Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Political Rants

Stays in Vegas.

We were treated to the third and final presidential debate this week, moderated by Chris Wallace of FoxNews. I can’t decide which I found more annoying – the ridiculous utterances by the candidates themselves or the clueless pundit commentary on what a great moderator Wallace was. Maybe MSNBC is planning on hiring Wallace, I’m not sure – it seems like they were blowing him pretty hard the morning after, even though he apparently cribbed questions from the Peterson Institute and Operation Rescue. “Partial birth abortion,” really? And no questions about climate change, of course. What a great news man.

Real sense of proportion.I could sit here an write about the obviously outrageous statements made by Trump over the 90 minute program, but you’ve probably heard enough of that. Suffice to say that the guy proves his unsuitability for the office of the presidency every time he opens his big yap. No one should need additional convincing, but alas … this is America. No, what astonishes me is some of what gets discussed (and what doesn’t get discussed) in the wake of these debates. That in itself is enough to make you want to rip your own head off. Take Syria. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, it’s pretty much a consensus that the Syrian conflict is a failure of the Obama administration on the scale of Bush’s Iraq invasion. Scarborough himself regularly refers to the conflict with terms like “holocaust” and “genocide”, which is frankly offensive.

I have never been a fan of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, but the comparison with Iraq doesn’t pass the laugh test. For one thing, more people were killed in the Iraq conflict than thus far in Syria, and that was entirely down to us. Syria is a civil war stoked by extremist remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq (thank you, Bush and Cheney) and other elements covertly supported by the US (thank you, Obama), facing off with an ossified authoritarian regime that knows only one thing: crush dissent. The Morning Joe crew is apparently disappointed that we didn’t roll into Syria in 2013 and turn it into an even broader international conflict, which would have resulted in open war with Iran, probably Lebanon, and maybe Russia. Would Scarborough want one of his sons to fight that war? Doubt it.

Nothing out of either candidate last night gave me any confidence that we wouldn’t get more deeply involved in this wretched civil war after January 21.  It’s up to us as a nation to make certain that the war fever we heard last night stays in Vegas and doesn’t guide American policy moving forward.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Burning man.

Watching the Trump campaign this week, I am reminded of a collection of bad movie scenes my brother curated back in the 1990s under the title, Destination: Brain – we informally referred to it as “The Greatest Hits”. As bad sci-fi movie aficionados, Matt and I loved to watch select passages from some of mankind’s worst films but found it tiresome to sit through 90 minutes of boring dreck just to get to that “sweet spot” of bad acting, cheap specials, horrible dialog, etc. Matt cut together Destination: Brain so that we could enjoy those poetically bad movie moments extracted from context, and yet given new meaning by their juxtaposition with other poorly-wrought scenes.

Winning!In any case, one of our favorite scenes was from a cheap-ass Frankenstein knock-off with a bunch of no-name actors and the clumsiest monster you ever saw. There is a climactic laboratory scene in which the monster’s arm catches on fire, and he runs around the lab, screaming, trashing the place from end to end. That’s what I think of when I look at where Trump has gone over the last week or so – a crazy-ass Frankenstein’s monster set on fire and spreading his conflagration to everything he touches. Better that he should do it during the campaign than in the oval office, am I right?

I am no fan of Ross Perot, but watching the news cover these serial sexual abuse allegations brings to mind the Texas billionaire’s studied but folksy rejoinder, “This is just sad.” Every minute spent covering this pissing match is another minute of not talking about the serious issues that face us. Not that the mainstream media and the dominant political culture need any excuses to avoid discussion of global climate change, or the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons, or the continuous state of war we’ve been embroiled in since 2001, or you name it. The notion that anyone should need more information about Trump’s past in order to vote against him is … well, it’s just sad. (The idea that any of these allegations would surprise any sentient American over the age of 25 is in itself beyond absurd.)

Tomahawk Thursday. We’re firing missiles into Yemen, nominally in response to missiles fired at our vessels in the Gulf. Of course, we are in so deep with the Saudis bombing Yemen into the stone age that the Houthi rebels (or as NBC calls them, the “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels”) do not distinguish between the U.S. and Saudi. You can kind of see why. That war sucks, and we can do something about it. The fact that we don’t is a crime.

Political Rants

Week that was 3.0.

It’s been another one of those weeks. Not sure how many more I can stand. This election is enough of a nightmare without the regular drumbeat of disasters, but I guess it always works like this on some level. Maybe I’m getting more sensitive in my dotage. In any case, this is what I’ve been thinking about this week:

Lives not mattering. Police shootings of black men in Tulsa, Charlotte, and outside of San Diego demonstrate that this is not getting any better and perhaps is getting much worse. Whereas there has always been a degree of indifference about these incidents, as more and more take place without just resolution, people will tend to become inured to the issue, just as they have with mass shootings. And of course, in at least two of these incidents, details about the dead man’s background have been made known, including brushes with the law. They did this with Patrick Dorismond back in the later nineties and it’s become a favorite tactic: If you’re black, you have to be an angel to deserve to live through a police encounter. That’s a high bar.

Lopsided matchupNot-so-great debate. I was witness to the nerve-wracking exchange between former secretary Clinton and Donald Trump, and I have to say that something about seeing the two of them on the stage of a presidential general election debate was disturbing enough even before they said anything. Clinton bested Trump, but that shouldn’t be hard. The guy literally knows nothing about anything. Honestly, the Republican party seems determined to convince people that there’s nothing to the presidency, that any dunce off the street can do the job. Count me among those who do not agree. That rambling wreck Trump would be a total disaster, to borrow one of his favorite turns of phrase. If Monday’s debate proved anything, it’s that.

Name one leader. Did I mention that Gary Johnson is a dunce? That should be obvious after blowing another softball question on MSNBC. With a brain that flaccid, he should have run for the Republican nomination. I don’t know how this guy ever ran a state without being possessed of even a little bit of knowledge about the world. What makes him attractive to hipsters must be the perception that he would legalize marijuana … or perhaps that he provides a titanic opportunity for irony.

luv u,

jp