Patterico's Pontifications

9/30/2016

Donald Trump’s Latest Late Night Tweet Storm

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:32 am



[UPDATE: Ah, I see Dana already did this story. Well, read both of our posts!]

All the online polls say this was a good idea. All of them!

After the Machado story broke, places like the Daily Caller reported: “Snippets of an adult film starring Machado are available on multiple free porn websites.” This has been debunked:

It should come as no surprise that celebrity nude photographs and sex videos drive major traffic on the Internet. But when legitimate photographs or videos are not available, hoaxsters often resort to creating their own. In some cases, this involves Photoshopping a famous face onto a nude or near-nude body (as was done with Sarah Palin), or changing the title of a sex video if it features a porn actress who bears a resemblance to a celebrity

The latter is the case with Alicia Machado. In 2009, a video clip purportedly showing the former Miss Universe winner engaging in anal sex was circulated online, and that is the clip that now most frequently shows up in response to web searches on the phrase “Alicia Machado porn.” However, the woman seen in that video is not Alicia Machado — the clip was taken from the 2004 DVD Apprentass 4, which features porn actress Angel Dark, and was later retitled to suggest it showed Alicia Machado:

The Daily Caller article now sports the correction: “Correction: The star of Apprentass 4 was Angel Dark, not Alicia Machado.”

Happily, we can still carry on the debate, because there is some grainy footage of figures squirming together on a bed on a Spanish reality show. As Snopes.com says:

Machado is also often described as having been in a “sex tape,” a claim that stems from her 2005 appearance on the Spanish reality show La Granja (similar to the United States’ The Real World), which she was reportedly kicked off of after being filmed having sex with another cast member:

The romantic relationship between Alicia Machado and her fellow Venezuelan, baseball player Bob Abreu, is finished. The breakup was announced by the athlete himself in an interview with the Telefutura cable network.

The remarks followed a scandal that erupted over Machado’s appearance on the Spanish television program La Granja. In the course of that reality show, the former Miss Universe and Spanish actor Fernando Acaso were filmed having sex. After the incident, the Venezuelan actress and singer was booted from the program, and two weeks ago she apologized on the air to her boyfriend.

“I never thought things would happen like that. [Fernando] behaved very respectfully towards her as a woman” Abreu says. He also said that Machado would now have to think things through. Abreu emphasized that he is no longer Machado’s boyfriend and said their relationship had ended before Machado went to Spain to participate in La Granja.

However, the so-called “sex tape” stemming from that incident, which is nothing more than some grainy, night-vision footage of a couple of covered figures writhing in a bed, hardly qualifies as explicit. And reality television being what it is, the scene the tape depicts was quite possibly staged or fabricated.

I have a friend who once played a role on a reality show. He was the cheating husband caught on tape with multiple bikini-clad women in a hot tub. My friend has never been married, but he got paid cash money to pretend he was so he could sit in a hot tub with bikini-clad women. Not a bad gig. Lesson: “reality” shows are fictional trash. Sorry to burst your bubble.

So now maybe Mike Pence can spend part of the Vice Presidential debate defending the notion that Trump’s late night reference to a sex tape was not a debunked reference to a porn tape, but a reference to grainy footage from a reality show. I think that would be a good use of his time, don’t you? Better than, say, using that time to talk about, say, Tim Kaine boycotting Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and his ties to J Street.

Thanks, Donald!

When The Biggest Roadblock Is One’s Own Ego

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:44 am



[guest post by Dana]

Good morning! It looks like some of us were awfully busy during the wee hours of the morning:

untitled

Who is it keeping this ridiculous story alive? Who is it giving the media even more fuel for their partisan fires of bias? Who is it that eagerly snapped up the bait dangled before him? And who is it that filters everything, first and foremost, through the personal prism of his enormous ego?

Oh, fool, thy name is vanity:

I don’t understand why everybody is surprised at his lack of discipline. He has been out there for 15 months. He is completely undisciplined. Yes, for a month he has been led around, shackled, handcuffed by his staff, made to read from the Teleprompter. But the minute you let him loose – meaning on the debate stage where there is no prompter, and the immediately after when he is reacting — what emerges is his central weakness: vanity. You have seen this all along. I don’t know whether his strategy was to go after target audiences. I suspect that’s what his staff was hoping. Trump’s strategy is to express himself. He did extremely well in doing that in the primaries. He came out of nowhere. There weren’t a lot of people who thought he could. And he trusts himself. Is anybody surprised he is continuing the feud with Miss Universe? The worst part was that little interjection about not paying taxes, which he now has to defend as well. Because this is a man who, when he is personally attacked, has to reflexively respond to defend his self-image. That’s what drives him

As observed:

Why should anyone be emotionally invested in this man’s victory, if he refuses to learn, refuses to improve, and refuses to avoid making the same mistakes, over and over and over and over again? I’d love to see Hillary Clinton defeated. I just have no faith that Donald Trump is capable of doing that. Every now and then, he gains some traction, the polls get closer… and then he goes and does something stupid. And all of his supporters insist it doesn’t matter, and that we should all avert our eyes, and that we’re betraying something good and righteous by noticing what just happened right in front of us. And then they insist it’s not stupid, that there’s some brilliant nine-level chess going on that we can’t possibly understand from the outside, and if we just wait and see, Donald Trump will win in the end. Unless he doesn’t, because the election is rigged. That’s not a campaign; that’s a cult.

–Dana


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