Tiny-handed man-baby plays nice

So, in the last few days, we have seen “good Trump” on ample display. He had a nice meeting with the Failing New York Times, backed away from his pledge to lock up Crooked Hillary, nominated a couple of women for top jobs without grabbing them by the pussy, and so on.

He gave a Thanksgiving address, or should I say made a Thanksgiving video, calling for unity after a long and bruising campaign (without mentioning that he caused almost all the bruising).

Why? Why now? What’s in it for him?

A friend of the blog offered the theory that he’s worried about the upcoming electoral college vote on December 19, and is being told to present a saner version of his mercurial self until that hurdle has been cleared.

As we all know by now, Trump lost the popular vote by over two million votes. That’s a lot! Clinton has 232 pledged Electoral College votes and would need only 38 faithless electors to change their vote, which, in 22 states,  they would be entirely within their rights to do.

It’s a longshot at best, but many of those electors have been getting an earful. An online petition already has 4.5 million signatures. Apart from the fact that he lost the popular vote and is seen by most as temperamentally unfit for the job, he accepted illegal campaign contributions amounting to $1.3 million and the Trump foundation has admitted self dealing to the IRS.

In addition to all that, there is the whole question of conflicts of interest with his various businesses. Although he claims that “the president cannot have a conflict of interest” and that the law is on his side (amazingly, he could be right on this!), that may not be enough.

The emoluments clause in the constitution prohibits receiving gifts from foreign powers, and, depending on how you want to define “gift”, Trump could be in a lot of trouble here.

To put this in perspective, Obama had to jump through a lot of hoops to figure out whether accepting the Nobel Prize was a violation of the Emoluments clause.

Whether Trump’s conflicts of interest are something for the electoral college to sort out, or whether it will be the job of congress or the Supreme Court, is yet to be seen. But if you were an elector, perhaps it would tip the scales for you. There’s already plenty of weight on the side of the faithless.

In the meantime, on Thanksgiving, we can give thanks for a few days of relative normalcy in Mar-a-Lago.

Sounds OK in English, doesn’t it?

Hail Victory! Hail Trump!

alt-right-nazi-salute

A group of clean-cut young Americans who love their country are enthusiastic about the incoming administration and want to make our country great – what’s wrong with that?

Don’t you want to make our country great, too? Are you opposed to making our country great? Are you opposed to our government? Maybe you aren’t very patriotic. Maybe you’re on the wrong side of the conflict here. Maybe you’re an enemy of America. Better watch yourself.

A perfectly normal young American guy, Richard Spencer wants to make America great again. Just like the incoming president does. Why should a fine young man like this have to keep his enthusiasm to himself? Isn’t he just saying the obvious, the thing we’re all thinking – that white lives matter?

spencer

It’s not like he’s some sort of evil fanatic, is it? I don’t see any weird little mustache or anything, do you?

Who can argue with his principles? Like he said, “America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”   Or, “Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.”?

Spencer has every reason to  expect our new president to start in on the changes we need to make. This is what was promised during the campaign and this is why we voted for him.

And Trump has already done everything he could possibly do to discourage any inappropriate speech, so let’s get started. As Kellyanne Conway said on PBS Newshour last night, “Trump has been very clear in disavowing” any inappropriate speech.

Nothing left to say after that, right?

Hail Victory! Hail Trump!

Are there really two Trumps?

Trump took to social media to “address” the country about the priorities of his coming administration yesterday. This was in the form of a short Youtube video, in which he talked about how he was going to create “many millions” of jobs (by lifting restrictions on the coal industry), revoke and “renegotiate” trade agreements, and impose lobbying bans

In terms of content, it was just a rehash of some of his campaign blather, though he did manage to steer clear of the more incendiary provocations of the campaign, i.e. the building of a wall, deportation of millions, and revocation of the ACA.

In terms of form, there were a couple noteworthy elements. The first is the choice of Youtube, rather than a TV address or press conference, of which there have been none since the election. In the past, the use of social media for such messages has been thought to be too like simple propaganda, though Obama has done some of it. For the coming administration, it is now clear that this will be the norm.

The main “new” element in this communication was Trump speaking in a more moderate way, staying on script, using a teleprompter, and being “presidential”. There was no Trumpian bombast, no fight-picking, no singling out of critics for retaliation.

This was taken by many, including the New York Times, as evidence that there are really two Trumps, that Trump is very “self-aware”, and that he chooses carefully which Trump to present based on his objective. He has said he is capable of being “very boring” when he needs to be, meaning go five seconds without calling someone a name, and this video “proves” that.

If only.

In fact, there are not two Trumps. There is only one Trump and one Conway. What we see here is the momentary triumph of his handlers in their ongoing effort to reign in their impulsive man-baby. They wrote out a not-too-long message which he was able to deliver, selfie-style, into an iPhone camera without any tantrums before returning to the more pressing business of flipping channels, looking for his name on the internet, and grabbing the occasional stranger by the pussy.

Trump is going to show us how to be president in the internet age. He will do it from home using only his cell phone. No need to come to Washington, no need to meet with congressman, no need to deal with the press, no need to modify his family life or business interests in any way.

He can do it part-time without changing any of his real priorities. There may not be two Trumps, but perhaps this isn’t a bad thing. One is enough.

 

And the 2016 Stewie award goes to…

Teddy Ebersol’s Red Sox Fields! Also known at Stewie Committee Headquarters as the “Teddy Ebersol Grass Museum”.

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Congratulations, Teddy!  For the 8th consecutive year, Teddy Ebersol’s Red Sox Fields has garnered the prestigious Stewie, which is awarded annually to the second worst public space in the Boston area.

Here is a brief FAQ about the prestigious Stewie award and its 2016 winner.

What qualifies as a “public space”?

Any place that is open to the public, whether owned or maintained using tax dollars or is privately controlled.  Examples include public parks (of course), airport terminals, train stations, college campuses, waterways, “greenways”, bike trails, and so on.

How does the Stewie committee determine what a bad public space is?

Well, it’s the opposite of a good public space, which is one that is well used, one that invites you in, one that is known as a good place to meet old or new friends, one that is accessible, comfortable, and functions well as intended.

An example of a good public space is Post Office Square Park, formerly a parking garage, now an inviting urban oasis. Privately developed and maintained.

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Everybody in the area gravitates to it and enjoys it.

Why does the Stewie go to the second worst public space in Boston and not the worst?

Because there is no question about which space is worst and therefore no surprise about who would get the award. The worst public space in Boston, and maybe anywhere in the country, is, and always will be, City Hall Plaza. It is a vast Sahara of bricks, unbroken by any shade, benches, greenery, water, or other indication that human beings might be able to survive on it for more than a couple of minutes.  It is such a complete and abject failure that no other space could ever hope to compete.

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It can only be seen as “successful” if its objective was to keep you from ever entering City Hall itself, the brutalist monstrosity which is also a horribly failed public space.

Who is Teddy Ebersol?

He was the 14 year old son of Dick Ebersol and Susan Saint James who was killed in a chartered jet crash in 2004 in Colorado.

What does this have to do with the field we’re talking about?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.  The kid was a Red Sox fan. The father was an NBC exec who is friends with Tom Werner, a Red Sox team owner.  They all figured a good way to memorialize the kid was to appropriate a well-used public space and put their own stamp on it.

Isn’t this another example of the privatization of public resources?

Yes. Yes it is. You have to make an appointment to use the field. It’s “closed” one day a week.  The permitting process is guided by an unnamed Advisory Board, and the permit schedule is not made public.  All weekday field use is permitted to Hill House, a Beacon Hill community group.

What are some other examples of privatization?

Development of beach front real estate that de jure still allows public access to the beach, but de facto makes it almost impossible

Converting metered parking spaces on public streets to reserved spots for Zip-cars and the like.

Allowing small planes to pull ad banners over public spaces, creating flying lawn-mower noise pollution  that makes enjoying your back yard difficult in summer.

Closing off the Boston Esplanade to public use for a week before the July 4 concert for “security reasons”, and reserving large spaces in the venue for “VIPs.”

Allowing tour buses filled with people who want to gawk at Harvard or M.I.T. to park in public bus stops, making it difficult for the public to access their bus and creating unneeded traffic jams.

Private interests have transformed what once was a well utilized and loved space into a virtual “Grass museum”.  You can go by there at any time on a beautiful spring or summer day and see not a soul.  Once in a while you might see a pack of Beacon Hill nannies with their toddlers off to the side in the shade, wearing their play-time helmets and slathered with sun-screen, but that’s about it.

Click on pics to enlarge:

It is the most underutilized public space in Boston. For decades, this space had been a great destination for anybody wanting to play with their dog, throw a football around, smoke a joint, make out with their love-interest, take a bag lunch, or just hang out.  It was well used with no complaints. No more.

Everyone is sorry about Teddy dying in the plane crash, but there simply has to be a better way to honor his memory than to take away a well-used public space and substitute a never-used grass museum.

Today, everything about Teddy Ebersol says, “Keep Out”, and that’s why it’s a perpetual Stewie award winner.  Congratulations and well done.

President of the people who like him

Once again, our President-elect has chosen to create a spat and escalate it to a media-saturating battle in the culture wars, or, more accurately, a battle between Trump and anyone who criticizes him directly or indirectly.

As everyone now knows, Mike Pence went to a performance of Hamilton, after which cast members addressed him from the stage and expressed the desire that the new administration should work “on behalf of all of us”.

It was an unprecedented and inappropriate calling-out of an audience member, true. But it comes after an unprecedented and inappropriate Trump/Pence campaign. Everything has been changed now, and it wasn’t the Hamilton cast that changed it.

Pence behaved with dignity and, one might say, a bearing appropriate to the highest office in the land. He listened to what was said, smiled, and left. That, for anyone who may have forgotten, is what’s known as being “presidential”.

Trump, on the other hand, immediately dropped what he was doing up in his tower (filling out his cabinet with white men) to take to the Twitter once more. He demanded an apology from the cast. Then he belittled them for not being able to memorize their lines – typical made-up Trumpian nonsense which he deleted shortly after posting .

This is the opposite of being “presidential”, something even many Republicans now acknowledge. It is exactly the kind of behavior Trump has repeatedly engaged in that signals he will use the office not to work on behalf of us all, as the Hamilton cast hoped, but to work against those who criticize him.

To underscore this mission, Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s strongest supporters, said about the Hamilton furor, “President-elect Trump is signaling that he will fight for his team and his policies”.

Exactly the problem. “His team” should be all Americans, not just those who admire him. Save the fighting for our enemies, not your critics. Unfortunately, this is not anything new for Trump. It’s who he always has been. What you’ve seen is what you’ll be getting.

One thing that has become clear, though, is that when Trump says or does something for which an apology might be warranted (in this case, inexplicably accusing the cast of the most successful production in recent theater history of not being able to read lines), he does not apologize. He never apologizes. He simply deletes the thing for which he might apologize and, presto, it never happened.

Conversely, Trump is constantly demanding apologies from others, or threatening to sue them, or both. He is perpetually aggrieved. Looking at the first few pages of a quick google search of  the term “Trump demands apology”, you can get the idea.

Trump has recently demanded apologies from:

FoxNews for using foul language

Former Mexican president for saying they won’t be paying for a wall 

Hillary Clinton for the “deplorables” remark

Hillary Clinton for calling him ISIS’ best recruiter

Hillary Clinton for causing death and destruction

The Onion for being The Onion

A “crazy“ MSNBC host for questioning one of his supporters

The New York Times for saying he mocked Serge Kovaleski

The New York Times for publishing a story about his groping victims

David Cameron for saying Trump’s remarks on Muslims were divisive

Ted Cruz for his anti-Trump campaign ads

Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.

To be fair, other Republican presidents never apologized either, and Republicans often accuse Democrats of apologizing when they shouldn’t, and of thereby diminishing our great country. This may explain Trump’s appeal to his admirers, but it doesn’t explain his actions. His refusal to apologize is not a republican trait or strategy. In fact, many have pointed out that Trump is hardly a Republican at all.

No, the Trump case is unlike anything we’ve seen before. In the first place, Trump can’t go a day without doing something which cries out for apology, so the sheer volume of transgressions is new.

But mainly it’s Trump himself. He’s simply unlike anyone who has reached this level before. Many who voted for him see his intransigence and bellicosity as great strengths. Many who are reviled by him think the opposite. Can Trump be the president of both groups, the president of all of us?

 

 

 

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Narcissist

Our country is designed to work on the principle of checks and balances. No one arm of the government can override the other two. It’s a lot like the rules of Rock/Paper/Scissors that way. Neither the Legislature, the Judiciary, or the Executive can impose its will on the other two. At least that’s the way the Constitution wants it to be.

The President can veto legislation passed by Congress. Congress can block  Supreme  Court nominees or re-write legislation the Supreme Court has ruled on. The Supreme Court can determine the legality of presidential actions or even elections.

Or going around the circle the other way, the President can appoint Supreme Court justices, the Supreme Court can approve or invalidate legislation, and Congress can override presidential vetoes or even impeach the president.

But there are some new elements in the mix now. First, both houses of congress are now not just “Republican”, but stacked with either people who profess not to believe in government at all, or who are beholden or committed to the Koch agenda one way or another. They are unlikely to push back on any Trump initiative. Or any Trump court, cabinet, or ambassadorial appointee. Or any executive order.

Also Trump may have the opportunity to nominate multiple Supreme Court Justices. He will certainly nominate one and that alone will tilt the court his way.

And second, we will have a President with no government experience of any kind, one who’s never been elected as even blackboard-monitor in grade school as far as we know. We’ll have a president who has bloviated about how he’ll drain the swamp, prosecute his opponents, punish our trading partners, invalidate our treaties, and abandon our allies.

We’ll have a president who has proven that avenging any perceived slight and attacking any perceived enemy is the highest priority. A president whose inner circle consists entirely of family members and sycophants. A president who has begun appointing a cabinet of nitwits, dipshits, and nutjobs.

We will have president who clearly demonstrates all the elements of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

What will become of the checks and balances here? Who will ever say no to this guy?

Who’s going to say no to Trump when he wants to bring his kids to meetings with heads of state  or security briefings?

Who’s going to say no to him when he decides he’d rather sleep in his own bed in New York every night, traffic below be damned, and not reside in Washington at all?

Who’s going to say no to him when he refuses to divest or even disclose conflicts of interests related to his businesses? Or even medical or psychiatric issues?

Who’s going to say no to him when he denies press credentials or refuses to even hold press conferences at all?

Who’s going to say no to him when he wants to defy anti-nepotism laws? Or any laws at all for that matter?

These are all seemingly small things that have either already happened or are about to. Let’s not yet contemplate the potential here for persecuting minorities, destroying the environment, or starting wars.

The rules of the game are changing. Narcissist covers rock. Narcissist cuts paper. Narcissist crushes scissors.

 

Only two kinds of people in the world

There are only two kinds of people in the world: the kind that thinks there are only two kinds of people in the world, and the other kind.

So what divides us the most consistently and predictably? And by “us” I mean all of humanity.  Is it my religion vs. your religion? My language vs. yours? Liberal vs conservative? Haves vs. have-nots?

I think the most universal source of differences among us has to be the urban/rural divide.

If you come from a remote, sparsely populated place where your nearest neighbor is a long way off and where self-sufficiency is vital, you probably have a really different outlook on life than the person who lives in a big city in close proximity to all kinds of other people and who is not required to grow his own food or build his own house.

If you look at the places around the world where religion and culture have merged, where local government is everything and federal government is nothing, where women are most thoroughly under the control of men, where factional warfare between families, tribes, villages, sects and so on is the most common and persistent, well, you’re looking at sparsely populated, remote regions. Think Afghanistan, Yemen, Rwanda.

Even in a world of universal connectivity and instantaneous, affordable global communication, if you live in a place where you come in personal contact mainly with the same people and their families every day for your whole life, you’re going to have a much different perspective than someone who lives in a bigger city, or who travels a lot and maybe has lived in a few different places in his life.

In this country, talking about the divide between red states and blue states misses the point completely. At the state level, there is really very little difference among us, which is why the “swing” states swing.

But if you look below the covers, even to the county level, a clearer picture emerges.

map-2016-wide

Better yet, think of it as regions of population sparsity/density and  the differences between Trump America and Clinton America are clear.

Trump America

trump-america

Clinton America

clinton-america

Virtually every medium and large population center in the U.S. went “Blue”. We live in a highly developed, affluent country where everyone speaks the same language, spends the same currency, has access to the same TV shows, buys the same range of products from the same companies, and so on. But the urban/rural divide asserts itself nonetheless. It’s not so very different from living in Kandahar vs., say, Helmand province. Or Karachi vs. Waziristan.

I don’t know how our differences can be reconciled if the three branches of the federal government and the fourth estate, too, pander to and amplify those differences. And even if they don’t.

Twidiot Tweets Twaddle

For the love of God. What a thin-skinned man-baby we’ve elected. The smartest thing his people ever did, or should I say tried to do, was to get Trump to stop tweeting for just a couple of days. But it didn’t take. Trump just can’t help himself

Obama isn’t gone and I already miss him. To my knowledge, he never rose to the ample bait that FoxNews chummed out continuously for eight years. He would have been right to point out the falsehoods they spewed, to say that they weren’t a “news” organization at all, to accuse them of weakening the power and prestige of the office with their nonsense. But he had the dignity and self-control not to.

If he had taken issue with them, it would have been through back channels, or perhaps indirectly by referring to the right wing media in general. But never impulsively. Never in the middle of the night. And certainly never on Twitter.

Trump has chosen to create and escalate an absurd spat with the New York Times, even before taking office. There is nothing at stake for him in this, nothing to be gained. He’s no longer trying to persuade people to vote for him. If it’s not just  a reflexive narcissism or some misplaced sense of outraged victimhood,  it’s hard to understand his motive.

It’s a lot like the name-calling of opponents during the primaries, or the constant threatening of lawsuits against detractors. It puts people on the defensive and creates a chilling effect for any future coverage or interaction. This would be the kind of “long game” that Trump admirers might suggest is actually his brilliance at work, that has proven effective in the end as is evidenced by his election. I don’t think so. I think he’s just a man-baby. And a twidiot.

It creates a “tone at the top” of his organization that spills out all around him.  Many have been struck by the “sore winner” vibe coming from Trump Tower. Eliot A. Cohen noted it. Corey Lewandowski had an  epic meltdown on election night because Clinton wasn’t conceding fast enough.

The NYT has reported nothing inaccurate (unlike Fox). If something ultimately is shown to be inaccurate, they’ll retract it without having to be shamed into it or sued. They’re not The National Enquirer. But the colicky man-baby can’t be soothed when it comes to the NYT. This WaPo piece points out 30% of Trump’s post-election tweets have been shots at the NYT.

And true to his playground-bully roots, he often includes his favorite epithet. If you liked “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hillary”, you’ll love “The Failing New York Times”. Is this “presidential”? Is this good for the country? Is it good for Trump? Can’t anyone stop it?

Melania? Jared? Ivanka? Kellyanne?

There must be someone who can finally  deliver the simple message:  Put. The Twitter. Down.

Meet the Shadow-President-Elect

His name his Jared Kushner. He was Trump’s closest adviser during the campaign, has now taken over the transition, and, if Trump gets his way, will soon have Top Secret clearance and will be sitting next to Trump during national security briefings.

Now, it’s clear that someone has to pay attention during security briefings (and all matters that require learning something), since Trump has an extremely short attention span, no capacity for study or preparation, and prefers to make decisions based on intuition, which, unfortunately, changes from minute to minute and seems mostly to reflect the views of the last person he talked to. But Jared Kushner?

The younger Bush was similar to Trump when it came to learning and paying attention, and he delegated almost all the heavy lifting to Dick Cheney. A lot of people initially took comfort in the fact that Cheney was a serious political player, a man of “gravitas” with a very impressive resume, including being a congressman, Secretary of Defense, and of course, Vice President. He already had Top Secret clearance, so he didn’t need to bend any laws to get it. But despite the qualifications and gravitas, the shadow presidency of Dick Cheney was a disaster.

Kushner is as unqualified to hear national security briefings as Trump. Our 1967 anti-nepotism laws specifically make him ineligible, but if anyone thinks that will prevent Trump from getting his way, well, no. Let’s just hope the son-in-law has a better attention span than the father-in-law.

In any case, we are about to have both a manifestly unqualified president and a manifestly unqualified shadow president as well. This can’t be good.

Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law, married to daughter Ivanka.  He’s a lot like Trump was at his age – inherited real estate money, had help getting into good schools, and partnered with his father on almost all things. It’s not clear what his business “successes” might be, but then he’s only 35 years old. He has no government experience and certainly no gravitas.

As with Trump, family loyalty and alliances are what matter to Kushner, and, like Trump, he’s a vindictive little shit. Look forward to four years of settling scores, real and imagined. It has already started with the gutting of Chris Christie’s transition work over the last couple of months. Christie may be a Trump supporter, but he’s on Kushner’s enemies list because he prosecuted Kushner’s sleazebag father  and put him in jail in New Jersey. Therefore Christie must be punished, diminished, and his work must be scrapped.

Anyway, if you thought that Trump would have the good sense to surround himself with vetted experts and experienced operatives, you were mistaken. What you saw in the campaign is what you’ll be getting for the next four years.

If you thought, as Obama suggested, that the seriousness of the office has a way of sobering you up and making you understand the importance of the task at hand, it looks like that, too, is in doubt. Your new shadow-president is Jared Kushner.

 

Ohiowa has its say

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent piece just before the election describing the ways the whole thing had been rigged against Hillary. Here’s a quick summary:

  1. State governments did all they could to suppress minority voting
  2. Russian intelligence hacked Dem emails then released through Wikileaks
  3. Comey deliberately spread innuendo that hurt Hillary
  4. Foxnews trumpeting falsehoods, retracted, if at all, after damage done
  5. Mainstream media clearly favoring the lying candidate with no proposals
  6. Absurd media obsession with Hillary’s emails

In the end, it was simply that the potential Trump voters were energized to show up and vote, and the expected Hillary base, i.e. the coalition of youth, minorities, blue collar workers, women, etc, were not.

This coalition was built by Obama, an inspirational and charismatic figure. Hillary is not an inspirational or charismatic figure. She is not a natural retail politician, does not like to press the flesh, and does not smile easily. When she does smile, it seems fake, and somehow this translates into “not trustworthy”.

Moreover, she had little in the way of a transformational message to offer. To be fair, just running on another four years of doing what we were doing over the last eight should have been enough, particularly when the opposition is a liar, a con man, and certainly the least qualified candidate ever to be nominated by a major party, both by temperament and experience.

It seems weird to say, but the inspirational and charismatic candidate was Trump. As many others have pointed out, the lightning he captured in a bottle was the profound exhaustion that everyone in “flyover country” feels about “political correctness”.

They are sick of being called racists, homophobes, Islamaphobes, and whatever else simply for being Republicans, or for not abandoning what they feel are common sense positions fast enough to suit the college professors and talking heads.

They feel that if aliens arrived on earth tomorrow, they would think maybe 30% of our population must be transgender based on the volume of discussion of transgender issues. They want to understand why we have to  spend so much time and energy discussing the “persecution” that less than 1% of the population suffers for not being welcomed into the bathroom of their choice.

They  resent being called insensitive if they haven’t kept abreast of the already long and growing lexicon of pronouns needed to attempt to keep every individual happy. And personal pronouns are just the beginning. Just google LGBT vocabulary to get an idea of what you don’t know, and prepare to be accused of something if you don’t learn it all and fast. They think it’s all too much to ask of a farmer or an out-of-work machinist, a taxpayer and a church-goer.

Even writing the above paragraphs, which do not represent my own feelings about these issues, but merely attempt to explain the feelings of others, puts me at risk. If I dare to try to explain or understand these things, then I must at some level agree with them, and therefore I must be “outed” and “shamed” by the Internet Justice League, which can mean swift and severe punishment.

This is why I don’t allow Google to index this blog. This is what leads to self-censorship and, ultimately, backlash. This is what leads to Trump.

This is what the people in Iowa, or as we eastern elite liberals prefer to pronounce it, Ohio, have to tell us.

Such a nasty woman

Kellyanne Conway is a piece of work.

Her latest thing is that Hillary and Obama should be responsible for calming the anti-Trump protests in Portland. No mention of what a few words from Trump might be able to accomplish, or, better yet, acknowledgement that we’re now reaping what Trump has sowed over the last year and a half.

Why is everyone on the Trump team still so angry? They won. It’s over. Enough with the name calling and finger pointing.

First of all, in terms of what Hillary or Obama could do, they have both given gracious speeches saying Trump is now the president of all of us and let’s give him a chance, and his success is America’s success.

In Hillary’s case, I can’t imagine how she did it after all the bloodthirsty “Lock Her Up” chanting. In Obama’s case, same thing – five years of Birtherism and a lot of other crap from Trump. But they did it, and they meant it.

Second, Hillary is a private citizen with no authority to “calm” anything. And the protesters in Portland are not pro-Hillary, but anti-Trump.

Obama might have the authority to, what, send in the National Guard? Maybe this is the martial-law approach Trump will be taking to any legitimate exercise of first amendment rights, but not Obama. And as for property damage, etc., yes, if a crime has been committed, let due process kick in as we always have (and hope to have over the next four years).

But the real issue here is Trump’s responsibility for this nascent civil war. Hillary never incited violence against those who opposed her at campaign events. Hillary never incited violence against her opponent personally.  It’s hard to remember now all the incendiary things Trump said and encouraged during the campaign. It’s hard to remember all the dog whistles. It’s hard to remember the wink-wink tacit approval of his supporters’ hate speech and talk of “action” if he lost.

This is the climate that Trump created and thrived in. This is the country we now live in. If he had lost a close election, how would he have reacted to the suggestion that he would then be responsible for calming protests against Clinton’s election?

Is it Kellyanne Conway’s “job” to forget all that? To deny who her boss is and what he has done? To imply Clinton was actually the one responsible for this climate, and now must act to mitigate it?

Such a nasty woman.

Hail to the Chief

OK, you did what the sneering elite said you couldn’t do. All their polls were wrong, maybe even “rigged”. Take a victory lap or two to rub it in, and then start thinking about what you’ve let yourself in for. The easy part is over now, and it’s time to actually do the job.

You promised many preposterous things along the way, and no one really expects you to deliver on them. For many who voted for you, putting an end to Crooked Hillary was enough. But there are one or two promises which you could actually deliver on without too much trouble,  and a few of the people who voted for you are expecting you to do so right away.

You repeatedly talked about one factory situation in particular- the Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis was moving 1400 jobs to Mexico – and you told people exactly how you would stop that and preserve the jobs. You would put a 35% tariff on any Carrier system made in Mexico. You said the president of Carrier would be calling you up as soon as you took office saying, “Sir, we’ve decided to stay in the United States.” I think you were sincere about this. 1400 voters believed you and are counting on keeping their jobs.

You have to deliver now. It has struck me a couple of times since the “transition” has begun this week that you look like a different guy. You look a little chastened, a little lost, a little tired, a little like it’s dawning on you that you bit off more than you can chew.

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trump1

I’m guessing those Carrier workers have some tough times ahead. They’ll join all the other people who trusted you over the years and were stiffed. Maybe you’ll feel a little sorry about it, but I’m guessing you won’t . I’m guessing you’ll put a positive spin on it. I’m guessing you’ll turn it to your advantage.

And why not? The band will be playing “Hail to the Chief”.

Who let the dogs out?

A postal worker in Cambridge MA apparently got in some sort of altercation with a Hispanic guy while gassing up his vehicle. A witness reported that he yelled at the guy, “Go back to your country. This is Trump land. You ain’t getting your check no more.”

Is Cambridge Trump land? You wouldn’t think so, but maybe it is. It’s got the big universities and their thousands of students dominating street life, and a pretty crunchy-granola kind of city government. And of course it’s a Sanctuary City, which means it will lose any sort of federal funding, that is if you believe anything our President-elect says.

Cambridge has a very diverse population which includes a lot of working class white folks, for whom Trump’s message and style may resonate. One of the things we learned from the election was that, as the Trump campaign insisted, there were in fact a lot of Trump fans who were reluctant to voice support publicly, but who actually liked everything about Trump. These are the people who said, “Trump says what I think”.

Trump said many outrageous things during the campaign,  things that had been previously unacceptable to say. In doing so he, he gave us all permission to say or even yell whatever mean-spirited nastiness that we all previously knew to keep to ourselves. “Political correctness” prevented these expressions, and pro-Trump sentiment is nothing if not a rebellion against political correctness.

Trump has thrown the Overton Window open wide, possibly forever. The dogs were just waiting  to jump through it.

 

 

Nostrovia!

First, they’ll come for your health care.

Why is “Obamacare” so terrible? 20 million people who didn’t have health insurance before the ACA have it now. Why has gutting/overturning it been the singular obsession of the right since day one? Well, it’s the death panels, of course.

No, seriously.

The most common complaint is that it requires everyone to purchase health insurance, and Americans don’t like to be required to do anything, especially by the gummint. Young people in particular resent the requirement, as they are less likely to need the insurance they must buy. In Massachusetts, we’ve had this requirement for a while – we call it Romneycare – so the ACA didn’t really strike anyone here as anything new or horrible.

Another complaint is that some people really can’t afford it. In the past, the uninsured have either let their health problems go untreated, or have sought emergency room treatment. In either case, the rest of us paid for it one way or another. You would think this would be a reason for the right to support Obamacare. Wrong.

Republicans must oppose Obamacare for two reasons, one political and one financial. They cannot confess to either and cannot speak in an honest way about them.

The principle political objection to Obamacare is Obama. It represents a great achievement for a democratic administration and that cannot stand.

The more important objection to Obamacare, and any other scheme that attempts to address the health needs of all Americans, is the financial interests of some very powerful adversaries are at stake. In this country (only in America!), your health is a profit center, and any form of universal healthcare is going to be a drag on profits.

The principle beneficiaries of your poor health are the drug companies (aka Big Pharma), doctors (represented by the AMA), and for-profit hospitals, who would all like to increase their bottom line while lowering costs.

The principle beneficiaries of your good health are the insurance companies, and here’s where the real problem lies. They are highly incentivized to raise revenues (your premiums) and reduce costs (your benefits).

One of the arguments against further government involvement in health insurance is that “you wouldn’t want some government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, would you?” Well, first of all, you already have an army of insurance company bureaucrats between you and your doctor, and, yes, I would prefer a bureaucrat who has no real reason to deny me benefits to a capitalist who hopes to get a gold-plated toilet installed in his Gulfstrem G5 by letting my health deteriorate.

And then there’s the issue of the new tax of 3.8% on income over $250,000 for a married couple has been imposed to pay for it all, and some people are pretty upset about that.

Trump has pledged to repeal Obamacare and there is little doubt that this will now happen. What is the alternative? What will they do with the 20 million newly insured? It will be interesting, and probably disheartening, to see.

The broader lesson here seems to be that there is no point in a democratic administration getting any law passed. It’s only temporary if it happens.

But to the victor goes the spoils. Let’s raise a glass and toast all the red-blooded, red-staters who “won”, or at least think they did: À votre santé!

Uncertainty and fear

In November, seventeen years ago, the world was facing an unavoidable change in the coming January. No one knew what the impact would be, only that a big change was coming. Would factories shut down? Transportation systems stall causing huge economic disruption? Massive power outages affecting hospitals, food, traffic and all modern life? Missiles start launching and the end of everything? All of these seemed very possible and no one could really predict what was to come.

It was late 1999, and the millennium was coming to a close – Y2K was here.

Computer systems all around the world had been programmed to store only two characters to represent the year. 1999 was “99” and 2000 would be “00”. Any computerized system that contained algorithms based on the time and date would cease to function correctly, and such systems were embedded everywhere.

When January finally came around and Y2K  was “inaugurated”, we all held our breath. And then…

Nothing happened. The experts and doomers completely whiffed. Life went on. As Emily Litella used to say,

emily-litella

Fingers crossed, y’all. Fingers crossed.

Now look what you’ve done.

Prominent historian Simon Schama described a Trump victory and Republican control of both the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives as a “genuinely frightening prospect”.

“NATO will be under pressure to disintegrate, the Russians will make trouble, 20 million people will lose their health insurance, climate change (policies) will be reversed, bank regulation will be liquidated. Do you want me to go on?,” Schama told the BBC.

“Of course it’s not Hitler. There are many varieties of fascism. I didn’t say he was a Nazi although neo-Nazis are celebrating.”

He forgot to mention that The National Enquirer is now the Newspaper of Record

Pay no attention to the man behind he curtain.

giphy

 

Time to play “Stupid or Liar”.

Chris Christie’s Bridge-gate defense is that he knew nothing about it – his overzealous underlings did it on their own and never told him a thing.

It’s a pretty standard defense in both the corporate world and in government. In the Wells Fargo fake-account-creation scandal, the guys at the top said they had no idea what 5300 employees were tasked to do. Same with the VW emissions thing (two engineers did it), the Enron collapse (Ira Fastow did it), Iran-Contra (Ollie North), Watergate (everyone but Nixon), and a million others.

The guy at the top, who has obscene amounts of money or power, is the direct beneficiary of the wrong-doing, but can’t be expected to know any of the details of what exactly his wealth or power is based on.

First, let’s just clear one thing up – the guy at the top always knows and approves of whatever it is. Even Reagan, who literally didn’t know where he was at times near the end of his term, would have been briefed. Whether he actually “knew” is a distinction without a difference.

In Christie’s case, it’s just preposterous. Of course he knew and approved the closing of lanes on the George Washington bridge. For five days! Even if you accept the absurd notion that Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni cooked the whole thing up and put it in motion without their boss’s OK, Christie has to know on day two of the five when the telephone lines all melted down from the complaints.

But that’s all beside the point. What I want to say here is that taking refuge in the “I didn’t know” defense is a horrible idea. Why? Because not knowing about this sort of shit is a greater indictment than knowing.

Why are you the guy at the top if you have no control of those under you? Why are you corporate moguls paid hundreds of millions of dollars if you have no clue about what your organization is up to? And are we expected to vote for you politicians so that we may be governed by your underlings for whom we did not vote, and with whom you apparently don’t communicate?

In denying knowledge and accountability, you invite us to choose whether your epitaph should read “Stupid” or “Liar”. Those are the only two possibilities. And the answer is always “Liar”.

Well poisoners and the unfocused group

Everyone knows Trump is a loose cannon. The weird thing is that this is apparently exactly what has endeared him to his fans. They admire him because he “says it like it is” and “unlike politicians, he doesn’t run every comment or position by a focus group”.

I guess that’s right. It’s the opposite of a focus group – call it the unfocused group. First he tries it out on the whole world – just lets it fly. Then, if needed,  he refines it.  If he gets more down-votes than up, he might walk it back, reverse course, deny the whole episode, ignore, double down, or simply move on to the next outrageous blast.

Just yesterday, I wrote,

There is no filter between his brain and his mouth or his Twitter. No thought goes unsaid. No tweet is edited or refined or even delayed while he counts to ten

Well, today his handlers finally took his Twitter away.   Now, any proposed tweet must be vetted by Hope Hicks before the “send” button is hit. Finally. To paraphrase The Beach Boys, it’s been fun fun fun.

As Obama rightly pointed out in response, if he can’t be trusted with Twitter, he can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. But there’s no reason to believe that this latest proof of the obvious will have any impact. We’re beyond that. Les jeux sont faits.

What’s interesting to me in all this is what exactly Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway and the rest of his non-family inner circle are thinking. Why are they there?

The obvious answer is that they’re getting paid well and that, win or lose, they’ll have lucrative positions in the coming Empire of Hate. The only other possibility is they think Trump would make a great president and they’re doing it for love of country, so let’s just stick with the Empire of Hate thing for now.

It reminds me of what the loggers always say when asked about the advisability of clear-cutting the old-growth forests – “we need the job”. And when the forest is all gone? Well, at that point they’ll look for another job. But, really, why wait?

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

I think I understand what drives Trump and Steve Bannon, but I’ll never understand the well-poisoners.

A Face in the Crowd

As Lonesome Rhodes in “A Face in the Crowd”, Andy Griffith was a scary kind of folksy, anti-establishment, populist-turned-megalomaniac, demagogue media star. This clip is meant to show how Trump is saying a lot of the same things as that character, and how his political and media trajectory is similar.

The people around Lonesome Rhodes see him for the cynical faker that he really is, and ultimately take him down by leaving a microphone open so that his followers can finally understand how they’ve been fooled.

But the analogy is not perfect.

Trump’s microphone is always open to begin with.  Everyone already knows every nasty little thing he thinks. There is no filter between his brain and his mouth or his Twitter. No thought goes unsaid. No tweet is edited or refined or even delayed while he counts to ten. The NYT did a nice little list of 282 people he has insulted on Twitter. It includes presidential candidates of all parties, their spouses, other politicians, columnists, celebrities, and on and on and on.

Whole countries are insulted, too. Britain, China, Mexico, Iran, Germany, Saudi Arabia each get the treatment. Add it all up and you’ve got literally billions of people Trump has gone after in terms ranging from dismissive to vulgar and beyond.

Even the middle aged, white, male, blue collar workers that love him so much and eagerly await the return of their factory jobs only have to look at the way he’s treated their counterparts who have come into his orbit to understand what Trump really thinks about them. He’s stiffed them all.

The veterans, who have been given a “hot line” to Trump so that “If he is elected President he will take care of these and all Veterans complaints very quickly and efficiently like a world-class business man can do, but a politician has no clue”, have also been stiffed. They get a recording. They’re told to email him. The emails are not answered.

There is almost no one left to insult.

The bottom line is that unlike the Lonesome Rhodes example, there is apparently nothing that Trump, or anyone else, can say or do that will make his followers finally understand how they’ve been fooled.

Trumpism and truthiness

Trump famously said he could shoot someone on fifth avenue and he wouldn’t lose voters. That was putting it a bit too strongly perhaps, but basically it has proven to be true. The vote is just a couple of days away now, and he is still standing and might even win.

Of all the things he’s done in his career and said during this campaign that could and should have disqualified him and turned the voters against him, the only thing that really made even a small dent was the whole “grab them by the pussy” thing, and even that lasted only a week or so.

From the beginning, the central plank in his platform, if you can call it a platform, has been a strong  anti-immigration stance – deport the illegals, build a wall, no Muslims allowed (morphed into “extreme  vetting”), and so on.

Today, The Guardian is reporting that Melania worked in the U.S. before getting a work visa. In other words, she was an illegal, taking jobs from Americans. I only read the headline, not the story, partly because I don’t give a shit about this, but mostly because I know that whatever the revelation, scandal, hypocrisy, or outright lie might be, it won’t affect Trump’s standing with his supporters one bit.

Yet, this is exactly the kind of thing that would sink any Democratic candidate faster than an errant email. Or at least dominate the news for weeks, like nanny-gate. But Democrats live in the fact-based world and must be accountable for their statements and actions. For Trump, it just isn’t going to matter at all.

All the old proverbs and litmus tests that used to apply in Republican presidential politics have been shown to be a smoke screen: “family values”,  strong military background, fiscal responsibility, never-talk-shit-about-other-Republicans, unshakeable anti-abortion credentials, and so on, were just slogans of convenience.

I’d bet anything that somewhere along the line, one of his three wives, his daughter, one of his Miss Universe employees, or one of the pussy-grabees has had an abortion that Trump paid for. I’d also bet that if this came to light today, none of his supporters would hold it against him even a little bit. But there’s no need to speculate on such things when the already-known list of Trump’s words and actions that violate Republican “principles” is so long.

No, for the Trump supporter, it’s always been about “truthiness”.

According to the word’s inventor, Stephen Colbert, truthiness means “how you feel is more important than what the facts are, and that the truth that you feel is correct is more important than anything that the facts could support”.

It was kind of funny and certainly true when applied to talk radio and FoxNews, but I don’t think many people took it seriously as something that could be ridden to the White House in the form of this toxic Trumpism.  How wrong we all were.

Adam Gopnik wrote this recently:

What can be causing Trumpism? We ask, and seek for an earthquake, or at least a historical oddity or a series of highly specific causal events. The more tragic truth is that the Trumpian view of the world is the default view of mankind. Bigotry, fanaticism, xenophobia are the norms of human life—the question is not what causes them but what uncauses them, what happens in the rare extended moments that allow them to be put aside, when secular values of toleration and pluralism replace them.

What really needs explaining is not why the Trumps of the world come forward and win. It is why they sometimes lose.

Who’ll be president next year?

On Tuesday either Trump or Clinton will be elected. But I don’t think that will be the end of it. The same forces that make governing impossible now (at least for a Democrat) will redouble their efforts.

The House Republicans, dominated by their obstructionist wing, are committed to the filibuster as the standard tool for opposing legislation, effectively changing the way we make law. They have successfully prevented a sitting president from even starting the process of filling a vacant Supreme Court seat, as was his right. They gutted the Affordable Care Act and then spent huge amounts of the taxpayers money repeatedly suing to remove the hollow shell that remained.

If Clinton is elected, impeachment proceedings will certainly begin immediately. Hillary Clinton used the wrong email server and that’s that. If that’s not good enough, she also “lied” when she uttered the word “video” while consoling families of the four individuals killed in Benghazi in 2012, or at least that’s what someone alleged. Nuff sed.

But what if Trump gets elected? Hang on just one second – I need to step outside a sec before I go on –

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Whew. OK. I feel a little better now.

So a President Trump would be allowed to govern, right? Not so fast. There is so much “Trump is a clown unfit for office” sentiment out there, and not just among Democrats, that an “Impeach Trump” movement might have something for everyone. It wouldn’t be hard to find a valid reason to impeach. I’m guessing they could start with improper business dealings with Russia, but it could be any of a hundred things.

If successful, they’d get the rock-ribbed, anti-abortion, midwestern, conservative, establishment Republican they’ve wanted from day one in Pence. He’d have none of the stink of the primaries on him and would restore some sense of decorum to the office. FoxNews would love it, too. They’d go back to persecuting Clinton or whoever they thought might challenge in 2020.

So who’ll be president in 2018? My magic 8-ball says all signs point to Tim Kaine.

 

Flying pigs clash with locusts

Chicago’s Near North neighborhood was virtually paralyzed this morning, Nov. 3, 2016. The streets were filled with the carcasses of pigs and locusts that had exhausted themselves while competing for air space over the Chicago area shortly after midnight.

Authorities are attempting to determine how pigs could have been flying in the first place, and whether there is any indication that this may signal further unprecedented, and perhaps ominous, events.

Bees Denounce Honey

In a related story, the Trump campaign today said that “Mr. Trump and the campaign denounces hate in any form.”

This was in response to the “warm embrace” of Trump by the KKK journal, “The Crusader”, which calls itself “The Premier Voice of the White Resistance”.

Observers also noted that in denouncing hate, the Trump campaign made significant progress in its effort to re-purpose as many English language words as possible in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Both “hate” and “denounce” have now been added to the list of words that no longer retain their original meanings when spoken by Donald J. Trump, the next president of the United States.

 

Emails to expose Hillary’s crimes

Until recently, I was a little confused by the whole “she’s a liar” and  “she can’t be trusted” thing. If you google her biggest lies, Benghazi seems to be thing most often cited Once you go past that, it all seems like “Hillary said it wasn’t going to rain on April 6, 2013, but it did! Another Clinton LIE!”

She “lied” about the motivation of the Benghazi attacks when she said early on that they seemed to be part of the whole hysteria resulting from that stupid youtube video. It’s hard to remember now, but there were all kinds of riots and whatnot that resulted from that video, and Clinton prematurely asserted that the Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans were killed, were part of the reaction to it. So did Obama, and just about everyone else at the time. They’re all LIARS!

Sometime later, everyone including Clinton realized that it was a pre-planned attack by the usual suspects. I could never figure out why some people are so exorcised about this “lie” – I didn’t see what benefit she would possibly derive from putting it out there. She correctly noted in testimony before Congress that nothing changes in terms of American preparedness or response based on which thing motivated the attack.

I recently found the explanation on some anti-Hillary web site: See, if she says it was al-Qaeda right out of the box, Obama loses the 2012 election. If she says it was that video, he wins and we get four more years of the Muslim-in-Chief.  I guess it was a lucky break for Hillary that the stupid video came along just in time for her to come up with the lie that kept Obama in office.

Or maybe she was really behind the video, too! Yeah, that’s it. I wouldn’t put it past her. After all, she did murder Vince Foster, as everyone knows. Ginning up a fake video is child’s play compared to that.

In my opinion, the new batch of emails to her aide Huma Abedin  will certainly reveal this and many other crimes. Here are my predictions for just a couple of the top crimes and criminal plans FoxNews will report about in the new emails.

1) Hillary has entered into a deal with the Chinese that will line her pockets. Communists will infiltrate our intentionally porous borders, and seek out and stab to death all puppy dogs. Clinton will receive $100 per dead puppy.

2) All firearms held by law-abiding tax-payers will be confiscated once and for all. Once the populace has been disarmed, every former gun owner will be required to undergo gender re-assignment surgery.

3) All Christian Republicans will be required to wear a yellow crucifix sewn to the front of any garment worn outside the house. Celebrations of Christmas will be against the law.

4) The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually planned and executed by Hillary. It was a false-flag operation designed to “Wag The Dog” to disguise the now well-known fact that the Clintons sold all White House furnishings, decorations, artwork, and other items belonging to the American people within days of their taking occupancy.

5) The Clintons have built a solid-gold Fortress of Solitude on a private island in the Ionian Sea, using proceeds from improper speaking engagements. It has been mysteriously deleted from Google Earth.

Had enough of the Clinton scandals? Let’s Make America Great Again!

 

I accept responsibility. To blame others.

Modern political dissembling may have been perfected by Richard Nixon. A really sweet example is his first Watergate speech, where he’s explaining to the country why Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kleindeinst, and Dean have resigned, and where he takes personal responsibility for the whole affair. In it, he says:

“For the fact that alleged improper actions took place within the White House or within my campaign organization, the easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign. But that would be a cowardly thing to do.

I will not place the blame on subordinates—on people whose zeal exceeded their judgment and who may have done wrong in a cause they deeply believed to be right.

In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility. That responsibility, therefore, belongs here, in this office. I accept it. And I pledge to you tonight, from this office, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice and that such abuses are purged from our political processes in the years to come, long after I have left this office.”

Wait, what? You think blaming subordinates would be cowardly. The responsibility is yours.  And you  therefore pledge to find out which subordinates are responsible. Nice! That man knew how to dissemble. He was the best.

It’s a little hard to compare Trump to Nixon is this area, because Trump isn’t really dissembling. When he says, without irony, “No one respects women more than me”, he actually believes it, so it’s probably not technically a lie. Trump might even believe he’s going to build a border wall and Mexico will pay for it. With this guy, who knows?

In any case, we’re learning that you have to let Trump be Trump – you can’t expect too much in the way of accountability. His surrogates are another matter, though. At some point someone has to explain the excesses, and this is where some heavy duty dissembling is going to be needed.

At a campaign event this week, a gentleman wearing a “Hillary for Prison” T-shirt, spotted members of the media and yelled at them “We know who you are! You’re the enemy!” and repeatedly chanted “Jew-S-A”.  Get it?  Not “U-S-A”, but “Jew-S-A”.  So clever.

No one is really surprised by this kind of thing in Trump-world. Just google “leugenpresse” for a little more on this.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the campaign “strongly condemns this kind of rhetoric and behavior.  It is not acceptable at our rallies or elsewhere”.  See, she figured saying “strongly condemns” is a lot more convincing than just saying “condemns”, so, you know, let’s go with that.

So, what can we look forward to here – what form will the strong condemnation and unacceptability take?  Kicking the next Nazi wannabe out of a Trump event, maybe?  Trump asking the crowd to dial it down?  Reminding everyone that his daughter is married to a Jew, converted herself, and is raising their children as Jews?  No, that won’t work – everyone knows Jewishness is in your blood, and you get it from your mother.

Well, I’ll end the suspense and tell you what to expect in the way of anyone taking responsibility here. Nothing. Movin’ on.  A surrogate dissembling for two seconds is all they have for you. Now, it’s back to the dog whistles and incitement.

We certainly can’t hold Trump responsible for the actions of others. Somewhere, Nixon is smiling.

Some people feel the rain.

Others just get wet.

I know as little about poetry as I do about wine, which is to say practically nothing. I took a wine class once to try to fix this. On completing it, I felt this cartoon accurately reflected my new level of knowledge:

wine-school

In high school, I was exposed to some poetry basics, like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Around a campfire,  “The Cremation of Sam McGee” seemed awesome, but that was about as far as I got.

My more literate friends gave me the side-eye when I said  Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, just sitting there on the page with no music, was the best poem I ever read. Fifty years later, it turns out I’m a damned poetry genius.

As with everything Dylan, getting the Nobel Prize for Literature stirs  controversy. Part of it is his initial apparent snubbing of the prize people, but most of it seems like envy and misunderstanding – critics being critical and needing to show how clever they are by putting something down. Like the man said, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand”.

I think maybe there’s something else going on as well. It’s like the legendary visit Steve Jobs made to Xerox PARC, where they gave away all their innovations, which  Jobs then used to revolutionize desktop computing. Jobs said he was so blinded by the brilliance of the first thing they showed him (the graphical user interface),  that he completely missed the importance of two others (ethernet and object oriented programming).

Maybe Dylan’s powerful vocal style and “finger-pointing” songs blinded the critics to his beautiful music and his brilliant poetry.

Dylan’s vocals were unique and authentic, so much so that many thought he couldn’t really sing. Mitch Miller was head of A & R at Columbia when they signed Dylan, and said he “didn’t see the genius in it”. They wanted beautiful voices and beautiful arrangements.

And sometimes you don’t realize how beautiful Dylan’s tunes can be until you hear them covered by someone else, and he’s been covered by more contemporary artists than anyone. This site catalogs something like 6000 recorded covers of 350 different Dylan songs covered by about 2800 different artists.

But the torrent of words, images, thoughts, dreams, and ideas that flowed from Dylan is the thing, above all else, that defines his brilliance, and has only now been accepted by the literary establishment (or at least the Nobel Prize committee) as “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

Dylan may be quoted more that any other English language source besides Shakespeare and the Bible. Dylan is the song writer most quoted by the Supreme Court. There are over 700 references to Dylan’s words in the biomedical journals database.

Everywhere you look there is a Dylanism. Today I saw something in the bookstore subtitled “The whole world’s watching”. I’m guessing the author didn’t know this is from “When the Ship Comes In”, a brilliant song and poem that has been largely forgotten, except that I just this second heard it on TV as the soundtrack to a VW Golf Alltrack ad.

So much has been written about Dylan that it seems silly to try to add anything new at this point. But if you’re looking for expert opinion on poetry, I can now say with confidence that you’ve come to the right place today.

Also, watch this space for my thoughts on why Gruener Veltliners and Rieslings co-exist so well in the terroir just west of Vienna.

Roger Cohen swings and misses

Again. As usual.

In today’s NYT column, entitled “Why Israel Refuses to Choose”, he admits that the two-state solution is probably not a real thing. As usual, his column is about what Israel needs to do about it. For “fairness”, also as usual, there are one or two sentences explaining how the “Palestinians” could help, but the article is about how Netanyahu is refusing to choose between having a small Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state, or having one large democratic state.

The current situation, you see, is Israeli “occupation”, which oppresses and humiliates the Palestinian people, and Israel needs to fix it.

First, I don’t know why it’s taken all these years for people to realize the two-state solution won’t work. How do I know it won’t work? Because we already had it and the Arabs didn’t like it.  Remember? From 1948-1967? We had the state of Israel in the pre-1967 borders and no Jewish settlements in the West Bank or Gaza. For “fairness” I should point out that the U.K. version is that the Jews started the 1967 war.

Second, there’s a problem talking about “occupation” as if we all agree on what we’re talking about. In the west, it has always meant Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza, the lands won in 1967. Of course we’re all against “occupation” of someone else’s land, at least when it comes to Israel.  But, in the Muslim world, “occupation” does not mean lands taken in 1967. It means lands taken in 1948, i.e. the State of Israel. Occupation ends when Israel ends.

Most people in this country don’t grasp this distinction and don’t think about this “fallacy of equivocation”. This is particularly true of ignorant but idealistic college students, e.g those  of Portland State who last week passed a resolution defining the founding of Israel as occupation. This is a great triumph for the Iranians and their clients, who have long sought to delegitimize Israel, as well as for anti-semites everywhere who have no problem with the idea of 50 Muslim states but can’t abide the idea of a single Jewish state.

Lastly, Cohen’s article is subject to the same problem that virtually all Tom Friedman’s articles are: the people he knows and writes about on the other side, the victims of this horrible occupation, are the elites. They are people just like us – educated, entrepreneurial people, often Christians (as in this instance), who would not object to living in a pluralistic society alongside others of different faiths.

If Israel had to co-exist only with people like the ones Cohen writes about, the conflict would have been over decades ago. It’s a little ironic that the same Palestinian factions that refuse to make peace with the Jews now would also purge their Judenrein paradise of Cohen’s friends as well, if they ever got the chance.

Mini-Me gets a scolding

This article covers a recent debate between Mark Kirk, Republican senator from Illinois, and his challenger, Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat who lost both legs piloting a helicopter in Iraq.

Kirk is recovering from a major stroke, and won’t release his health records. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has been falsely accused of various infirmities and has released hers.

But, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Especially when a Republican senate seat is at stake. So Republicans, in the main, are all in for Mark Kirk.

Kirk seems to be a small-scale Trump in a lot of ways.

Like Trump, Kirk exaggerated his own military record. Remember all that marching Trump did in school – it was more experience than guys who actually served?

Like Trump, he also diminished the real military record of his opponents. Remember Trump asserting McCain is no hero?

Like Trump, he questioned the ancestry of his opponents and detractors. Remember Trump keeping the Birther thing alive for five years? Or raising the issue of Cruz’s eligibility?

Like Trump, he makes absurd accusations about Obama, e.g. calling him “Drug-dealer-in-chief”, then denies he ever made them.

Like Trump, he has been told by his minders to stay on message and away from extemporizing to the media. Remember every day of the Trump campaign?

Like Trump he uses vulgar language and opines on things he should shut up about, e.g saying the unmarried Lindsay Graham is a “Bro with no ho”. Remember every hour of the Trump campaign?

Like Trump, many have pointed out he has no control of the filter between what he thinks and what he says. Remember every minute of the Trump campaign?

But here’s the best part: although it would seem that Kirk would be exactly the kind of incumbent Trump would want to help, he made the unforgivable mistake of un-endorsing Trump after the “Mexican judge” thing. And if there’s one thing that defines Donald Trump above all others, it’s his thin-skinned and petty inability to let go of a grudge.

So, Kellyanne Conway gave Kirk what he had coming, by tweeting (of course), under the title, “Senator Mark Kirk mocks disabled Iraq war vet Tammy Duckworth in debate for her mixed-race heritage.” :

“The same Mark Kirk that unendorsed his party’s presidential nominee and called him out in paid ads? Gotcha. Good luck,”

Stupid is the new smart

Full disclosure: I’m old.

I complained about the outdated voting procedure and the geriatric poll volunteers, and it probably seemed like I was saying I could do their job better than they were doing it. No, I would be worse. I’m older than any one of them and am no better equipped to do their job  – not sharper or smarter, don’t hear or see any better, don’t have more energy or compassion, and certainly don’t have the needed patience for dealing with other people for more than a minute or two.

In  Hombre, Fredric March explains to Paul Newman why he stole from the Indians he was supposed to help by saying, “It’s a shock to grow old.” For me, “It’s a shock to BE old” says it better. Growing old didn’t feel like anything at all. What nobody ever tells you is that you might find your 17 year old self living in a 70 year old body, with desires, tastes, opinions, and so on, pretty much unchanged.

At least, that’s the way it worked for me. Maybe it’s because I have no children and never had to really accept the role of “adult”. Maybe I’m just selfish or have some sort of arrested development syndrome or that I’m just a weird outlier of some sort. Not sure.

It’s the way others see you and what you see in the mirror one fine day that’s shocking.

It would be nice if there were some benefits to getting old, like maybe a little respect or deference from younger people. Historically and forever, any time someone said something like that, about how “kids today” have no respect for their elders, the response was always to quote Heraclitus or someone complaining about the same thing a million years ago, meaning nothing is different now and it will always be thus.

But in the internet age, something really is different. The casual mockery and disdain for old people is part of the DNA of the digital world, a world created and driven by young people, largely catering to their own needs and fashions. Ageism is really the only unchecked and even unremarked prejudice left in today’s hypersensitive world. There is no “safe place” for old people to avoid the “triggers” that everyone else agonizes over.

And any knowledge acquired through age is now irrelevant. Thanks to the internet, knowledge has become a completely de-valued commodity. There is no incentive to learn and retain information that is instantaneously available to everyone on their phone. You can’t impress your friends by reciting your memorized list of state capitals. It’s something no one cares if you know because anyone can know it at any time.

Once in a while I’d like to expose someone’s nonsense by saying something like, “Benghazi? What are you so upset about? I bet you can’t even tell me what country it’s in!” But all they’d have to do is glance at their phone to prove me wrong, even if I was right.

Stupid is the new smart.

And, it turns out, wisdom isn’t really something you get more of as you get older either. Experience is worth something, I suppose, but experience and wisdom are not the same thing.

For old white men, all this is exacerbated by the various political and social movements that aim to diminish and discredit the influence and achievements of old white men past and present. It’s a bummer for the Mozarts and Galileos, but it is what it is.

But I’m not complaining.  It’s now obvious to me that old white men actually don’t know anything more useful or valuable than anyone else. There is absolutely nothing that qualifies me to make a decision about anything that affects anyone else.

And I take this to mean that the same was true for just about all the old white men that came before me, and for any that now insist their birthright has been taken from them and want it back.

Double Down, Ramp It Up

Remember how easy it used to be to screw up your chance to be president (or even vice president)? Those were the good old days. Here’s a little visual quiz. See if you can remember what’s going on in each of these pictures. I’ll give you a slam dunk for the first one. Meet you below the pics.

hart

Gary Hart resigned his senate seat in 1988 to run for president. He was the front-runner in the primary when allegations of womanizing forced him to drop out. That’s right, allegations.

Ed Muskie shed a tear during a NH speech. See ya.

Gore sighed at some stupid thing Bush said in a debate. Elitist!

GHWB looked at his watch during a debate. Outrage!

Thomas Eagleton saw a therapist once for depression. Lunatic!

Biden defends himself against plagiarism charges. OK, you got me there.

When Trump entered the race last year, a lot of people were saying it’s just a publicity stunt like everything else he does. He’s so obviously unqualified, even he knows this can’t go anywhere. As time went on, his scattershot nonsense somehow resonated with Republican primary voters (surprise, surprise), but even as he gained momentum, the guys who thought they were actually running things did not take him seriously.

They said, “When the field slims down and people can unite behind an establishment candidate, this will change”. Then it was the “Anyone But Trump” movement, the brokered convention hope, and a few other fleeting intermediate manifestations of denial. Finally it was, “Now that he’s the nominee, he’ll pivot and show that he is actually ‘presidential'”.

Throughout it all, many people still held to the belief that even Trump knows he can’t do the job and, let’s face it, wouldn’t want to.  He will find a face-saving way to bow out before it’s too late. As the mountain of bullshit coming from the Trump campaign grew, the thought was that sooner or later he’ll say something so over-the-top that even FoxNews will turn on him and he’ll have to quit.

But it never happened. In fact there was so much jaw-dropping blather to refute, fact-check, and just marvel at, you didn’t have time to re-act to a particular thing before there were two more outrages to process. Re-tweeting shit from white supremacists? Mocking people with disabilities? Trump University? Buffett doesn’t pay taxes? Obama founded ISIS, not figuratively but literally? Ted Cruz’ father conspired to kill Kennedy?  Even starting a small list diminishes the importance of  the dozens of other “should disqualify” things you forgot about.

No one ever held him accountable for any of it. And if someone did try to call him on something, he never took a step back from it, other than the occasional “He was just kidding, and, anyway, why aren’t we talking about Clinton’s emails” from Kellyanne Conway.

It was always double down. And then ramp it up.

Finally Trump’s exit strategy reveals itself. The way out is clear. Go down swinging as hard as you can and take your 50 million “followers” with you to the next level.  We can look forward to Trump monopolizing what passes for political discourse in this country for the next four years, and making a ton of money in the process.  No one can take their eyeballs off the spectacle, and eyeballs are money, as our finest “journalists” readily admit. You might as well call the coming media empire the DHC Network – Delegitimize Hillary Clinton. “Lock Her Up” was just a taste of what’s to come.

Can’t “Make America Great Again”? No worries, it was actually “Ruin America for Personal Gain” all along.

The New Yorker Endorses Trump!

Just kidding.

They endorsed Clinton, of course. As if anyone gives an actual shit about who The New Yorker or anyone else “endorses”. But this brilliant piece says everything there is to say about it.

Early voting started on Monday and my local library opened its booths at Noon. I went over there at about 12:30 and there had to be 150 people in line ahead of me. I saw a guy came out of the booth with a red “Make America Great Again” ball cap. I guess it can’t be unanimous, even in Massachusetts. But as he passed by me on the way out, I saw that his cap actually read “Make Donald Drumpf Again”. Maybe it CAN be unanimous.

I don’t know why voting is always so much more inconvenient than it needs to be. Let’s just do it on the internet, like we do everything else. Some of the problem is the little system they have in place, and some of the problem is the geriatric volunteers there to “help”. Apart from the helpers squabbling among themselves about who has more pens, etc., you have to jump through too many hoops, and the helpers can get a little discombobulated.

When your turn comes, you step up to the first guy who asks your name, which he can’t hear. After a couple of attempts, you try to spell it out and he can’t find it on his list. Some time goes by and he finally turns his computer screen to you. You point out your name and even this takes three tries.

Then he prints out a little ticket, and says the next woman will help you. You take a step sideways, Soup Nazi style, and stand in front of the second woman who ignores you for what seems like two or three minutes while she shuffles envelopes around and mumbles.

Finally, a third woman next to her calls out to you, “Sir. Sir! Can you please step over here?”  Yes, yes I can. I can step anywhere I’m directed to step. She hands me an envelope and a ballot, tells me to write my name and address on the envelope, sign it, go into the booth, mark the ballot, put the ballot in the envelope and return to her for further instructions.

First, though, we have to find a pen.

Finally, I’m able to actually vote. I return to her, she inspects my name and address, directs me to place the signed envelope in the ballot box and hands me the “I voted” sticker. Whew. All done.

This system is meant to be an improvement over the conventional experience, which is check in with the voters-list guy,  get a ballot and fill it in, put your ballot in the box, and check out with the second voters-list guy.

In eliminating the second voters-list guy in favor of the woman who inspects your signed envelope, they quietly, and probably without too much thought, also eliminated one of the bedrock principles of our free elections: the secret ballot. For the first time, your ballot is now wrapped in an envelope with your name on it.

Well, at least it’s convenient.

Email from Oz

I don’t hear from my Australian friends too often – generally an email at Christmas with family news, or maybe when something big happens in the world of sports. This election season is different, though, and I’ve received a couple of distraught  messages like this one from a friend in Melbourne after the first debate (I’m  “Mad Dog”, his view of my approach to downhill skiing ):

Mad Dog

I turned on the last 20 minutes of the debate today. I cant believe what is happening over there. I wonder if Americans understand how this is being perceived in other countries? It is regular front page news here and the general tone is one of incredulity. How could America have finished up with this masquerading as a political system? Could anyone possibly vote for Donald Trump? Really? Has he any possibility of winning? The election, along with the gun debate and police shootings of black youth have really made America the laughing stock of the world, with the general view that this is a once great empire in serious decline.

I think it is really sad as I have great respect for America and the friends I have there. I also think there may be a silver lining at the end of this. Surely Trump is going to get smashed, drag the senate down with him and possibly the house. That way making the passage of sensible legislation that much easier and at the same time forcing the Republican party to ask themselves serious questions and stop this sort of thing ever happening again.

I did see Alec Baldwin on Saturday night live and enjoyed it! Also Robert DiNiro.

I told him I blamed the media for giving Trump a platform over the years, and the decline of what passes for journalism. I said, for me, the silver lining was actually the loss of “empire”, that I was sick of the toxic strain of worldwide liberalism that blames the U.S. (and Israel) every time a light bulb burns out somewhere in the world. Let some European country (or Australia!) step up and be the world’s policeman and scapegoat.

The real problems will begin after November 8th. Trump isn’t going away. Win or lose, fifty million people will have voted for him, and the opportunity to monetize that (and, of course, the diseased hypertrophic ego) will not be denied.  One way or another his media presence will expand and the excesses will increase.

Sleeping through the wake-up call

What’s the first thing you think when you hear, “Ralph Nader”? The first thing that comes to my mind is, “narcissist whose obstinacy led to the most disastrous presidency in our history”. It’s not right that this could be his epitaph, since he should be remembered for his lifetime of selfless consumer advocacy, and the genuine differences he made in our quality of life.

Nader also made many good points about our electoral process during his 2000 run for office. No one could argue with him that both major parties are beholden to corporate interests, that the American people deserve more and better choices, and so on.

But his blind spot was his insistence then (and now) that there was no real difference between Bush and Gore. Admittedly, it was a little hard to see why this wasn’t true at the time, as no one really knew much about GWB, and no one had a crystal ball. But the lesson should certainly have been learned in retrospect: one of the two major party candidates was going to be the next president and they were NOT the same.

The people who backed Nader were so convinced he was the only guy for the job, that a third of them said they would not have voted at all in a two-person race. When the dust cleared, Florida went to Bush by only 537 votes. Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. Exit polls asked respondents how they would vote in a two-person race between Bush and Gore.  47% of the Nader voters said they would choose Gore, 21% would choose Bush, and 32% would not vote.

Here’s the thing. 16 years later, this important lesson has still not been learned. The people who still plan to vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson at this point are just delusional. They know not what they do.

But what about the Bernie voters who now insist they won’t vote at all?

capture

In this random article,  a young genius-for-Bernie says:

“I could, at this point, care less if Hillary Clinton won or lost because I think that Donald Trump winning might actually be a wake-up call for the rest of the country, and a wake-up call for the Democratic Party.”

Kid, try to understand. The wake-up call is not Trump winning the presidency. The wake-up call is Trump winning the nomination.

Voting for Bernie

In Massachusetts, it doesn’t much matter if I vote in the presidential election. The state will go to the Democrat.

In 1968, Nixon ran on his “Secret Plan to End the War” (for any Millennials that might stumble on this, that would  be Viet Nam). By the time 1972 rolled around, the war was still going strong, and another 20,000  American boys had been pointlessly killed. But in the 1972 presidential election, Massachusetts didn’t have much company.

Image result for 1972 electoral college map

If you want to feel like your vote matters in MA, the primary is your best shot. This time around, I voted for Bernie. I knew Hillary would make a perfectly fine executive, but I thought she wouldn’t be a very strong candidate.

Running for president and being president require two completely different skill sets, and I knew Hillary had problems with the first. She just wasn’t a natural like Bill was. Not to mention the headwinds she’d face with the 25 years of made-up scandals that FoxNews would be yammering about. She could actually lose the election, despite being the best person for the job.

Voting for Bernie was a rush.  First of all, it would the greatest thing in the world if the U.S. elected a Jewish Socialist as president. It would finally take the idiotic stigma off being either.

But the main thing was Bernie was a guy who believed in the power of government to do good things, to solve problems, to lift us all up. He believed it sincerely and passionately, and deep in his Jewish Socialist bones.

Hillary is more a technocrat, and that’s good too. Life would be better with her as president than with any Republican alternative who would believe that government is never the solution, but always the problem. With the modern Republicans, you know what you’re going to get: an anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-science, environment-fucker that is beholden to Dark Money.

At least, that’s what we thought until the Ass-Clown-in-Chief hijacked the whole process. With Trump, the problem is that he has no beliefs, no principles, and, worst of all, no consistency. He only cares about “likes”, “upvotes”, or whatever the hell it is you get from Twitter. Every thought and “position” is transient. Don’t like what I said just now, how about the opposite?

It turns out Trump understands the job of running for president a lot better than anyone thought. But how well does he understand the job of being president? I know what the people of Massachusetts think, but what about the rest of you? Stay tuned…

The Sun Revolves Around the Earth

I was watching one of those focus group things after the third Clinton-Trump debate. They had a bunch of “undecided” voters in a room, and were asking them whether anything they heard would cause them to commit to vote for one of the candidates.

It’s been said before, but, really, who the hell could possibly be undecided at this point? You already know you’re dealing with people who don’t have it quite together. So, of course most people said, no, nothing had changed for them. And one guy said yeah, he was now voting for Hillary, and a woman said now she was voting for Trump. Everything is designed to be “fair”,  meaning the ridiculous false equivalency that we’ve been served up here must be maintained, or else, God forbid, someone will say the coverage is biased.

Anyway, her “reasoning” was along the lines of “they’ve had eight years, blah blah nothing changed something something America etc etc.”  I wasn’t really listening. Put it this way – I’m not undecided and this moron wasn’t gonna change that.

But I totally get the impulse to throw the bums out. Doesn’t matter if unemployment is down, the stock market is up, Guantanamo is moribund, we’ve got the only kind of peace we’re ever going to have in our lifetime, and so on. Give someone else a chance. Change is good. Let’s shake it up a little.

Except this time is different. The one guy is so obviously, manifestly, thoroughly unfit for the job, we just can’t let it happen. This time, we have to keep the bums in.

In this country, everyone is entitled to be as stupid as they like. It’s in the Constitution. I almost wrote “that’s what makes our country great” there. Problem is, the die is cast. It’s too late now. The worst just might happen. There’s nothing left to do about it. It could be President Trump.  If only the election WERE rigged!

Does anyone actually listen to this guy?

At a rally in Delaware, Ohio on Thursday, Trump said he would accept the election results if he won.

What a relief!

He also said, “And always, I will follow and abide by all of the rules and traditions of all of the many candidates who have come before me. Always.”

Really? Shall we start with your tax returns?

Ted Turner Started It – Background

Before cable TV, and CNN, everyone got their news through the three TV networks. At a prescribed time once a day, trusted figures like Walter Cronkite told the American people what was newsworthy. They didn’t interpret it. They didn’t spin it. There was no agenda, or at least that was the idea. News was not a profit center for the networks, but the fulfillment of an obligation to the government, “payment” for the use of the airwaves over which their for-profit programming would be offered before and after the news was presented.

Ted Turner came up with the brilliant idea of a for-profit 24 hour news network that was offered over pay cable and therefore not subject to existing constraints and conventions. The first gulf war revealed the enormous pent-up demand for up-to-the-second news. No longer did we have to wait until six PM to find out who was shooting at who.

So far so good.

But Turner also had another idea that most people didn’t recognize as a problem at the time – he wanted to present an international viewpoint to an international audience. This meant the occasional story from the Iraqi point of view or stories about how the U.S. military was actually fucking things up now and then.

This was a little jarring to some people who felt that the news presented by Americans to Americans should understand Americans to be the good guys. CNN employed journalists, yes, but before that they were Americans. Edward R. Murrow never presented any story from the German viewpoint. He wanted us to win, though this was not understood as “bias” at the time.

Enter Roger Ailes. In the news-for-profit era, increasing ratings was far more important than getting the story right. The line between opinion and reporting blurred. FoxNews created a winner with its hard right fact-free version of the news, easily surpassing CNN in viewership, which was now the only important measure of success.

The only loser was the American people. No longer did we all tune in to the same stories at the same time every day to learn what was going on. Now there was a 24-hour echo chamber in which we could all have our viewpoints validated without worrying about what might be “true”, or, perhaps, learning something. Just stay away from those “other” channels, the ones only idiots watch.

Ted Turner Started It – Conclusion

First the news/opinion line was blurred, but that wasn’t enough in the news-for-profit era. In the quest for ratings and dollars, FoxNews went the next step – news became entertainment.

Entertainment needs personalities, thus the rise of O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. Their formula was simple: from day one of the Clinton administration, it was all accusations all the time. Nonstop nonsense. Gays in the military. Hillary’s health care efforts. Finally they got their meal ticket in Ken Starr. “Whitewater” led to Lewinsky blow jobs, 24/7. A very effective peace-and-prosperity administration was undermined (and our power and influence internationally, as well). Shoot at bin Laden? “Clinton is just playing Wag the dog. Well hear more from Linda Tripp when we come back”.

And always they were at Hillary. “Tonight: Is she the evil murderer of Vince Foster or simply a misguided lunatic? A fair and balanced discussion after this.”

Because of the stain on Clinton created by Murdoch/Ailes, Al Gore has to run away from the excellent Clinton record. Bush slides in, resulting in eight years of willful ignorance, profligacy, and the disastrous shadow presidency of Dick Cheney. The middle east is destabilized for keeps.

Obama landslide results, but FoxNews never quits attacking. The terrorist fist bump. Birthers. Framing a middle-of-the-road moderate as a dangerous radical. All the while they have their eye on the Heiress Apparent. Liar! Benghazi! Emails! Goldman Sachs!

Now comes Trump. Again with Bill’s blowjobs. After 25 years of the made up scandals and carping on Crooked Hillary’s criminal empire, FoxNews can no longer dial it down. When Trump whips up the “lock her up” crowd, they have to buy in. They can’t now say, “actually, you know what, never mind, we didn’t mean it all these years. You’ve gone to far. What are we – Iran? In this country, we don’t imprison or execute our political opponents.”

The toothpaste is out of the tube. Thanks for nothing, Ted Turner.

The New Republic explains Trump

The Pro-Trump Intellectuals Who Want to Overthrow America

What a crock.

How about this instead: Just as digital technology has disrupted and redefined all other endeavors and professions – journalism, retail, travel, cab drivers, stock brokers, classified advertising, yard sales, radio broadcasting, telephones, photography, pornography, and so much more – it has also changed what it means to be a politician.

Trump does not need a war chest of hundreds of millions to press his case (or should I say his venomous babbling) via TV ads on networks that no one watches any more. He doesn’t need Gallup polls when he has “likes”, “upvotes”, and “followers”. He only needs his cell phone and Twitter. All is said in 140 characters. All is transient, forgotten, contradicted, amplified, and transmogrified seconds later in the next tweet. Nothing is vetted. Facts, or as the Straussians prefer, “truth”, matters not.

Idiocracy has given way to Twitterocracy. The death of the printed word signals the birth of Trumpism. Give the worst instincts and impulses of everyone and anyone a platform and megaphone equal in power and authority to the New York Times, and let the devil take the hindmost.

Trump and echoes of 1933

So many parallels. The cult of personality, requiring loyalty to the man not the state or party, the paranoia, the “crimes” of his opponents and the threats against them, the fear of the sycophants surrounding him, the personal isolation and lack of friends, the ignorance and misreading of world affairs, the impulsiveness and readiness to deploy arms, the xenophobia, the encouragement of minions to act against enemies to stifle dissent at rallies or polling places, the intemperate language, the legitimization of saying and doing things that the social contract has previously forbidden, the unending personal vendettas.

The damage Trump has done to this country’s prestige abroad is already huge. Win or lose, he’ll be making trouble at home for a long time.

“Bill Clinton did it, too, but worse”.

A. Bill Clinton is not on the ballot.

B. We already paid a high price for Clinton’s antics. Gore couldn’t run on the accomplishments of Clinton’s eight years because of the indiscretions, so we wound up with Bush instead.

C. “Why are you upset with me when you gave Bill Clinton a pass?” A pass? WTF are you talking about? They fucking IMPEACHED the guy!

D. Actually, “they” didn’t impeach him, Republicans impeached him, i.e. the same people now defending Trump. Democrats didn’t much care about personal things then and they don’t much now. It’s the Republican hypocrisy that’s at issue.

E. “My transgressions were words, Bill’s were actions.” Again, we agree we won’t vote for Bill Clinton in this election. But, to be clear, your words were bragging about your actions.

F. Clinton’s transgressions might have been a sin, but yours were a crime. Clinton’s “victims” were all in love with him – the sex was consensual. In your case, we’re talking about assault. None of your accusers consented. You, sir, are a pig.

G. “It’s just locker room talk”. Yeah, no. Not really. I’ve been in a few locker rooms over the years and I’ve never heard any one say. “I wish I had a lot of money so I could grab strangers by the pussy and they’d just let me.” Maybe that’s what they’re saying in Brunei or Riyadh or some such. I don’t know. But I’ve never heard it here.

H. And if I ever DID hear that said in a locker room, the last thing I would think is  “By Jove, that fellow should run for President!”. The first thing I would think would be, “Christ, what an asshole.”.

Visited the U.K. once – not going back.

I have always hated the class system. It is my conviction that the U.K. will never let go of it. It’s not just the worship of and gawking at “The Royals”. It permeates every thing they all say and do, from the school you go to to the accent you speak with. It’s the reason any ambitious Brit comes to America to further his career and no ambitious American goes to Britain.

And the class system, the idea of “breeding”, is also at the heart of the very deep and persistent current of antisemitism that I believe runs through daily life there. I was in London all of thirty minutes before a stranger made an antisemitic remark to me. Even in Munich, that never happened.

Roger Cohen, a Brit, is the NY Times’ most dedicated critic of Israel and most consistent apologist for Iran. He is one of the many who usually insist that strong criticism of the Israeli government is in no way indicative of any antisemitic sentiment. This of course, is nonsense, and in today’s column he finally refers to the “safe place” that Corbyn and Corbynism creates for the antisemites.

“That which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is.”

When the left turns against the Jews, all is lost.

You might ask, “Why single out the U.K. – you’ve been elsewhere in Europe many times and surely things are even worse in many other countries?” True. But it’s one thing to visit with your historic enemies, knowing exactly what they think of you, and another to visit to your closest cousin and ally who hugs you and smiles in your face, but actually hates you and talks shit about you when you leave.

Welcome to Dumbfuckistan

When you ask anyone in a Muslim country why they wouldn’t prefer a western-style government (aka “democracy”), they will say one of two things.

The first is that it puts the law of man above the law of God. These are the people that want Sharia law. They believe the brutal, arbitrary rule of mullahs is a better alternative than the brutal, arbitrary rule of dictators or kings. These people have no history or tradition of liberal democracy to refer to. Their model has always been, Big Strong Man seizes power, uses the wealth of the country as his own, stays for life.

The second is that elections are the equivalent of two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. This glib aphorism betrays a complete lack of understanding of what western government is all about.

Elections are only a small part of how we govern ourselves, not nearly the most important thing that defines the brilliance of the founding documents. Some of  the other elements we take for granted include:

Rule of law – not even the president is above the law.

No tyranny of the majority – minority rights are assured, particularly political and religious minorities. The wolves are not allowed to eat the lamb for lunch.

Independent judiciary – free from political control

Free press – you can say or print any opinion or dissent

Loyal opposition – all sides are part of the legislative process

Local and state administrations all living under a unified federal system. You can make your own local laws, but you can’t go crazy.

No armed factions – this is the one that plagues ALL third-world countries.

And then there is the most important of all – the peaceful transfer of power.

Whoever is elected is expected to be the president of all of us, even those who voted against him, and work for our common interest. We accused Saddam Hussein of gassing “his own people”, i.e. Iraqis. But he understood that “his people” were Tikriti Sunnis. He figured, to hell with the the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs.

In this country, when you lose an election, you smile, make a speech congratulating your opponent, and go away. This is the main thing that accounts for our political stability, our domestic tranquility, and the confidence of our international treaty partners. In “Palestine”, it makes no difference whether Abbas signs a peace treaty or not – you can bet Hamas will keep shooting.

Last night Donald Trump refused to accept that the election wouldn’t be rigged against him. For the first time, the peaceful transfer of power is not a given.

Welcome to Dumbfuckistan.