Tag Archives: 2016 Election

Trump the Projectionist

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Seeing that Trump often refers to Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” got me thinking about projection. Not the kind of projection that used to happen in movie theaters, but the psychological kind. It’s theorized that people sometimes defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others. It’s an old idea that was later developed in detail by Sigmund Freud:

Freud considered that in projection thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one’s own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else. What the ego repudiates is split off and placed in another. [Wikipedia]

So let’s consider the principal criticisms, i.e. insults, Trump throws at Clinton.

(1) Hillary is crooked.

Of course, Trump might be the most crooked, corrupt person ever to win the presidential nomination of a major party. It’s been documented that, as a New York City real estate developer, he had links to organized crime. He’s accused by the attorney generals of various states of committing fraud. He’s bragged about paying politicians to do his bidding and the evidence indicates his contributions or bribes have paid off. He’s been sued thousands of times. He’s been fined by the IRS. He has a habit of not paying people who work for him, such as subcontractors who worked on his buildings. His bankruptcies have made it impossible to borrow money from American banks, so he’s borrowed large sums from Russian lenders who have connections to Putin and his brand of criminal capitalism. Trump says he’s contributed millions to charity, and probably taken tax deductions for those contributions, but in many cases he didn’t make those contributions at all or he made them with other people’s money. Plus he won’t release his tax returns. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been investigated over and over for years and years and nobody has found real evidence of any corruption at all.

(2) Hillary is a liar.

Every respectable commentator and fact-checker has pointed out that Trump lies more often than any other presidential candidate ever. He lies about being against the Iraq War, for example, when he wasn’t. He lies about contributions he’s made. He lies about statistics. He lies about who he knows and what he’s done. He has built his whole campaign on lies and bullshit. Clinton is a politician who says self-serving or misleading things sometimes, but less than most politicians do. You can look it up.

(3) Hillary can’t be trusted.

When people say this, it’s never clear what she supposedly can’t be trusted to do. Given her long public record, it’s undeniable that she would govern as a center-left Democrat, more liberal on social issues than some, and less liberal on military or foreign policy issues than others. Trump, on the other hand, has a history of not paying his debts. That’s why he’s sued so often. Certainly, his ex-wives and business partners shouldn’t have trusted him. Furthermore, he regularly flip-flops between policy proposals. Aside from a general animus toward certain groups and a vague promise to make America great, it isn’t clear what he thinks about anything, aside from how wonderful he is and how much he loves money. As many have said, there’s no telling what he would do as President, because he doesn’t know himself.

(4) Hillary is trigger happy.

Trump criticizes Clinton for voting for the Iraq invasion and for supporting our intervention in Libya. Yet he was in favor of both those actions until he was against them. Trump himself, however, has advocated war crimes, such as killing the families of terrorists and seizing Iraq’s oil. He also advocated bringing about regime change in Iran after their disputed 2009 election. Most recently, in response to provocations from Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf: “When [the Iranians] circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.” Quoting Chas Danner of New York Magazine:

So in one day, Donald Trump said that he both supported regime change and didn’t support regime change (even though he has always supported regime change), and then later suggested he’d go to war with one of the countries he is still willing to publicly support regime change in, just as soon as they … give us the finger from a little boat?

(5) Hillary is running a disgusting, issue-free campaign.

Every sentient being with any interest in American politics knows by now that Trump’s campaign has been in the gutter since he announced his candidacy. Aside from his amazing ability to lie in the face of all evidence, he’s insulted entire classes of people, as well as specific individuals, on a daily basis. Hillary Clinton has said she regrets saying that half of Trump’s supporters are deplorable (although many observers have pointed out that 50% or more of his supporters do indeed hold deplorable views). 

Regarding the issues, nobody has ever accused Hillary Clinton of being short on issue statements or policy proposals. She’s been criticized instead for being too caught up in the details of policy. Trump, on the other hand, has rarely said anything concrete about anything, including his signature proposals to build a very big wall, deport lots of people and keep out Muslims. Not surprisingly, one of his more specific policy proposals was to enact a tax cut that would theoretically save him and his children millions of dollars (assuming we know roughly how well he’s doing). Anyone doubting that Clinton has been more issues-oriented can visit their respective websites. Clinton’s features a wide-ranging discussion of lots of issues. Trump’s doesn’t.

On the issue whether Trump is projecting his serious inadequacies onto Clinton, it can hardly be said that the jury is still out.

We Should Let Garrison Keillor Pick the Next President

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Mr. Keillor shared his thoughts on Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign yesterday on Facebook. I don’t think he’d mind me reprinting what he wrote. Or you can click on this link to read it.

[Quote:]

I saw Hillary once working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She had learned the art of encountering the crowd and making it look personal. It was not glamorous work, more like picking fruit, and it took the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited to see you so by gosh you can treat them right.

So it’s no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. What’s odd is the perspective, expressed in several stories, that her determination to keep going reveals a “lack of transparency” —- that she should’ve announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed.

I’ve never gone fishing with her, which is how you really get to know someone, but I did sit next to her at dinner once, one of those stiff dinners that is nobody’s idea of a wild good time, the conversation tends to be stilted, everybody’s beat, you worry about spilling soup down your shirtfront. She being First Lady led the way and she being a Wellesley girl, the way led upward. We talked about my infant daughter and schools and about Justice Blackmun, and I said how inspiring it was to sit and watch the Court in session, and she laughed and said, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant.” A succinct and witty retort. And she turned and bestowed her attention on Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was sitting to her right. She focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times. I was impressed by her smarts, even more by her discipline.

I don’t have that discipline. Most people don’t. Politics didn’t appeal to me back in my youth, the rhetoric (“Ask not what your country can do for you”) was so wooden compared to “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” so I walked dark rainy streets imagining the great novel I wouldn’t write and was still trying to be cool and indifferent well into my thirties, when other people were making a difference in the world.

Hillary didn’t have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesn’t do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Don’t give up. It’s not about you. Work for the night is coming.

The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.

Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now they’re in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks they’ll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We don’t operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.

Someday historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back fifty years from now and if I’m wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.

[Unquote]

Keith Olberman Has a List of Trump’s Offenses

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But the list only has 176 entries. Olberman could have easily made it 200.

You can both read his list and watch him read it here.

This Election Requires a Comedian to Cover It

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Samantha Bee, previously of The Daily Show and now of her own show, Full Frontal, has a problem with the way journalists and “journalists” have been covering our presidential election. She’s funny and, more importantly, willing to say what rational people have been thinking for months now.

If you’re concerned about what might happen to America and the world starting on January 20, 2017, you should watch these YouTube videos and share them as widely as possible, especially where registered voters will see them.

Part 1 (less than four minutes):

Part 2 (five minutes):

 

Sgt. Joe Friday Lays It on the Line

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A brief reference to the 1955 movie Pete Kelly’s Blues, which starred Jack Webb and Janet Leigh, and for which Peggy Lee received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, inexorably led me to the following clip. It’s from an episode of Dragnet, the long-running TV show that featured Mr. Webb’s immortal performance as Sgt. Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In this scene, Sgt. Friday gives it straight to a smirking con man who’s been caught impersonating a member of the LAPD (it’s hard to imagine a more heinous crime in Sgt. Friday’s eyes):

As YouTube videos often do, this led to an idle thought:

Where’s Jack Webb now when we need him to give it straight to a certain smirking con man who’s hard to avoid these days?

It wasn’t long before an online pal responded under the heading: 

Where Jack Webb Is Department

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Proving once again, he pointed out: There’s never a cop around when you need one!

PS: Does anyone doubt that Mr. Bookman, the library cop on Seinfeld, enjoyed the occasional episode of Dragnet when he wasn’t out rousting book criminals?