Pragmatism

 

(Updates at the end of the post)

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-- Trump Is The Revolution Against The Establishment

-- Still with her? LOL you should be fitted for an orange jumpsuit

-- […] can’t understand why a supposing military man would even vote for Hellary who murder 4 american heros and see them tortured by arab scums for hours and she says *who even cares??!” kind of makes you wnder if you really r a veteran hmmm?!

-- You think you are a good blogger and youre funny with insults arent you but libs just cant stop with the personal insults because you have no moral center without G*D Only a G*D hating fag lib would vote for Crooked Hillary Clinton. Libs should be thrown in prison oar a mental hospital! SICK!

-- Hillary is a loser. Trump is a billionare what does Killary have? That’s right nothing not even Bill! EVERY REAL POLL SHOWS TRUMP WINNING THE BLACKS! PS. and I’m not white so just sto pwith the racists ok?

-- MR WRONG YOUR ATTACKS ON JILL STEIN ARE DISGUSTING! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF. YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE! UNFOLLOW!

-- I simply can’t understand why somebody of your background would vote for Hillary Clinton.

-- Answer these questions if you can  […] don’t you WANT America to be great? If so why not? Why do liberals hate America and tear it down? Why do you hate Christians who built this great country and want to give it to the muslim cult? Are YOU a muslim paedophile? Think about it!

Welcome to my inbox.

Here Donald Trump is a revolutionary.

And Hillary Clinton is a Wall Street tool.

Trump is the candidate of law and order, secure borders, and small government.

Clinton is the candidate of bankers and foreign interests, Allah and atheists, and the New World Order.

Only a traitor would vote for Clinton.

Patriots, warriors, true Americans vote for Trump.

According to my email, if you vote for Clinton it’s because you hate America. Or you hate the Christian God. Or you’re sick in the head. Or you’re a criminal yourself. Or an illegal alien. Or a fake veteran. Or the real racists who keep “the blacks” from raising themselves up by their own bootstraps. Or maybe you just don’t like self-made billionaires.

Trump is rich and successful, brutally frank and honest, he says it like it is. He’s a man of God.

Clinton is a criminal and a lying bitch and a murderer who hates the military.

Also, for variety, there’s Jill Stein and that Johnson guy, Gary, Gerry, Larry, something like that.

Over the last several months, as this horrifically horrendous horrifying election season has careened wildly out of control towards November like a burning prison bus slathered in raw sewage and filled beyond capacity with gleefully capering clowns frantically squirting their little seltzer bottles and honking their little horns with mad abandon unconcerned as they hurtle willy-nilly ever closer to the cliff edge, my inbox has grown increasingly frantic with panic and accusations and naked greased insanity dressed up like Napoleon decked out in a Hitler moustache and wearing giant pink bunny slippers and a propeller beanie.

But, underneath all of that is a legitimate question.

Why would somebody like me vote for Hillary Clinton?

That’s not a rhetorical question.

You see, I’m a stereotypical conservative.

Or a least I should be.

I’m male.

I’m white.

I’m straight.

I’m a veteran.

I make a decent living.

I believe in the promise of the Declaration.

I swore my life in defense of the Constitution.

I believe that the only truly inalienable right is the right to define yourself.

I should be a conservative because everything in this society is tilted in my favor and I should want to keep it that way.

I should be a conservative because by inclination I tend towards the traditional conservative values of personal liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, personal enterprise and free markets, balanced budgets, strong military, and self-reliance. Hell, look at me. I couldn’t look any more the traditional conservative if I channeled the staid and buttoned-down ghost of William F. Buckley himself.

I should be a conservative because my childhood was the 1960s. I came of age at the end of the 70s. I was raised in a conservative Republican household in a predominately white Christian conservative Republican Midwestern town surrounded by the traditionally conservative Republican professions of factories and farming.  The soundtrack of my youth was Johnny Cash and the Grand Ole Opry and we never missed a John Denver or Donny and Marie Christmas special. I was a Boy Scout. My heroes wore white shirts and ties, they were serious frowning men with brush cuts who smoked Pall Malls, they were the scientists and the engineers and the astronauts who built and flew the rockets and got America to the moon and safely home again. My dad was a veteran of Korea and I respected the tall fit dangerous men who wore the uniform of America and went to fight in Southeast Asia and I had little use for the dirty unemployed hippies who smelled of burning rope and shouted from the street corners protesting The War and The Man and The Establishment and who sang silly songs about the Age of Aquarius.

After high school, when it became apparent I had neither the aptitude nor the money for college, nor the desire to shovel cow manure or work on a factory line, I joined the military. It wasn’t a popular choice at the time, earning you scorn from liberals and conservatives alike – albeit for different reasons. Vietnam was only four years behind us and you had to go to the worst parts of town to find a recruiting station. And in fact, the Military Entrance Processing Station in Detroit where I went for my induction physical via Greyhound bus from Grand Rapids was in the bottom two stories of an old burned out hotel surrounded by drug pushers and prostitutes and bombed out buildings. Inside, the walls were peeling yellow paint and the place stank of urine and mildew. The uniformed men who worked there had seen hard service in the jungles and rice paddies and they held new recruits in the kind of sneering contempt it takes years to master and even they thought we must be the dregs indeed to join up. You really had to want to enlist. Now, I’d like to say I joined up out of a sense of patriotism or to serve my country or for freedom and democracy or some other such lofty conservative ideal, or at least the pragmatism of an education and salable job skills, but mostly it was just a way to get the hell out of my suffocating hick town and see something of the world. Also I had the vague idea military men got a lot of girls. And it was that, but it also eventually became the first part too. My enlistment turned into a career, a college degree, a marriage, a son, the very best of friends, unusual and unique skills, incredible experiences, three wars, and finally an officer’s commission. And during the two and half decades I spent in uniform the military went from being hated and despised, the refuge of scoundrels and losers and alcoholics in the public perception, to a professional volunteer force of America’s very best. And there is no more a concentration of conservative ideals than the military. We are conservatives both by definition and by practice. Adherence to discipline, tradition, doctrine, order, accountability, conformity, authority, service, sacrifice, patriotism, and a powerful resistance to change, these are the very traits which define both military life and traditional conservatism. I spent nearly my entire adulthood living up to those ideals, I was damned good at it and I have the scars and decorations to prove it.

I retired from the military to a conservative red state and then moved to an even more conservative red state. My friends are conservatives. My family are conservatives. My acquaintances are conservatives.

I did consulting work for the military, but eventually I became a full time writer and an artist. These days I’m a self-employed small business owner who resents the hell out the hefty check I send to the IRS every three months. It’s true that as a disabled veteran and a military retiree I get a stipend from the government each month, but it’s not nearly enough to live on and it’s not nearly enough to pay for all the damage that was done to my body over decades of service. I can get lousy medical care at the VA if I’m willing to stand in line for a few months, or I can pay a large deductible for Tricare and hope to find a decent doctor who will take it. I pay more to cover my family and I pay out of pocket the full cost of dental insurance which military retirement doesn’t cover.  And even if I do everything just right, the government can (and does) change the rules arbitrarily to renege on the promises they made back when America was desperate for my service and I was foolish enough to believe. 

As a writer I have no idea if I’ll make enough to survive each month – let alone pay for my son’s college tuition and take care of my mother-in-law who lives with us due to medical issues.

I’ve fetched up for now in the Panhandle of Florida, unlikely ever to return to my beloved Alaska. I’m surrounded by the welfare state. Lack is what defines this place, lack of education, lack of decent jobs, lack of basic healthcare, lack of opportunity, and most of all lack of dreams. Nevertheless, they are a fiercely proud people and the Civil War still smolders just below the surface. Here in my adopted homeland they hold their religion and their guns and their families close. Passionate about their heritage and their history, they raise the banner of the Confederacy alongside the American flag and they honor both. Their anthem is Sweet Home Alabama and they play it loud and woe to the man who fails to render proper respect. Here they speak fervidly of state’s rights, self determination, and liberty. They hold on to their traditions hard, what traditions they have left anyway.  And it’s easy to see that government has long ago failed the citizens here in the Old South and while the American Dream might not be entirely dead, you’d have to be a fool to believe you have much of a shot at it.

And so that’s me. That’s who I am. That’s where I come from and where I live.

So why would a guy like me vote for Hillary Clinton?

Why indeed.

Well, you see, it’s not just about voting for a particular candidate.

No candidate, especially a candidate for President of the United States, comes free of political entanglements and political influence and political obligation and political money or a questionable past. Not today, not ever. Any politician who tells you they are free of such is either deluded or lying directly to your face and if you believe them, well, then you deserve everything you get.

Clinton is as much – or as little – a part of the machine as is any other candidate stretching all the way back to George Washington himself, who in addition to being part of the military was a wealthy businessman and consummate politician and just as obligated to those who put him into power as any elected public servant is today. This is why I have to suppress a laugh when Bernie Sanders supporters earnestly tell me Bernie isn’t a Washington insider. Sanders was first elected to Congress in 1991, he’s the longest serving Independent in US history. If he’s not an insider, if he’s not a career politician after nearly 30 years in Washington, then he’s doing something seriously wrong. Now, I don’t mean this as an insult, to either Sanders or his supporters, I’m simply saying any candidate for the highest office in the land comes with more than just his or her toothbrush and charming smile. This is why I laugh outright when Trump supporters tell me The Donald is an outsider, that he’s the “revolution against the establishment.” That’s hilarious. You don’t get to be a billionaire New York real-estate developer and an Atlantic City casino owner and an international golf-course resort mogul and the star of a TV-Reality show without being connected to power and money, seriously connected, without being an insider, without being a politician. Donald Trump isn’t a revolution against the establishment, he is the establishment and to suggest otherwise is either ironically hilarious or dangerously deluded – perhaps both. The belief that Donald Trump is somehow going to bring about a “revolution” against the very power and the very influence and the very wealth and the very privilege that literally defines every fiber of his being is quite literally the definition of insanity.

But none of that explains why I would vote for Hillary Clinton.

It’s not enough to vote against something or someone, you have to believe in something too.

I don’t like Clinton.

I never have.

It’s a personal distaste. It’s visceral. Perhaps it’s my small town Midwestern upbringing with its inherent suspicion of big city elitism. Perhaps it’s my military background; the Clintons were never popular with the military for some reasons they deserve and many they don’t. Unfair? Sure. But that’s just how it was … and still is. Perhaps it’s that she and I have little in common. Perhaps it’s that I often find her manner irritating, her voice grates on my nerves, and for me her jokes often fall flat. Perhaps it’s that I don’t find Hillary Clinton to be inspiring the way Barack Obama is, or charismatic in the manner of Ronald Reagan, or imbued with great vision like John F. Kennedy.  Perhaps it’s that I don’t much like her friends – particularly Henry Kissinger, a man I hold in utter contempt and would like to see die in prison for the 20,000 Americans who died in Vietnam for his vainglory.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t like her husband. Oh, settle down, I can admire Bill Clinton’s intelligence and compassion, his easy likability, his personable style, the fact that he left office with the country far better off than when he first swore the oath. But I wouldn’t want to have a beer with him. I don’t admire those who step out on their spouses, who are raging hard-ons, who can’t keep their pants zipped, and I’ve known plenty such in the military. It is my experience that no matter how gifted professionally they might be, their lack of integrity with those they supposedly hold most dear means I could never trust them at my back. What I’m saying is that I might admire Bill Clinton the President, but I don’t have much use for Bill Clinton the man – and that’s important, because we’re going to come back to it shortly.

So why would I vote for Hillary Clinton?

And I am voting for Hillary Clinton come November 8th and make no mistake about it.

Yes, I am. Enthusiastically and with gusto and I encourage you all to do the same.

And yes, November 8th. I’ve made a conscious decision to go to the physical polls on election day here in the land of black democrats and white republicans. I’m not voting early. I want to see for myself without filter. I want to experience it first hand. I want to face the armed Redshirts for myself – if they indeed show up. And if necessary, stand with those who would be intimidated and fight alongside them if it comes down to it. And that’s part of it right there, part of the reason. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why am I voting for Hillary Clinton?

Why would I vote enthusiastically for a candidate I personally dislike?

Why would I vote for a person who appears counter to my background and experience?

Why indeed.

Because I’m not voting for just Hillary Clinton.

Because I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton the person.

Because, despite first appearances, she and I have far more in common than we don’t and I can prove it.

And most importantly because pragmatically I must acknowledge Hillary Clinton and the power structure she represents is far and away the best choice to defend the ideals I hold most dear – those ideals I mentioned up above at the start of this essay, the ones I swore my life to defend, chief among them personal liberty and the right to define yourself – that is: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, each and every single one.

I’m not just voting for Hillary Clinton, I’m voting against Donald Trump and most especially the hateful ideology he has come to represent.

Because it’s not enough to just believe, you have to stand steadfast against the fall of night too.

I cannot vote for a Republican.

Not even one I respect should such appear.

It’s not just Donald Trump. Or Mitt Romney before him. Or John McCain before that. I cannot, will not, vote for the Republican Party platform.

Up above I said I tend towards the traditional conservative values of personal liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, personal enterprise and free markets, balanced budgets, strong military, and self-reliance.  All of that is true and as such there is no part of 2016 Republican Party Platform I can support without question, without violent protest.

Social issues? Tell me why a party who professes a profound belief in personal liberty and individual freedom and inalienable rights should contain within its ideology strictures regarding who you can marry, who you can love, what you can do with your own body, how you define your sexuality, how you define yourself. I will never vote for a Republican so long as they support the idea that government and political parties and religion have the right, nay the duty, to dictate these most personal of freedoms. I will never support a political party or a candidate who would deny full and unrestricted rights in any way whatsoever to my friends who happen to be gay, or transgender, or of color, or female, or Muslim, or whatever ridiculous qualifications we use to deny others full citizenship. I will not. And so long as these things remain part of the Republican Party platform, no matter the bullshit justification, they are deal breakers so far as my vote is concerned. Even if they field a candidate I can enthusiastically admire.

Economics? Thirty years now the Republican Party has embraced the failed policies of Reaganomics. Thirty years we’ve been waiting for the promised largess to trickle down. Thirty years we’ve been fed the idea that the selfish ideology of Ayn Rand will somehow make us, the worthy, rich – even though Rand herself died in lonely poverty dependent on government and the kindness of strangers. Thirty years we’ve given tax breaks to the obscenely wealthy and watched them grow ever more obscenely rich while the Middle Class teeters ever closer to extinction. Thirty years now we’ve watched our jobs head overseas while serial CEOs rake in billions. Invest in America they say, and it’s our money and our homes and our jobs and our retirements and our kids’ college funds they vaporize while they themselves cash out to the tune of millions and then complain about tax dollars going to bail out citizens “who should have known better.” Known better than to trust another goddamned Republican I guess. And they’re not even ashamed to say it out loud, as Donald Trump himself said when he smugly blamed Hillary Clinton for the loopholes that have allowed him to get away with not paying taxes for the last two decades.  I will not support further tax breaks for the rich on the backs of the middle class and the poor.  I will not vote for another Republican so long as this provably unworkable economic policy is part of their platform. This alone is enough to lose my vote.

Military matters? Foreign policy? Immigration? I spent most of my life in the uniform of the United States. I’ve seen war and the consequences of war up close. I listened in awe with tears in my eyes when Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and demanded in righteous fury, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and I can not, will not, support a political party who intends to wall America off from the world behind mine fields and barbed wire. I can not, will not, support a party who declares its unqualified uncritical allegiance to a foreign power, even one such as Israel, especially for religious reasons.  I can not, will not, support an ideology that condemns peace and diplomacy out of hand and who salivates at the idea of yet another war. This alone would be enough to lose my vote.

There is no part, not one single part, of the Republican platform I can support.

This is not personal liberty or personal responsibility, not when government decides who you can marry, who you can love, or what you do with your own body. Their idea of limited government is limiting the very things government should exist for because if government does not protect the weak from the predatory then what damned good is it? A belief in personal enterprise and free markets does not mean I think capitalism should run amok, unchecked, unregulated, benefitting only the rich and repeatedly raping those without the power to protest. The republicans make a great show of balanced budgets but would find their frugality on the backs of the poor and I will not support a political ideology who thinks tanks and aircraft carriers and war are acceptable ways to spend our money while feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and healing the sick are not.

In the final analysis I can not, will not, support a party who hates government so much so that they attempt to break it at every turn.

And this is the party that is supposed to hold Donald Trump in check?

That would be laughable if it wasn’t so utterly horrifying.

Hillary Clinton is not my preferred candidate. She is not perfect. She is not without flaw.  Far from it in fact.

But I will vote for her and I will do so enthusiastically because while I might not like Hillary the Person, I think Hillary the President will be a politician I can respect. Because she is the face of a political party that while I might not agree with everything they stand for, defends the rights of my friends and is willing to put it in writing. Because they are a party who believes in diplomacy over war, science over religion, pragmatism over unchecked capitalism. Who ultimately believes in the values I grew up with and who I can trust to hold her to the fire.

Even if I didn’t believe in the candidate, I can support the party platform – even if its not everything I want.

Even if I didn’t support the party, I can believe in the candidate – even if she’s far from perfect.

In the end, you must be pragmatic enough to realize “liberal” and “conservative” are just words without any real meaning and true freedom is not allowing those empty words to dictate your choices.

In the end, you must hold fast to what you believe in and you must be honest enough with yourself to know what those things truly are.

You must look beyond the words and the ideology and stand steadfast against the fall of night, for if government does not, can not, will not, protect the helpless from the ruthless then what goddamned good is it?

You ask why someone like me would vote for Hillary Clinton?

You ask why someone like me would stand with the Democrats?

You ask why someone like me, a white man of privilege and traditional conservative values, someone this entire country is designed for, would go to the polls and stand against armed men in defense of those who owe me nothing and who very likely hold me in contempt?

Because in the end I am not a slave to my past.

Because in the end we must do whatever it is we cannot not do.

Because in the end we all must choose which side of history we’re on.

And if you don’t like my choice, then you should have given me better options.

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Update:  Comments on this post are now well over 200.  In order to see all of the comments, including newly posted ones and ones that appear nested under other comments, you have to go to the bottom of the page and click on “Load More…”   You may have to do this several times to load all of the comments.  // Jim

Glass houses

This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said that women don't deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men
-- Hillary Clinton

 

I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, I can't do it. I just can't do it. It's inappropriate. It's not nice
-- Donald Trump, discussing his performance on CNN after the debate

 

- Mr. Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they actively worked to destroy Bill Clinton's accusers
- Hillary Clinton bullied and smeared women like Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky
- Are you blaming Hillary for Bill's infidelities? No, however, she's been an active participant in trying to destroy the women who has come forward with a claim
-- Talking points circulated by the Trump Campaign this week, advising supporters on how to bring up former president Bill Clinton’s sex scandals in the wake of Trump’s failure to do so during the first Trump/Clinton Debate

 

Donald Trump bragged about his “restraint.”

His restraint, he says.

Restraint.

Trump boasted of his restraint.

Out loud. Trump actually claimed great restraint, as if that’s a trait he actually has.

 

You’ll pardon me for a moment?

 

OK. Sorry about that. I think I’ve got it under control.

So, Donald Trump says he showed great restraint by not bringing up Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs during last Monday’s debate.

I mean, he would have, he wanted to, but he managed to restrain himself.

Because it was the the right thing to do.

Because dignity and class and like that, those are the traits Trump is known for.

That’s Donald Trump for you, restrained and modest. Everybody says so. You betcha.  

I …

 

What? Oh, now you need a moment? Sure. It’s a new rug, don’t want any accidents. Take all the time you need.

 

Good? OK.

Now where was I?

Oh, yes, so then, naturally, Trump being Trump he’s spent the last three days telling everybody he can about his heroic manly restraint (it’s huge, folks, YUGE) and openly encouraging his supporters to bring up Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs.

This is nothing particularly new for Trump. He’s the guy who encouraged Russia to hack Clinton’s email – jokingly, of course, joking, we’re just joking – and coyly suggested gun nuts might win the race for conservatives if they were to, you know, provide some Second Amendment solutions with regards to Hillary Clinton, wink wink, kidding again of course, kidding, because there just isn’t anything funnier than jokes about murdering a woman who annoys you. Especially when you’re trying to prove how you’re not a rampaging hard-on of a misogynist.

Of course he’s also the guy who hid from military service in some rich kid prep school while he encouraged others to go fight and die in a foreign land. 

Prompting his fans to do his dirty work instead of soiling his own hands is pretty much his whole brand.

I digress.

So, Trump boasted of his restraint.

And, being Donald Trump, he then spent three days lamenting that he didn't go after Hillary Clinton by bringing up Bill Clinton's infidelities during the debate. Because Clinton "ambushed" him with Alicia Machado – the former Miss Universe who Trump called "Miss Piggy" for her weight gain.

Trump says he was taking the high road.

But he’s acting like the oafish jock who thinks up a lame comeback … a day after he got humiliated in public by the class brainiac and keeps trying to find a conversation where he can use it. Yeah, why don’t you make like a tree and get out of here? Huh?

Trump was taking the high road by not throwing Bill Clinton’s infidelities in Hillary Clinton’s face? 

Not exactly a bold move from a guy who cheated on his first wife with his second wife and cheated on his second wife with his third wife.

He also seems to think that fat shaming women is OK, so long as you do it in volume and as such he’s spent the last three days publically naming a list of women he considers fat and unattractive as justification for calling a woman fat and unattractive.

 

One day in the distant future students of logic will refer to this as the Trump Tautology.  

 

In the days since the debate, prominent republicans have rushed to Trump's support.

Men such as Newt Gingrich.

Newton Leroy Gingrich, a man who married his high school geometry teacher when he was 18 (and really, no creepy factor there, right, Conservatives? Nooo), then cheated on her (while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer) with the woman who would become his second wife. Then cheated on his second wife with his third wife – while at the same time attempting to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about having an extramarital affair. All of which, somehow says something bad about Hillary Clinton’s character, I guess. Apparently. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

This tactic was so successful for Newt that it got him booted from office and made Bill Clinton into one of the most popular presidents in recent history.

But, yeah, Trump should listen to this guy, because Newt, he’s what Republicans nowadays consider an intellectual.

And in to further cement his intellectual credentials, Newt just had to weigh in on fat chicks. Last night during the annual Republican Spirit of Lincoln Dinner, SPIRIT OF LINCOLN DINNER BAWAHAHAH …

 

Sorry, won’t happen again.

 

… Newt opined publicly Trump was right about Miss Universe, Alicia Machado. Seems she really was a fatty and Trump had every right to fire her for being a huge giant enormous fat pig. Oink Oink.

But hey, that’s just Newt being Newt – the guy who ditched his older wife dying of cancer for a fresh perky newer model.

It’s not like all of Trump’s …

What?

Who?

Oh. Of course.

Today, Rudy Giuliani chimed in, saying the Bill Clinton “disgraced” the country with his affairs.

Rudy Giuliani, the man who "accidentally" married his cousin despite knowing her his entire life and then petitioned the Roman Catholic Church for a divorce while he was cheating on her with his second wife.  And then – Goddamn but these people are so predictable – Rudy cheated on his second wife with his third wife. But only after having an affair with his communications director in an apartment maintained at New York City taxpayer expense.

 

Maybe it's just me.

 

Gingrich yesterday floated a new conspiracy theory, one that is now raging out of control on social media and in the press, spread by conservatives desperate to salvage something, anything, from Trump's miserable performance on Monday night.

According to Gingrich, the Clinton Campaign for months planned the "Machado Trap."

Yes, that’s right, the Machado Trap.

See according to the theory, during the debate, Trump – classy gentleman that he is – was taking the high road of intellect and reason, going easy on the girl, considerate of her health I guess. Trump was shocked, given his restraint, when Clinton desperate and on the ropes from Trump's well reasoned and deliberate performance sprung her ambush at the last minute. Trump, according to the conspiracy theory, restrained gentleman that he is, was so shocked by Clinton’s unfair sucker punch that it tricked him into accidentally blurting out Rosie O'Donnell's name instead of Monica Lewinsky.

Or something like that.

The details are a little hazy, but the long and short of it is: Clinton tricked Trump into acting like a loutish misogynist.

Newt didn’t describe how his theory accounts for Trump’s “restraint” first inviting and then disinviting Gennifer Flowers to the debate.  You know, if he wasn’t gong to bring it up.

 

But let’s not let details ruin a good conspiracy theory or derail Newt’s promising political comeback, shall we?

 

 

Given Hillary Clinton's aggressive take no prisoners performance, the Trump camp should be damned glad he didn't bring up Bill Clinton's infidelity.

Oh, yes, they should give thanks for his “restraint” indeed.

First, because it was Bill's infidelity and not Hillary's.

And when you're the guy who's got a string of affairs and broken marriages in your wake and who spends a lot of time calling women fat pigs, it might be a tactical mistake to attack a woman for her husband's infidelity. Especially when your campaign already spends a significant fraction of its time telling everybody you’re not a howling misogynist, really truly you’re not.

Second, Clinton would have eaten him alive.

Look how she handled his comments about her email. That was supposed to be Trump’s big moment, his gotcha moment all the pundits would be talking about for days. But instead she brushed his comments aside with the practiced ease of somebody who faced down a congressional witch hunt without breaking a sweat or even raising her voice. And in three days since, nobody has mentioned Trump’s big moment. Nobody. Just as nobody buys into the nonsense Trump somehow wasn’t really a birther, but was engaged in masterful brinksmanship – even his friends think that’s pretty lame.

So, Bill Clinton screwed around?

What? Does Trump honestly think mention of it would, what? reduce Hillary Clinton to a puddle of sobbing lady tears?

Really?

No, of course not. Just as in that list of talking points above, Trump’s Campaign hopes to use Bill Clinton’s infidelity and Hillary’s subsequent decision to salvage her marriage as evidence that Hillary Clinton is some kind of traitor to her sex.

 

Gentlemen, as a fellow man I would suggest to you that might be a bad tactic.

 

And really, don't you think for one damned second Hillary Clinton – Hillary Rodham Goddamned Clinton – wasn't ready for that?

Hell, how could she not be?

Trump thinks he is some master poker player, but you don’t advertise your trump card by inviting it to sit in the front row.

What, you think Clinton didn’t notice the Gennifer Flowers bit?

C’mon. You strain my already sprained credulity.  

Hell, based on the evidence, I'd say she was hoping Trump would bring it up and, like a matador twitching her cape to enrage the dumb bull, she was very likely holding her sword just out of sight.

She’s had twenty years to prepare for that exact attack. She was goading him into it and smiling all the while.

Trump can snort and paw at the ground, but he is lucky, damned lucky, he didn't make the final charge considering his own history.

Clinton would have brought him down like a bad side of beef, bank on it.

But let's say it's true.

Let's say Newt is right. Sure. Let’s give Newt this one. He’s had a shitty couple of decades since he was thrown out of office, let’s be generous.

Let's say Clinton planned that ambush.

Let's say the Clinton campaign looked at Trump, analyzed his weaknesses, his bluster and bravado, his utter inability to ignore a barb or a taunt, his inability to control his ego or his temper or his mouth, his weakness around women, his infidelities.

Let’s say they then designed the Machado Trap with malice aforethought.

And he fell for it.

Even Gingrich admits Trump fell right into it.

Trump as much as admits it himself.  

He fell for it. And for the last three days he’s kept falling for it.

 

Now, can you imagine this guy, a man so easily led into ambush, leading America?

 

In the end, this is what we have:

An unprepared amateur who substitutes bluster and bombast for actual substance and preparation.

Or a professional of intellect and wit who’s been preparing for this moment her entire life.

Those are your choices.

Make of them what you will.

 

I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And, yes, I did. You know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President.
-- Hillary Clinton

Knowing

 

If you go back and look at some of the arrests that were made, I can about say probably 70 percent of those had out-of-state IDs." 
-- Todd Walther, spokesman for the North Carolina Fraternal Order of Police, describing those arrested during the protests in Charlotte last week.

Seventy percent were from out of state.

Seventy percent of those protesting in Charlotte are outside agitators.

Seventy percent.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, September 22, 2016, police spokesman Todd Walther said with confidence seventy percent of those arrested during the violence in Charlotte, North Carolina this week were “instigators that are coming in from the outside.”

The violence in Charlotte was instigated by agitators coming from outside the state.

Not by people who actually live there.

Outside instigators.

The implication being, as it was after Ferguson, the violence isn’t a legitimate expression of rage and frustration by a population fed up with the perception of police brutality and abuse of power. That statement automatically delegitimizes the protests themselves, as indeed it was designed to do. Walther’s statement delegitimizes not the violence – or rather not just the violence, which may or may not be a legitimate and necessary expression of protest depending on your point of view – but the entire idea of black people protesting altogether.  The idea that the vast majority of those arrested are confirmed to be in reality outside actors, agents provocateur, immediately taints the entire protest itself and confirms for many whites that those black people rioting in the streets of Charlotte aren’t really yelling about civil rights at all – instead they’re smashing things and lighting shit on fire because, you know, that’s what black people do.

That’s why the police have to shoot them in the first place.

 

There’s just one problem with Walther’s statement: it’s completely and totally false.

 

What?

Oh, right. You’re right, of course. There are many things wrong with Walther’s statement beyond its falseness. You’re right and we’ll get to that. Bear with me for a bit.

Walther made that statement on Thursday.

On Friday he was – in the vernacular of our times – forced to “walk it back.”

In more precise terms: he lied.

Walther acting as the official spokesman for the North Carolina police union was completely wrong, deliberately so. He lied.  In reality, a full seventy-nine percent of those arrested since the violence began in Charlotte were in point of fact residents of Charlotte and all of the remainder were from surrounding areas in North Carolina. None of those arrested were from out of state. Not one.

The official spokesman for the North Carolina police union, a man you are supposed to be able to trust, lied. 

During an interview with the Charlotte Observer on Friday, Walther was forced to admit his comments were “inaccurate and merely based on speculation.”

“I didn’t quote facts,” said Walther. “It’s speculation. That’s all it was.”

Speculation. Well, that part is the truth.

But then he lied again, because that’s not all it was and he knows it – or he wouldn’t have made the original statement in the first place.

Walther knew his statement was speculation when he made it, yet he made it anyway and deliberately didn’t caveat it with the part where it wasn’t based on factual information. That is a lie by omission.

Why make the statement, that particular statement, in the first place?

We hear this statement, this particular statement, in nearly every case where black people take to the street following a police shooting. It was outside instigators. Agents provocateur.

Why make that particular statement?

Walther’s comment as the official spokesman for the police of North Carolina is a clear indicator of institutional bias. It’s an indicator of the fear and contempt the police hold for the people they are supposed to protect. It’s a dog whistle directed at a specific population. Walther was, in point of fact, telling white people what they wanted to hear: this isn’t about racism or inequality or abuse of power, no, instead the protests were mostly caused by black thugs who just wanted to smash things and light shit on fire. Exactly what most of those white people believe in the first place.

It’s deliberate confirmation bias, otherwise there was no point whatsoever in saying it in the first place.

And the message is this: the police were completely justified in shooting Keith Lamont Scott because you just can’t trust black men not to resort to violence. Nothing to see here, move along.

And, by Walther’s own admission, that was a deliberate lie.

And so the question at this point is this: how do you know?

How can you trust the police? How can you trust the police when their own spokesman by his own admission is engaged in speculation and not facts? If he lied about the simple things, if he lied to reinforce stereotypes, to favor one part of the population and delegitimize another, then how can you believe him when he tells you his officers were justified in killing a citizen?

He might be right, those officers might have been justified, but how would you know?

 

After two days of protests and violence in Charlotte I wrote a number of Facebook posts.

One began with this headline:

 North Carolina Governor Declares State of Emergency After Another Night of Violence.

The post ridiculed the idea that it took two days of violence to get North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s attention.  It took two days of violence and then instead of actually addressing the cause of the violence, the old white men did what old white men always do when faced with angry people in the streets: they declared a state of emergency and called in the military.

I suggested that the entire state of emergency could have been avoided if only those supposed leaders like Governor McCrory had declared an emergency after Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson (or Trayvon Martin, or Dontre Hamilton, or Eric Garner, or John Crawford III, or Ezell Ford, or Dante Parker, or Tanisha Anderson, or Akai Gurley, or Tamir Rice, or Rumain Brisbon, or Jerame Reid, or Tony Robinson, or Phillip White, or Eric Harris, or Walter Scott, or Freddie Gray, or etcetera and there are many etceteras going all the way back to Selma, Alabama), if only McCrory and those like him had taken action at any of those pivotal moments, if only they’d declared a state of emergency then, and taken the steps necessary to rein in and retrain the forces under their command, taken steps to address the reason for the protests in the first place, then perhaps Charlotte might never have happened.

But then what would you expect of a governor who has worked deliberately and systematically with North Carolina’s legislature to pass laws disenfranchising and marginalizing those they dislike – in particular people of color?  

I also mentioned that after two nights of violence, another black man, Justin Carr, lay dead in the street (he had been shot in the head and later died at a hospital).

I ended that post with this:

Sometimes your only reason for existence is to serve as a metaphor for larger things.

I asked my readers on Facebook to think on that carefully.

Now I rarely use words by accident.

I rarely write things that are only what they appear, one layer deep, and nothing more (yes, including the jokes and the humor pieces and even the bits about my cats). I rarely write things that are not part of some larger context.

Earlier in the week I wrote about choice.

I wrote a Facebook post that went viral where I talked about being forced to take sides. You can find the full text of that essay here on American News X, but the heart of that post leads off with

When you attack my friends for their sex or sexual orientation or their identity or their race or the color of their skin or who they love, then you force me to take a side. You or them.

and that’s the larger context I was working within when I asked my readers to think about Charlotte.

That’s the context I was working within, knowing that not everybody who read the later posts would be aware of that context or bother to go looking for it – and yet would respond with confidence anyway.

As I said, my post are rarely only as they seem.

And so I asked my Facebook audience to think about Charlotte as part of history with the implication being that the violence there is just the latest step in a march which stretches all the way back to 1965 and Bloody Sunday.

Naturally, I got mail.

[…] there's not a whole lot of credible information available right now. Family says Scott had a book, cops say he had a gun. […] The guy [Justin Carr]shot at the protests last night? People in the area say it was cops that did it […] cops say it was gang violence, or a personal beef, or whatever [..] it’s just as reasonable- to believe that the police shot and killed Mr. Scott because he was black as it is to think that he was killed because he pointed a gun at the officers on the scene. […]Now for all of us in Charlotte, you could also be forgiven for having not a clue that anything was going on last night.

Scott’s family says it was a book.

Cops say it was a gun.

People say it was cops who shot Carr.

Cops say it was gang violence or a personal dispute.

Maybe I believe the cops shot both men because they were black. Maybe I don’t.

Maybe I don’t have a clue as to what happened in Charlotte.

Perhaps this correspondent is right about everything, but how do you know?

How do you know?

Another:

Jim, it saddens me to see this post from you. I enjoy your banter most of the time, but you sir are now ranking yourself among other ignorant people. Did you not read your own news link? Or any others? The man [Keith Lamont Scott] was armed, a 2 time felon and the only witnesses to say otherwise were his family members, hmm. Video is being released to his family and other leaders of the community. Doesn't exactley [sic]sound like the moves of a coverup [sic]. ALSO, the man shot last night [Justin Carr], is not dead yet, but in critical condition, shot at an ATM by another civilian, please get your facts straight. Otherwise you are just being another part of the problem by misinforming people. Thanks, probably won't even read this of consider what I've said, but the truth is out there, promote that!

The truth is out there.

Scott’s family said he had a book.

The police say he had a gun.

Scott was a “second time” felon – but how would the cops have known that at the time, they hadn’t even identified him when he was shot. How would they know?

Hmmm, indeed.

And again, maybe this correspondent is right.

But how do you know?

The burden of proof is on the police, isn’t it?

I mean shouldn’t the burden of proof, of trust, be on the people who killed a man?

Shouldn’t it?

So what would make you trust the police?

No, the more precise question is: Why should you trust the police? 

Why should you trust the police?  Given that the Thin Blue Line always closes ranks around situations like this, given that the police control all of the evidence, given the history of shootings like this one, given that list of dead black men above, why should you trust the police?

No. Stop. Don’t roll your eyes and dismiss the question.

Don’t resort to politics and don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. If you’re a conservative, the police are right. If you’re a liberal, the family of the dead black man are right. Don’t do that. Have the moral courage to put your politics aside for one goddamned minute and answer the question, coldly and logically: why should you trust the police? Why should any citizen trust the police?

In general, why should you trust the police?

In the specifics, why should people of color trust the police?

What untainted, uninvolved, unbiased mechanisms exist to provide us with factual data?

What leaders, what politicians, what legislatures, exist that we can all trust to police those who police us?

What history exists which demonstrate the police are trustworthy in cases such as this one? What history demonstrates to people of color that they can expect justice or even the same level of scrutiny normal in the death of a white citizen?

What power structure exists that we can turn to for consistent and unvarnished truth, for unbiased judgement, for an honest and just investigation of the events? One that we can all trust to be honest and just without question, every time.

What source of information can we find regarding this event, or the one before, a source without an agenda and free of manipulation, one that provides detailed facts without accidental or deliberate distortion, and one that is so consistent in its duty as the watchdog of the republic for all citizens equally that we all can believe it every time?

If this was your father, your brother, your son, dead at the hands of police, where do you go for the truth? Truth you can trust?

While the protests raged in Charlotte, out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Officer Betty Shelby shot another unarmed black man, Terence Crutcher, to death during a routine traffic stop. Shelby claimed she was in fear of her life – in fact she said she’d never been so afraid. And yet, video of the shooting clearly shows Crutcher with his hands up and his back to Shelby when she shot him. Granted Crutcher was not complying with Officer Shelby’s orders, but he also clearly wasn’t menacing her – and even the authorities were forced to admit this.

Shelby was arrested and charged with manslaughter.

So again, why should you trust the police?

How can you trust the word of an officer who is so terrified of a black man that she shot him in the back?  

Without that video it would be the officer’s word against a dead man’s.  The Thin Blue Line closes around her, the investigation is conducted by the police, the forensic evidence is all gathered and processed by the police. And without that video, there would be nothing, nothing, to dispute the officer’s story.

And that is true in far, far too many such cases.

Conversely, or perhaps as an aside, far too often if there is video it’s not clear and provides no proof either way – or it’s subject to erasure or manipulation or “malfunction.”

So, how do you know?

How do you as a citizen know?

No. I said stop it. Don’t roll your eyes and dismiss the question. Have the courage to face it head on. How. Do. You. Know? As an American, as a citizen, how do you know?

What, specifically, gives you reason to trust the word of the police?

Spell it out. List the reasons, line by line, one after the other.

Answer the question without politics. Without race. Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts. Why should should Americans trust their police? Why? Name ten indisputable reasons based on fact. Go.

 

Well?

 

Can’t do it, can you?

And doesn’t that bother you?

Doesn’t that bother you as a citizen? Regardless of race, regardless of political party, doesn’t it concern you that you don’t have any real way to know?

Doesn’t that bother you as a cop? As a cop don’t you want to be trusted? Taken at your word? Held to a higher standard? Part of a trusted cadre, a brotherhood of justice and truth, just like in the comic books? Doesn’t it bother you that I can’t take you at your word? That I am forced to doubt you every single time I see a black man bleeding in the street? Well?  

Doesn’t bother you as a politician? As a leader? As a governor? As a mayor? As a lawmaker? As the town council? Doesn’t it bother you that the citizens of your community – that people of color – can’t trust your police force?

Or don’t you care?

Are you comfortable with the “truth” being whatever your gut tells you based on skin color and political party?

Are you comfortable with the current state of affairs? Riot and violence? Protest? Another citizen of whatever color dead in the street? If you believe black lives matter, blue lives matter, all lives matter, then doesn’t this bother you?

Doesn’t the hypocrisy bother you?

I mean, let’s be honest here, shall we? Those who hate and fear the government most, those who tell us the government cannot be trusted, those who sneer and dismiss every single word the government says as a lie, are the ones right now telling me to believe the police without question.

Ironic, that, wouldn’t you say?

Especially ironic, given that many police officers themselves are conservatives who tell me that I can’t trust the government.

Why should I trust the police when I can’t even trust the spokesman for the police union not to lie, not to engage in fact free speculation and deliberate falsehoods? Why should I trust the authority of the police when they themselves don’t trust governmental authority? And, again, isn’t it ironic that those who hate unions most of all are the ones telling me to trust the police union?  I digress.

Politics isn’t proof.

So what then?

The press? You believe in the accuracy of the press? What in recent years has given you reason to trust the press? Be specific. Show your work.

The politicians? The man on the street? The mob? Me?

How do you know?

 

The truth of the matter is that we don’t know.

We have no way of knowing.

And we should.

In that example above, I didn’t ask my readers to take a side. But they did anyway.

Because in the absence of proof, in the absence of trust, in the absence of justice, they have little option. They must take a side, we must all take a side. And even if you chose to ignore the situation, even if you go blithely on with your life pretending dead black men in the street don’t concern you, you’ve still made a choice.

And that choice is not based on fact or truth or rightness, but because we have been forced to take a side in a political war.

Those we should be able to trust, the police, the press, our leaders, are the least trustworthy, the least reliable.

Until we start holding these agencies to higher standards, until we hold our leaders and our guardians to account, until we demand proof, until we demand liberty and justice for all, until we hold ourselves to higher standards as citizens, until then, our cities will burn.

This is not a black and white issue.

This is not liberal or conservative issue.

This is not a black lives matter issue or a blue lives matter issue.

This is not a Republican or Democratic Party issue.

This is an issue of justice for each and every one of us.

It’s a matter of trust.

 

Up above I said something many of you walked right on past without a second glance.

But others of you caught it. Some of you saw a single word and it pulled you up short.  That word made you raise an eyebrow and frown. That word made you open your mouth … and then close it on a hard straight line. That word has you even now reaching for your keyboard in protest. 

That word is perception.

“…the perception of police brutality and abuse of power.”

Because we see the death of Keith Lamont Scott through the eyes of our particular politics instead of in the cold hard light of truth, many of you didn’t give that line a second glance.

But some of you are outraged.

Outraged that I might be insinuating the protests and the anger on the streets of Charlotte (and Ferguson, and Los Angeles, and New York, and Detroit, and Baltimore, and Tulsa, and Madison, and Brighton, and Cleveland, and Milwaukee, and all of those places back to Selma itself) might somehow be invalid, somehow nothing more than a perception of police abuse where none really exists.

And it may be so.

But how can you know?   

I used that word on purpose.

Because that’s what this is about. Perception. Keith Lamont Scott, lying dead in the street is about perception. His death is a metaphor for larger things, for how we see each other and most especially how we see our protectors, our leaders, and our nation.

This is about trust. And trust is about perception.

The police – and the press and our politicians – must not only be worthy of trust, they themselves should want our trust as citizens above all. For our society to survive, for our cities to remain unburned, we must perceive them as trustworthy.

But trust, like respect, cannot be forced at the muzzle of a gun.

Trust must be earned. By every action, by every word.

To be trusted, you must be worthy of trust.

For trust, there must be justice.

And if you are not, if you are not worthy of trust as police, as leaders, as the press, then you must be held to account by those whose confidence you have betrayed.

And thus it falls to us, you and me.

If we want a better nation, we have to be better citizens.

Greatness, Again

You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.
-- Charlie Manson

I saw George Wallace speak once.

Yes, that George Wallace.

George Corley Wallace, Jr. the infamous governor of Alabama.

Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever! That George Wallace.

It was 1972. I was ten years old. Wallace was once again running for President of the United States, this time as a Democrat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This really begins four years previous, in 1968.

You nowadays hear people talking about the current election as the worst they’ve ever seen, the worst in American history.

But 2016 has nothing on 1968.

I was very young then, of course. And while a child, even one as bright and perceptive as yours truly (heh heh), can’t understand the complexities of the world around him in any great detail, that child can and does feel the emotional currents. A child might not understand why men are rioting in the streets, why buildings are burning and people are dying, but that child can see the uncertainty in the faces of his parents at the dinner table every night. He can sense the undercurrent of fear on the evening news even if he doesn’t have the maturity to understand why the screen is filled with burning helicopters and falling bombs and hard-eyed soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam. That child can feel the tension in the world because it’s everywhere like a foul miasma of nameless, shapeless dread.

And I remember it, the simmering fear and the rage of that time.

It was everywhere.

Though America didn’t yet know it, the 1968 Paris Peace Talks were about to collapse and as such we had only reached the middle of the Vietnam conflict and the worst years were still to come. Nguyễn Văn Lém was summarily executed by the South Vietnamese National Police Chief, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, shot in the head at point blank range and the picture of that moment – the exact moment when the bullet tore through a human head – was plastered across every TV screen and newspaper in the world and won war photographer Eddie Adams the Pulitzer Prize. That was the moment when America was suddenly confronted for the first time with the real horror of what was actually going on over there. 1968 was the battle of Khe Sanh, the Tet Offensive, and the My Lai Massacre.  1968 was also the year Americans learned they’d been fighting a secret war in Laos. By 1968, 30,000 Americans had died in the rice paddies and the jungles of Southeast Asia.

20,000 more would follow by the time I saw Wallace speak in 1972.

In 1968, half of America was on fire. North Korea had seized the US Navy electronic spy ship USS Pueblo and was holding her crew as prisoners of war and there wasn’t a damned thing America could do about it. USS Scorpion went to the bottom taking 99 American Sailors with it and no one knew why. That was also the year the Pentagon announced it was sending more than 24,000 mostly conscripted troops back to Vietnam for an involuntary second tour and a hell of a lot of young Americans decided they’d rather live in Canada. Those who didn’t burned their draft cards and joined student war protestors occupying college campuses across the country.  Others detonated bombs and robbed banks and fought it out with The Pigs and The Establishment whenever and wherever they could. Others tuned in, turned on, and dropped acid. The counter-culture was in full frontal assault mode against the stodgy culture of their square parents. Out in California, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson picked up two female hitchhikers and set in motion a chain of events that would eventually end in Helter Skelter – one of the most infamous murder sprees in US history. That was the year Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Race riots immediately followed. Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and Washington D.C. burned outright, but no American city was left untouched. In Oakland, Black Panthers shot it out with police in a bloody firefight reminiscent of Vietnam. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and directed the Bureau to begin “neutralization” of Black Power organizations. But neither COINTELPRO nor bullets and tear gas could stop the Civil Rights movement. Black Americans had finally had enough of second-class citizenship and they would not be silenced. And so 1968 also became the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act (AKA The Civil Rights Act of 1968) into law, following up the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) – unleashing yet more riots and mayhem, this time by whites and personified by none other than George Corley Wallace, Jr. 

Ironically, 1968 was also the year Star Trek episode Plato’s Stepchildren aired and William Shatner embraced Nichelle Nichols in what is widely considered the first interracial kiss between a white man and a black woman broadcast on public television causing widespread outrage.

1968 is also the year Saddam Hussein began his rise to power following a coup d'état in Iraq and it’s a small world sometimes, isn’t it?

And so, in 1968 it seemed the superpowers were on the brink of nuclear annihilation and the United States itself was coming apart at the seams. The economy was collapsing, energy costs were soaring, people were out of work, war raged, social structures disintegrated and were discarded whole cloth, and it seemed the world was falling into chaos, fear, and darkness.

People were frightened.

Naturally the politicians and pundits took full advantage of that fear.

And no one did it better than George Wallace.

Wallace wasn’t just popular in the Old South. Or with just the John Birch Society and the KKK. In my home state of Michigan tens of thousands turned out to hear him thunder his message of small government, law and order, and walling off brown skinned people from white America – because a lot of Michiganders were terrified of the dark faces looking out from Detroit and Flint.  Wallace hated the liberal hippies almost as much as he hated people of color, saying the only four letter words they didn’t know were “soap” and “work.” He swore to run over liberals with his car (that’s right, liberals. Because in those days Democrats from the South were anything but liberal). He was brash and outspoken and his supporters loved that he said what he meant without regard for his opponent’s feelings.  Wallace always put on a hell of a show and his message resonated with those who felt their country, their America, was being stolen out from under them.

When asked what he considered to be the biggest domestic issue of 1968, Wallace often responded:

What are the Real issues that exist today in these United States? It is the trend of the pseudo-intellectual government, where a select, elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions, have spoken from some pulpits, some college campuses, some newspaper offices, looking down their noses at the average man on the street.

And who would bat an eye to hear that in a speech from Mike Pence today?

Oh how the world has turned.

 

What does any of this have to do with that fact that I saw Wallace speak in 1972?

 

Everything.

You see, Wallace won five states in 1968 as an independent. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. He won 13.53% of all the votes cast in that election and took 45 Electoral College votes – nearly enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where he stood a reasonable chance of becoming President by legislation.

Instead, Richard Nixon won and Wallace went back to Alabama in defeat.

And somewhere in there the world, America, began to change. See that comment about Mike Pence, up above. This, right here, this time is where that began.

Which brings us to 1972.

This time Wallace was running as a Democrat.

Wallace was one of a dozen Democrats fighting his way through the primaries.

But in the four years between 1968 and 1972 the world had turned. Not much, but enough. 

Wallace was still popular in the South and in Michigan and during the first months of the election season he did extremely well and the pundits and prognosticators predicted he would clinch the Democratic nomination easily. But the Vietnam war was winding down and America was coming to grips with the idea that people of color should be viewed as equal citizens – the country wasn’t there yet (still isn’t there yet) but four years had changed things irrevocably.  The Democratic Party itself was changing and Wallace was forced by circumstance and changing attitudes to distance himself from segregation and adopt a moderate view of racial relations in America. In fact, so far had the pendulum swung Wallace declared that he’d always been a “moderate” regarding race – despite the irrefutable evidence of history and the more things change, right?

On May 15, 1972, during a rally at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland, Arthur Bremer shot Wallace five times.

Bremer wasn’t looking to make a political statement on race or anything else.

He just wanted to be famous.

And so he was, briefly, the most famous man in America. He was the man who took George Wallace’s legs.

One of Bremer’s bullets had lodged in Wallace’s spine and left him permanently paralyzed. 

Wallace spent a month in the hospital and several more weeks recovering and then returned to the campaign trail. But it was over for him. People showed up out of idle curiosity or sympathy or pity. But Wallace’s campaign was as moribund as his legs. In 1968 and the opening months of 1972, Wallace commanded huge crowds when he came to Michigan. Now his supporters had to bus in old folks and school kids and the party faithful just to fill out a reasonably sized parking lot.

And that’s how I saw George Wallace.

I asked my mother last week if I was remembering it right. She laughed. Her memories and mine matched up. She told me how the local authorities packed all the school kids they could find onto buses and drove us out to the airport.  We were kids, what did we know of the burning world? We cheered when they told us to and clapped in glee. It was a grand adventure. A fieldtrip to see American Democracy in action, that’s how they sold it to our folks and I suppose it was even true.  And it certainly beat the heck out of sitting in a classroom learning long division or how to diagram a sentence.  I’d never been to an airport before and I had nothing to compare the dinky little backwater Kent Country Airport to.  It was, to me, a spaceport filled with shining rocket ships and I couldn’t have cared less about the angry red-faced man up on the stage, or long division for that matter.

But then the crowd parted and … I remember that wheelchair.

I remember it now four decades later clear as a bell.

I remember a cold cloudy gray fall day in 1972 and a withered man in a wheelchair shouting about desegregation and bussing and commies at a parking lot mostly full of bemused school children.

 

And now, many, many year later I realize I was witness to history: the very moment when the Democratic Party hit bottom.

 

As Conservatives are so fond of pointing out, once upon a time Democrats were the party of John Birch and the Ku Klux Klan, of racists and bigots and Confederates.

And conservatives are of course right – no pun intended.

But all of that changed on that day in 1972.

The party had been changing slowly for decades, but it began in earnest when Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 – ushering in desegregation and Affirmative Action and effectively ending Southern apartheid with the stroke of a pen. Many Southern conservatives saw Johnson’s action, himself a Southern Democrat, as treason.  They began to leave the Democratic Party. Many became Independents, and thus supported Wallace’s run in 1968.  By 1972 that trend was in full charge and even Wallace’s run as a Democrat couldn’t pull them back into the fold. And the party’s nomination that year ended up being the liberal “hippy candidate,” George McGovern – which turned the trickle of defection into a flood.

Nixon’s campaign strategy in 1972 was in part to woo these disaffected conservatives and he was largely successful at it. Exactly how this happened is subject to some debate, but while Nixon didn’t invent the political term “Southern Strategy” it was his campaign that began the polarization of American politics into Democrat/Liberal – Republican/Conservative. By the time Ronald Reagan came along all he had to do was play up the perception of conservative white victimization with terms like “welfare queens” and “states rights” and everybody knew what he meant and former Southern Democrats flocked to his banner. This was done by deliberate design. The guy behind it was Lee Atwater, the Reagan campaign’s deputy director. Atwater gave an interview after Reagan was elected (anonymously, but his name was later revealed as the quote’s source) in which he said:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now he [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964. And that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger.” That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like “forced busing,” “states' rights” and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

And so here we are 30 years later in 2016.

I could write another hundred thousand words on how we got from “nigger nigger nigger” to here.

I could spend hours explaining how the Democrats went from the party of John Birchers and old white Southern racists to what it is today. Or how the Republicans woke up one morning to find themselves staring in horror at the Klan and the Neo-Nazis and the dimwitted droolers shouting for segregation and walls and war from the front ranks of last night’s Trump rally. We could talk about how the GOP went from serious men in white shirts, scientists and engineers and doctors who once built and flew the ships that took us to the moon and brought us home again, to the party of creationists and science deniers.  Millions of words have been devoted to this subject by people far smarter on the subject than I am and so I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to flesh out the bare bones outlined above.

What matters is that moment in 1972.

What matters is that ruined man in his wheel chair.

What matters is that moment when Democrats hit bottom.

Sometimes that’s what it takes, you know. Hitting bottom.

My dad was a recovered alcoholic. He knew all there was to know about it. He used to tell me this: Nobody can make you quit drinking. Nobody. You can see it. You can see what the booze is doing to you, to your family, to those around you. None of that will make you stop, that’s what addiction is. You have to want to quit drinking. You have to want to. Not others. You.  You have to want to and that want has to be stronger than the addiction. And sometimes, too many times, you have to hit rock bottom. You have to lose it all, you have to destroy your life and stand right on the very edge, the very edge, before not drinking becomes more important to you than the next sip.  For my dad, it was a little kid. He hit a kid with his car while blackout drunk. That was his rock bottom. That’s what finally got through to him, that’s what was finally stronger than the addiction. It took a long time and the help of many friends, but he beat the disease – because at long last he himself wanted to change.  And when he died, more than 40 years later, after 40 years of sobriety, hundreds came to his funeral. You see, my dad wasn’t a great man in the sense of some single great achievement. They didn’t build monuments to him or raise up buildings with his name on the front in great gold letters. No, rather my dad was great in a thousand small ways. He was admired and respected and loved by hundreds, thousands, of people whose lives he’d touched for the better. Because he chose to be that person, because he’d seen rock bottom and was determined not to again.

And that brings me at long last to the point.

 

The Grand Old Party has reached its George Wallace moment.

 

The Republican party has reached bottom and in their few moments of sobriety, conservatives know it.

Republicans began as the anti-slavery party in direct and vocal opposition to Southern Racism and the Know Nothings. They fought a civil war in order to change the world for the better.

Today it is the Klan and the John Birch Society cheering the Republican candidate on. 

The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln who gave his life to hold the Union together with the power of the Federal government.

Today Republicans talk openly of secession and burning Washington to the ground.

The Republican Party began with one of the greatest orators in American history, a man whose words continue to ring down through history sharp and pure as ruby laser light, Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…. I don’t even have to look it up. Like many Americans I know the words by heart and more than a century after they were first spoken on the field at Gettysburg they still resonate with raw power and the promise of a better world.

Today republicans nod and cheer when their candidate says, We have to come up, and we can come up with many different plans, in fact, plans you don't even know about will be devised because we're going to come up with plans, health care plans, that will be so good.

Trump is no Lincoln. He’s no Ronald Reagan. Hell he’s not even George W. Bush.

This is the nadir of the Republican Party.

And this may be where it ends. This may be where the Republican Party finally drinks itself to death, a withered ruin in a wheelchair.

 

Or…

 

Perhaps this is the point, the bitter and terrible rock bottom, that finally turns things around.

This is the crucible in which greatness might be reborn.

America is not well served by the destruction of the Grand Old Party. 

Growth, innovation, ingenuity, vigor, are all the products of stimulating competition and intellectual challenge. America needs both conservatives and liberals of reason and intellect and a willingness to work together.

And it’s ironic indeed that those spitting blood right now over recent national outrages such as the flag and the pledge of allegiance forget that they themselves put the words “one nation” into those vows. If they don’t mean it, what the hell are they so mad about?

Here’s the bottom line: Republicans don’t need to take back America, for they never lost it.

Instead they need to take back their party.

The descendants of Abraham Lincoln do not need to make America great again, for America has never lost the greatness described by Lincoln’s words.

Instead America needs to make the Republican Party great again.

Not great in some grand gesture, some fantastic achievement, but instead great in a thousand small ways. Great in the ways which make America great for all of its citizens – indeed all the citizens of the world.

Now is the time for Republicans of good intention, of reason and moderation and compromise, to wrest back their party from the bigots and the fanatics and the lunatic fringe and send them back into the margins, isolated and powerless, where they belong.

In the end, even George Corley Wallace, Jr, himself came around.

Wallace made peace with his God and apologized sincerely to America and directly to people of color for his hate and bigotry. He said of the stand that made him infamous, Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever! “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over.” He said that while he had once sought power and glory, he came finally to the realization that he had to ask for love and forgiveness of those he’d wronged. He openly and publicly recanted his racist beliefs, moreover his actions proved he was sincere. In his final years as governor of Alabama, Wallace set about making things right, he appointed a record number of black people to state positions including his own cabinet and did everything in his power to make permanent the gains of the movement born in Selma, Alabama in 1965.

George Wallace didn’t change things in any great way, but his final actions were great in a hundred small ways and they changed America and the Democratic Party forever.

Wallace spent his final years holding court in a rundown diner not far from the State Capitol in Montgomery.  In constant pain, he sat in his wheelchair and held forth on politics and The South and America. He died on September 13th, 1998 and thousands, black and white, came to his funeral.

For a man who couldn’t walk, he had come far since the day I saw him speak in 1972.

That’s the man I wish I’d met.

 I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
-- Rosa Parks

Renegade 911

Edit 3: Facebook has restored the original post and apologized. They are still looking into the details of what happened.

Edit 2: Comments on this post are now well over 200. If you want to see all of those comments, you have to go to the bottom of the page and click on “load more.” You may have to do this several times.

Edit: Addendum at the end of the post

_____

I made a Facebook post about 9-11.

It went viral.

It wasn’t even the first viral post I wrote this week, or the first to offend a certain segment of America.

And many people were offended.

Oh, yes, they were offended.

Those who beat their fleshy chests and wave the flag in righteous unending fury and bleat most bitterly about “Freedom” and “Liberty” and “Patriotism” were the most offended.

Because aren’t they always?

Aren’t they?

They attempted to hack my Facebook account.

When that didn’t work, they complained to Facebook in righteous anger, furiously waving their little flags.

Because that’s what you do when you love “Freedom” and “Liberty” and “Patriotism” -- not the real freedom and liberty and patriotism but the jack-booted goose-stepping version where everybody is lined up and made to salute the flag with a gun to the back of their necks.  The kind of “Freedom” that’s administered by serious men of pure Aryan descent with death’s heads and lightning bolts on their collars.

Eventually these patriots  succeeded in convincing Facebook’s idiot mechanical brain to remove my post for “violation of community standards,” even though nothing I wrote violates Facebook’s community standards in any way.

Now, I’m not particularly vexed by this.

First, because this is the risk you take when you post to Facebook. You don’t own it. You don’t control it. You are entirely at the mercy of poorly coded algorithms and the arbitrary judgement of some 20 year old Frappuccino swilling douchebeard somewhere in the bowels of the Facebook cloud.

Facebook’s interests aren’t yours, even if like me you make them piles of money by pulling in 130,000 people every day.  I knew this when I signed up. It irritates me, what they did pulling down my post because a bunch of fascist right-wingers got their delicate little Hitler Under-Roos all in a bunch, but I’m not in anyway surprised by the behavior of either party. It’s right there in the EULA.

Second,  Because the people who complained confirm everything I said about them.

And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t amuse me.

By getting my post pulled down they confirm everything I said.

They always do, these patriots, predictable as the next row of goose-stepping Nazis.

And what was it I said that was so terrible?

What was it I said that was deserving of censorship and death threats?

This:

You're expecting some kind of obligatory 9-11 post, aren't you?

Here it is, but you're not gonna like it.

15 years ago today 19 shitheads attacked America.

They killed 3000 of us.

And then ... America got its revenge for 9-11.

Yes we did. Many times over. We killed them. We killed them all. We killed their families. We killed their wives and their kids and all their neighbors. We killed whole nations that weren't even involved just to make goddamned sure. We bombed their cities into rubble. We burned down their countries.

They killed 3000 of us, we killed 300,000 of them or more.

8000 of us came home in body bags, but we got our revenge. Yes we did.

We're still here. They aren't.

We win. USA! USA! USA!

Right?

You goddamned right. We. Win.

Except...

Every year on this day we bathe in the blood of that day yet again. We watch the towers fall over and over. It's been 15 goddamned years, but we just can't get enough. We've just got to watch it again and again.

It's funny how we never show those videos of the bombs falling on Baghdad today. Or the dead in the streets of Afghanistan. We got our revenge, but we never talk about that today. No, we just sit and watch the towers fall yet again.

Somewhere out there on the bottom of the sea are the rotting remains of the evil son of bitch who masterminded the attack. It took a decade, but we hunted him down and put a bullet in his brain. Sure. We got him. Right? That's what we wanted. that's what our leaders promised us, 15 years ago today.

And today those howling the loudest for revenge shrug and say, well, yeah, that. That doesn't matter, because, um, yeah, the guy in the White House, um, see, well, he's not an American, he's the enemy see? He's not doing enough. So, whatever. What about that over there? And that? And...

Yeah.

15 years ago our leaders, left and right, stood on the steps of the Capitol and gave us their solemn promise to work together, to stand as one, for all Americans.

How'd that promise work out?

How much are their words worth? Today, 15 years later?

It's 15 years later and we're STILL afraid. We're still terrorized. Still wallowing in conspiracy theories and peering suspiciously out of our bunkers at our neighbors. Sure we won. Sure we did. We became a nation that tortures our enemies -- and our own citizens for that matter. We're a nation of warrantless wiretaps and rendition and we've gotten used to being strip searched in our own airports. And how is the world a better place for it all?

And now we're talking about more war, more blood.

But, yeah, we won. Sure. You bet.

Frankly, I have had enough of 9-11. Fuck 9-11. I'm not going to watch the shows. I'm not going to any of the memorials. I'm not going to the 9-11 sales at Wal-Mart. I don't want to hear about 9-11. I for damned sure am not interested in watching politicians of either party try to out 9-11 each other. I'm tired of this national 9-11 PTSD. I did my bit for revenge, I went to war, I'll remember the dead in my own time in my own way.

I'm not going to shed a damned tear today.

We got our revenge. Many times over, for whatever good it did us.

I'm going to go to a picnic and enjoy my day. Enjoy this victory we've won.

I suggest you do the same.

Horrible, yes?

How terrible that I should suggest we stop wallowing in this misery, that we stop allowing ourselves to be terrorized by men long dead.

Yes indeed, how terrible.

On Facebook, posts openly calling for the assassination of the president do not violate Facebook’s community standards.

Open racism doesn’t violate Facebook’s community standards.

Sexism and misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, bigotry of every stripe, none of these things violate Facebook’s community standards – or the community standards of supposed Christian Conservatives for that matter. 

Posts that directly call for armed insurrection, that call for militias and Sovereign Citizens to march on Washington and burn it to the ground, to hang the government from the nearest light poles,  don’t violate community standards.

You can use Facebook to organize Klan rallies and gather Neo-Nazis for Trump, to take over a bird sanctuary in Oregon or even to call down the wrath of your god upon everybody you hate.

You can openly call for the murder of a football player that you don’t think is patriotic enough.

All of these things are fine.

But don’t say you’re not going to celebrate 9-11.

_____

Addendum:  I can see that I’ve attracted a certain element and that I have to explain things that would be obvious to those of normal intellect. Very well: If you read the above piece and came away with the idea that I – a retired US military officer who was on active duty on September 11th, 2001 and who willingly served in the resulting war – that I am somehow saying that the US shouldn’t have responded to the 9-11 attack (or Pearl Harbor for that matter, because apparently you’re all reading off the same crib notes) then you are too goddamned stupid to comment here. So don’t bother. As previously noted, I don’t mind having enemies, but I do require they meet certain levels of reading comprehension and reasoning ability.  If you think that a measured response against an identified enemy is the same as invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, then you don’t qualify and your comments will not post. // Jim

Cossacks

“And what is Aleppo?”
  – Libertarian Party Candidate Gary Johnson

 

What's your plan to fight ISIS?

The plan, man! What’s the plan?

I am this morning reminded as I often am of that scene in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. 

You know the one.

Sure you do.

Max, Savannah Nix, and the Feral Kids have kidnapped Master and along with Pig Killer busted out of Bartertown's power plant dungeon. They're barreling madcap down the train tracks through the blasted wasteland in a ramshackle makeshift pig-shit powered steam locomotive. Max works his way up the side of the train, fighting Tina Turner's post-apocalyptic punk-metal roadies all the way and finally reaches Pig Killer at the controls of the engine.

"So, what's the plan?" Max shouts over the roar of the slipstream.

Pig Killer grins in unbelieving mirth. "Plan?" He laughs in delirious glee. "There ain't no PLAN! Hahahahahah...."

God, I love that scene.

I digress.

I'm not really sure what the point of last night's "Commander In Chief Forum" was, unless NBC wanted to publicly confirm how utterly incompetent Matt Lauer is as a journalist. It was 30 minutes of, "So, Scumbag Lying Hillary, tell us more about your criminal email scheme to destroy America," and 30 minutes of "Gee, Awesome Donald, you're so dreamy!" Lauer repeatedly cut Clinton off and repeatedly failed to follow up on Trump’s increasingly bizarre and ridiculous statements.

If they still teach forum moderation in Journalism School, this would be a good example of how not to do it.

Somewhere wedged in between Trump's gushing schoolgirl man-crush on Vladimir Putin (and honestly, was it just me or did anybody else expect Trump to go full on Tom Cruise couch jumping at that point? I LOVE HIM! I LOVE HIM! No? Just me then) and the ten billionth recounting of Clinton's email server, somebody in the audience asked Trump, "What's your plan to fight ISIS?"

What's your plan to fight ISIS.

The plan.

What’s the plan?

What’s your plan to fight ISIS?

That question shows just how little Americans, including a lot of veterans who ought to know better, actually understand about the Islamic State and the ongoing mess in the Middle East.

What's your plan?

Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Have we anything resembling a plan?
Herger the Joyous: Ride till we find them. Kill them all.
-- The Thirteenth Warrior, Touchstone Pictures, 1999

As if it's that simple.

As if “ISIS” is even the right label.

As if you could just sum up a solution to two thousand years of sectarian violence in a Tweet. I mean, think about it, Lauer wouldn’t give Clinton two minutes to explain her goddamned email, right? But Trump is going to give us the war plan in the same amount of time? Sure, why not.   

As if "ISIS" was just this one little unified group of easily identified shitheads confined to one little chunk of land instead of a vast nebulous entity spread across half a dozen countries and mixed in with millions of innocents.

As if the "ISIS" of January when the new president is sworn in would still be the same "ISIS" of today, right now. As if the enemy is all, “Whoa, hang on, flag on the play. Let’s us just wait for the new guy over there in America. It’s only fair!” As if the tactical situation would be unchanged between then and now. The international situation unchanged – including no further actions by Trump’s beloved Putin between now and then. The terrain, the weather, the supply routes, the intelligence, the bases and strongholds, the available assets, all unchanged. Trump claims to be some genius real-estate mogul, but even real-estate doesn’t work like that. Is this guy really so naïve that he thinks the vastly more complex world of war and geopolitics remains static from day to day?  

As if you can formulate an actual workable plan to deal with a staggeringly complex problem without detailed information, without a full assessment of available assets, without the consultation of Congress (you know, the people who have to fund and authorize such an adventure), without some kind of actual national strategy which includes military and nation-building options and contingency plans for when the enemy doesn't roll over and cooperate.

As if you can do all of this by firing the nation’s top generals and running it all yourself from the Resolute Desk, apparently by using your vast Hitler-like military genius.

As if it was just "Okay, you military guys, listen up. Here’s what we’re gonna do: Bomb some shit. Yeah, bomb some shit. And, uh, some fighter jets! And Tanks! And SEALs! Yeah! Green Berets! Kill 'em. Kill 'em all. God Bless America! High fives all around! Profit!”

Crazy, right?

Yeah, but see, the worst part is this: that really is Trump’s whole damned plan:

“Part of the problem that we’ve had is we go in we defeat somebody and then we don’t know what we’re doing after that, we lose it, like, as an example you look at Iraq what happened how badly that was handled. And then when President Obama took over and likewise it was a disaster. It was actually somewhat stable I don’t think it could ever be very stable it’s a war we never should have gone into it in the first place but he came in and he said, “When we go out” and he took everybody out and really ISIS was formed. This was a terrible decision and frankly we never even got a shot. And if you really look at the aftermath of Iraq Iran is going to be taking over Iraq they’ve been doing it and it’s not a pretty picture. The, and, and I think you know, ‘cause you’ve been watching me I think for a long time I’ve always said shouldn’t be there! But if we’re gonna get out take the oil if we would have taken the oil you wouldn’t have ISIS because ISIS formed with the power and wealth of that oil.”

That, that right there was Trump’s actual answer to the question, “What’s your plan to fight ISIS?”

That rambling incoherent stream of unconscious, that goddamned gibberish, was his answer.  

What’s your plan, Commander?

Well, see we go in, right, and we defeat some people and then we don’t have a plan for after that. Sad.

Okay, thanks for the history lesson, Professor, but what’s your plan?

Well, Iraq, see, I supported it but I didn’t support it and we won and it was stable but also not stable. We shouldn’t have gone in but we shouldn’t have left. And that’s how Gazpacho is made!

Yes, yes. But what’s your plan?

Iran is taking over Iraq. Not pretty! Not pretty! They’re doing it. People tell me they’re doing it. Sad!

I got it. But again, what’s your goddamned plan?

Take the oil! We should take the oil. In Iraq. Because ISIS, which is the Islamic State in FUCKING SYRIA, somehow something something Iraq invasion vague hand waving Putin squirrel Assad.

Jesus H. Christ, man, what’s the plan?

Plan? There ain’t no plaaaan ahahahahahahaha!

It’s gibberish.

It’s just goddamned gibberish.

Trump is ramshackle makeshift train wreck carrying a cast of pig-shit covered lunatics down the tracks into a wasteland.

If you take Trump’s statement apart, line by line, and you get rid of all the digression and all the filler and the non sequiturs, the only coherent thing you can parse from his response is this: Kill ‘em all, take their stuff

Kill them all, take their stuff.

 

That’s not a plan for defeating the Islamic State, you lunatic! THAT’S THE ISLAMIC STATE’S PLAN.

 

Kill them all, take their stuff.

Trump isn’t talking about defeating ISIS, he’s talking about pillaging Iraq.

Trump is actually talking about invading a country and looting it.

No wonder this guy admires a Russian despot. Because that’s some shady Cossack shit right there.

How does this work?

No really, I’d like to hear the details.

We … take the oil? Right. Okay. How?

No, that’s not a rhetorical question. Trump disparaged Obama for not taking Iraq’s oil on the way out. But how would we do that? Do we drill new wells, build massive new pipelines, and then what? Pump the country’s entire oil supply to a fleet of giant supertankers waiting offshore? How long does that take? Who pays for the wells and the pipes and ships – do we maybe just enslave the Iraqis and make them build it?  And the other Gulf States are gonna what? Just watch us sail away with the booty, with enough oil to completely collapse the world market and completely destroy their economies? I guess we’ll have to fight our way out of the Gulf. Good thing giant lumbering tankers don’t make easy targets. No. What do we do with it? Billions upon billions of barrels of oil, where does it go? To refineries in America? They don’t have that kind of capacity. To storage tanks? Do we just park it offshore for a while? Who cashes out on this? Do Americans get a cut? Sure, we’ll all be Saudi Sheiks. Or do we just give it to Exxon? Here you go, fellas, Merry Christmas! Maybe we give it to Putin?

And what if the natives resist? Do we send in Colonel Quaritch and his fleet of flying tanks to burn down the big tree they all live in? Because it’s looking a lot like Trump got his entire plan from watching Avatar.

So, we take the oil from Iraq, we kill all the big blue natives, and somehow this magically ends the war in Syria and stops global terrorism.

I guess Trump never watched the end of the movie.

Maybe it’s just me.

 

Jake Sully: This is how it's done. When people are sittin' on shit that you want, you make 'em your enemy. Then you're justified in taking it.
-- Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2009 (Director’s cut)