Tag Archives: 2016 Election

Good News for a Change (We May Have Finally Hit Bottom)

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Maybe it was the insane spectacle of a TV morning show host much more interested in Hillary Clinton’s emails than 100 other possible topics during a nationally broadcast interview that was supposed to deal with national security and who should command the most powerful military in the world. Maybe it was the realization that her dangerously unqualified opponent might win in November if the media keeps treating him as if he’s a normal candidate and a normal person.

But the editorial board of the influential Washington Post finally concluded that “the Hillary Clinton email story is out of control”. The editorial is here.

Of course, so is the Clinton Foundation story. Although the Clinton Foundation presents the possibility of conflicts of interest, the Trump Foundation is a scheme by which Trump takes credit for giving away other people’s money and uses “charitable contributions” to buy crap for himself and operate a political slush fund.  A Washington Post reporter, David Fahrenthold, has been telling that story in articles like this, this, this and this. A representative quote:

For months, The Washington Post has been looking for evidence to back up a key claim Donald Trump makes about himself: that, in recent years, he has given millions of dollars to charity out of his own pocket. There is no evidence of that in the files of Trump’s nonprofit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation. And Trump has not released his tax returns, which would detail his recent charitable giving.

In an effort to find proof of Trump’s personal giving, The Post has contacted more than 250 charities with some ties to the GOP nominee….

So far, The Post‘s search has turned up little. Between 2008 and this May [2016] — when Trump made good on a pledge to give $1 million to a veterans’ group — its search has identified just one personal gift from Trump’s own pocket.

If you have any information about a charitable gift given by Donald Trump, please email fahrenthold@washpost.com.

Anybody Who Still Admires Trump

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about Trump’s supporters. One of the points frequently made is that we should try to understand their admiration for Trump from their perspective. We shouldn’t assume we know best.

Okay, I’ve tried to do that. This is the conclusion I’ve reached: 

Anybody who still admires Trump at this point is either an idiot, an ignoramus or a dupe.

In fact, I’ll share this further observation:

Anybody who thinks Hillary Clinton is the corrupt, untrustworthy candidate in this race is either an idiot, an ignoramus or a dupe.

Consider, for example, this article from The Washington Post: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?”

And this one from Salon that explains why so many people are wrongly convinced that Clinton is corrupt: “Press, lies and Hillary’s campaign: Years of smears have created a fictional version of Clinton. They’re also a disservice to voters”. Its subtitle is “Many Americans think Clinton is a congenital liar — that’s because of the right and the media, not her”.

Finally, here is well-known journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic showing how recent news coverage of the campaign was especially dangerous and misleading. The article’s title is “How the Media Undermine American Democracy”.

Fallows has been writing almost daily about this moment in history under the heading “The Daily Trump: Filling a Time Capsule”. His editors explain why:  

People will look back on this era in our history to see what was known about Donald Trump while Americans were deciding whether to choose him as president. Here’s a running chronicle from James Fallows on the evidence available to voters as they make their choice, and of how Trump has broken the norms that applied to previous major-party candidates.

This is Fallows’s first entry from back in May, in which he shows how Trump jumped to a conclusion about a missing plane. This is his most recent entry, which discusses Trump’s continuing refusal to release his tax returns. 

It’s great to know there are journalists who are doing a good job covering the presidential campaign. Despite the fact that you have to look for them, there’s no excuse at this point for being a political ignoramus or a dupe, whatever your perspective is. 

And one more thought: I should have said that you could still admire Trump at this point if you’re a thug. Obviously, one thug can appreciate another thug who’s getting away with thuggery.

Five Minutes of Trump Debating Trump

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It would be great if this video were watched as many times as “Gagnam Style”. Only 2 billion views to go.

Of course, when someone says “he tells it like it is”, what they mean is “he tells it like I think it is”.

From Under the Cone of Silence

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Four days ago, I lowered the Cone of Silence, thereby tuning out all the news and commentary that keeps me relatively well-informed about current events. I wanted to watch the Democratic National Convention with no help from anybody else, unfiltered and undiscussed by anyone on TV or the internet. That’s meant no New York Times, no New York Magazine, no Guardian, no Daily Kos, no VOX, no Sky News, not even any Yahoo News for four whole days.

Finding gavel-to-gavel coverage of the convention online was easy (the convention has a website). Resisting the urge to read about it has been hard. In fact, despite my best efforts, one piece of news slipped under or through the Cone.

I learned that the Republican candidate for President of the United States said the Russians should try to find a bunch of Hillary Clinton’s emails and share them with the world. (Later, he apparently said he wasn’t joking.) That made me wonder. If the emails were uninteresting, hacking them would merely be a crime and an enormous campaign dirty trick. But if they did indeed contain sensitive national secrets, that would be a crime, a dirty trick and a breach of national security. Maybe Trump should have kept his mouth shut?

Anyway, I have a couple thoughts I want to share.

Remember two weeks ago when Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she was very worried about a Trump presidency? She later apologized for speaking out, since Supreme Court Justices are expected to keep their opinions about politics to themselves (although it’s fine for them to help elect a Republican President, vacate campaign finance laws and rule that the Voting Rights Act is obsolete, all while voting along party lines). 

Then, today, I saw that a retired Marine Corp general, John Allen, who commanded our forces in Afghanistan, will speak at the convention. Presumably, he will explain why he believes Clinton would be a much better Commander-in-Chief than you know who.

In reading a little about Gen. Allen, however, I saw some criticism at the Marine Corps Times site:

One expert on civil-military relations fears that by endorsing Clinton, Allen could give the appearance that he is speaking for current senior military leaders.

“A man of his prominence and his rank can be interpreted to speak for the whole military community, retired and active duty,” said Richard Kohn, who teaches military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kohn said he does not believe any retired military officer should ever endorse political candidates.

“They are in effect declaring themselves partisans and leaving the non-partisanship of the military profession and that’s a different thing,” he said.

We should note that a retired Army general spoke in favor of the Republican nominee last week, but putting that aside, it strikes me that anyone criticizing Gen. Allen, and anyone who criticized Justice Ginsburg, in fact even Justice Ginsburg herself, have all missed the point.

Rules help us make our way through life in an orderly fashion. Ethical rules, professional rules, grammatical rules, rules of thumb, the rules we call “the law”, they all help us deal with the situations we confront as we go about our business. Should I take that loaf of bread without paying? If he won’t look you in the eye, he’s probably lying. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. “Couldn’t” is okay, but “can’t” isn’t.

As we all know, however, extraordinary things do happen. We sometimes face situations where the standard rules aren’t good enough. Can you think of such a situation today? Let me put it this way: Trump is so utterly unqualified to be President, he would be so dangerous if he became Commander-in-Chief, that no rules, laws, standards or common practices should stop anyone at all from saying so. 

Despite the fact that he won a major political party’s nomination, it would be entirely appropriate if the whole Supreme Court (all eight of them) and the senior officers who make up the Joint Chiefs of Staff (all seven of them) went on national television and pointed out the obvious fact: Nobody should vote for this guy! Wake up, you people!

I don’t mean to say that none of the rules apply in this situation. We should still have a presidential election on November 8th. The FBI shouldn’t put Trump in a cell. He shouldn’t be given a one-way ticket to Mars. But, seriously, we all need to do what we can to stop him from becoming President. We need to do it for ourselves as Americans but also for the rest of the world. (There are even rules in our favor: Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.)

Before I go, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. Maybe you’ve seen a movie called “Seven Days in May”. It was based on a novel about an attempted military coup in the United States. The idea was that the President wanted to sign a treaty with the Russians, but most of our military really hated it. So Burt Lancaster and a bunch of other high-ranking officers tried to take over the government. I won’t tell you how it ended, but we were lucky to have Kirk Douglas on our side.

Now consider if somebody like the general who led the conspiracy in Seven Days in May decided to leave the Army and run for President. As played by Burt Lancaster, Gen. James Mattoon Scott was a very handsome, very intelligent, very experienced, very skilled officer. If anyone was looking for a Man on a White Horse to save America in its darkest hour, he’d be a prime candidate.

So here’s my question: If millions of Americans are willing to elect an unpredictable ignoramus and reality TV con man like Trump, how would our fellow citizens react to a candidate who favored equally misguided policies, but who could speak intelligently and had a distinguished record of service to America?

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not worry about that question. We have enough trouble already.

History Repeats Itself and Then Kind of Doesn’t

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In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign hired an actor who was a registered Republican to do a four-minute commercial expressing his misgivings about Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for President. It was in black and white, of course, and the actor indulged in an unhealthy habit:

The ad was called “Confessions of a Republican”:

The actor, whose name is William Bogert, is still with us and has now made an ad for the Clinton campaign. It’s only a minute long, since our 2016 attention spans are 75% shorter. It’s also called “Confessions of a Republican”.

Also, here’s a related story that probably won’t appear on Fox News.That’s a pity. The ghost writer, who spent 18 months with Trump and wrote “his” popular book, The Art of the Deal, for the real estate developer, wishes it had been called The Sociopath instead:

“I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

Mr. Schwartz also says Trump has no attention span, is the most prolific liar he ever met and is running for President because he loves publicity. 

Meanwhile, the Republican National Conflagration began today in Cleveland, Ohio. The Never Trump faction tried to get Trump dumped. Yelling and confusion ensued, but the Trump Forever faction won with the help of the politician who held the gavel. A brief video records the disagreement:

God bless America.

PS — This is a longer article from The New Yorker about Trump’s ghost writer. The concluding quote:

“People are dispensable and disposable in Trump’s world.” If Trump is elected President, [Mr. Schwartz] warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows—that he couldn’t care less about them.”