Response to Two Down

(See: Just Above Sunset: Two Down)

One disagreement I have with all the pundits, especially on my side of the aisle, is whether all that Billy Bush and Donald Trump chatter on the bus was “locker room banter”. They say it wasn’t, and I can’t understand what they mean by that. Of course it was, as if that means anything useful here. Why do they think that it being locker room chat somehow makes it okay?

Except that, since I don’t play golf or tennis or whatever, I have no way of knowing what is being talked about in men’s locker rooms these days. I only know from way-back memories of high school phys-ed classes and track team practices. Yes, these kind of topics were discussed, in roughly the same language, and probably made-up claims, but it’s important to note that, not only did not all the guys join in, only a very few of the loud jerks did, usually cheered on by a small gaggle of giggling toadies. 

Most the us guys ignored it, trying not to get dressed too fast and leave too hurriedly so as not to arouse suspicion that all this ”guy" talk made us slightly uncomfortable — which it did. 

And yes, as Trump confessed, it was just “all talk”, allowing him to claim that his deeply-regrettable transgressions were only words, whereas Bill Clinton’s were actions! (And yet, without checking the debate transcript, didn’t Donald at one point accuse Hillary of being “all words and no action”? How does this guy always seem to position himself on both sides of every argument?)

But to punctuate his puzzling claims about Bill Clinton, about an hour before the debate was scheduled to begin, Trump staged a blitzkrieg news conference at a nearby hotel with a group of anti-Clinton women, three of whom claimed they had been sexually assaulted by Hillary’s husband, and the fourth being a woman who, back when she was 12 years old, was the (alleged?) victim in a rape case in which the then young lawyer, Hillary Rodham, defended the accused.

Yes, this Trump stunt largely fizzled, maybe because Monica Lewinsky was not one of the women (I’ll bet it was not from lack of trying by the Trump campaign; I’ll bet they asked her but she refused). It probably went nowhere because all the other cases had been litigated and investigated years before, mostly ending up nowhere.

But just so the history of these cases not be obscured by 2016 politics, I looked them all up.

In the case of Paula Jones, who was an Arkansas state employee when Bill was governor:

According to Jones's account, on May 8, 1991, she was escorted to Clinton's (then Governor of Arkansas) room in the Excelsior (now Little Rock Marriott) Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he propositioned and exposed himself to her. She claimed she kept quiet about the incident until 1994, when a David Brock story in the American Spectator magazine printed an account. Jones filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton on May 6, 1994, two days before the three-year statute of limitations… 

Judge Susan Webber Wright granted President Clinton's motion for summary judgment, ruling that … Jones failed to show that Clinton's actions constituted "outrageous conduct" as required of the tort alongside not showing proof of damages caused by distress. Jones appealed the dismissal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, where, at oral argument, two of the three judges on the panel appeared sympathetic to her arguments. …

But before there was a ruling:

On November 13, 1998, Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000, the entire amount of her claim, but without an apology, in exchange for her agreement to drop the appeal. Robert S. Bennett, Clinton's attorney, still maintained that Jones's claim was baseless and that Clinton only settled so he could end the lawsuit and move on with his life. In March 1999, Judge Wright ruled that Jones would only get $200,000 from the settlement and that the rest of the money would pay for her legal expenses. ... 

She also appeared in the news media to show the results of a makeover and of a Rhinoplasty [a.k.a., "a nose job”] paid for by a donor. 

In April 1999, Judge Wright found Clinton in civil contempt of court for misleading testimony in the Jones case. She ordered Clinton to pay $1,202 to the court and an additional $90,000 to Jones's lawyers for expenses incurred, far less than the $496,000 that the lawyers originally requested.

By agreement with the Arkansas Bar Association, Clinton gave up his Arkansas law license for a period of five years. And it was the Paula Jones case that got him impeached, for lying and obstruction of justice in saying he didn’t have sexual relations with that Lewinsky woman.

Jones sued Penthouse Magazine during all this for printing nude photos of her, taken by her boyfriend, but it was too late — the magazine had already gone to the distributors. But in 2000, she went back and made a deal with the same magazine:

She later posed for photos illustrating an article, "The Perils of Paula Jones" in the December 2000 issue, citing the pressures of a large tax bill and two young sons to support.

Then there’s Kathleen Willey:

In 2015, Kathleen Willey alleged Clinton groped her in the White House Oval Office in 1993. Kenneth Starr granted her immunity for her testimony in his separate inquiry. 

Linda Tripp, the Clinton Administration staffer who secretly taped her phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky in order to expose the latter's affair with the President, testified under oath that Willey's sexual contact with President Clinton in 1993 was consensual, that Willey had been flirting with the President, and that Willey was happy and excited following her 1993 encounter with Clinton. Ken Starr thought there was insufficient evidence to pursue her allegations further. 

In 2007 Willey published a book about her experiences with the Clintons.

And there’s this add, back in May, from Media Matters:

The Office of the Independent Counsel reviewed Willey’s allegations but declined to press charges after determining that Willey repeatedly shifted her story, lied to the FBI, and urged a friend to falsely support her story. She subsequently suggested that the Clintons had murdered her husband in the same way they supposedly murdered former White House aide Vince Foster.

On that same page, there's also, "close Trump ally Roger Stone says Trump himself gave money to Willey so she would be able to attack the Clintons during Hillary Clinton’s current presidential run”. This was back in May of this year, and Stone mentioned that "various victims of Bill Clinton — those who were raped or attacked or assaulted — those women are getting organized, and I think a number of them are going to speak out this fall.”

Number three of the accusers is Juanita Broaddrick, who actually accused Bill Clinton of raping her:

In a 1999 episode of Dateline NBC, former Clinton volunteer Juanita Broaddrick alleged that in the late 1970s Bill Clinton raped her in her hotel room. According to Broaddrick, she agreed to meet with Clinton for coffee in the lobby of her hotel, but Clinton asked if they could go to her room to avoid a crowd of reporters. Once Clinton had isolated her in her hotel room, he sexually assaulted her. Broaddrick stated Clinton injured her lip by biting it during the assault. In 1999, Clinton denied Broaddrick's allegations through his lawyer. 

Supporters of Clinton have questioned her account by noting that Broaddrick continued to support Clinton, and appear at public events on his behalf, weeks after the alleged rape. In addition, Broaddrick had once signed a deposition stating that no sexual contact had occurred with Bill Clinton; although she subsequently stated that she had made this claim because "I didn't want to be forced to testify about the most horrific event of my life." In 1999, Slate magazine published an inconclusive piece on whether Broaddrick was telling the truth. 

Broaddrick's allegations resurfaced in the 2016 presidential campaign. In various media interviews, Broaddrick stated that Clinton raped her and that Hillary Clinton knew about it, and tried to threaten Broaddrick into remaining silent. She claimed that she started giving some interviews in 2015 because Hillary Clinton's statement that victims of sexual assault should be believed angered her.

(In fact, while nobody was ever able to prove or disprove Broaddrick’s allegations either way, if you read that inconclusive Slate magazine piece, mentioned above, you might just find her story quite credible.)

Finally, the fourth woman in the group, Kathy Shelton, was not an accuser of Bill, but instead has a beef with Hillary Clinton herself, as investigated by Snopes earlier this year:

”In 1975 when I was 12, I was raped by a 42 year old man. Hillary Clinton volunteered to be his lawyer. In court, Hillary told the judge that I made up the rape story because I enjoyed fantasizing about older men. Hillary got my rapist freed. In 1980 she gave an interview where she admitted she knew he was guilty. And she laughed about it. Hillary Clinton is an advocate for rapists. Not for women or children.”

According to Snopes, this poster, complete with photo of a beautiful blond teenaged girl with tears running down her face (but with this small-print disclaimer, “This story is true. Photo is not the actual victim”), began circulating back in May on Facebook, the claims of which Snopes pronounced “Mostly False”, in that, for one thing, Hillary did not volunteer, but was assigned to the case by the judge because the accused demanded to have a woman defense lawyer. Also, witnesses from the time attest that she requested to be let off the case, but was turned down.

Documents from the 1975 case include an affidavit (p. 34) sworn by Clinton ... That affidavit doesn't show, as claimed, that Hillary Clinton asserted the defendant "made up the rape story because [she] enjoyed fantasizing about men"; rather, it shows that other people, including an expert in child psychology, had said that the complainant was "emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing about persons, claiming they had attacked her body," and that "children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences." Clinton therefore asked the court to have the complainant undergo a psychiatric exam (at the defense's expense) to determine the validity of that information… 

As for the claim that Hillary Clinton "knew the defendant was guilty,” … [is] largely irrelevant given that under Hillary Clinton's handling of the case, the defendant pled guilty rather than going to trial and asserting his innocence.

What really happened? Here’s a Newsday article from 2008:

Finding out precisely what happened in the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 1975, is difficult three decades later, particularly since [the accused Bruce Alfred] Taylor died in 1992 of a heart ailment. But a basic outline can be reconstructed from interviews, court documents, witnesses’ statements and the Washington County sheriff’s original case file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. 

Sometime around midnight, the girl was sleeping over at a friend’s house in Springdale when Taylor and his 20-year-old cousin walked in, asking if anyone wanted to take a drive. The sixth-grader, who says she was bored and wanted to buy a soda, jumped into Taylor’s beat-up red 1963 Chevrolet pickup truck. 

Soon after, they picked up the 15-year-old boy and drove to a liquor store, where Taylor bought a pint of Old Grand-Dad whiskey, which he mixed for the girl in a cup of Coca-Cola, according to the boy, now a 48-year-old Army veteran. (Newsday is withholding the boy’s name because he was charged in the case as a juvenile offender.) 

After a few hours at a local bowling alley, the foursome crammed into Taylor’s truck and drove to a weedy ravine off a busy two-lane highway connecting the sister cities of Fayetteville and Springdale, according the sheriff’s department account. 

Taylor and the older man went off for a walk, leaving the 12-year-old and the teenager alone in the cab. In a statement to police, the 15-year-old said he removed his pants and admitted to having sex, revealing the encounter only after being pressed by investigators. 

Moments later, he said he left and Taylor approached the truck, climbing on top of the girl. The girl let out a scream, according to the police report, and he claims to have seen Taylor hitching up his pants. 

The victim, the boy reported, turned to both of them and yelled, “You all planned this, didn’t you?” 

At 4:50 a.m., the girl walked into a local emergency room, badly shaken. The doctor’s report noted that she had injuries consistent with rape.

The “she laughed about it” part came after a 1980s interview Hillary gave to a reporter, in which she is heard laughing at this surprising development, in speaking of her client:

He took a lie detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs [Laughter].

She didn’t “get him off” of the rape charge, she made a plea deal to a lesser charge — “found guilty of Unlawful Fondling of a Child Under the Age of Fourteen” — which the prosecutor agreed to at the behest of the victim and her mother, "to make a quick plea deal rather than have the [victim] go through the ordeal of a court trial, with the mother actively interfering in the investigation to bring about that result”, with the sentence "that carried a five-year sentence, of which the judge suspended four years and allowed two months credit of time already served towards the remaining year.” 

“We both wanted it to be over with,” the victim told Newsday. “They kept asking me the same questions over and over. I was crying all the time.” ... 

In 2005, while working in a laundry, the victim stole several hundred dollars worth of checks from her boss to buy drugs. She is now living in a halfway house and looking for work. 

Despite these problems, she bears Hillary Rodham Clinton no ill will and was eager to read “Living History” — at least pages 72 and 73, which contain her case.

Which brings us to today:

Eight years later, in 2016, the UK's Daily Mail identified the victim (who had previously spoken anonymously to the Daily Beast) as Kathy Shelton and quoted her as saying that she "cannot forgive Hillary Clinton for defending her rapist" and that she was unaware for many years that Hillary Clinton was the person who had represented the defendant in her case. 

'It's put a lot of anger back in me,' said Shelton, now 54, in an exclusive interview at her Springdale, Arkansas, home. 'Every time I see [Clinton] on TV I just want to reach in there and grab her, but I can't do that.' 

For decades, Shelton said she had no idea that Clinton was the same woman as the lawyer who defended her rapist in 1975.

That’s the tragic thing about fame and history and how they combine to effect people! Think about it:

Had Hillary Rodham never married some guy who went on to become president of the United States, then real life sexual-assault victim Kathy Shelton, who all her life held no ill will toward the woman who defended her rapist, might never have changed her opinion about her, and therefore, would never have gotten a prominent seat at this second Trump-Clinton debate, and would have missed her own very small place in American history!

Response to The Last Friday

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Last Friday)

Well, that does it for me!

Hearing the truth about the sorts of things the man says when he thinks nobody is listening has finally convinced me, once and for all, that I will not, because I cannot, in good conscience, ever, ever again vote for Bill Clinton!

(Note to self: Try to remember that if Bill ever runs for office again.)

But as for Donald Trump? Oh, for god’s sake, big whoop.

I mean, there seemed to be an epidemic of Casablanca Shock spreading through the Republican party yesterday, with all these folks who have already endorsed him being suddenly shocked! shocked! to learn he was the kind of guy who thought this way about women!

These people just cannot catch a break! One can imagine how hard they look forward to this whole national nightmare ending, and it no longer matters how it ends. Meanwhile, not a day goes by that this cretin in their midst doesn’t do or say something that ends up putting their collective private parts through a wringer.

Still, I do hope Donald Trump doesn’t drop out of the race in favor of Mike Pence. Let’s not confuse this election any more than it already is. Besides, I for one kind of like the way things are going now. (As of this morning, Nate Silver's group had Hillary’s chances of winning up to 81.8%!)

But what I am really looking forward to seeing is how attacking Hillary by bringing up Bill’s adventures plays out in this election.

Although it defies common sense, Trump seems to have convinced his disciples that women voters everywhere will become incensed at Hillary, once they are reminded of how viscously she attacked the women who had sex with, or claimed to have had sex with, her husband.

If Donald somehow brings this up in debate, wouldn’t you think she could just turn the tables on him by asking him to "answer, truthfully, how you would feel about any man who you learned had an affair with Melania — or for that matter, any of your many wives — while you were married"?

In fact — and only because he brought it up — does he happen to know how his first wife, Ivana, felt about Marla Maples when she learned she was having an affair with her husband? Of course, we’ll never know, since he forced her to sign a gag-agreement about their marriage.

And speaking of how presidential candidates treat women, she could ask him, "Is it true, as has been alleged, that the reason you left your first wife is because you could no longer be attracted to a woman who had given birth to any children? And by children, I mean, your own three children?"

But then again, I’m sure Donald will get a chance to test his “Bill Clinton Attack Strategy” during any of his many debate prep sessions before Sunday night.

Oh, wait! I forgot! Donald Trump doesn’t need no stinking’ debate prep!

Response to The Indirect Trap

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Indirect Trap)

Alan,

Instead of completely agreeing with you (and Waldman), I think I’ll stick with my comment of yesterday — those voters who care more about appearances and less about actual truth will continue to claim that Pence won, while those who think truth matters can argue that Kaine won. Both sides make their point, and never the twain shall meet, at least this late in the campaign.

What happens in the next few years if Trump loses?

It could go either way — either Republicans will, at least for a while, try to do what the Germans did with Hitler after WWII, which is try to never mention him and see if he’ll be erased from public memory, or eventually say, “Yes, he was awful, but we had no knowledge of what he was doing”; or what Republicans tried to do with GWB after he was gone, which is try to never mention him and see if he’ll be erased from public memory, or eventually admit what they were forced to admit, which is that the Iraq War actually was a big mistake, but then pretend it was made infinitely worse by the inactions of (fill in name of Democratic villain/s, to be named later).

In other words, eventually the truth of history will be irrefutable, and all they’ll really be able to do is somehow mitigate its damage, in hopes of making it easier for those future “voters who care more about appearances and less about actual truth” to defend their team.

Let’s face it, there will always be those who believe that we should do what we feel like doing, rather than what we really should be doing, and that, since the ends always justify the means for these people, the truth can always be safely denied the opportunity to interfere with conservative policymaking.

But Wait! There’s more!

There’s always the chance future Republicans won’t have to struggle with any of this! Now let’s try to imagine what Republicans will do if Trump wins!

Response to How It's Done

(See: Just Above Sunset: How It's Done)

Until I realized that Tim Kaine was just "taking one for the team", as one CNN pundit pointed out in their after-debate show, I thought he was pretty much just making a fool of himself with all those interruptions, and that Mike Pence was "winning” the debate by coming off as the adult.

But because neither campaign is any longer really fighting to change minds — since both sides seem to realize those voters who are still undecided at this point will probably vote for neither, the plan being just to settle for who they already got — then this whole debate was just a playful but meaningless exercise that neither side really won. Kaine, who otherwise seems kind of meek, played the part of the slugger, hoping to throw Pence off balance — and nicely performed, I must say! I couldn’t have done that! — and Pence’s job was to not fall down, which he mostly didn’t.

Did Pence fail to defend Trump from damaging blows? Probably not really, since his base doesn’t care, and neither does the other side. And was Pence really just setting himself up as the nominee for 2020? Maybe, but since he’s such a non-entity today, I really doubt he’ll be a real contender by then either.

I guess both sides did what they came to do, but since what they did actually didn’t need to be done, then I really didn’t need to stay up late to watch them do it. 

Response to Death by Taxes

(See: Just Above Sunset: Death by Taxes)

Could this New York Times tax returns story be the "October Surprise" we’ve all been waiting for? I don’t get the feeling it is. Maybe it’s that it’s too early in the month for that, but something just doesn’t feel right about it.

In fact, I’m wondering if the real October Surprise will come along when Donald Trump confesses that he himself mailed doctored phony documents to the Times, just to catch them in a trap, just to expose how gullible the lying press is, so anxious to embarrass Trump that they’d jump on anything juicy that appears over the transom. His ex-accountant could even be in on it.

But in the meantime, let’s assume the documents are real, in which case, Trump’s not looking like the genius he and his gang of thugs think he is.

My point is that, while Donald Trump was looking out for, shall we call it, his big fat “bottom line”, I and lots of my fellow Americans were shelling out many of our dollars to keep the country going. A lot of people dont realize it but even undocumented immigrants pay federal and state income taxes, which means the people he wants to throw out of the country have been doing more for it than he has. 

While he might argue that he has been paying all his workers and keeping the economy churning, but for all that, so do drug kingpins. And just possibly drug dealers actually don’t cheat their workers out of their hard-earned pay like Donald famously does.

Another favorite comeback of Trump’s is that the “government doesn’t spend its money well anyway”, but the answer to that is that one might think Donald Trump would have earned his right to complain about the way the government spends our money if any of it came from him.

And if the point he’s trying to make to his not-so-wealthy political base is that, while he may be a hugely wealthy shit-head, at least he’ll be a shit-head on their behalf, then the real question seems to be, when and if he becomes president, is there any evidence that he will work to change the law, making it no longer possible for extremely rich guys like him to get away with paying no taxes in this way? 

Here’s Chris Christie, yesterday, from Salon:

Chris Christie said, “this is actually a very, very good story for Donald Trump.” The New Jersey governor practiced some of his best spinning on “Fox News Sunday,” arguing that the Times story showcases “the genius of Donald Trump” because he knows tax policy better than anyone. 

“And that’s why Donald Trump is the person best positioned to fix it,” Christie said. “There’s no one who’s shown more genius in their way to maneuver about the tax code as he rightfully used the laws to do that. And he’s already promised in his tax plan to change many of these special interest loopholes and get rid of them so you don’t have this kind of situation.”

That sounds good, except that I’ve not been able to find any evidence of him actually proposing to do that in his tax plan, which he has already released. If I missed it in there, please let me know, but I’ve heard nobody else can find it either.

On the other hand, even the conservative Tax Foundation has predicted that, while his present tax plan "would significantly reduce income taxes and corporate taxes, and eliminate the estate tax”, it would also "reduce federal revenue by between $4.4 trillion and $5.9 trillion on a static basis.”

Is that good? Only if you don’t want the government to have enough money to pay for what it needs to pay for, or if you don’t mind the country increasing its debt by up to six trillion (that’s “trillion”, with a “t”) dollars. Trump always complains about the size of our debt as it is.

And by the way, maybe any comparison of Trump’s business dealings to that of Leona “The Queen of Mean” Helmsley is even more appropriate than immediately apparent, at least from glancing at her entry on Wikipedia:

Despite the Helmsleys' tremendous wealth (net worth over a billion dollars), they were known for disputing payments to contractors and vendors. One of these disputes would prove to be their undoing. 

In 1983, the Helmsleys bought Dunnellen Hall, a 21-room mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, to use as a weekend retreat. The property cost $11 million, but the Helmsleys wanted to make it even more luxurious. The work included a $1 million dance floor, a silver clock and a mahogany card table. 

The remodeling bills came to $8 million, which the Helmsleys were loath to pay.

Sound familiar?

A group of contractors sued the Helmsleys for non-payment; they eventually paid off most of the debt. 

In 1985, during those proceedings, the contractors revealed that most of their work was being illegally billed to the Helmsleys' hotels as business expenses. The contractors sent a stack of the falsified invoices to the New York Post to prove that the Helmsleys were trying to avoid tax liabilities. The resulting Post story led to a federal criminal investigation. 

Also, Jeremiah McCarthy, the Helmsleys' executive engineer, alleged that Leona repeatedly demanded that he sign invoices to bill personal expenses to the Helmsley company and, when McCarthy declined to do so, Helmsley exploded with tyrannical outbursts, shouting, "You're not my fucking partner! You'll sign what I tell you to sign.”

But then there’s this interesting little tidbit:

In 1988, then United States Attorney Rudy Giuliani indicted the Helmsleys and two of their associates on several tax-related charges, as well as extortion.

I guess he’s glad he’s no longer in the prosecuting business; otherwise, he might have to indict one of his closest friends.

Anyway, her husband was let off because of failing health, but she was eventually convicted on "one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, three counts of tax evasion, three counts of filing false personal tax returns, sixteen counts of assisting in the filing of false corporate and partnership tax returns, and ten counts of mail fraud.” The extortion charge was dropped.

She was sentenced to 16 years, but her appeals lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, eventually got that reduced, and she was released after serving only 19 months.

She was forced to give up control of her hotel empire, since most of her hotels had bars and New York does not allow convicted felons to hold alcohol licenses. Mrs. Helmsley lived her final year at her penthouse atop the Park Lane Hotel.

She left a $12 million trust fund for “Trouble”, her Maltese dog, but that was later reduced to $2 million, "as excessive to fulfill its purpose.” I don’t know if Donald has pets, but I can just about see all that other stuff happening to him.

And so we’ll just have to wait and see if this new story in the news about Trump being a cad will make any difference to his support. Even if the staunchest Trumpeters won’t be able to make any sense of it, maybe it will be just enough to keep independents from swinging in his direction.

And do you remember that school dance scene in "Back to the Future", in which Marty (Michael J. Fox) watches as his family fades away in the family photo, and out of his future, as his teenaged mom and dad fail to hook up on the dance floor? I’m reminded of that every time I look at 538.com and see Hillary’s chances dropping.

But then I see his family fading back into the photo whenever I go there on days like today, and see her fortunes improving — pushing 70%! — seemingly in response to this Times story, but it probably wouldn’t happen that quickly.

Maybe it’s just because America is coming to its senses anyway, the closer we get to the crucial day.

Response to Number Nineteen

(See: Just Above Sunset: Number Nineteen)

The good news about a possible President Trump might be that, when that famous 3:00 AM call comes in, he’ll already be awake for it. Of course, the bad news is, he’ll be too busy sending out his snarky tweets to take the call.

Donald Trump hates it when people ask what his plans are, such as his plans for defeating ISIS, since that lets the other guy know what to watch out for, but he’d have nothing to worry about if ISIS turns out to have the attention span that he does.

In fact, I’d been worried about what would happen if Trump were to actually listen to all these pundits on TV advising him to not take Hillary’s bait, since her campaign had telegraphed their intention to try to “get under his skin”, but I know now that there was nothing to worry about. We now can assume he hears all these warnings, but just ignores them!

No need anymore to talk behind his back! Why bother, since he obviously never takes advice from people who give it to him to his face! The man listens only to himself!

You heard the latest, from an interview he gave to The New York Times?

Donald J. Trump unleashed a slashing new attack on Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions on Friday as he sought to put the Clintons’ relationship at the center of his political argument against her before their next debate.

Yay!!! Go for it!

(Donald, pay no attention to me, assuming you’re reading this.)

He said he was bringing up Mr. Clinton’s infidelities because he thought they would repulse female voters and turn them away from the Clintons, and because he was eager to unsettle Mrs. Clinton in their next two debates and on the campaign trail.

I wonder if it occurs to him that, if he really knew what it is that “would repulse female voters and turn them away from the Clintons,” he would probably already have their vote. But he doesn’t. My advice would be, he really needs to give this more thought — but then, why would I expect him to take my advice? I could tell him this stuff right to his face and it would be the same as telling it to Henry, my cat!

But when asked if he had ever cheated on his wives, Mr. Trump said: “No — I never discuss it. I never discuss it. It was never a problem.” 

Asked specifically about his affair with Ms. Maples when he was married to Ivana Trump, Mr. Trump said: “I don’t talk about it."

He thinks nobody knows about these things? What is the matter with this guy?

But it turns out, he wasn’t making up being distracted by some problem with the microphone:

Mr. Trump said he did not think he needed to prepare more rigorously for the next debate than he did for the first one, because any shortcomings on Monday, he argued, were because of a problem with the microphone at his lectern, which he “spent 50 percent of my thought process” dealing with. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which sponsors the events, said on Friday that there were “issues” with Mr. Trump’s audio.

And apparently, the problem only effected how he was heard inside the hall, not how he was heard on TV. Still, speaking of getting rattled while making a speech, remember this?

...in a speech Clinton gave to Congress on 22 September 1993 detailing the Clinton health care plan, the teleprompter was loaded with the wrong speech. Specifically, the one he gave to a joint session of Congress shortly after he was sworn-in in 1993. Teleprompter operators practiced with the old speech and it was accidentally left in, forcing Clinton to ad-lib for almost ten minutes.

And the president handled it so deftly that nobody was the wiser, at least not until the screwup was revealed after the speech. To my memory, Clinton neither lost his cool, nor complained about it. But maybe that’s because some people are just that good.

But back to that Times interview:

“She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” Mr. Trump said.

Precisely! Do it! Then make sure you brag about it afterward! Let Trump be Trump!

And whatever you do, Donald, don’t go check your odds of winning at 538.com, which, as I’m writing this, show you’ve dropped over 12% since the debate.

Response to Simpleminded Braying

(See: Just Above Sunset: Simpleminded Braying)

Once again, it was the ant versus the grasshopper — and as usual, the ant won. That tale has traditionally been a conservative favorite, but the truth is, its moral never really worked for them.

What’s more, the grasshopper should’ve seen it coming, since the story has been retold millions of times, the moral always being that the survivor will be the one who prepares for what-come-may, not the ignoramus who takes the easy way out by deciding ahead of time to burn his bridges when he comes to them. Or maybe this was the tortoise and the hare. Whatever. All these little life-lessons date back to the ancient Greeks, and as the old saying goes, he who doesn’t study his history gets his ass handed to him.

But Trump's bragging about what most people think should be shameful is classic Donald Trump.

For example, not paying taxes?

CLINTON: … we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. 

Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.  

TRUMP: That makes me smart.

Which gave Hillary a chance to come back with this:

CLINTON: So if he's paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. And I think probably he's not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide.

Which, when you think about it, makes good sense.

After all, he already has the votes of the people who don’t care if he releases his income taxes, and assuming there’s nothing bad in there, he can only win the votes of anyone who is holding back until he releases them, right? Which makes me wonder what awful stuff can be learned from his tax records that make him work so hard at keeping them secret, making him look like a tax cheat, putting him at risk of losing a good chunk of votes that just could put him over the top.

So to sum up? “Smart", my ass! He not only doesn’t support his country, he’s proud of not supporting it!

And he also doesn't pay his debts?

CLINTON: ... if your main claim to be president of the United States is your business, then I think we should talk about that. You know, your campaign manager said that you built a lot of businesses on the backs of little guys.  

And, indeed, I have met a lot of the people who were stiffed by you and your businesses, Donald. I've met dishwashers, painters, architects, glass installers, marble installers, drapery installers, like my dad was, who you refused to pay when they finished the work that you asked them to do. 

We have an architect in the audience who designed one of your clubhouses at one of your golf courses. It's a beautiful facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn't pay what the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do...  

TRUMP: Maybe he didn't do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work…

Fine! Then return his work, rather than continuing to "put it to use”! By keeping the product, you confirm your satisfaction with it, so you need to pay for it! Otherwise, it's called "theft"!

And maybe it's your track record of putting small vendors out of business that makes you think you have the experience to do the same to ISIS?

But also of note is the famous question of trustworthiness. How Hillary Clinton scores so low on the trust meter, with essentially no evidence to support her being untrustworthy, versus Donald Trump, who actually boasts about not paying his workers, not paying his taxes, and just recently, has been shown to not even give to charity except to pay with money that others have donated to his own family’s private foundation, which supplies us with yet another instance of boasting about something he should be ashamed of:

Kenansville, North Carolina (CNN) — Donald Trump bragged Tuesday there's "nothing like" using other people's money, hours after a report said he used more than $250,000 from his charitable organization to litigate lawsuits against his business interests. 

Trump, while calling for building safe zones in Syria financed by Gulf states, vaunted the benefits of doing business with "OPM." 

"It's called OPM. I do it all the time in business. It's called other people's money," Trump said. "There's nothing like doing things with other people's money because it takes the risk -- you get a good chunk out of it and it takes the risk."

In other words, he’s a self-confessed cheat — which, as you would know if you walked a mile in his shoes instead of your own, is actually a good thing.

And speaking of the criminal element, did anyone other than me think his constant sniffing suggests "very-rich-guy-snorts-cocaine"? Or did I miss the part where he confessed to having the sniffles? For his part, he denied it on Fox this morning, although he did complain about the microphone not working, or something:

Trump also insisted that he does not have a cold or allergies when asked whether he was sniffling during the debate. 

"No, no sniffles. No. You know, the mic was very bad, but maybe it was good enough to hear breathing, but there was no sniffles," he said on "Fox and Friends."

So does blaming his microphone for his performance remind you of, “It wasn't me, it was the chair”?

Among so many of his several stumbles that passed by virtually unnoticed, probably my favorite was him crowing about a minor accomplishment of his that nobody but he (and, of course, his legion of cable news sycophantic surrogates) cared about in the first place — something he even admitted last night:

Well, nobody was pressing it, nobody was caring much about it. I figured you'd ask the question tonight, of course. But nobody was caring much about it. But I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate. And I think I did a good job.

Exactly! You’re the one who called his bluff, and lo and behold, it turned out he wasn’t bluffing!

You got him to prove that he was born in the U.S., something hardly anybody in their right mind doubted, much less (in your words) "was caring much about", in the first place!

With all your five-years-long yap-yap-yapping about Obama having been born somewhere else — which, by the way, was moot anyway, since even if he had been, he would still have been a natural-born U.S. citizen, making him as eligible to be president as John McCain, Ted Cruz, or George Romney — it turns out that Obama was born here after all!

So the question that you still need to answer is this:

Why the hell did you, for all those years, push this stupid meaningless issue? What was your purpose?

And why are you now bragging about something you really ought to be ashamed of?

(The answer to that one is easy: Because you are the man who "knows no shame”! In fact, being born without the shame gene is not such a good thing, since it fools otherwise ordinary people into thinking they can run for president.)

And something everyone who believes it’s time to "move on from this birther issue" (but who plans on voting for him anyway) needs to ask themselves is, What the hell are you thinking in supporting for president of the United States some shameless jerk who spent so much of his life keeping alive this stupid birther issue?

This transgression is exponentially worse than Rick Perry’s career-killing “Oops!”, and yet, instead of slinking out of the race with his tail between his legs, Donald Trump somehow convinces you that his mistake was actually something to be proud of?

And given that the emperor's skills are such, he’s persuaded you people that he’s actually wearing clothes, I have just one last question:

Want to buy a bridge?

So as for my vote for who won the debate, I’m going to go real shallow here and stick with the one with the best hairdo. What the hell, it’s as good a reason as any other reason to vote for her, which seem to be countless.

Response to The Right Stuff

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Right Stuff)

The author of “The Right Stuff” is Tom Wolfe, with whom, many years ago, I shared an elevator in New York City.

He could not have been mistaken for anyone else in the car, much less on the planet, wearing a painfully-bright white three-piece suit, and, while my mind’s eye may be wrong about this, I somehow remember him carrying a foppy-looking cane. He looked like a cartoon version of a Southern Planter, but apparently didn’t mind the attention this gave him, since everyone on the ride laughed good-naturedly about it, which he took with a gently smiling grace that only someone who hears this all the time could affect. I remember wondering why he kept up the act; still, I envied him his life. It looked like fun.

I made myself read the book in the early 1980’s, just after CNN named me overall producer of its upcoming coverage of the second mission of the Space Shuttle Columbia. I thought it would help me understand the people who risked their lives to do this sort of thing.

I especially recall the phrase, “Spam in a Can”, which was Chuck Yeager’s description of what would become of any of his fellow test pilots who decided to sign up as Mercury astronauts. He complained that a so-called “astronaut" would not in any way be “piloting” the spaceship — he would not be in control if and when, God forbid, anything went awry — which, at some point, was bound to happen.

I also remember Wolfe’s contention about the drawls we’ve heard on those cockpit microphones for decades, from jetliner captains, many but not all of them former military pilots, when they come on to talk to the passengers and crew — always equally calm and collected whether instructing everyone to prepare for an emergency landing, or merely to point out that Mt. Rushmore is out there on the left side of the plane. That calm demeanor of pilots everywhere, Wolfe claimed, originated with Yeager himself as he famously faced life-and-death problems to become the first human to break the sound barrier miles above the earth:

Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, Yeager broke two ribs when he fell from a horse. He was worried that the injury would remove him from the mission … 

Yeager told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley, about the accident. On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the X-1's hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch.

And that’s the real "Right Stuff" — not the bluster of a self-involved newby who tries to scare a problem to death by growling at it, but instead just knowing about how things work and just thinking about a problem, then quietly doing what needs to be done to solve it.

I imagine Donald Trump thinks he has it, but he doesn’t. He’s way too obsessed with "political correctness” to allow him to understand what is a real problem, and too busy calling his opponent names to notice that so many of his own followers are racists.

Yes, racists. Answer these simple questions about Trump supporters, posed by Justin Gest:

Is it racist to associate immigration with the greater globalization of commerce that has altered the economic prospects of outmoded people? 

Is it racist to be frustrated that members of ethnic minorities are rendered new advantages unavailable to white people, such as affirmative action policies and ethnicity-specific advocacy? 

Is it racist to believe that white working-class people are underrepresented in political leadership or vilified in popular media?

If you answered “Yes!” to all of these questions, give yourself a perfect score!

You’d think that having so many “Deplorables" backing you would be something that worries you more than that people accused of crimes in this country are being treated fairly. Trump’s more upset with how good our country is, than he is concerned with solving the real problems it faces. And yes, of course his audience cheers when he complains about terrorists getting fair treatment, because he seems to attract the sort of vigilante lynch mob we used to have in our Wild West days, before the law arrived out there to tame it.

Trump praises “dictators” and “strongmen” whenever he notices them do very un-American things to their victims, and yet he complains when he sees American leaders not acting like dictators. He favors “profiling"? Isn’t profiling what that terrorist did last week in Minnesota — ask his victims if they’re Muslim, and then stabbing them if they’re not?

The so-called “Radical Islamic Terrorists” he talks about want us to act like them — and not coincidentally, so does Donald Trump!

Why do he and his gang of clueless Deplorables fall into the terrorists' trap?

Because their idea of having the Right Stuff for the job requires not analyzing things too closely, and not getting the big picture. Because Trump celebrates fear and venerates it and encourages it in others. And because Trump has a bad attitude that, in his case, comes from living a mostly-successful life of always trying to get away with something, and he makes others believe that having a bad attitude about people is okay, and neither he nor them seem to be smart enough to realize it.

I’m beginning to think Radical Conservatism is a personality disorder, and lately, as so often happens (think McCarthyism), is inherently un-American.

Americanism is not kicking someone’s ass, just to watch ‘em squirm and because it demonstrates to your fellow conservatives how tough you are. What Americanism is is ignoring terrorists and not allowing yourself to become like them, but instead showing them the strength that comes from being good — not just "good at what you do", but the kind of goodness that impresses God, assuming the guy exists.

In short, Donald Trump has the Wrong Stuff. He’s not very bright and he’s nasty and weak, and if he ever becomes president, he will make America the same way.

And so, yes, don’t be afraid to call him what he is:

Donald Trump is a “Radical Conservative Terrorist”, and the reason he is more dangerous to America than ISIS is that he, unlike the terrorists from way over there, has an actual chance of taking over our country, and rendering its founding principles into just so many dusty old unreadable documents that nobody cares about anymore! 

Response to A Return to Self-Sabotage

(See: Just Above Sunset: A Return to Self-Sabotage)

"...he infuriated the press to the point where they’ll never cut him a bit of slack ever again."

I wouldn't bet on that. I’m sure I’m not the only journalist (or, in my case, maybe ex-journalist) who strongly suspected beforehand that this was a trap. Still, they had to play along with the ruse anyway. 

This business about Trump claiming that Hillary started this thing, while he ended it, reminds me of the occasional story you hear about some fireman being arrested for setting fires that he would then heroically rush in to put out. 

And his theatrics of yesterday also reminds me of his days way back before he was a candidate for anything, offering millions of dollars to charity if only president Obama would dance the can-can in a bikini, or something — desperate attempts to make himself look like a player, attempts that we would all sluff off without much more than a pathetic smirk, since he seemed to be the only one thinking he wasn’t irrelevant. But fast forward to 2016, and it’s truly a case of Albert Shanker getting his hands on nuclear weapons.

But how much do his shenanigans hurt him? Unfortunately, not very much, as far as I can tell.

I wonder, were anyone to do a study on real estate prices in Costa Rica right now, if they would find a rise that corresponds in any way to Donald Trump’s 538.com improving chances of winning this election?

Response to The Ambiguous versus the Unlikable

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Ambiguous versus the Unlikable)

Seriously, did you realize, before the other day, that Donald Trump was not on record as believing Barrack Obama was born in the United States? I didn’t. I guess I haven’t been keeping up with politics as much as I thought I was. 

I thought, once Obama’s long-form birth certificate became public, that Trump accepted it as legit, and even — rather presumptuously, I should say! — tried to claim credit for doing the country a favor by forcing Obama to release it, although that was something only he and his fellow whackadoodles would care about anyway. I guess I was wrong in thinking it was no longer an issue, since, this last week, it resurfaced and was tossed, not-very-elegantly, into that toy box known as Trump Campaign Strategy, a box that is continuously threatening to run short of fresh doodads to play with.

It’s like Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say:

"Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it's always something — if it ain't one thing, it's another."

Have I used this Roseanne Roseannadanna analogy here before? I may have. It’s been a longstanding explanation of mine of how the penny-wise Trump campaign keeps itself in the news:

(1) Trump says something stupid on Wednesday, and won’t retract it;

(2) The news shows debate it all day Thursday,

(3) And on Friday, Trump announces that he takes it back.

(4) That sets up the weekend talking-head show panels of pundits to gum all about it, from every angle, and then we have a new week to start the nonsense over again. 

And for all those out there who blame the media for Republican successes, look closely at this whole birther affair as an example of how easy it is for just about anybody to manipulate the media, and ask yourself, how would you handle this? People of all political stripes want to know about Trump’s latest scams, and Trump knows people do, and Trump knows the press has to drop everything else to report it. After all, when you have strict journalistic principles you follow, you’re just predictable enough to allow some evil actor to take over the controls. It was bound to happen; it was only a matter of time.

So Trump promotes a news conference he's having on Friday morning in which he will be making a "major statement", hinting it will be about the birther issue, and at the very end of using all these decorated veterans as human shields for a half-an-hour, he drops in a thirty-second statement that only raises other questions, and then, pretending he’s ending the press's unhealthy preoccupation with his birtherism once and for all, so now we can get back to “Making America Great Again”, he ends his performance by dramatically walking away to lead a tour of his stupid new hotel, while strong-arming the network TV pool producer off the tour, while letting the camera crew on through.

But why would the national TV networks want to use their precious time covering some local hotel grand opening? So the DC bureau chiefs, who manage the pool, then voted to pull the pool crew out and to not release whatever useless video it shot.

It’s also worth noting that, the night before, after Trump’s campaign staff screwed up the flight arrangements for the traveling press, he left them stranded in New Jersey while he went ahead to his rally in New Hampshire, then mocked them at the event for their absence:

Trump publicly mocked his own traveling press corps for showing up late, a turn of events that his own campaign staff caused. 

"I have really good news for you," Trump told about 1,000 people in a New Hampshire middle school gymnasium. "I just heard that the press is stuck on their airplane.” 

"They can't get here. I love it! So they're trying to get here now. They're gonna be about 30 minutes late.” 

"They called us and said, 'Could you wait?’”, he claimed. "I said, 'absolutely not.'"

Each reporter apparently pays about $15,000 per week to the campaign for travel arrangements. Can they sue the campaign? Maybe, but it’s probably not worth the trouble. This is not likely to happen on Hillary’s events, since in her campaign, the press flies with her on the same plane.

Trump treats the media like just another toy in his toy box, which might or might not someday backfire on him. While his treatment of the press will immediately disqualify him with some voters, others, who don’t understand the role of journalists as standing in for the public, and don’t see a slight of the press as a slight on themselves, will think it’s a hoot.

I need to repeat this:

Those people who remember learning in school that a free press is a necessary fixture in good countries, understand that when a politician fucks over the press, he’s fucking over those that the press ultimately serve, which is the public. And those who don’t remember that sort of thing from school will probably be voting for Donald Trump anyway.

But is it just me, or has Donald Trump single-handedly changed the way the press covers politics in this country, maybe forever?

There was a time, back when the differences between the parties were not so great, the national news media took an objective approach to each side, not wanting to question the veracity of anyone's stance for fear of being accused of partisan bias.

But times have changed. Trump has so completely flooded the public square with outrageous lies and sleazy innuendo, reporters and anchors have had no choice but to make it their job to call him out on every one of them. For example, this morning, every reporter I heard reporting this story made sure to insert words to the effect, “and he has wrongly claimed that Hillary Clinton was the first to question where president Obama was born.”

So is this the end of objective journalism? From now on, will there not be a dime’s worth of difference between “objective reporters” and “liberal reporters”? Time will tell. Maybe when this election is behind them, journalists will find a way to write new rules of political coverage.

Meanwhile, what’s your decision: Do you stop covering his campaign, just to spite the sonofabitch? That certainly would be fun!

But no, you keep on going. After all, just because the candidate keeps acting like an asshole doesn’t mean you can stop doing your job.

And maybe the worst thing is, as stupid as he is — and make no mistake, just because he knows how to play the press doesn’t mean he’s not stupid — but as stupid as he is, the asshole knows you’re in a bind.

Response to Mutual Damage Control

(See: Just Above Sunset: Mutual Damage Control)

Lately, people keep saying stuff like, "Our two parties have nominated two deeply flawed candidates this time…”, but I think that’s too much of the same old infamous “both sides do it” bullshit. It leaves the impression that there are two equally-guilty contenders here, of which Donald Trump is one and Hillary Clinton is the other.

Yes, Hillary has some faults, and so does Barrack Obama, arguably the best (or maybe second-best) president in my lifetime, but neither one of those two is “deeply flawed”. To put this back into perspective, Hillary is actually just fine and whatever flaws she has do not belong inside any equation with those of Donald Trump, period, and belong probably more in the “horserace” category (either “she doesn’t smile enough” or “she smiles too much”) rather than of the stuff that is important, such as “All things considered, would this person make a tolerably good American president?”

The fact is that Hillary would make a good president, whereas Trump, being an evil scumbag, would not.

But more importantly right now, here’s something else we’ve been hearing lately:

“I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country,” running mate Mike Pence told CNN on Thursday.

Okay, but using that standard, you could also say, "Vlad, the Impaler has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country”. In fact, by that standard, the 15th-century Rumanian Vlad was even more powerful than the present day Russian one.

In both these cases, the argument ignores that the reason these guys are/were powerful is that they are/were tyrants, with essentially nobody to report to but themselves. Obama is at a disadvantage there, since he has to work within our American Constitution and, unlike Putin, can do hardly anything without the concurrence of Republicans. Putin can do virtually anything he wants to do, without the inconvenience of having much of any opposition to deal with at all.

But conservatives just don’t give as much weight to real reality as they to do the so-called optics:

“Bare-chested Putin gallops his horses, poses with his tigers, and shoots his guns,” wrote National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson in a 2014 column. “Barack Obama, in his increasingly metrosexual golf get-ups and his prissy poses on the nation’s tony golf courses, wants to stay cool while playing a leisure sport.”

And yet, with all this imagery of galloping horses vs tony golf courses, you might be tempted to believe that the strongman's domain is going gangbusters, while the leader of the Land of the Free is presiding over a wasteland. Don't be, since it's actually the other way around. The United States, much to the chagrin of both Trump and Putin, is doing remarkably well, under the circumstances, while Russia is its usual mess.

But also, think about the implications of this:

“He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good,” said Trump of the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during a July campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina. “They didn’t read them the rights,” he continued. “They didn’t talk, they were a terrorist, it was over.”

Which all sounds fine if you’re just spouting off, without giving it much thought, but the obvious reason they didn’t "read them the rights” is because they didn’t have any! 

After all, Saddam killed lots of people, and I’m willing to bet that whether or not they were “terrorists” was never a real consideration. In fact, I’d bet hardly any of the people he murdered were terrorists! He killed people because he decided he didn’t like them, and also because he could! After all, he didn’t live in the United States of America, where you’re not allowed to do that sort of thing, and the failure to acknowledge this just highlights a lack of appreciation for what the American founders were able to accomplish in creating their republic.

Will this Putin admiration thing finally be the deal-breaker for Trump? That’s hard to tell, given that the standards for breaking the deal have lowered of late. After all, who of us doesn’t indulge in nostalgia for the days when a simple promise to do three things, then to remember only two of them, was enough to instantly bounce you out of the race? Maybe that’s the way it should be.

Think of it this way: If you are interviewing a job candidate who, during the course of his initial interview, professes his belief that adults should be allowed to have sex with toddlers, you don’t even consider inviting him back for a second interview in hopes that he might say something to redeem himself. But times have apparently changed, at least in Republican party politics.

Trump is not, as portrayed by his army of seemingly all-blond surrogates, the “defender” of “Western civilization” against the invading barbarian, he is the invading barbarian! He represents the enemy that this country has traditionally sought to defend itself from!

First of all, Donald Trump is literally evil (figuratively speaking, of course.) If I were at all religious, I would argue that Donald Trump was sent here by Lucifer to finally destroy the United States of America, at least in the sense of the U.S. as a guiding example of a nation ruled by good people.

Second of all, we should not elect an evil person president!

And thirdly, the only thing we can do to keep this evil person from becoming president is not to stay home on election day, or randomly vote for whoever the Libertarians are putting up this year, the only thing America can do is to elect Hillary Clinton.

“But I just don’t trust her,” (whatever the hell that means), you say? Well, after deftly sidestepping the obvious question, “Trust her to do what?”, you need to seriously ask yourself the crucial question, “But do you distrust her more than you do Donald Trump?"

And if your answer is yes, then you have to ask yourself this:

"What, are you nuts? Have you actually lost your mind?”

Once all of this is behind us, assuming Hillary wins, I do hope America takes a lesson from all this, and maybe looks for a way to fix our system of choosing candidates, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

For one thing, as I’ve mentioned before, the Republicans should consider making a rule that nobody who “self-finances” their campaign should be allowed to get the party’s nomination. Trump was only able to take control of the party because he had so much money of his own that he didn’t need to pass any of their qualifying tests. He should have had to impress them, but instead, he ignored them.

(The GOP might also consider a rule that limits the size of donations, making it more likely that the winner would have widespread popular support, instead of just billionaires who can afford to buy support for their own agenda — but maybe that’s too much democracy for the party to swallow in one gulp.)

And maybe we do need to take a citizenship test to earn the right to vote, for which you will need to study very hard — to learn, first of all, what it was the founders were trying to do when they created the nation, and secondly, learn about all the trials-and-errors the country had to go through to collectively learn the lessons that it had to learn to get to be what we are today, the longest-lasting democracy in the world.

Response to Under the Volcano

(See: Just Above Sunset: Under the Volcano)

Since posing as one of his own people in order to say something stupid on his own behalf has historically proven to be his wont, I wonder if this “unnamed campaign adviser” could possibly have been the Big Trumpeter himself:

An unnamed campaign adviser was oddly specific ... telling CNN that the goal of Trump’s visit to Mexico was explicitly to get a photo that makes him look presidential.

So Mexico was just some frigging photo-op?!?

And not only a photo-op, the Trump surrogates, without a hint of irony, are today even saying the trip was “successful” because it showed Donald Trump, standing next to some foreign leader “on the international stage”, looking presidential!

This may explain the discrepancy in stories about whether the two discussed the wall. Yes, Peña Nieto probably did tell Trump at the very beginning of the private discussion, just to get it straight, that Mexico wasn’t going to be paying for the wall, to which Trump just stared into space — and so when someone asked him later about whether they talked about “the wall”, and he answered, truthfully, no, there was no discussion of the wall.

In fact, he didn’t fly all the way to Mexico City to get into some discussion, he came there for action! Specifically, he came to get his picture taken!

Which also explains why Trump said all those nice things about the Mexican people, and that he thinks of Mexican president Peña Nieto as his “friend”. The president, for his part, seemed dumbfounded, but of course, this was only supposed to be a photo-op for him, too, since his popularity numbers are also in the toilet, and he wanted to let everyone know that he had told the Donald off!

(One has to wonder: Was the talk taped? Maybe we’ll find out some day.)

In essence, Trump didn’t need anything from Peña but to be in the same picture frame with him in an official-looking “foreign policy setting", and so it didn’t matter what was said, as long as none of it would upset the applecart, and just so the whole visit could end up being as boring as all those foreign visits that Hillary Clinton used to make -- since, I’m sure in the minds of Trump and his gang, nothing ever happened at those boring international junkets either, outside of everybody posing for pictures with one another, all looking very serious and important. And afterward, everybody goes back to whatever they were doing, such as insulting each other from afar.

And that, my friends, is how foreign policy is done! Nothing to it! Especially if you have the photos to prove you were there.

The question is, did his junket change any voters' minds, like so many Republicans, grasping at straws, were hoping?

I doubt it. Let’s face it, anybody who was impressed with his south-of-the-border dog-and-donkey show was already voting for him, and if all those hoping for a sign that he was actually “softening” his approach to immigration wasn’t already hopelessly confused by all the backtracks of his reversals of his flip-flops in the week leading up to Mexico, then his hard-nosed Arizona speech should have knocked their heads off — unless, of course, that happened when, the next day, they heard Trump characterize his speech as a “softening” of sorts.

But you have to figure the conservative Hillary-Derangement-Machine must be chugging along very well if these people are still looking for Trump to show signs of reform.

Sure, it’s all very easy for me, who sees her "high crimes" (assuming she’s even guilty of any of them) as being on the order of going forty in a 35 MPH zone, but to me, Trump’s deal-breakers are not even that huge — cheating workers out of their pay and Trump U students out of the life-savings, telling a friend that you gotta “treat [women] like shit”, deriding an American war hero POW as just some loser who got captured, and addressing all his political opponents with demeaning nicknames like “Little Marco” — but they all demonstrate that he’s too much of a dirtbag to run any country, especially ours.

So continuing to look for Trump to show he’s in the least way up for this job is just idiotic. He’s already shown us the best of what he thinks he can do, even before he demonstrated that he hasn’t a clue what an American diplomat, even a “pretend" one, actually does in a meeting with a foreign leader.

And, by the way, about his big speech on immigration policy?

Immigration, as Trump himself says over and over, is an issue that nobody was talking about before he started talking about it, and probably because it doesn’t present the country with any real serious problems. It has been shown repeatedly that so-called “illegal” immigrants don’t bring lots of crime to this country, no matter how many individual cases the Trump campaign rounds up. Nor do migrant workers replace American workers. In fact, I saw an interview last night with a farmer who can’t find enough workers, American or not, to show up to pick his crops, even after hiring every undocumented worker in sight for $12 per hour.

In other words, Trump has us all focussed in on a non-issue!

The real problems that do need solving revolve around the economy itself, including poverty and jobs, and the fact that whatever wealth is being produced is being hogged by the people at the top of the food chain. This includes some of the same things that, for complicated reasons, Trump followers think have to do with competition from immigrants and foreign workers, but really have more to do with automation, not to mention the way we apparently don’t tax rich people as much as we should. Americans in the working class are not making enough to afford to buy their own products, much less move into a safer neighborhood.

And some of our problems come from our not listening enough to the people who know about these problems, and how to fix them. Instead, we listen to people like Donald Trump, who thinks you can ignore expertise in all its forms — including, by the way, how to run a campaign. He seems to be out to prove that someone can win the White House without, say, buying ads on TV, since he can always say something stupid on a daily basis as a way of tricking the media into covering you, or without coordinating with your party so you can have a gang of campaign volunteers on the ground in a state to do all those local things that campaigns have learned over the decades that have to be done.

So this election really is a test to see who’s got it right — is it the smart people who, say, have spent much of their careers, traveling from place to place, building expertise, trying to get some good things done; or is it the bombastic "strongman" who, just for fun, can get almost any crowd to chant just about whatever he wants, but also knows how to play the “diplomat” by flying in his own plane to some foreign country, just to have his picture taken with some foreign president, as if Leadership is just some child's game of Make-Believe?

He thinks it’s all just smoke and mirrors. He’s gotten along for years by tricking himself into thinking he’s smarter than he is, that all these so-called “professionals” are faking it, and figures he can do that, too.

But while I’d like to state, unequivocally, that he’s about to learn his lesson, I can’t. I just now looked at Nate Silver’s site, which shows Hillary’s odds of winning (right now at 74.1%, down from 89.2% on August 14th) gradually sliding earthward on a daily basis, slowly but surely taking my faith in self-government with them.