Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

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

Newsitis.

Time to face facts: I’ve got newsitis. Can’t take my mind off of the ongoing cycle of awful public policy stories. In homage to this obsession and temporary ADD, I will run through a few top of mind items and attempt to keep them brief.

Motor mouth cityNuclear summer. Here in New York State, our always forward-looking government recently decided to sink up to around $7 billion over the next dozen years to subsidize our aging nuclear power plants, particularly the Fitzpatrick plant up in Scriba, NY. Part of an effort to advance so-called “clean” energy, we will now be further subsidizing this moribund industry, underwriting the transfer of this 40-year-old plant to another massive electrical utility. Meanwhile, in my home county, they have canceled a major solar energy generation project. What’s wrong with this picture? (Actually, what’s right with it?)

His ass said it. Trump is making that pivot all right… pivoting right into where he was before. I think some of the pundits got a little excited when he delivered that sorry-sounding speech to the Detroit Economic Club last week – an overly long amalgam of wild, unfounded promises and tired old GOP favorites, like the three-tiered tax system and the 15% top rate for business. Pappy tax cut is back, folks! Then, of course, being a good cartoon neo-fascist, he piped up with this:

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if — if — Hillary gets to put her judges in.

Being the bad comedian that he is – essentially, all set up and no punch line — it’s not hard to see how he would get around to this. He’s playing the crowd, of course, and many standup comedians riff on a certain topic, try to get a little edgy. Suggesting assassination is just where you would expect a comedian/politician to go.

Assholes vs. Fuckers. There was a fair amount of Clinton news this week as well. A lot of it was just email fodder about what amounts to the usual networking bullshit anyone who has worked in an office runs into almost constantly. Other stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation is more problematic, and I have little doubt that there would be plenty for the GOP to mine through four or eight years of Hillary. I tend to think concentrating on the Clinton’s finances is shaky ground for Trump, seeing as his own “billionaire” finances are pretty much opaque, but we’ll see.

As for me, I’m still voting for the assholes. Why? Because they’re better than the fuckers, that’s why.

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