it would be nice if biden would announce his vp pick already. he must know who it is, and my read on it is that it's almost certainly to be susan rice, even if what he really wants is a senator.

let's be honest here - when biden promised to pick a black woman (and he said that. explicitly.), that was a gaffe, the kind biden is known for. it seems like he would be truly comfortable with susan rice, granted. but, let's be real - he stuck his foot in his mouth, and he's not going to get the candidate he really wants, because of it. so, he's dragging that foot that's stuck in his mouth, and he's going to come out of the promise with a head wound.

right now, it seems like just about the only way he can lose is to pick kamala harris (who, if this happens, will go down in history as the black sarah palin. somebody ask her if europe is a country.), which probably means that's what the apparatchiks are pushing for.

so, i'm premature, and i will be premature until he announces.

but, i'm going to say this right now, anyways.

back in 2016, my deduction, after months of analysis, was that clinton would win if the election was fair but that the information i was receiving from media, in total, suggested to me that it had already been decided that trump would win, and the election was essentially a sham. that is (and i know that there are dissenters, but when you gather enough data, you can pull whatever trends you want out of it), that while the data seemed to point to a decisive clinton victory, the media coverage suggested to me that this data was essentially irrelevant.

you may have forgotten, but trump was the media's darling over the last election. admit it: either trump himself, or kellyanne conway, were pretty much on the news 24/7. they dominated the coverage, even when it was negative. it was absolutely obvious that something was pulling strings in the background, in trump's favour, and that the thing had already been determined.

so, that's why i said what i said: the data pointed to clinton, but the media suggested trump would win. and, i derisively suggested that they'd tell us trump will win pennsylvania, and we'll all be baffled by it. what happened was predictable - by watching cnn, not by reading the polls.

so, it was my media analyst hat that was more predictive than my data analyst hat, here.

let's stop for a moment and be clear about what i'm saying, because when you juxtapose "donald trump" and "deep state", you get to this messaging that the cia is out to get the donald. this is just a projection. i mean, i don't know - maybe they got something on him and they forced him into it. but, whatever the deep state's perception of donald trump really was in 2015/2016, there is considerably less uncertainty about what it thought about hillary clinton, and that is that it feared and loathed her. the vast right-wing conspiracy is a far more real construct, and represents reality far better, than any kind of deep state plot against donald trump; rather, what i'm suggesting is that donald trump seems to have been the prime actor in a deep state conspiracy to block hillary from office.

if you've been following clinton's career for any depth, you know this goes back. they've been blocking her path since the 90s, and i've been pointing this out for almost as long. but, if you look at what happened in the election - the emails just being a small part of it - it's rather obvious what side they put their thumb on.

so, i do argue for a deep state conspiracy involving donald trump, but it's the opposite of the projection that trump himself projects; i've been arguing for years that they're out to get clinton, and i argued through most of the election that trump was just a pawn of the intelligence apparatus. and, frankly, very little of what i've seen since has disrupted that perception. in the end, he seems to always do what he's told, doesn't he?

but, why did the media align with this? because, in the end, they cared about ratings, and all that the scandals that clinton generated managed to do was convince the media that a trump presidency would be more profitable than a clinton presidency - which they were no doubt correct about. fox is different, but, in the end, cnn and msnbc and ... are just corporations, and their single purpose is to maximize profit for shareholders. they don't care about policy; they care about ratings.

and, where are we today?

well, if you thought clinton was boring, meet sleepy joe.

so, we'll see what direction the coverage takes over the next few months.

but, i'm getting deja vu.