( Editor’s note: Mixed into a rambling narrative about the current state of affairs in the NFL loaded with historical, music and pop culture references, Mr. Brutal makes his football picks. Bob Gaughan makes his too. It is called “The War of 1812 Football Prognostication” probably because he is Canadian, Bob is American and they have some huge unknown cross border stakes riding on their year-to-year competition. So get with the programme, honour the concept and enjoy the colourful Canadian flavour.)
Thursday, September 15, 2016
8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time
New York J-e-t-s, Jets! Jets! Jets! @ BUFFALO BILLS (-2.5) 41
This game features two teams who failed to launch their seasons with victories on Sunday. You could call their collective performances intolerable, reprehensible, falling short of expectations, unsatisfactory, regrettable, woeful, wretched or if you want to sound sophisticated like a liberal elite:
“Leaning towards politely opprobrious.”
If you are fan of alliteration, adjectives you could us to describe the play of the Jets and Bills in their first game of the year last Sunday could include:
Dire, disreputable, dopey, disastrous, dreadful, dishonourable, definitively distressful, divisive, dirty, a downer, degenerate, dissident, disgusting, disappointing, destructive, disparaging or even dolorous.
Whatever you do, don’t utilize another “D” word currently trending the Interverse, ….. the dreaded “Deplorable.”
A bevy of baskets without any deplorables.
When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used that adjective last week, the feigned outrage of the Alt. Right, the “Failed Multi-Business Champion Donald Trump” and much of the mainstream media was something to behold.
The tight lipped, don’t dare break a smile, take your self seriously earnestness of Mr. Trump going to bat for all the people so deeply hurt by Hillary Clinton’s words was indeed noble. He described them as the “Greatest, most beautiful, tremendous, loving, patriotic Americans that ever lived and who support me.” This was especially absurd and disingenuous even by the P.T. Barnumesque standards of hyperbole that Trump uses regularly.
The ineffectual powder puffs at CNN, in their race to establish their position of journalistic neutrality through their failed policy of false equivalency acted as if Mrs. Clinton had identified them as “rapists” or “murderers,” ….. as Mr. Trump had fingered so many others on numerous occasions.
Yes, Hillary Clinton called half of Donald Trump’s supporters:
“A Basket of Deplorables!”
The nerve of the woman!
This was just mere days before she fainted leaving the 911 Memorial sight from the effects caused by her undisclosed Bubonic Plague infection.
A few hours later, Mrs. Clinton decided to arise like Lazarus from her deathbed. After exiting her daughter’s apartment, Clinton decided to exploit a photo-op to prove she was still alive and was ambulatory.
Later, in typical, weak-willed Democratic fashion, she then walked back her comments from a few days previous, and apologized for making such an unfortunate and hurtful over-generalization about the cultivated lynch mob that constitutes Mr. Trump’s main body of support.
This is the opposite of the typical Republican & Trump response to criticism of anything egregious uttered by the Donald, ….. which pretty much happens three or four times a day and six to ten times per speech.
They own it!
They double down on their belief in the stated invective and go on the attack with another offensive abstraction that dwarfs the previous one in repugnancy. Subsequently, the entire media and most of the public forget about the initial insult, as well as start accepting this repeated abhorrent comportment as normal and thus acceptable.
We thought Hillary Clinton was going to apologize for grossly underestimating the realistic portion of stated Trump supporters who met her definition.
She should have.
The Democratic nominee for President stated that the 50% of Trumpites in the “Basket of Deplorables” by her own definition, included those who were “Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Xenophobic, Islamophobic, you-name-it-a-phobic.”
Without bothering to add to that list, which would take up too much time & space, let us look at the actual numbers.
According to a recent PPP National Poll, judged to be one of the fairest by independent observers, ……
1.) 65% of Trump supporters believe that President Obama is a Muslim!
By definition, since the President has stated he is a Christian and has attended church services as President far more regularly than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford or Richard Nixon. Only Jimmy Carter had a stronger attendance record amongst modern Presidents.
( Personally we think Obama is too intellectually enlightened and intelligent to be anything other than an Agnostic or Atheist. However, he realizes that declaring such would make him even less popular than if he declared he was a follower of the American Nation of Islam and had Louis Farrakhan over at the White House on a regular basis for fantasy football strategy sessions, political consultation, interior decorating tips, gluten free recipe exchanges and sleepovers.)
So if two thirds of Trump supporters by their own self declared delusional projection, ….. believe that the President of the United States is a Muslim, ….. then they can safely be classified as “Islamophobic.”
Most rational people would conclude that a self declared delusional projection of that nature, sans any evidence to the contrary, would indeed constitute a mental state of “Islamophobia.”
Case closed, ….. over one half of Trump supporters are indeed in the “Basket of Deplorables.”
However, accounting for error, let’s look for backup evidence.
2.) In the same poll, 59% of Donald S. Trump supporters declare that they believe that President Obama was not born in the USA. He therefore is not an American and is also subsequently not eligible to even be President according to the Constitution. A document most of them cite as sacrosanct, especially the Second Amendment which they seem to worship like a sacred calf & misinterpret at will.
Sigh, …. a lot of this belief was started by Donald Trump himself who helped start and encourage the “Birther Movement.” Mr. Trump sent detectives to Hawaii to find out the truth about Mr. Obama’s origins. He promised “Big Time discoveries!” but of course Magnum P.I & the other crack investigators he probably didn’t pay, came up short.
Like most of his undertakings, these phantom audits were not profitable and produced zero evidence of anything other than Trump’s obsessive compulsion to garner headlines. He has repeatedly done this in his shadow political career by pursuing vain attempts to legitimize red herring theories through wild goose chases and snipe hunts of his own creation.
Now we don’t know what “phobic” or which “istic” refusing to believe in a man’s birthplace falls under, …. probably quite a few, but using logic, let’s chalk it up to: …… “Racist.”
Because if VP Joe Biden had been the Democratic nominee and won the Presidency in 2008, …… does anybody seriously believe Mr. Trump would have found any political traction amongst the Alt. Right and the Teabaggers in questioning Mr. Biden’s country of birth?
3.) Another not so stunning result from the polling of these individuals. 31% believe all homosexuals should be barred from entering the United States. Not just foreigners attempting to become citizens, but any gay people amongst the 30 million people who just want to visit America each year or American citizens who visit other countries and attempt to return. Wow! …. let’s just say that’s pretty homophobic!
So don’t leave the country to visit relatives in the United Kingdom anytime soon after November if the unthinkable happens Sir Elton John. Ellen DeGeneres or Neil Patrick Harris and millions of other Americans are now on notice too.
4.) 16% of Trump supporters believe that the white race is superior, not only in regard to Blacks, but Asians, Latinos, Jews, Native North Americans & everybody else. Another 14%aren’t completely sure, but are leaning in that direction. That is a whopping 30% who are inclined in the year 2016 to follow the thoroughly discredited pseudo-science espoused by Englishman Francis Galton, American Charles Davenport, German Otto Reche & countless other Nazi philosophers, political scientists, doctors and racist quacks.
Otto Reche
Otto Reche
In America, The Ku Klux Klan, The John Birch Society, The Aryan Nations, The Aryan Brotherhood, The Volksfront, The American Freedom Party and about two to three dozen more hate based groups also subscribe to the same basic disparaged hypotheses of Eugenics. Of course they all believe that the Holocaust never happened as well, and was the creation of a world wide Jewish orchestrated conspiracy.
Not coincidentally, most of them have also voiced real, tangible support for Mr. Trump.
Galton, Davenport, Reche and others all espoused scientific racism in the form of Eugenics. It was certainly racist, but contained little science. It was designed to bolster certain classist & racist assumptions that the progenitors were often using to justify their personal or familial station in society.
Eugenics purpose was as much about cementing the position of class privilege through selective breeding, sterilization, euthanasia and genocidal elimination amongst the general population. That was the priority far beyond any serious, honest, without bias, scientific examination of intelligence and genetic health via heredity through racial designation.
In conclusion, about one third of Trump supporters give support to one of the most vile & thoroughly discredited theories ever developed in the history of mankind. Who knows how many more aren’t leaning in that direction and are bi-curious about the concept.
5.) According to another recent poll, 20% of Trump supporters disagree with Lincoln’s passing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
You read that correctly.
In that poll, a follow up question clarifying that the Thirteenth Amendment was about freeing the slaves was posed. …. ( because one might reasonably think that some of these people don’t know what the term “Emancipation Proclamation” is referring to ) ….. However, even with that clarification, the results remained at the same level, 20%. So we can ascertain that they all knew what the initial question was referring to.
Without further analysis, and notwithstanding the temptation to conjure invective, let’s just politely call that one fifth of his supporters blatantly “Racist.”
Now, some might say that those last three items all came out to under 50%, so they don’t fit the case of “Half the supporters are a Basket of Deplorables.” Incorrect, …. we cannot assume for example, that the 65% who believe President Obama is a Muslim & the 59%who believe he was born in Timbuktu all agree with their loving political mates who answered in the “Deplorable” category on the follow up questions.
So, without getting into the intricacies of marketing research & polling science, suffice it to say the data from this particular poll does not identify in the final results which way singular people who responded with an answer to one question correlates with their answers to the others.
As a result, one can safely assume that amongst the 35% who believe that Barack Obama is not a Muslim and the 41% who believe he is an actual American, ….. that among them, there are many who believe gay people should not be allowed into the country, white supremacy is an intriguing & logical philosophy and freeing African Americans from bondage was a mistake.
Conservatively then, the actual number of Donald Trump supporters who support at least one “Deplorable” position is probably, generously on the low estimate side, at least 75%.
If you consider support for Donald Trump’s convoluted belief in building the “accounts receivable till hell freezes over” Mexican Wall and banning any & all Muslims from coming to the United States as being racist and Islamophobic, then we wouldn’t even have to waste our time on this because support for those initiatives in previous polls hit 82% &75% respectively. Well over the 50% threshold of one half. However, those questions weren’t asked in this most recent poll.
So, Mrs. Clinton shouldn’t have apologized for being “overly generalistic,” she should have apologized for making an “underly underestimate,” and possibly for using creative license in the department of word creation and sketchy grammar.
Case proven.
Truly a “Basket of Deplorables.” Since Hillary Clinton might not win the race for the White House, she should plan for her grandchildren’s financial future by immediately copyrighting “Basket of Deplorables” before it is used by the producers of the “Minions” movie franchise as the title of an upcoming, money grubbing sequel.
Looking at this football game between two AFC East losing teams coming off the short week.
Revis Island has morphed into the “Island of Dr. Moreau.” Not for the visitors & castaways arriving but for the holder of the deed.
In the first week of the NFL season, Bengal wide receiver A.J. Green won the battle against fading Jet corner Darrelle Revis and that was enough for Cincinnati to beat New York by the slimmest of margins, 23-22. We speculated last week that the Jets should double team Green, because he was the only big weapon they had to worry about, and therefore victory might follow.
They ignored that strategy.
The result: A.J. Green targeted 13 times, 12 receptions, 180 yards, 1 TD. That was just about exactly half of the total Bengal receiving offense. As we predicted, the Bengals had a poor running game against the Jets’ front seven and only gained 57 total yards. The Jets just wouldn’t address the situation and deserved to lose against a one dimensional, one target Bengal attack.
Unfortunately for the Bills, with WR Sammy Watkins hurt yet again, Revis will likely not have the same sort of challenge Thursday night whether Watkins plays at half health or is rested for the ten days till the next game. Unless that is of course, Mr. Revis hasn’t recovered during the short week from the high mileage track burn he received from chasing A.J. Green all day.
No doubt Revis had been ridden hard Sunday afternoon & was put to bed wet.
The Jet offense did very little against Cincinnati. Ex Bills’ QB Fitzpatrick didn’t get much help from his wide receivers and tight ends. RB Matt Forte was the only consistent weapon, so look to HC Todd Bowles & OC Chan Gailey to call his number a lot Thursday. This could work early in the year, but if he gets overused, look for him to tire and accumulate nagging injuries as the year wears on like he did while playing for the Bears and was handling the ball on 40% of the snaps.
The Bills looked lacklustre on Sunday. They just can’t be that impotent. They have the home crowd advantage and the short week favouring them. The Jets have a strong defense, but if Tyrod Taylor & the offence play just a little bit better this week then they did against the formidable Ravens’ defense last week, they might score 14 points instead of 7.
We’ll guess that will be enough to beat the Jets.
Brutal: BILLS -2.5
Bob: Jets +2.5
