Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

Two heads.

The thing called Trump is attempting a new strategy this week: slap some lipstick on the race-baiting pig and hope that that’s enough to convince wealthier, suburban G.O.P. voters that they are not, in fact, racists themselves. How do you do that without abandoning the psychotic core of the party of Lincoln? Well, you hire Kelly Anne Conway AND Steve Bannon. Bannon will cavort with alt-right neo-nazis and Kelly Anne will deftly smooth it all over. It’s like that guy-with-two-heads movie – one head is a racist Ray Milland and the other is 1970s Rosy Greer. That’s the Trump campaign in a nutshell.

The Thing with Two HeadsConway is a good con artist. I suppose you could find her convincing if you choose to forget that in 2012, Trump was birther-in-chief, claiming that his operatives were turning up “unbelievable” stuff on Obama’s birth certificate – a campaign that was always about race, about being the “other”, about legitimacy. I suppose you could buy what she’s selling if you choose to forget the last year or so of fevered rhetoric – NOT gaffes or errors, but deliberate, repeated statements – about immigration, about foreign policy, about law enforcement policy. And I suppose you could believe Conway’s contention that Trump is a hard-working, honest fellow who treats people well if you haven’t been paying attention to the last 30 years of his very public life. I guess you can believe whatever you want to believe if you try really, really hard.

This is a tough sell, though. Fortunately for Trump, his opponent is Hillary Clinton, and the Clintons are experts at shooting themselves in the foot. Indeed, their drive to reclaim the White House has put us in severe danger of having Trump elected president. That, to my mind, is the most irresponsible thing Hillary Clinton has ever done, save perhaps her vote in favor of authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

Everyone knows that the Clintons are larger-than-life public figures, scandal magnets, and supreme triangulators on policy. In the current phase of American life, probably none of this matters. The political ground has shifted significantly since Bill was president; the Democrats are more weighted to the left than in the 1990s, and the future of the party is substantially to the left of Hillary. That gravitational pull is affecting her now and it would continue affecting her as president. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t feel that attraction whatsoever, and he will lean right to keep his flank happy.

So Clinton v. Trump is a match mad in hell. But let’s not resort to false equivalencies, like Michael Steele and others tend to do. Trump is just a dangerous person to allow anywhere near a position of authority, and anyone who supports him should have his/her head – or heads, in the case of Conway/Bannon –  examined.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

How crazy is too crazy?

By most accounts, it hasn’t been a good week for candidate Trump. I say “most” because The Donald has die-hard ditto-heads, like the ones attached to Limbaugh’s ample ass (and there’s probably substantial overlap between those groups). His problem has been his mouth, as usual, though that’s just the thing that makes noise. It’s the policy implications of a Trump presidency that scares the hell out of me, not the fact that he has terminal foot-in-mouth disease. In with Trump would come all of the worst players in the Republican establishment – the war starters, the torturers, and so on – plus a substantial cadre of tea party freaks to fill in all of the gaping holes in his action plan as president. He took zero interest in the drafting of the GOP platform, tossing it off to these rancid constituencies. The result has been a remarkably reactionary document, far to the right of any the party has drafted before.

More likely? Well ... maybe.Does this bother the Republican establishment? Not at all. They get a little bothered by his off-hand comments and rejoinders to everyone who looks askance at him. Overt racist policies, ethnic cleansing, etc., inspires mild concern. I think the turning point was Trump’s reluctance to endorse Paul Ryan and other prominent Republicans – that’s getting their attention, and now the party is openly looking for ways to rein him in or read him out. I don’t think either will happen, frankly. His fellow Republicans worry about their seats, not about the planet – they don’t care that this hyper narcissistic man-baby who seems to have a fascination with nuclear weapons might become president.

Maybe it’s because we’ve had potential world-destroyers in the highest office before, right? Like Truman, who contemplated bombing the border between North and South Korea. Or Kennedy, who nearly blew us up over the right to keep some obsolete missiles in Turkey – missiles we had already secretly planned to remove. Or the unabashed racist Nixon who wanted to use nukes on Vietnam. Or Reagan who almost touched off a nuclear exchange with Russia by repeatedly probing their perimeter defenses until a miscalculation on the Soviet side nearly sent the missiles flying.

Or maybe it’s because they’re too craven to care about anybody other than themselves. My money’s on that one.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Lookout, Cleveland.

That was quite a convention, am I right? I’m just listening to what seems like the closing strains of Trump’s acceptance speech, a veritable greatest hits reel of the more boring parts of his stump speeches. A lot more waving the bloody shirt, a full-throated exhortation of the new nativism, and a bizarre admixture of vague populist economic rhetoric (that is probably scaring the hell out of some in his own party) and core GOP positions on fossil fuels, school choice, military spending, etc. Over an hour at the podium and still going. Holy shit.

Most reactionary agenda ever.I can’t believe how badly they miffed that introductory video, though. An amazingly bad production, narrated by an ossified Jon Voight (last seen praising Giuliani), it seemed like a farce fit for John Oliver’s show. I had to shake my head a few times – it was a jaw-droppingly lame attempt to make Trump’s life resemble a Horatio Alger story, evidently written by someone in his inner circle, perhaps a family member. He really has to widen that circle.

Okay, so … the convention can be boiled down to a handful of items. One is that Hillary put the nation in peril with her email server. (No, seriously. Priebus said this on the last night.) The second is that Hillary killed those guys in Benghazi, just like Vince Foster. Third, Hillary and Obama gave $200 billion of “our money” to Iran as part of the nuclear pact (incidentally, no one in the corporate media to my knowledge has called bullshit on this yet – the money is not from the United States; it is Iranian assets from oil exports that were frozen as part of the ongoing sanction regime).

But I think what the whole grisly spectacle boils down to is what Trump outlined in his closing argument: we are in a firestorm of crime and terrorism, and it’s all because of them foreigners and their enablers in our political class. To hear Trump say it, you would think that criminal illegal aliens are all around us, striking at will, raping our grandmothers, etc. This is a toxic, xenophobic trope that has already done tremendous damage, from Latino and Muslim kids being harassed at school to thug-like attacks on adults of the Wrong Color. No one in the corporate media is calling this out, as far as I can see. The other side of the deadly coin is total denial on climate change. Trump is the king of drill, baby, drill. If he wins this fall, it’s game over for the climate, friends.

With respect to this election, we have to do the hard thing: convince as many people as we can to vote for the ass so that we can defeat the fucker. This is a test, friends – an intelligence test, to some degree – and we dare not fail.

luv u,

jp