Month: October 2016

We probably should have seen this coming, but the quadrennial dialectic over our country’s governance, has devolved into a shambles that makes a middle school food fight look profound. Let’s review:

Four years ago this week, a divided nation, torn between giving a second term to President Barack Obama or replacing him with Mitt Romney, was transfixed on the question of whether tax cuts scheduled to expire should be renewed. Four years earlier, the closing argument between Obama and John McCain was how to best recover from the country’s economic collapse. And four years before that, when John Kerry ran against President George W. Bush, the focus was on the Iraq War – was it a mission of folly or an essential predicate for stability in the Middle East?

And now? Forget about tax policy, job creation or wealth redistribution. The endgame for this 2016 presidential campaign has us slowly twisting. . .no, make that sinking, in a quagmire of pussy and Weiner. Up until Friday afternoon, Donald Trump was having another bad week. On Thursday, Miss Finland of 2006 became the twelfth woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, in effect adding to the validation of his “Access Hollywood” claims that he uses his star power to forcibly kiss women and/or grab their private parts. She said Trump squeezed her rear end while she and Miss Australia, Miss Puerto Rico and Miss Columbia posed for a picture. And that is as close as his campaign got to a discussion of foreign affairs this week.

By Friday, however, The Donald was suddenly a born-again believer in the sanctity of U.S. elections and his chances of securing the presidency. That’s because the FBI supposedly stumbled upon some Hillary Clinton related emails while conducting an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s exchange of sexually oriented texts with a 15-year-old girl. Or, as the New York Post headline put it: “Stroking Gun”, with a kicker of “Dickileaks: FBI Reopens Email Case”.

The unfortunately named Weiner, of course, is the now the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s top aides. The FBI had subpoenaed his laptop in search of underage sexting evidence and came across emails that might be related to Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state. From a strictly factual matter, of course, the FBI did not say it was “reopening” the closed investigation of Clinton’s email. Nor did it say that it found any emails that it had not already reviewed, or even if any of them came from candidate Clinton. But none of that matters much when you are Donald Trump and trying desperately to move the conversation away from the growing parade of women he allegedly groped, fondled, squeezed and/or forcibly kissed.

“This is bigger than Watergate,” the always hyperbolic Trump said yesterday. “This changes everything.” Actually, it changes absolutely nothing. It is merely one more piece of bizarre absurdity in a campaign jammed packed with them. The most important byproduct of a national election is the conversation it creates about the kind of country we want. How people should be taxed, corporations regulated, students educated, justice distributed. There has been nothing resembling a conversation this year. Just shouting: “Lock her up!” “Build the wall.” “Nasty woman.”

The only serious policy positions in this campaign have come from the Clinton camp because, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton has spent her political life as a policy wonk. She has always been more comfortable in the deep weeds of complicated issues than pressing the flesh on a rope line. But you wouldn’t know much about her positions unless you visited her website. Trump has ignored public policy altogether, relying instead on simplistic but dangerous solutions to complicated problems: “build the wall”, “keep Muslims out”, “America first”. That lack of substantive symmetry has made serious policy conversation impossible. Saying “wrong” seven times in one debate does not qualify as a national conversation.

In lieu of substance, campaign media coverage has focused, understandably, on the elephant in the room. That would be Trump and all of the off-the-wall stuff he says and does, whether it is promoting one of his hotels, introducing women who claim Bill Clinton groped them 30 years ago or repeatedly calling Hillary “crooked” or “corrupt” without a scintilla of substantiation. As soon as the FBI director mentioned the existence of Clinton emails, Trump immediately characterized his opponent as a modern day Lizzie Borden.

Meanwhile this week, it was just another day on the Trump rally circuit. According to the Raleigh News Observer, a young black man, a Trump supporter, wandered up to the stage of the Kinston, NC get-together, intending to hand his candidate a note containing some tips on how he could appeal to more African Americans. A black face stands out in the whiteness of Trump Land. Security was called and they hauled the man away, presumably for being black at a Trump rally, while The Donald goaded him with accusations of being a paid disrupter.

When the Weiner Gate dust finally settles, we will be right back where we always have been: the worst excuse for a presidential campaign in the country’s history. And a choice between a razor sharp woman who knows policy inside and out, but has made her share of mistakes over the years, and a racist buffoon who abuses women and has never developed a serious public policy position in his life. In my book, that’s an easy decision – even if those emails spell out top state secrets in Haikou.

I am, hopefully, less than 24 hours away from yet another surgical attempt to extricate the latest in a series of invasive protrusions on my upper back. As reported earlier, these benign-but-annoying tumors have been popping up faster than Donald Trump’s sexual assault victims. The current one expands its girth on a daily basis, rubbing up against a muscle and creating general havoc on my central nervous system. I’ve found some mitigation from a delicate and precise arrangement of pillows on the back of my office chair. That and 10 milligrams of Percocet every six hours.

It is from that opioid induced fog of critical thinking that I address you now. Reviewing my last few posts in this space, it occurs to me that I have been exclusively critical of the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. My late mother raised me with the mantra of “always look for the good in people.” In the heat of this most divisive presidential campaign, I regret that I have failed to follow her edict. I have not sought out the goodness in Donald J. Trump. With tomorrow’s scheduled surgery, I am one slip of the knife away from having written my final blogpost. So this one is for Mom: a compendium of Trump Goodness.

1. A Trump presidency would give President James B. Buchanan his first good night’s sleep in 160 years. Buchanan has long been regarded by most historians as the worst president in U.S. history. If elected, Trump, in a selfless act of charity, would relieve the 15th President of the burden of being the worst.

2. Trump is singlehandedly responsible for taking Billy Bush off the air.

3. Thanks to The Donald, business is booming for Taco Trucks.

4. He performed a miracle by making Mike Pence, a raving lunatic of a wingnut, look like the adult in the room and, as a two-for, spared the good citizens of Indiana from the possibility of a second Pence gubernatorial administration.

5. He prompted the Tic-Tac company to issue a statement in support of women.

6. Trump has done more than any other individual to spur Latino voter registration.

7. He has pulled record numbers of American Muslims into the country’s political process.

8. In the waning moments of print journalism, Trump framed a brand new issue for vigorous debate in the daily news huddle: “Can we use the word ‘pussy’ in a headline?”

9. He created unlimited possibilities for memes, country western songs and B movies with his delectable combination of “Nasty Woman” and “Bad Hombres.”

10. Finally, and best of all, Donald Trump appears to be on the verge of his most significant act of goodness – making it possible for the United States to have its first woman president.

And that concludes my pre-surgery act of contrition. The next time you hear from me, I shall be lumpless. And with nothing good to say about The Donald.

I am struggling to understand the universal shock-and-awe reaction to Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of this election. My lack of comprehension may well be a side effect of the pain meds I’ve been on this week, but I really don’t get it. Every major news outlet led its Wednesday night debate coverage with Trump’s remarks challenging the legitimacy of an election he appears to be losing.

The lede on the Associated Press debate story began with these words, “Threatening to upend a basic pillar of American democracy. . .” Serious politicians and thinkers of all political stripes have been shaking their heads in deep disdain ever since.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the defeated 2008 Republican nominee for president: “A concession . . . is an act of respect for the will of the American people, a respect that is every American leader’s first responsibility.”

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer: “This is political suicide.”

Veteran Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, saying Trump’s remarks were “disqualifying,” added, “The campaign is over.”

New York Times editorial: “Donald Trump turned . . . from insulting the intelligence of the American voter to insulting American democracy itself.”

Believe me, I am not rising to his defense. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the validity of the election process he willingly entered into was absurd and nonsensical. But I would submit, from the totality of the record, that, (a) we should not have been at all surprised, and, (b) he has repeatedly repudiated decency, respect for law and the American way of life. When it comes to graven depravity of political thought, Trump has mastered the art of consistency.

After all, The Donald has called for: the assassination of Kim-Jong-um and the families of terrorists, shutting down the mosques, deporting U.S. citizens whose parents entered the country illegally, reducing U.S. debts by defaulting on them and banning Muslims from entering the country. This is the candidate who wished for the housing market to crash so he could make money off it, kept a collection of Adolph Hitler speeches in a cabinet by his bed, refused to rule out using nuclear weapons on ISIS, fraternizes with avowed white supremacists on Twitter and urged supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies. And this is the candidate who secured his party’s nomination on the back of one word: “winning.” America doesn’t win anymore, he said. The other candidates were weak losers. Trump defined himself as a winner, the only person who can make our country win again.

Did we actually expect him to walk onto that final debate stage, down seven points and falling, and tell Chris Wallace that yes, of course, he would graciously concede this hard fought election to Hillary Clinton, should that be the outcome, and then pledge to do everything he can to help the Clinton Administration Make America Great Again? If he had, that would have been one hell of a story. First year journalism students are taught that it’s not news when a dog bites a person, but you’ve got yourself a story when a person bites a dog. In Wednesday’s debate, Trump merely bit himself, just as he has been doing since the start of this campaign. Had Mitt Romney or John McCain said the same thing about not recognizing the validity of the election process, it would have been a stop-the-presses moment. In 2016, it was merely Trump being Trump.

It is abundantly clear that this guy is, in every way, totally ill-equipped to handle even the lowest level of public leadership, let alone the presidency. He lives in his own world, constantly creating and revising a reality to suit him for the moment. He supported the Iraq War when he thought it was the thing to do, but denies it now. He supported abortion rights, but says he didn’t. He spent his life objectifying, denigrating and sexually assaulting women, but insists that “nobody respects women more than I do.” The very predicate of his presidential candidacy is that he, Donald J. Trump, is a winner. When he wakes up on Nov. 9 with less than 270 electoral votes, he will experience the worst bout of cognitive dissonance in his life. He will sputter with foolish excuses and scapegoats. Ultimately, it won’t matter. Our country is stronger than that. Under the law of the land and in our hearts, The Donald will be what we’ve always known him to be: the World’s Biggest Loser.