Tag Archives: elections

Political Rants

The student prince.

I missed NBC’s “Commander in Chief Forum” thus week, but caught the aftermath, and it wasn’t pretty. For one thing, never have a discussion about war and peace on any deck of a warship. It’s like, I don’t know, riding an H-bomb Slim Pickens-style, like it’s a bucking bronco. Second, don’t hire Matt Lauer unless you plan on making it some kind of variety show with a quirky meteorologist and people standing outside the window holding signs. Then, of course, there’s the problem named Donald.

The Student PrinceTruth be told, I have seldom been so gob-smacked by the stupidity of a presidential candidate. Sure, Dubya was a tremendous dumb-ass. Sure, Dan Quayle couldn’t spell and thought Mexicans spoke Latin. Sure, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson apparently thinks “Aleppo” is the name of a new recreational drug. Donald Trump is in a whole other category. Basic concepts about the nature of the world appear to be beyond his grasp. At the forum, he repeated his opinion that we should have “taken the oil” when we invaded Iraq. Asked to elaborate, he poked around the notion of leaving a few people there to stand guard over it, as if it was a small, contiguous, manageable object and not a massive natural resource that’s part of the geology of that unfortunate country.

Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist David Kay Johnston says that Trump knows nothing, and the first time I heard that I thought it was hyperbole. But it really is true: the guy simply has no knowledge outside of what he absolutely needs to know to hold himself upright. His comments at the forum were evasive, full of blather, devoid of meaningful content, and remarkably incoherent. And yet people still support him for the presidency. Some of those attending that event later commented that they were still “undecided”. I can understand the reluctance regarding Clinton. But this is no longer a policy argument. This is different. Trump would be a learn-on-the-job president with very few constraints.

The salient issue in this campaign is now how to keep a rich-ass crackpot away from the most powerful office on earth. That is a simple binary choice, whatever ideology you subscribe to.

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

Rights and wrongs.

Remarkable week in so many ways. Where to begin? At the beginning.

Attack at Attaturk Airport. The horrendous bombing in Turkey was reportedly the work of three Central Asian extremists, presumably with ISIS though the group has not as of this writing taken responsibility for the attack. Two things come to mind in the wake of this atrocity. The first is that the Syrian conflict is this decade’s gathering place for psycho-fanatical killers from every corner of the region, just as Iraq was in the 2000s, Bosnia in the 1990s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s; hence, jihadists from Uzbekistan as well as the gulf. Second, ISIS is in a love-hate relationship with the Turkish government like the one between the Taliban and Pakistan. This is a monster Turkey (with our support) helped to create, and tragically it’s preying on their good people. Sickening.

Tenney: NY-22's own little Trump cloneRestored Right to Choose. The Whole Women’s Health decision by the Supreme Court has moved the needle in a positive direction on the abortion issue for the first time in many years. I’m hoping that this is the death knell for this generation of TRAP (targeted restrictions on abortion providers) laws taking hold across the country over the past few years. What the anti-choice crowd will try next is anyone’s guess. Another example of why, on the basis of the Supreme Court alone, it is well worth bothering to get out and vote the right way this fall. Just saying.

Primary Colors. Speaking of voting, New York had its federal office primary … another in a series of primary days in the Empire State. What a stupid system! In any case, my home congressional district (NY 22) only had a contest on the Republican side. Our incumbent is the centrist Republican Richard Hanna; those vying to replace him in his party are all significantly to his right: Claudia Tenney, who once referred to Oneida Indian leader Ray Halbritter as “spray-tan Ray” on Twitter; businessman Steven Wells, whose ridiculous commercials appeared to suggest that he would keep ISIS out with a chain link fence at the border; and some other conservative asshole. Tenney won, so now our district stands a fair chance of lurching significantly to the right of where it’s been pretty much my entire life. Tenney will run against Kim Myers, a mainstream Democrat from the Binghamton area.

Suggest people get their asses out and vote for this Myers person, even if she’s not a white-hot progressive. The last thing we need is to be represented in Washington by an anti-choice bigot like Tenney.

luv u,

jp