Lock Who Up?

Lock her up!

• Had problems with the way she used email. 

Lock him up!

• Boasted about, and may well have committed, sexual assault.
• Withheld payment from family-business contractors who did work for him, then dared them to sue him. 
• Ran several businesses into bankruptcy and left investors holding the bag. 
• Ran a totally bogus “university” – currently the target of lawsuits by people who were taken in by the scam – that had on its faculty and staff people with personal bankruptcies, foreclosures, credit card defaults, and/or tax liens in their past, as well as “teachers” who did not have college degrees and were not licensed to broker real estate.
• Has filed over 4,000 lawsuits in three decades. 
• Has tried to subvert the American democracy by claiming the electoral system that has served the country for over 200 years is “rigged” and therefore invalid. 
• Has refused to disclose his tax returns – documents that may well show business ties to Russia, a country whose leadership he has expressed admiration for and a country that has thousands of warheads trained on U.S. cities. 
• Mounted a blatantly racist and totally false “birther” campaign targeting the President of the United States 
• Counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas. 
• And on… 
• And on… 
• And on.

Donald Trump. Real Estate Man and Failed Casino Operator,, Sets the Generals Straight

The pentagon tells us that more than 50,000 bombs have been dropped on ISIS targets by U.S-led coalition drones and warplanes in Iraq and Syria in the last two and a half years or so, killing some 25,000 ISIS militants and causing ISIS to relinquish massive chunks of its self-declared caliphate. The announcement that the fight to take back Mosul was beginning came just hours after ISIS lost Dabiq, a village in Syria they had said was where Armageddon would play out in an apocalyptic battle with infidel forces from the West. (It was reported that ISIS forces fled Dabiq when Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey and reportedly advised by U.S. Special Forces, pushed into the town.)

In recent months, ISIS has lost a number of top leaders in U.S. airstrikes, including its chief of external operations, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, in and Wa’il Adil Hasan Salman al-Fayad, the minister of information and a member of the ruling Shura Council. One administration official reportedly described the situation as “a rapidly crumbling caliphate… under more pressure than ever before.”

So goes the administration’s “feckless” – Mike Pence’s favorite new word – foreign policy generally and its program for squashing ISIS in particular, as the coalition moves on the last ISIS stronghold of Mosul. As for the attack on Mosul, the United States, it is reported, has played a key role in coordinating rival Iraqi forces for the operation, and with the recent addition of another six hundred troops, the U.S. now has more than five thousand personnel deployed in Iraq and another few hundred Special Forces in Syria.

Meanwhile, as Josh Rogin wrote in The Washigton Post: “For months, Donald Trump has been promising to be tough on the Islamic State and has criticized the Obama administration for not taking the fight to the terrorists. Now that the battle of Mosul is underway, Trump has become a cheerleader for the failure of the mission while promoting a conspiracy theory that it’s all about him.”

Trump’s conspiracy theory: The Obama administration began the assault on Mosul “because Obama wanted to show what a tough guy he is before the election.”

Trump has already declared the Mosul operation a failure – a “disaster” in fact -- but still has not said what he would do to combat ISIS that has not been done, other than he would “knock the hell out of” them. (So much more sophisticated than the planning of the senior military advisors that has eviscerated ISIS over the past couple of years.)

Josh Rogin: ‘Trump’s statements on how he would combat the Islamic State have been all over the map. At various times he has said his plans are ‘secret,’ endorsed the torture of suspected terrorists, pledged to kill their families and promised to 'take the oil,' which makes no sense at all.”

As for Trump’s talk – well-known military tactician that he is, due, presumably, to his attendance at a military prep school -- about famous WWII generals turning over in their graves at the failure of the U.S. military to make the attack on Mosul a surprise, there’s this from the news/opinion site Vox:

Preparing to launch a massive military operation to retake Iraq’s second-largest city is not the kind of thing that can be done stealthily. It’s literally not possible to move tens of thousands of troops, heavy artillery, and other equipment to the outskirts of the city a couple of hours before the attack is supposed to begin. Making matters even harder, the 20,000 to 30,000 troops that will take part in the offensive aren’t part of a central, unified command. Moving fighters from so many different groups — some members of a formal army, some just tribal fighters with minimal training — and all of their weapons and equipment into place around a city as big as Mosul takes a while. And the idea that all that activity would go unnoticed by ISIS fighters in Mosul and the surrounding areas beggars belief.”

(In this connection, there have been a good many comparisons to the invasion of Europe on D-Day, which, critics point out, was kept a secret by the allies as to where and when it would occur. If that could be done with an operation as massive as D-Day, why not Mosul? Well, the “where” part of the secret-keeping is going to be a problem for this line of argument, since any attack on Mosul would take place at…well, Mosul. [Where else? Cincinnati?] As for the when, see the above paragraph.)

Trumps posturing on this subject has been nothing short of buffoonish. He has no clue what he’s talking about, and makes it up as he goes along. He has no experience in this area, no knowledge, no expertise. But, of course, that doesn’t stop him from offering up his ridiculous opinions on the matter, and it doesn’t stop his followers from siding with him on this as opposed to the dozens-to-hundreds of senior military staff who actually know what they’re doing. ("Doh! Why didn't we think of that?" they prob ably said when told about the sneak-attack stratagem.)

As all of this is going on in the Middle East – that is, as dreams of an Islamic State, or
Caliphate, are being relegated to the dustbin of history – efforts to inflict damage and casualties in western countries by people affiliated with ISIS or inspired by it, and by jihadists and assorted other members of the lunatic fringe, will doubtless continue. But that’s not about battalions deployed in the Middle East and the taking of territory by way of large military operations. It’s about hard and smart work by the intelligence communities and police in the targeted countries, including the U.S. Stamping out ISIS on the other side of the world will not stop these attacks. Perhaps nothing will stop all of them. But police and intelligence work, not tough-guy promises to “knock the hell out of them,” are our best hope.

Separate but Equal?

It’s remarkable how some people sigh over the condition of the election as a whole every time Donald Trump says or does something off-the-wall, which he does daily; as if Clinton were somehow equally responsible for Trump’s irresponsibility. I can’t imagine the fictions people tell themselves about Clinton to create this false equivalence. The idea that Trump and Clinton are somehow equally reprehensible is itself reprehensible and completely at odds with the facts. The overwrought hatred of Clinton that would lead even otherwise reasonable people to prefer the worst candidate in the history of American politics is not rational. Once again, then, a listing (doubtless incomplete) of things that Clinton has not said or done…

...claimed without evidence that the election is rigged; accused his opponent of being on drugs; refuses to show his tax returns but apparently didn’t pay any federal taxes for many years; called for negotiating with mom and pop on the redemption of their U.S. savings bonds; imagines that he saw thousands of people on TV celebrating 9/11; characterized Ferguson as one of the most dangerous places on earth; made weirdo phone calls bragging about himself while pretending to be someone else; married and discarded glamour models and made sexually suggestive remarks about his offspring; favors starting a trade war and a worldwide recession by slapping an astronomical tariff on Chinese goods; calls for the creation of a Gestapo-like government force to undertake a massive, years-long round-up and deportation of undocumented families; believes members of one religion should be put under surveillance and possibly put in camps; thinks Mexican people are rapists and wants to build a staggeringly expensive 2,000-mile wall that would be the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system; believes that illegal immigrants are pouring over the borders to vote in the November election; believes American soldiers should kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists; ran a fake “university”; drove five businesses into bankruptcy leaving investors and creditors with nothing, and routinely stiffed contractors; mocked a war hero who was shot down and imprisoned for five years and callously dissed the parents of a fallen American army officer; ridiculed a person with a severe disability; threatened to crush anyone who criticizes him in print through libel lawsuits; questioned Barack Obama’s country of birth and lied about his birth certificate; acquired his foreign policy expertise by “watching the shows;” accused Ted Cruz’ father of complicity in the murder of JFK; implied the Clintons murdered Vince Foster; counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas; referred to disliked members of the opposite sex as fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, inferred that Megyn Kelley asked about those characterizations only because she was menstruating; bragged about grabbing women’s crotches and trying to seduce married women, and stands accused by multiple women of uninvited and unwanted spontaneous touching/kissing/grabbing.

Remember now: Hillary Clinton didn’t say these things. The mainstream media didn’t say these things. The "rigged system" didn't say these things. Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, said these things.

Donald Exposes the Banks

Hillary Clinton, we learned this week from Donald Trump “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.”

Whoa! Did you, his supporters, know about this? How about, you, surrogates – yeah, you, Giuliani, Christie, Gingrich, Spence, et. al. Since you support Mr. Trump, can we assume that you agree with him on the existence of this international cabal? And if you agree with him, you must have known about it all along. Right?

Well, you should have told the rest of us, because this is serious business, this secret society that controls the universe and is out to get your guy because he’s on to them. And where is Fox News when you need them? Why haven’t they reported this? And the Wall Street Journal! Especially WSJ, which is supposed to be good at ferreting out stories about banks planning to destroy the sovereignty of the United States. Or maybe he’s just springing this news on y’all, too. In any event, the United States of America will soon be no more, if Clinton and the banks have their way. Yikes. And make no mistake: The lamestream media didn’t say this. Mr. Trump did. (By the way, don’t you just love the term “lamestream media”? Super clever play on words. I know a guy who always refers to the Clintons as “The Hillbillary.” So funny.)

Anywho…I guess we can all be grateful that Mr. Trump has turned his attention to these grave matters – viz., the end of days for America at the hands of Ms. Clinton and her banks -- because not so long ago he had other things on his mind, as recounted in the Washington Post:

“One of the other allegations this week comes from Tasha Dixon, a former Miss Arizona, who has said in multiple interviews that Trump strolled into the contestant's dressing area even when they were naked — a claim echoed to BuzzFeed by contestants in the Miss Teen USA competition, where competitors are younger than 18 years old. Trump's own comments on Stern's show, as reported by CNN over the weekend, show him copping to that very same type of behavior at his beauty pageants.

“’I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,’ he said, per CNN. ‘And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore I’m inspecting it. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.’”

Hmm. Nothing creepy about any of that, right? It hasn’t gotten as much attention as the pussy-grabbing thing, but, well, there it is.

Speaking of the pussy-grabbing thing, some of Mr. Trump’s folks have said, hey, he’s running for president, not husband of the year. Or words to that effect. What an excellent point! I’m certain they would have made the exact same point about Barack Obama when he was running for president, if Obama had said this…

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it…I did try and fuck her. She was married…and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married…Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look…You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…and when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want…grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

He’s running for president, not husband of the year. That’s what Republicans, the religious right, and evangelicals would’ve said about Obama. I’m sure of it. It’s just locker room talk, after all. I’m sure Sean Hannity would have said, in Obama’s defense, “King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud!” Which is what he said about Mr. Trump’s sexual escapades. So let’s don’t get all bent out of shape over Obama, I think Sean would’ve cautioned. For crying out loud.

By the way, I don’t know if my bank is in on this international conspiracy thing, but if it is, it can kiss my checking account goodbye. This I can tell you. Believe me.

(This just in: Carlos Slim, the Mexican – Mexican! – billionaire is behind the New York Times part in the Great Conspiracy to bring down Mr.Trump.)

Just Before the Second Debate

This from a previous TVFF posting:

“This is a good time to ask Trump supporters, who hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when confronted with the litany of blockheaded ideas and outright lies their hero is guilty of, what their reaction would be if, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were found to be in business with Russia, had expressed admiration for former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, and encouraged Russia to spy on America. Or if they had called the American military a disaster, mocked an American flyer who was a prisoner of war for five years, and belittled the parents of a dead soldier. Answer: Spitting, fuming apoplexy. Hannity et. al would be shouting the T word – as in treason – from the rooftops.”

Now imagine what their reaction would be -- and what would be the reaction of evangelicals who make the unimaginably ludicrous excuse that Trump isn’t running for pastor, he’s running for president -- if Obama were caught out, on video and audio recordings, saying incredibly coarse and demeaning things about women and advocating, or possibly even admitting to, sexual assault. One cringes at the thought of the public crucifixion that would follow. And yet we hear Trump's cowardly enablers acknowledging this latest chapter of the freak show that is the Trump campaign, but arguing that we should forgive and forget; as if this were some isolated aberration where their guy merely went off the rails a little bit, as opposed to what it actually is: The latest in a long and depressing string of ideas and statements that range from the ugly to the nonsensical and which add up to a degenerate, narcissistic, uninformed blowhard who should not be allowed anywhere near our White House.

The cowardly enablers are many but the reference here is specifically to Christie, Giuliani, Ryan, and now Pence, all of whom, to save and advance their own political prospects, have consistently offered up loud and ridiculous-on-their-face excuses for Trump’s pratfalls; or like the pathetic Ryan, acknowledge the abject horrendousness of the various incidents but kiss them off by expressing the forlorn hope that Trump will do better later. This, instead of doing what they’d be doing if they had any spine and were less willing to sell out the country for their own political fortunes: Withdraw their support and tell the guy to take a hike.

It is as if they are saying the following: “Here’s a guy who refuses to show his tax returns but apparently didn’t pay any federal taxes for many years; called for negotiating with mom and pop on the redemption of their U.S. savings bonds; imagines that he saw thousands of people on TV celebrating 9/11; characterized Ferguson as one of the most dangerous places on earth; made weirdo phone calls bragging about himself while pretending to be someone else; married and discarded glamour models and made sexually suggestive remarks about his offspring; favors starting a trade war and a worldwide recession by slapping an astronomical tariff on Chinese goods; calls for the creation of a Gestapo-like government force to undertake a massive, years-long round-up and deportation of undocumented families; believes members of one religion should be put under surveillance and possibly put in camps; thinks Mexican people are rapists and wants to build a staggeringly expensive 2,000-mile wall that would be the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system; believes that illegal immigrants are pouring over the borders to vote in the November elction; believes American soldiers should kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists; ran a fake “university”; mocked a war hero who was shot down and imprisoned for five years; ridiculed the disability of a newspaper reporter; threatened to crush anyone who criticizes him in print through libel lawsuits; questioned Barack Obama’s country of birth and lied about his birth certificate; acquired his foreign policy expertise by “watching the shows;” accused Ted Cruz’ father of complicity in the murder of JFK; mplied the Clintons murdered Vince Foster; believes the American electoral process is rigged; counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas; referred to disliked members of the opposite sex as fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, inferred that Megyn Kelley asked about those characterizations only because she was menstruating, and bragged about grabbing women’s crotches and trying to seduce married women…

…and he's the guy we want to be president of the United States!”

No rational person would vote for a person like that. But support for Trump has never been about rationality. It has always been about middle-finger, take-this-job-and-shove-it, you’re-not-the-boss-of-me, you-think-you’re-so-smart resentment.  His hard-core supporters simply don't care what he says or what he stands for, as long as he seems to be sticking it to the various forces they believe are out to get them; even though, as Senator Paul Sarbanes once said about Ronald Reagan, a working man voting for him is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. The same can certainly now be said about a woman, working or not.

Donald Trump, Tax Genius

Good morning Trumpkins. Today’s discussion is about your man as a “genius” for navigating tax law in such a way as to avoid paying up for a couple of decades. First of all, of course, he isn’t one. His accountants and lawyers did all the heavy lifting here and Trump himself had nothing to do with it, His battalions of little people take care of matters like that. In fact, one of the accountants said he had a hard time getting the boss to pay attention as he explained what he was up to tax-wise. A lawyer, Jack Mitnick, who oversaw Trump's income tax returns in the mid-1990s, said he, Trump, had little interest in the tax code and didn’t understand it. So much for the genius theory. And neither are the accountants and lawyers geniuses. They’re tax experts who are paid to know the ins and outs of tax law. Nothing genius about it. It’s their job.

Meanwhile, as your favorite billionaire was ingeniously using these laws to avoid paying any taxes, I paid taxes to the tune of many thousands of dollars. I’ll bet you did, too, as we struggled to make ends meet, raise children and pay for their schooling, and all the rest. That’s the system your guy (obviously) favors and wishes to continue and strengthen: He pays nothing, you pay a lot. I guess if he can get you to vote for him under those circumstances, he is a genius of sorts. What working class people see in him, except for maybe authoritarianism, is beyond understanding.

Trump said in the debate that his not paying taxes makes him smart and that even if he did, the money would be squandered. Which brings us to a discussion of the bigger picture when it comes to taxes.

Taxation is not a commie plot. We citizens pool our money in the form of taxes to buy for ourselves collectively things we want and need but which would be impractical to buy individually: Roads and bridges, police protection, schools, national defense, and so on. No question, some tax dollars are not well spent; there is graft, corruption, and mismanagement. And lots of pork (with every bit as much of it going to Republican districts as Democratic ones.)

But that doesn’t translate into tax revenue as a whole being “squandered” thereby making it smart to not pay. The things mentioned above and countless others are things we wish to have, and they do not come from our fairy godmother. We have to buy them. That’s why good citizens – citizens with a mature sense of perspective and a sense of gratitude for the blessings of this country and its civilizing institutions, look past the inevitable mis-spendings and pay their fair share willingly.

Without a doubt, a major component of anti-tax orthodoxy – of the squander theory – is the idea of “welfare.” When Tea Party types carp about big government and high taxes, their most favorite shibboleth, they’re really talking about government taking money away from them and handing it over to their less responsible fellow citizens. Big government is code for what they like to call income redistribution -- a process by which money is snatched from the hard-working and given to the lazy and stupid. For many, that process, fictional though it may be, characterizes the government’s tax-and-spend activities in their entirety.

There are unquestionably some lazy/stupid/corrupt people getting government money in this fashion. But all of the government’s so-called “safety net” programs add up to less than 10-percent of the federal budget. Of that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these programs include: The refundable portions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which assist low- and moderate-income working families; programs that provide cash payments to eligible individuals or households, including Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor and unemployment insurance; various forms of in-kind assistance for low-income people, including SNAP (food stamps), school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance, and help meeting home energy bills; and various other programs such as those that aid abused and neglected children.

So, yes, some of our federal tax dollars go to “welfare.” Ninety-percent of them do not. Most of those go to national defense (16%) and social security/medicare-medicaid (49%). (If you are against these programs, social security and medicare, because you believe them to be “socialistic” then you should step up to that and call openly and vigorously for their repeal, and not hide behind the specious “I paid into it” argument.)

In normal times. Trump’s that-makes-me-smart remark is one that would echo down the corridors of time and be cited in the history books as the thing that ended the candidacy of a major political party’s nominee for president. But that hasn’t happened and probably won’t, simply because Trump’s irresponsible and ignorant ideas and statements tumble forth daily, so that any one ridiculousness tends to not get the attention it deserves. Today’s cancels out yesterday’s.

Trump surrogate – i.e. shameless toady -- Newt Gingrich says if Trump wants to win this thing he has to get a different song, other than "I gotta be me." But it will never happen. After all, where's the fun in that? The idea that he wants to serve the people as president of the United States is laughable. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is ego feedback. What he wants is to bellow orders and spout off his ridiculous ideas and opinions while his acolytes vigorously nod their heads – “You’re absolutely right about that, Donald,” they say as he opines that the earth is flat and the moon is made of green cheese -- and as his hot-eyed rally people, which, as Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, includes “his accumulation of Alt-Right cheerleaders, white supremacists and swastika devotees” -- scream their adoration.

In her WSJ editorial, entitled “Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome,” Rabinowitz concluded with this thought: “It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.”

Perspective

When you hear the words “Well, I just think…” in response to a query about what someone has against Hillary Clinton, you can be sure you’re about to enter a fact-free zone presided over by vague generalities and rootless, disconnected ideas that don’t describe any reality.  As in, “I just think she can’t be trusted” the most frequently cited objection to her by the I-just-think people.  What that actually means is anyone’s guess.  My guess: It means nothing at all.  She can’t be trusted to do what, exactly -- refrain from stealing your money?  Propose legislation that pleases you? Come back from the grocery store with the right change?  What?  Be specific.

It’s important to understand that Hillary Clinton is not running to be your banker, your lawyer, or your doctor.  Or your mom.  Or the dictator of America, as her opponent, Donald Trump, clearly thinks he is doing.  She’s running to be the chief administrative officer of the United States – the person who executes, but does not make, the laws of the land; who proposes, but does not pass, legislation that comports with and advances her view of how our world ought to work’ who uses her bully pulpit to try to persuade the people of the rightness of her vision for the country; and who presides over the conduct of our relationships with other countries. Neither she nor anyone else is going to “run the country,” in the phraseology of the ill-informed.  In our system, as the saying goes, the president proposes and the congress disposes.

So the question isn’t the vague, can she be trusted.  The question is, can she be expected to discharge her duties and responsibilities competently. As for her policy ideas – her view of the world – she has shown herself consistently to be a generally non-controversial, middle of the road candidate, very much in the mainstream of traditional American politics, and not an extremist or a radical.  It is certainly reasonable – at least, under normal circumstances – to not want to vote for a candidate of that description; but anyone who would thus turn their vote over to Donald Trump -- who is an extremist and a radical, not to mention a racist and a preening, egocentric fool, and who surely sets a record for untrustwothiness by way of his astonishing lies and reversals -- has lost all perspective. (How, according to the polling, more people see Trump as trustworthy and Clinton as untrustworthy, is one of the great mysteries of the universe.)

A generous interpretation of this “I don’t trust her” phenomenon is that what these people are really saying is that they don’t “like” her, in the same emotional but irrational way we like or dislike movies stars – that there’s just something about her looks or bearing or presentation or overall aspect that rubs them the wrong way, and that’s all they need to know.  A darker interpretation is that these people don’t trust her because she’s a woman, whose pretty little head can’t be expected to deal competently with the complexities of political leadership and who is, in any case, flouting the proper role and place of women.  As in, who does she think she is?

These things can explain the antipathy of Clinton’s political opponents, but less so the visceral anger and irrational hatred directed at her from some sectors, including, obviously, many Republicans but even some Democrats, primarily the Bernie Sanders obsessed. Oft-cited here are matters like Whitewater, the Clinton Foundation, email problems and, especially, Benghazi – words which they draw like a gun as though their meanings were self-evident and the proof they offer indisputable. In fact, they are ginned up controversies, one and all. Whitewater was an investment in a proposed Arkansas resort on which the Clinton’s lost money; the Clinton Foundation has not been shown to have been involved in any serious improprieties; the email “scandal” is one in which two-thirds (just a guess) of the people who recoil in horror at the very mention of it and cite it as proof positive of Clinton’s unworthiness, aren’t exactly sure what a server is; and Benghazi, the subject of multiple investigations at multiple levels over years and costing tens of millions, proved only that a bunch of thugs attacked a U.S. diplomatic facility while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

None of this is to be understood as a ringing endorsement of Hillary Clinton.  My impression of her before the wretched alternative appeared on the scene was of an ambitious politician with no particularly interesting or inventive policy ideas who wanted to be president not because she had a sense of mission but because she wanted to be president.  That may or may not be a valid description of her now, but it doesn’t matter. If nothing else, her election needs to be seen as preventative.  And there is urgency to that need.

That’s what the importance of perspective in this matter is all about. Hillary Clinton may not be perfect and may not be one’s beau-ideal as a presidential candidate, but neither is she a know-nothing crackpot who understands nothing about our democracy and who would ban a religion, bomb children, kiss up to a Russian dictator, refuse to disclose tax and health information after explicitly promising to do so, subscribe to cockamamie conspiracy theories including the reprehensible “birther” thing, and…well, on and on.  Still, we continue to be subjected to ludicrously false parallels in the news media, in a bizarre effort to not appear one-sided, as in “Sure, candidate A murdered 15,000 people with a machine gun, but, hey, candidate B neglected to disclose a bout with the flu in 1986.” 

Remember this, as the campaign winds down: Donald Trump – dangerously ignorant, bigoted man-child -- is the person who will be your president if, to indulge your irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton or your over-inflated sense of moral superiority, you vote for the Green Party candidate or the Libertarian Party candidate, or for nobody at all, 

Two Ships

The Kaepernick kerfuffle is a great example of the mistake people in the media and elsewhere make over and over again in talking about 1st Amendment freedom of speech rights: Conflating freedom of speech with freedom from criticism of one's speech. The first amendment right to free speech insulates us from government interference with our right to say what we want – government being the key word here. Government, under the constitution, cannot use its power to either prohibit or punish speech. In other words, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking or saying.

It absolutely does not insulate us from the consequences of what we say, or render us immune from criticism for it. It doesn’t insulate us from being told by our fellow citizens that we’re full of you-know-what when we flap our gums about this or that. If it did, then calling Donald Trump a jackass for the things he says (as just one example) would be a violation of his constitutional right to free speech. Freedom of speech says you can stand on a street corner and rail for the deportation of all left-handed people, but it does not protect you from being booed off your soapbox or pelted with rotten tomatoes for doing it. You can advocate for a whites-only policy at your workplace and not be put in jail for it. But you will be fired for it, and that’s not a violation of your free speech rights under the constitution.

Yet we see this scenario played out repeatedly in the Kaepernick Caper: One guy says he thinks Kaepernick is dead wrong; the other guy comes to his defense by citing his free speech rights. Two ships passing the night. No one -- except perhaps the wingnuts who see lack of sufficient devotion to mom and apple pie as treasonous -- questions Kaepernick’s right to do and say what he did. But that doesn’t mean he can’t or shouldn’t be criticized for it. It doesn’t mean that the content of his free speech can’t be disagreed with. And it certainly doesn't mean that criticizing him or disagreeing with his content or tactics equates to questioning or attempting to abrogate his rights.

As for the substance of his complaint: Although I assume his intent is to do his bit to keep the spotlight on the problems/conditions he is concerned about, I think his criticisms would be better directed at the individuals who perpetrate the conditions he deplores, as opposed to “the country” which, by way of its constitution and its ideals, is on his side in this issue. It’s not a country that does the things he rightly deplores. It’s people.  Kaepernick might avoid being accused of grandstanding and of calling attention to his moral superiority if his criticisms were more carefully targeted.  The notion that all of this is more about calling attention to himself than it is about expressing anguish over a serious social ill was reinforced when he showed up in public wearing clothing that seemed to pay homage to Fidel Castro, whose regime routinely murders political opponents and would not hesitate to throw Kaepernick in jail if it did not like the content of any public stance he might care to take.

Which brings us to the larger, and somewhat touchier, question of why it’s felt necessary to even have these displays of patriotism before sporting events – why sports at this level are so tied up with patriotic sentimentality. There’s nothing wrong with it, I suppose, but there’s nothing particularly right with it, either. There’s no natural connection between patriotic theater and large sporting events. We don’t do these things – wave the flag, play the national anthem, put color guards on parade – before movies or church or kids soccer games or algebra class. Why big-time sports? It’s a mystery. For more on this subject, here’s a link to an article by Sam Borden in the New York Times…

Senator McCain?

Donald Trump has now said he will not support Senator John McCain's re-election campaign in Arizona. And Senator McCain has not said, as of this writing, he does not support Trump's candidacy for president.

Wow.  What's it going to take?

By now, we are all drearily familiar with the spinelessness of figures like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, both of whom, in the service of their own political survival, have said in effect, “I consider Donald Trump an ignorant fool and I want him to be president of the United States.” One is tempted to again quote Joseph Welch who inquired of demagogue Joseph McCarthy back in the 50’s if, at long last, he had any sense of decency. But that would be of little use because they have clearly demonstrated -- by their continued support of a man they consider to be a danger to our democracy -- that they do not, and that their allegiance is to their political careers.

If this pair have set some kind of record for profiles in cowardice, what to make of John McCain, who has said essentially the same thing and more about Trump, and, in addition, has been personally insulted and mocked in the most egregiously cruel and supercilious manner by him and yet continues to lay supine before him and urge the voters to make him president.

McCain was an American flyer on a combat mission over North Vietnam in 1967 when his plane was brought down by enemy gunfire, a surface-to-air missile. He came down in a lake in the middle of Hanoi, breaking both arms and one leg. When he was pulled from the lake, his left shoulder was broken by a gun butt and he was bayoneted in the foot. Unspeakable horrors followed over the next five years in Hoa Lo prison including beatings, disease, and solitary confinement. He was repeatedly offered his freedom in exchange for saying positive things about his captors and their cause but refused unless the other American POWs were also freed.

Donald Trump, who dodged the draft during that era with student deferments and one medical deferment for bone spurs on his heel, who did not serve in the armed forces let alone in combat, and who claimed the expensive military-themed high school he attended gave him more training than many people who served in the actual armed services, called McCain a loser, and said, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

McCain’s response: Trump should retract statements about preferring military veterans who weren’t captured. “What he said about me, John McCain, that’s fine. I don’t require any repair of that.”

That’s fine?

More recently, of course came the Khizr Khan business in which McCain was again personally if indirectly insulted and belittled by Trump, by way of Trump’s dismissal of another casualty of war, Khan’s son Humayun

But instead of withdrawing his endorsement of Trump and/or demanding he withdraw from the race for this seeming last straw and for the vast and growing collection of other lies and stupidities of which he is guilty, including the recent suggestion that a foreign power spy on the U.S., McCain paid homage to Humayun Khan’s sacrifice, and said Trump ought to set a better example.

“It is time for Donald Trump to set the example for our country and the future of the Republican Party,” he said. “While our Party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us.”

He should set a better example?

"I claim no moral superiority over Donald Trump,” McCain went on. “I have a long and well-known public and private record for which I will have to answer at the Final Judgment, and I repose my hope in the promise of mercy and the moderation of age.”

Well, if John McCain thinks the pearly gates are going to open wide for him because he supported for president a person whose ideas and policies he despises and who he knows would be bad if not disastrous for America, all in the service of his own re-election in Arizona…well, I can’t speak for St. Peter, but I don’t see it happening. Nor is this the first time McCain has put his own electoral interests ahead of those of the country. Remember, it was McCain who would have put the airhead Sarah Palin a heartbeat away -- not because he thought she would make a good vice-president or president, but because he thought her presence on the ticket would help him get elected.

The ultimate irony and insult: Trump's announcement that he will not back McCain in Arizona. So the question is: At long last, Senator McCain, what’s it going to take?

Who knows? Maybe the people of Arizona will show more courage in this election than their senior senator has, and do the right thing.

 

Trump Supporters: What's it Going to Take?

This is a good time to ask Trump supporters, who hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when confronted with the litany of blockheaded ideas and outright lies their hero is guilty of, what their reaction would be if, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were found to be in business with Russia, had expressed admiration for former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, and encouraged Russia to spy on America.  Or if they had called the American military a disaster, mocked an American flyer who was a prisoner of war for five years, and belittled the parents of a dead soldier, as Trump has now done to Khizr and Ghazala Khan. Answer: Apoplexy. They would be shouting the T word – as in treason – from the rooftops.

And let’s be crystal clear with regard to whether he is lying about this Russia question. Donald Trump Jr. said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.“  Donald Trump Sr. said, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

So, that’s a lie.

Here’s another one: On national television he said, speaking of Putin, “I got to know him very well.” A week or so ago, he said, “I never met Putin.”

So, that’s a lie.

Conservative columnist George Will said this: “Speculation about the nature and scale of Trump’s financial entanglements with Putin and his associates is justified by Trump’s refusal to release his personal and business tax information. Obviously he is hiding something.”

The list of Trump “ideas” that are foolish, uninformed, bigoted, dangerous, and just plain goofy is a long one and gets longer every day.  And now this: Trafficking with an adversary of the United States – an adversary that has nuclear weaponry trained on American cities and that for decades has repudiated America and our way of life -- in a way that would send Trump’s  acolytes into orbit if it were done by a Democrat; and, now disparaging the father and mother of an army officer who was killed in combat.

So the question at long last for Trump believers;  What’s it going to take?

Bernie or Bust

The speech given by Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention was much praised and rightly so.  But the three most on-point words spoken during the first day of the event were these:  “You’re being ridiculous.”  As is now well known, they were said by comedian/actor Sarah Silverman to Bernie Sanders obsessives who were being, in fact, ridiculous – and, as is their wont, childish, boorish, and self-indulgent.  Their threat – in keeping with their insufferable self-righteousness and moral superiority -- to hand over their vote to the ignoramus Donald Trump in order to indulge their irrational, over-the-top hatred of Hillary Clinton, is truly astonishing.  A few points for them to consider:

1.Hillary Clinton is the nominee, not Bernie Sanders. That’s over with, and no amount of acting out will change it.

2. The overwhelming majority of Democratic voters – and for that matter, the overwhelming majority of the American people – do not know what the Democratic National Committee is or what it does or why it exists or if it exists, and are not influenced in any way by its internal machinations, including snarky email traffic among its functionaries about Bernie Sanders.  Sanders lost by millions of votes and that had nothing to do with the DNC or any election shenanigans of any kind by anyone else.  It had to do with the will of the voters. Period.  The nomination was not stolen from Sanders.  It was lost by him.

3. The jeering and the booing and the weeping and the long-suffering eyes-to-the-sky gazes betray a remarkably juvenile understanding of how the electoral process is supposed to work in a democracy, and how the two-party system is supposed to work within that process. The idea here is to  select a person whose view of the world is most like ours to run for office against the person whose view of the world is least like ours.   It’s not a team sport where we root-root-root for our side in the service of an uncritical emotional attachment to it and fall desperately in love with its star player.

4. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are politically much more alike than they are different, and they are both vastly different from Trump.  That’s what this election is about.  What it’s not about: Your failure to get every single thing you want, exactly as you want it, or you will stomp out of the room in a fit of pique.  The big picture here is that the Sanders-Clinton side is about inclusiveness and a reverence for the democratic process, and the Trump side is about divisiveness and authoritarianism, even fascism.  Get over yourselves and your petty disappointments and your haughtily judgmental verdicts regarding the sins of Hillary Clinton and get some perspective about who and what she is and is not.

Here is what the history books will say about fascist America: It came about because a group of disgruntled Democrats swung the election to Donald Trump by voting for him to show their anger over the failure of their candidate, Bernie Sanders, to win their party’s nomination.

Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's odious remarks about a "Mexican" federal judge, House Speaker Paul Ryan can circumlocute until the cows come home but what he has said amounts to this: “Donald Trump is a racist ignoramus.  I think he should be president of the United States.”  How’s that for a profile in courage? If Trump were not the GOP nominee, Ryan and other prominent Republicans – John McCain, Marco Rubio, Bob Corker, et. al. -- would think of him, if they gave him any thought at all, as an aging crackpot, a sort of Scrooge McDuck, harmlessly tweeting racist rants and cuckoo ideas from his Trump Tower aerie. As it is, however, they see the enacting of the GOP agenda, not to mention the preservation of their own jobs, as important enough to back for president a person they would otherwise see as a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe.  Particularly pathetic in all of this is McCain, who has declared his support for a man who mocked his 5 and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Meanwhile, in the rich and varied menu of misstatements, lies, and delusional assertions that have come out of the mouth of Mr. Trump, it’s easy for any one of them to more or less disappear into the gloaming – to get lost in the crowd, as it were. But one of the assertions he has made -- one that his followers presumably accept and that generated some pushback but not the gasps of incredulity it should have – is surely among his most demented. That would be the one that claims unemployment in the U.S. is currently in the vicinity of 20-percent. In the great scheme of things, acceptance of this idea by Trump folks is in keeping with the overarching belief on their part that everyone but their man is lying and only he sees through the lies.  But good grief, Trumpalators, when it comes to unemployment in America, do you not believe your own eyes?  Where are the bread lines and soup kitchens?  Where are the Hoovervilles?  Why is no one selling apples on street corners?  Where are the caravans of Okies headed west in a desperate search for economic salvation?  Because I assume you’re aware (aren’t you?) that in the worst year of the Great Depression, 1933, unemployment was about 24-percent. Trump’s assessment (which, of course, is based on nothing whatsoever), puts us right there, right now.

Holy smokes! If we are to take your guy at his word – that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been compiling data on employment and calculating the unemployment rate the same way for over 100 years and through twenty-plus Democratic and Republican administrations, is now lying – we have to conclude that unemployment is at Great-Depression levels.  This despite any tangible evidence in the world around us of mass unemployment; despite the fact that consumer spending recently hit a six-year high; despite more than 30 consecutive quarters of economic growth; despite the fact nobody you know is involuntarily unemployed; and despite the fact that the automotive industry is enjoying its best years ever – ever – in no small part because of robust sales of the vehicles of choice for many of those supposedly out-of-work Trumpistas: pick-up trucks.

And where the heck is the Wall Street Journal when you need it? I know, I know, WSJ is part of the mass media establishment; but it is no fan of the Obama administration or of Democrats in general or, especially, of the party’s economic agenda and overall philosophy.  One would think it would be indefatigable in its quest to dig out the truth if it suspected that unemployment was four times higher than that which is being reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  But no!  Not a peep out if it, or out of any of the other right-leaning media outlets.  Or for that matter, any other media outlets at all.  Not one of them is onto this. Not one of them has reported what would be the story of the century – that unemployment is at depression levels and nobody knows it.  Except, of course, his Donaldness.

No, wait. Actually, thousands of people know it.  They would be the green-eye-shade types who work at the BLS and assembled the employment numbers.  They know the facts, but were sworn to secrecy at a mass meeting in a cave somewhere.  “I know you all know the truth – that unemployment is at about 20-percent,” President Obama said to the assemblage, “but I’m asking you to tell everyone that it’s 5-percent.  Okay?  And don’t tell anyone I said this.  Mum’s the word.”

In Trump fantasyland, Fergusom is among the world’s most dangerous places; muslims  danced on TV to celebrate 9/11; a giant wall is going to be built; millions of people are going to be rounded up and deported, the Clintons killed Vince Foster and Ted  Cruz’s father killed JFK; the government is going to “negotiate” the redemption of U.S. Savings Bonds; and there will be a 45-percent tariff on Chinese goods. And unemployment is at 20-percent.  However, here on planet earth, the U.S. unemployment rate is at 4.7-percent.  Just like the labor department says.  You could look it up.