GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for President about a year ago, like a lot of Americans, I was both amused and appalled.  And as he dominated the primaries, picking off one opponent after another, I couldn't help but feel happy, sure that he would fall apart once he had to start appealing to the whole country and not just Republican voters.
Well, it appears that that scenario, for the most part, has played out; every reliable poll shows Clinton with a lead nationally and in most swing states.  She may even have a chance at winning traditionally red states like Texas and Utah.  And it couldn't have happened to a more deserving person; Trump is such a terrible candidate that newspapers like the Cincinnati Herald and the Arizona Republic, which haven't endorsed a Democrat for President in over fifty years, have endorsed Hillary Clinton.  Even USA Today, which normally doesn't make endorsements, has said that he doesn't deserve to be President.
And the Republican Party itself saw this coming; after Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama in 2012,  party officials and analysts  took a long hard look in the mirror and realized that they would never  win the Presidency again if they didn't find a way to appeal more to Hispanic and Women voters.  And then the Republican primary voters turned around and voted for a man who was the direct opposite of what the party knew that they needed.  The  party may be facing a split that may never completely heal; there's no way of knowing for sure, but it's entirely possible that a normal Republican candidate, like say Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, might be beating Clinton in the polls right now if the party had gone with them.  But, to the anger of the party elites, the primary voters picked Trump as their standard bearer, which will in all likely hood  end with his humiliating defeat.
While there is some worry that Trump won't accept the election outcome, seeing as he already is calling it "rigged", Clinton's margin of victory appears  that it will be large enough that even his most rabid supporters will have to accept his loss, even if he rants and raves about it.
Now, that's the good news.  Here's the bad part: while there is a fair chance of the Democratic party taking control of the Senate, it appears that the Republicans will hang on to the House of Representatives.  Which means that we can look forward to at least four more years of Congressional gridlock, not to mention tax payer dollars wasted on pointless investigations of every possible aspect of Clinton's political machine.  Senator John McCain, normally seen as a voice of reason in the Republican party, has floated the idea of rejecting all of Clinton's Supreme Court nominees for the next four years, regardless of their qualifications, (although he has seemed to walk that statement back a bit).  So, sadly, progressives like myself will probably spend the next few years gritting our teeth at nothing getting done while ruefully admitting that Clinton doing practically nothing is still better than Trump doing anything.

"HORRIFYING"

Well, it's official; there will be no more times this year that we will have to hear Donald Trump lie,  yell and insult his way through a debate. And, given recent polling numbers, we probably never will hear him debate again.    However the election turns out, for that we can all be grateful. (Although, sadly, I doubt he will disappear after losing).
Yes, the third debate was held last night, and, as with the first debate,  Trump manged to appear Presidential and give reasonably normal responses for the first part of it. But then, somewhere around the half hour mark, when his ADD started to kick in, and the fact that he was losing to a girl hit him full in the face, he reverted to the campaign Trump, the same man that his supporters all love and the rest of America can't stand. 
He had all his usual tricks:  the garbled, almost incoherent sentence syntax, the rambling, flailing attacks, all  sprinkled with rude  comments and crazy conspiracies.  At one point he huffed that Hillary Clinton shouldn't have even been allowed to run for the Presidency (uh, she's over 35 and was born in the US, so criteria met), and, in a brand new conspiracy, claimed that Clinton and President Obama paid people to start fights and cause trouble at his rallies.  (At least I think that's what he was saying, his phrasing of it  was quite muddy. ) So far the mainstream media hasn't even mentioned this odd line of attack that, if true, would be a major, perhaps even criminal, scandal.  From any other candidate, this charge would be big news, but when you're dealing with a man who has set records for the amount of lies he tells in each speech, it was just another addition to the long list of conspiracy theories that he has mentioned and possibly endorsed, from Birtherism to the death of Vince Foster.

The most chilling moment came when moderator Chris Wallace asked whether or not he would accept the results of the election; this was no idle question.  Recently at campaign rallies Trump has stated repeatedly that the election was rigged against him.  Like a schoolyard bully that cries and yells "you're cheating!" when he starts to lose a game, the narcissistic Trump can't believe that not everybody thinks he's as wonderful as he does.  And so, Trump categorically refused to say whether or not he would accept that the election results were legitimate, jokingly remarking that "I will keep you in suspense" about that, a comment that Clinton rightfully described as "horrifying".  His statement oddly flies  in the face of recent statements made by his own Vice Presidential running mate and his daughter, not to mention common sense and reason.
This is uncharted water; although Al Gore called for a recount of the state of Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, that was after the election, when reports of voter repression and irregularities were widespread.  Trump is the first Presidential candidate ever to question an election's outcome weeks before election day, setting another sad precedent in his candidacy. This is why Hillary Clinton needs to win big (or bigly, as Trump would say).  If her victory includes not only the usual blue states and swing states, but a few red states as well, it would show Trump's assertions to be the childish tantrums that they are; while voter fraud, if it existed, might be able to swing some very close states, it couldn't possibly change an election won by millions (or even tens of millions) of votes.  To steal an election by that many votes would require a massive expenditure of time and money, and even Trump's most staunch defenders couldn't say that she stole an election at that level.  And then hopefully he will retreat to his tower and pout alone while the world moves on without him.

THE UGLY DEBATE

Last night Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in a Presidential debate that was as ugly and mean spirited as one would expect from this campaign.  I suppose Trump was the winner, in that unlike in the first debate, he seemed reasonably prepared  and was not ever caught short sighted.  More importantly, he was able to say in front of Clinton what his rabid supporters  have been wanting to hear him say ever since he announced his candidacy: that Clinton was a liar, that she was wrong about Benghazi and her emails, that she "had enormous amounts of hate in her heart", and that he was going to call for a  special investigation of her if he's elected.  Finally, he topped it all  off with this sharp rejoinder: Clinton: (it's)“awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the laws in this country.”  Trump:  "Because you'd be in jail”.  So, we've gone from Republicans chanting "Lock her up!" at their convention, to Trump threatening her with jail to her face. 
And as if that weren't low enough, Trump responded to criticism of him making horribly sexist comments in a recording released last Friday by attacking Bill Clinton's record on women when he was President, saying "There has never been anyone in the history of politics in this country  that has been so abusive to women."   This seems like a desperate ploy by Trump, in that he wants to somehow re litigate charges made against Bill Clinton decades ago, and then extend those charges to include Hillary.  I can't see this winning over moderates or undecideds.
So while Trump may have won the debate, the election will be a far different thing, and with several prominent Republicans with holding or with drawing their support of him (especially House Speaker Paul Ryan) , his chances of winning are sinking lower and lower.  The question now is: how much of the Republican party will he pull down with him?  Will Clinton get a Democratic majority in the Senate, and perhaps even the House of Representatives?  Perhaps.  More importantly, we may be seeing a split in the Republican party, between people who understand that compromise is part of politics, and those who see it as a weakness, between those who realize that a party made up of mostly old white angry men does not have a great future, and those very same old white angry men who wish that the days of white male dominance in this country never ended.  Putting it bluntly, is Trump win the nomination  in spite of his saying things that are racist, and sexist, or because he says things that are racist and sexist?  Will his crazy candidacy  be seen as a one time aberration?  A brief fling with a celebrity with no political experience?  Or will his popularity with the party's voters cause them to turn from the party leaders?  Could the party literally split in two?  In any event,  these next few years are going to be very interesting ones for the Republican party and for the country in general.  As  those crabby old white men become fewer and fewer, hopefully a more moderate and modern Republican party will emerge, while Rush Limbaugh and his ilk fade away.  In any event, I'm glad Trump appears to be going down hard, and that no candidate like him will reappear soon. No more demagogues America, please!

UM...FINALLY?

Last Friday Donald Trump teased the press about a major statement he was going to make on the birthplace of President Barack Obama.  First, after forcing the TV press to sit through what was essentially an infomercial for his new hotel, he gave a terse statement:"  President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period, now, we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”  Unable to resist, he, in typical fashion, managed to work both a lie and a boast into his next statement: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Mr. Trump said. “I finished it.”
Now, it is normal for Presidential candidates to run further to the right or the left during the primaries  and then return to the center during the national race, when appealing to swing voters and moderates.  But, it's a sad state of affairs when a major party's candidate return to the center means abandoning a crazy, discredited conspiracy theory!  And like he does so often, Trump wants the American public to listen to and believe whatever is saying at any given moment and ignore everything he has said before (which works far better for him than it should).  Trump's assertion that Clinton herself began the birther theory back in 2008 has been fact checked and debunked thoroughly; while there may have been a few low level staffers who batted the idea around while she was running against Obama in the primaries, Clinton herself never pushed the theory.  But not only did Clinton not start the birther movement, she certainly never loudly and wholeheartedly embraced it the way that Trump did.  Remember that in 2011 Trump considered running for the presidency against Obama by giving one interview after another saying that Obama's birthplace was in question.  He made vague, ludicrous statements about how he had sent investigators to Hawaii who were finding out "incredible things"  about Obama, and kept it up even after the President released his long form birth certificate that year.  As late as 2014 he tweeted "Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama's college records (destroyed?) and check "place of birth". " The notion that he had put this issue to rest after keeping it alive for far too long is the height of hubris.  And, unfortunately, his statement on the issue allowed for no questions from the press and offered no apology to President Obama or the American people for wasting so much time on such a preposterous conspiracy.

To me the real tragedy of this whole mess is not Trump's hanging on to birtherism for as long as he has, it's how many American citizens clung to it, and still do.  In the eight years that Obama has been President, the percentage of Republicans who don't think he was born in the country or aren't sure has never hovered below forty percent.  Why do literally tens of millions of Americans cling to this notion despite a complete lack of evidence?  The sad truth is that an awful lot of white Americans have never been comfortable with an African American President and hold on to the birther movement as a safe place to express this discomfort without just coming out and admitting it.  And Trump has been capitalizing on that discomfort right from the start, and will continue to find ways to do so, even as he abandons birtherism.

It is truly horrific to consider that Trump may ride birtherism to the White House, and while the edge may be still in Clinton's favor, this race is far too close.  Even more horrid is the fact that if only white people voted, Trump would be well in the lead, and if only white men voted, he'd win in a land slide.  So here's a thought, since white men have held back voting rights to other Americans for so long, why don't we forfeit ours for the next, say, 100 years?  Personally,  I would gladly give up my right to vote if every other white man in the country had to also.  I'm  just saying....

HILLARY'S HEALTH

And the craziest national election is modern history just keep getting crazier.  Recently, Republican Donald Trump supporters have been pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton has some kind of serious ailment (ranging from Parkinson's to epilepsy) that she is concealing from the public.  Last month, former New York Mayor turned bug-eyed Trump supporting fear monger Rudy Giuliani gave an interview in which he encouraged people to "go online and put down 'Hillary Clinton illness' and take a look at the videos for themselves."  The videos in question were childishly slowed down images of Clinton reacting to things while right wing "experts" claimed that they proved existence of her brain damage, or whatever.
Sadly, what's going on here is obvious: just as the so called "birther movement", that claimed that President Barack Obama  was lying about being born in America, gave a smoke screen to racist comments by implying that Obama's Presidency wasn't legitimate, this new movement is allowing right wingers to make sexist comments about Clinton.  (Trump, it must be mentioned, was a prominent birther back in 2011, and he has never admitted that he was wrong about it). Although no one is saying that a woman can't be President, by talking about her alleged medical issues, it lets them use words like "toughness", "strength" and "stamina", all things normally associated with male strength, when talking about her.  The right wing media has always been good about dog whistles, playing up to its mostly white male audience's fears without coming right out and saying women and minorities aren't fit for office.

Unfortunately for Clinton, this crazy conspiracy got a boost this weekend when she, while attending a 9/11 memorial,  had to leave early.  Although it was initially chalked up to heat exhaustion, once a video of her needing help to get into a vehicle surfaced, she admitted that two days earlier she had been diagnosed with pneumonia. Thinking that it was, in her own words, no big deal, she soldiered on with her campaign, not even telling some of her advisers about the diagnosis, until her collapse on Sunday.  So, just as the White Water investigation back in the 90's eventually led to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, once again we have a Clinton accused of covering something up that turns out to be partially true.  Hopefully, her bout with sickness will not hurt her in the coming election, while convincing her to release a full medical report sometime soon.  Both she and Trump have been too reticent on this issue, especially when one considers that Clinton is 68  and Trump is 70. (At 69, Ronald Reagan was the oldest when he took office in 1980.)  Considering just how much being President appeared to rapidly age both George W Bush and Obama while they were in office, good mental health is important. (Physical health not so much, remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran the country from a wheelchair).  And hey, if health is going to be an issue in this election,  I would encourage people to consider that Trump is an admitted junk food junkie who works himself into a red faced lather during each speech.  The picture of modern health he isn't!

WHERE IS THE MEDIA?

Last Wednesday, in a preview of the upcoming debates, Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump gave back to back interviews with NBC morning news host Matt Lauer.  Lauer's performance during the interviews has been widely criticized, and with good reason.  While talking to  Clinton, Lauer asked her time and time again about her emails, and then rushed her answers on other matters, basically stepping on her talking points.  But while talking to Trump, Lauer allowed Trump's assertion that he opposed the 2004 Iraq war from the start to go unchallenged, even though there is documented video proof that he did support the war, from a Howard Stern interview Trump did  before the war started (Clinton even mentioned the interview in her part of the show).  Sadly, Lauer let Trump's lie float into the ether, letting him get away with it.  He also allowed Trump to lie about a similar opposition he claimed to have about America's military intervention in Libya.
Lauer's weak kneed response to Trump's falsehoods shows the media's problem with dealing with a candidate like Trump.  Trump lies so often, at such an alarming rate, that taking time to debunk one lie becomes difficult when he's already moving onto another.  And he lies with with such confidence, with so much righteous anger and certitude, that it becomes hard to challenge him.  Indeed, it's possible that he himself has no idea that he's lying; his short attention span and lack of focus has been well documented.
There's another problem that the media faces; it has been a talking point for decades that the mainstream media has a liberal bias.  Ironically, this statement usually comes from right wing media, where a completely biased opinion is expected!  While media bias is a debatable point (there certainly wasn't any media bias during the 2004 build up to the Iraq war, when serious questions went unasked), many members of the media take the criticism to heart and overcompensate by going after Democrats more than Republicans.  So we now have spent far too much media time and attention on Clinton's "scandals", while so little time has been spent on Trump's ethical problems over the years.  Why hasn't there been as much attention given to the fact that Trump and his father Fred were sued by the Federal Government in the 1970's for refusing to rent their properties to black people?  (They settled out of court). What about the $25,000 campaign donation that a Trump PAC made to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi just before she decided not to join a class action lawsuit against his bogus Trump University?  What about the fact that a man who boasts about his business acumen has declared bankruptcy at least four times?  Or that he also brags about his monetary worth without releasing his tax returns, calling into question just how wealthy he is? And this all is just a partial list, off the top of my head.  None of these things have been investigated as much as Clinton's emails, even though FBI Director James Comey has clearly said that no crime was committed by her.

It really seems that there are two kinds of coverage of the candidates, one in which Clinton is portrayed as being deceitful and  untrustworthy and Trump is praised when he can properly read a speech off a teleprompter without spewing lies and childish insults.  The effect is like clapping for a toddler who successfully takes his first step while complaining about a track star for not racing fast enough!  Sadly, the cumulative effect of this coverage is starting to take it's toll, with Trump clearly gaining on Clinton's lead in the polls.  While the odds are still in her favor, this election should be a land slide, not a squeaker.  Is it asking too much for the media to do it's job properly and give Trump's various scandals the same weight as Clinton's?  Sadly, given Lauer's ridiculously biased performance on Wednesday, the answer is yes. 

POLITICIANS: A SEPARATE, BULLET PROOF BREED

The continuing saga of the ups and downs of the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton has got me thinking; politicians are really a breed apart from the rest of us.  Some people, it is said, are just natural born leaders, and I think it's safe to believe that Clinton was already that way as a child, even though she was from a family of relatively modest means .  Who knows how young she was when she first got the idea of being our nation's first female president.  Way back in the 1970's, I think it's very likely that as she mapped out her husband Bill's path to the Governorship and the White House,  she was already working on  her own way there.  To me, Hillary has always seemed like the kid in the class that you voted for for class president not because she was popular or you wanted her as a friend, but because she was clearly the hardest working, smartest kid in the class.  The one who put her head down and studied, earning respect if not admiration.  She may lack her husband's seemingly effortless ability to connect with a crowd, but when it comes to knowledge of  details, and the nuts and bolts of political office, she knows what's she's doing.
One of  the other qualities that politicians have that sets them so far apart from the rest of us is how thick skinned they have to be, and Hillary shows this in spades.  I can remember that in 1992, the hatred of her husband from the right when he was elected was almost palpable: after a 12 year stranglehold on the presidency, the idea that a Democrat that had avoided the draft in Viet Nam, with a history of pot smoking and philandering, was about to be President was shocking to them.  And if the Republicans hated Bill, they seemed even more vitriolic towards Hillary; in his book BLINDED BY THE RIGHT, former conservative journalist David Brock recalls an article in the right wing magazine SPECTATOR when Bill was still governor of Arkansas that referred to Hillary as "the lady Macbeth of Little Rock." And Bill's ascension to the White House just increased that virtiol; for eight years the right wing media dumped on her, from accusations of past criminal financial dealings with what came to be known as the Whitewater scandal, to even implying that she had former aide Vince Foster murdered after he committed suicide.  And when the Republicans finally hit pay dirt, catching Bill lying under oath about an affair with an intern, the resulting media firestorm was almost as much an embarrassment for her as it was for him, with inevitable questions about how much she knew about the affair and why she remained with Bill arising from all quarters.
Given all of this, it would have been perfectly reasonable on her part to mostly exit from politics after Bill's second term, emerging only to write a book and perhaps give a few speeches.  But no, she dove head first into the lion's den all over again, successfully running to become  a US Senator from New York.  The fact that she was perfectly willing to run for political office, knowing full well how despised she was by the right, illustrates just how different politicians are then the rest of us, with our normal thin skins.   It is a testament to her individual drive and determination that she never let a little thing like her husband almost being impeached from the presidency, slow her down!  Personally, I can't even imagine accepting the disapproval of literally millions of Americans so blithely.   I am reminded of the famous quote from former President Franklin D Roosevelt  discussing business interests: "They are unanimous in their hate for me-and I welcome their hatred." 

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton also shows another aspect of the unique nature of politicians: their continual belief that they are above the masses and live by their own rules.   Like most Americans, I don't think that Bill Clinton lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky while he was President, warranted impeachment, but it was certainly a stupid thing to do.  After all, when the Republican party took the House of Representatives in 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was openly contemptuous towards the President, and clearly relished the idea of throwing every globule of mud at him that could be found.  In other words, it was a really bad time for Bill to start a secret affair.  But politicians can't seem to control themselves, as we are finding out now with recent stories about the Clinton Foundation, a non profit charity organization founded in 2013, which it  appears may have accepted donations from foreign countries for access to Hillary when she was Secretary of State.  And some of those contributing countries are places with terrible human rights records.  Once again we have a politician abandoning common sense: don't set up a possible conflict of interest when you are thinking about running for President!  This, combined with her ongoing email scandal, paints a definite picture of a political animal that sees herself above the rules and regulations of ordinary people.  Like her husband, she is a smart person who does foolish things because she considers herself bulletproof.  While I still will gladly vote for her, I do wish she would realize that American politicians are not like members of royalty or the Pope: that is, they are fallible.