-ers are going to be repeating his concluding statement, or paraphrasing it except to distort it and smear him. For the moment, most of the contestants are sounding like him, and even the "yes, buts" from the openly conservative white guys (Mayor Pete foremost among them) concede that Sanders' campaigns have defined the party's policy goals for good reason, that he has helped to revive real issues. And implicitly, this is what he said: they're all talking like him. But who among them is really ready to fight Wall Street, the insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, the pharma conglomerates, the billionaires, and (unnamed but omnipresent) the corporate media? Who really wants to put McConnell's head on a pike and pass a Green New Deal and a real single payer system? Only two who might remotely qualify as serious contenders may also meet this criterion, and of these we ask: Could Sanders, if he somehow won, really do it, with the awesome forces and money that will continue to be deployed against these goals? Only with the organized support of independent movements fighting for the same goals, as he made clear. And does Warren, now that she seems to talk the same way, really mean it?
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
TopSecret WallSt. Iraq &
more