September 2016 Archives

Dear America,

I had set my mind to watching the debate last night, and when 9:00 rolled around, I tuned in.  Right from the beginning, I found myself cringing every time one of them spoke, and by 9:30, I had turned on my Roku and was binge watching a British detective series.  They are both such ugly human beings that, though I dread a Trump presidency and I thus intend to vote for Clinton, I find myself yearning for Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter.  Hell, I'd even take Richard Nixon.  They were like two high school candidates for student body president rather than two aspirants to the presidency of the United States.  The sniping...the condescension...the outright incivility that both of them displayed was so crass and unbecoming that I was embarrassed for us, America.  I was too embarrassed to watch the two people, one of whom will be our president come January 2017, even speak to one another.  The edge was Hillary Clinton's in my mind, simply because she cogently articulated coherent and detailed policies--to the extent that time allowed for detail, that is--and the facts on which she based them, while Trump just made conclusory statements about what he planned to do, to the extent that he plans anything, and about what would result from it.  But regardless of whom I found more credible, neither of them should expect an invitation from me to come to our house for dinner.  As I was switching to Netflix in dismay, if not disgust, I found myself thinking that Bill Clinton would never have conducted himself the way his wife did, and while I don't even like Bill Clinton much, I at least could stand to listen to him, even as he was saying, "I did not have sex with that woman...Monica Lewinsky"...which everyone knew was a lie.  It was all so unseemly last night--so shabby.  As I heard Orson Bean put it on the Tonight Show one time about forty years ago, the air was full of shab.

Let me concede that I have thought that Hillary Clinton should put the wood to Trump, as we used to say in my juvenile softball-playing days, but I never thought about the details of doing so.  Sure Trump should be confronted with his "business practices," which most of us would call greedy and, if not outright fraudulent, fraudulike if I can be allowed to coin my own phrase.  And as to his revisionist attitude to everything he says, I thought he should be required to eat some of those words too.  I also thought that he should be confronted with the fact that the "economic policies" he claims to advocate aren't new; they are just retreads of Reagan's supply-side, trickle down economics, which are what got us to 2008 and the crash.  It is demonstrable that making the rich richer doesn't make the rest of us richer by any stretch of the imagination and that tax cuts don't bring about economic growth, as least as you can measure it in terms of jobs and earnings for those who actually work for a living.  And there are several other areas in which Trump should be required to explain himself in terms that his constituents will understand for what they are rather than what he wants them to be, but there are ways to do such things.  It wouldn't have required rancor and disdainful quips to get at them, but, while Clinton did direct some such questions to him, her demeanor probably made Trump's supporters feel sorry for him...and dislike Clinton even more.  I could hear Bill croaking, "Donald, I heard you say that declaring bankruptcy was just a part of doing business.  Is that the way you plan to run the country?"  He'd be smiling almost saccharinely as he said it, and a world would be disarmed by his charm while Trump just repeated the odious sentiment for which he was being subtly castigated.  Hillary has been with Bill for over thirty years.  Why hasn't she picked up any of his good traits.

Be all this as it may, the election is still up for grabs because our choice is between two characters who look for all the world like playground bullies who are prone to seeing the world as they will rather than as it is.  The fact is that registered Republicans will almost all vote for Trump and registered Democrats will vote for Clinton.  The election is in the hands of the independents who haven't yet decided, which I recently heard are about 11% of the total electorate.  Of those maybe 10 million voters, maybe as many as half won't vote.  The other half will be divided between three rubrics.  The first is those who will default to the liberal candidate and the second is those who will default to the more conservative one.  Thus, roughly 3 million plus a few will decide for the other 97 million of us, and what will they base their choices on?

That's what scares me: which evil will they choose.  Either way, we lose.  The only question is, are we just going to lose, or are we going to hell in a hand basket.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I've been talking about Donald Trump's lack of a plan to accomplish what he says he will, but I haven't really checked to see what he specifically proposes to do.  So I went to his website to look, and I discovered that my opinion of him hasn't changed as a consequence of learning more details about what a Trump administration would do for us, or more aptly to us, assuming that he could get congress to implement what he says he will do.  Here are some examples.

His tax reduction proposal would increase my taxes by about 20% based on his 25% tax rate and $30,000 standard deduction for my income bracket.  His tax reduction for business--from 35% to 15%--will have little effect on companies like GE, which paid no tax a couple of years ago, but it will serve to augment the incomes of most businesses.  How that would help this country escapes me since American business is already sitting on an estimated $2 trillion or more in idle capital.  And as to the 10% tax rate on repatriated corporate wealth, which he claims will result in billions coming back to this country, with all that cash on hand already going unspent, Trump's little sop for big business isn't likely to find its way into capital expenditures and more jobs.  But nowhere in his tax plan is there a penalty for outsourcing jobs overseas, nor is there a tariff on goods sold in this country after being manufactured abroad.  Thus, the perpetuation of the era of transfer of American wealth to other countries by dint of shipping our jobs to them seems to be part of the Trump plan by virtue of inaction on Trump's part. As to the minimum wage, Trump has gone from saying that wages are too high in this country so we shouldn't increase the minimum wage in late 2015 to...well, saying that wages are too high and there is no need to increase the minimum wage because he is going to bring back so many jobs--with his tax plan for repatriation, I guess--that people will be able to earn more than the minimum wage (if you smell bovine feces in there somewhere, join the club).  But since the Spring when he said that, he has gone on to say that the federal minimum should be $10...or so.  Not enough in my opinion since some states and municipalities have already gone that high or higher, and thus, a $10 minimum wage is virtually meaningless.

As to non-economic issues, there is the war against ISIL.  Trump says he has a secret plan, so there's no way to comment on it.  All we know is that he wants to be very tough on ISIL...in some way, as if that's not what bombing the hell out of them, as we are doing already, isn't.  In this area, as well as in most others, Trump's policy is, I'll take care of it, believe me.  And I don't.  On the issue of abortion, I think he's against it now, but that's a recent development.  On healthcare, Trump wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with free market reforms, whatever that means.  He thinks that doctors should be more transparent with regard to prices of  procedures and that insurers should be able to sell their products across state lines.  He also said something about the pharmaceutical industry, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is in the end.  Then he wants to make Medicare a block grant program, in other words, he wants to send bulk payments to the states and let them decide how much to pay and when, as was done in the nineties when Bill Clinton signed off on the Republicans' "reform of welfare as we know it."  Now, in some states only 4% of the block grant money they receive actually goes to making welfare payments to those in need, the rest going into supplementation of education budgets, law enforcement training and various other programs only-tenuously connected to financial assistance, if at all.  Of course, you know that he is going to have Mexico build his wall--again we are just supposed to believe him on this even though the Mexicans have steadfastly denied that they will ever acquiesce in Trump's demand that they do so--and he's going to "humanely" deport about 11 million people.  With regard to the second amendment--which starts, by the way with the phrase "a well regulated Militia...that's well regulated, not un-regulated--Trump just wants us all to carry guns so we can protect ourselves.  Apparently the statistics that show gun owners to be more likely to be killed with those buns by people who accost them than they are to use those guns to kill those who accost them haven't come to his attention, nor has the ability of anyone to buy an unregistered gun at a gun show because congress refuses to act.  And as far as improving our mental healthcare system, I assume he wants that to operate on a free market basis just like the rest of our healthcare system.  What are the odds that the system we now have--the free market system--is going to improve on its own.  He also wants to improve our energy self-sufficiency by increasing coal production and drilling for oil and gas virtually everywhere, though he makes no mention of renewable energy or conservation like LED bulbs in place of incandescent ones and a solar panel on every roof, right next to a little wind mill.

To wrap this all up, I always thought that Trump had no real ideas.  But now that I have read his ideas on his website, I know I was right and I'm more scared than ever.  His almost bizarre justifications for them, I realize now, really are the mark of a self-deluded narcissistic megalomaniac, so I feel much better.  Now I know I'm not wrong to be afraid...very, very afraid.

Your friend,

Mike


I live in Connecticut, and hence, I generally see nothing of the campaigns of the presidential candidates, because the last time this state went Republican in a presidential election was in 1988 when George H.W. Bush beat the Democrat, Michael Dukakis.  You may remember the key moments in that election's publicity.  There was the Willie Horton ad run by Bush, which made reference to Horton's release from prison on a weekend furlough, despite the fact that he was convicted of murder and was serving life without the possibility of parole.  He didn't return from his furlough and committed rape, murder and robbery before he was caught.  Dukakis had supported the program, though it existed when he took office, and the decision to give a weekend furlough to Horton had nothing to do with Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts.  The other prominent moment was Dukakis riding in a military tank with his head sticking out of the turret as he sported a tank commander's hard helmet that dwarfed his face.  He looked ridiculous, and as to the Horton ad, he barely made a response.  And in a presumable effort to take the high road, he did not respond in kind either.  So much for ethical behavior in presidential politics.

The reason I bring up the Bush/Dukakis election is fear that the outcome of this election may reflect that one...and for the same reasons.  At the moment, I have no fear that Trump will beat Clinton in this state, but with almost two months to go, that's far from certainty because the characters of the two candidates are somewhat reminiscent of that former contest.  Trump will say anything, and while much of what he says gets reviewed for accuracy these days,  as with the Horton ad in 1988, intellectual honesty is not the coin of the realm these days.  In this election, people seem prone to believing what they want to believe without much regard for what is true, much less accurate--there is a difference--and because Hillary is somewhat hapless in her decision making when it comes to her personal candor, Trump has donned something of a mantle of candor himself by simple dint of invidious comparison.  It started with all that finessing of his own boorishness with fulminations about political correctness, which became a blanket excuse for ignorance, bigotry and outright fabrication and prevarication.  His supporters, who may not be a "bucket of deplorables," to coin one of Hillary Clinton's more innocuous contretemps, are eager enough to pillory her that they will seize on anything without question, and Trump is either too stupid or too ethically malleable to eschew canards and calumnies.  So, all this roiling of the waters over Clinton's emails tends to exclude the reality that it did not harm...at least none that anyone has ever produced any evidence of...and her campaign's failure to promptly inform the public about her recent bout of pneumonia is being ginned up into another scandal: much ado about nothing in my estimation, but not in that of Trump supporters.

Of course, nothing can be done about Trump's noisome assertions and innuendos, or even his outright lies.  He claimed that a black minister in North Carolina had deliberately undermined him with her congregation when in reality, she actually admonished the parishioners to desist when they became somewhat raucous over Trump's descent into opponent-bashing.  He had been invited only to explain his positions relative to the interests of the African-American community.   Somehow her intervention on his behalf...her insistence on decorum in the church became nervousness and preordained antipathy in Trump's mind when he was asked about the uproar after the fact, but I guaranty that his advocates ignored the evidence to the contrary that was aired immediately after Trump's self-serving characterization of the pastor and the events.  Those supporters of Trump who are disinterested in the realities won't be swayed.  But all the while, the independents are listening and hearing very little from Hillary Clinton, or at least that's the way it seems here in Connecticut.  And it isn't because Clinton has nothing to work with.

Trump's business practices--and they are relevant because he vaunts his success as a credential for the presidency--have left him with many enemies...victims in most cases.  There are contractors who didn't get paid for work done on Trump's casinos when he declared his various and sundry bankruptcies.  There is the fact that he is actually a somewhat minor figure in New York real estate though he touts his influence in that business as if he invented it.  There is the fact that, like George W. Bush, his money came from the previous generation, both men's progenitors being moguls who endowed them with their financial seeds.  There is Trump's lack of constancy as evinced by his three marriages and of course, there is his refusal to disclose information about his finances, which are at the core of his braggadocio.

Maybe Clinton will be unleashed by the national audience that the debates will create in a few days...at least I hope so.  But she had better not wait any longer than that.  The ghost of Willie Horton is rattling around, and that isn't good.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last night, we saw Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump back to back, both of them charged with answering questions for an audience of military and related people.  My impression was that the town-hall style sessions were to focus on military and defense policy.  At the outset, the moderator, Matt Lauer of NBC's morning show, Today, exhorted both candidates to eschew personal attacks and focus on answering the questions, and both agreed, but neither kept his or her commitment.  Setting that aside, Lauer tried to get answers to various questions without much more success than anyone else has had, and he tried to elicit candor from both Clinton and Trump with only varying degrees of success.  I have to say that this event proved the rule, at least in politics: the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Trump was as blustering, insubstantial, braggadocios and preposterous as he always is, and Clinton was as effusive in her understated way as ever, but as opposed to Trump, she seemed informed and persuasive in style, if not in substance as she always is.  Both of them resorted to invidious comparison in the hope, and with the apparent intention, of separating themselves advantageously from one another, but Clinton seemed better armed in that battle than Trump.  She was specific and fact driven while Trump did his usual dance, punctuating his more dubious claims with, "believe me."  In the final analysis, the candidates neither gained nor lost anything in my opinion.. The Clinton supporters no doubt sat at home saying, "See!" and the Trump supporters were on their couches saying "That's what I'm talking about."  But the independents were given the opportunity to make a side-by-side comparison of the two candidates, and it seems to me that Trump didn't fare too well.

All that emerged from the two half-hour long sessions, one with each candidate, is that they are two completely different kinds of people.  Trump is a brassy construction worker pontificating about how the world would be if he were in control with no idea how he would make the changes if given the opportunity.  His only argument is that he is good for his word, but all the evidence from his business career suggests just the opposite.  Clinton, on the other hand, is the cerebral, savvy intellectual who can make a case for any point she avers, but cogent as her arguments may seem, they lack the detail that would give them a likelihood of manifestation if she ascended to power.  To her credit, she declined to make a promise when pressed on defense against domestic terrorism, knowing that any such promise would be disingenuous no matter who made it, while Trump never shied away from claiming that he could do anything, just because of who he is...or more aptly, of who he wants us all to believe he is.  I can't recall a candidate in the past 55 or 60 years during which I have been aware of politics who was shorter on solid ideas than Trump, and it showed last night.  But on the other hand, I can't recall another candidate besides Clinton who had developed as great a facility for carrying so much baggage as she has.  From White Water to her emails, Clinton has managed to surround herself with a fog of dubiety that would probably be politically lethal to another candidate, while Trump doesn't even carry his baggage.  He just ignores it, leaving it for some apologist to tote from place to place.  This is not the golden age of American politics.  Trump carries himself with his chin leading as he walks into the room, much like Mussolini used to do while posturing with an imperious, subtle backward tilt of the head, and Clinton moves like the grandmother she is and evinces a slightly censorious attitude with a mouth turned down at the corners and a sort of rehearsed seriousness about her.  Still, the choice is clear, and the independent, non-committed voters will make it.

On election day, we will be forced to choose as a nation whether we want to spend at least four years, and probably eight, being led by an autocrat who thinks that he is smarter than everyone else or a politician who knows how the system works and wants to work it.  I'm not sure that either type of person would best serve the United States right now, but there is a tie-breaker.  I believe that when it comes to policy, Clinton genuinely would prefer to err on the side of the common man while Trump would rather rely on those with money and power to trickle their largess down on us.  Clinton would try to be firm but fair, but Trump would be inflexible and with the thought that toughness solves every problem...and it doesn't as is apparent from the fact that the Republicans control congress, both houses, but they can't get a bill to fund Zika prevention through.  Trump would raise his high hand and do what he thought was best without regard for anyone else or rational considerations.  Clinton would tend toward pragmatic consideration of the facts that prevail and do what she thought would work out best for all of us.  Trump is a nouveau riche Babbitt while Clinton is a smooth talking Yalie with an intellectual appeal.  Trump is erratic while Clinton is steady almost to the point of predictability.  Clinton believes in the ivory tower while Trump believes in the Trump Tower.  Clinton wants to govern.  Trump wants to rule.

So, while my mind is made up and so is the mind of virtually every liberal or progressive, so is the mind of every conservative or reactionary.  The only question is which of the character types the independent third of the electorate is going to choose, and at the moment, there is no indication either way.  I just hope that the debates tell a more detailed story, because the more the independents know, the more they are likely to do the right thing.

Your friend,

Mike

 


Assuming that the accounts of the nearly impromptu meeting between Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Donald Trump are accurate, and they vary so little that there can be little doubt that they are, Donald Trump came away with singed hair and burnt fingers, but that's far better than he could have expected.  As to Nieto, though he did what he probably wanted to do, he didn't do it well, and now he is paying the price in the form of heavy criticism for even having the meeting, much less standing passively by while Trump characterized what seems to have been a non-event as the initiation of détente between the two.  I presumed upon hearing of the meeting that Nieto was setting Trump up...that he would publicly repeat what he had already said: that Mexico wasn't paying for any wall.  And he did that during the meeting. But after the meeting, he stood silent while Trump excused himself for failing to effectively insist by claiming that the subject never came up.  So, while Nieto later tweeted that he had done what he had indubitably intended to do all along during the private talks, he had let his opportunity for political gain slip away at the press conference.  His only hope of redeeming his reputation with the Mexican electorate was to confront Trump in the open, and Nieto's one sentence tweet after the fact of allowing Trump to tell a bald-faced lie at Nieto's expense was no substitute.  It may be that Nieto will come off like more of a statesman than Trump for restraining himself, but his goal must have been to show who was "mas macho," not who was the better diplomat, and that goal wasn't met.  Still, as to Donald Trump there was nothing gained, and if anything, he manifested what has been a persistent criticism of him: that he is an apostate with regard to his own policies and that he is all talk.

How many times have we heard Trump excuse himself for something he said by either making light of it, as when he said that he was only kidding when he insisted to a conservative talk-show host that he really meant it when he said that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were the founders of ISIS.  How many times has he had to parse his prior statements in order to make what is patently offensive or absurd seem like nothing more than imprecise diction.  But this time, we are talking about Trump's boast that he would build a " 'uge wall," and make Mexico pay for the wall he has promised to build, and assuming that he will build the wall in any case...apparently whether congress, which controls the money needed to build it if Mexico won't come up with the money, agrees to or not.  With that in mind, it seems that Trump's mouth is making promises that his ego can't keep.  Even a Republican congress isn't any more likely to fund Trump's fantasy project than is Mexico, and now Trump has been told at least twice by the one Mexican who can make the decision unilaterally that Mexico is out.  And Trump's response to this embarrassing but tacit realization: "They're gonna' pay for the wall, believe me!" as if the phrase "believe me" makes it a reality.

I'm sure that this isn't the last time that his ego will get his ass-pirations in trouble.  That's in his nature, and like old dogs, there is not teaching him new tricks.  But this latest contretemps has potential to be his undoing.  The wall is central to his charismatic appeal among those for whom thinking is only an occasional pass time.  Any one who thinks about what Trump has done in Mexico will see that everything he has said he could do in the past is far more speculative than he would have us all believe.  Sooner or later, someone is going to make the point that Trump's self-vaunting claims of artful deal making are just that.  He has made a lot of money breaking his word to contractors and creditors, so conniving is certainly one of his cardinal skills, but deal making?  If you want to consider deceiving people and then defaulting on your promises to be making a deal, then Trump's your man.  But as in the case of Trump making the government of Mexico pay for his wall, he had the chance to make the demand and he couldn't even do that...he couldn't even talk about it when his adversary on the point brought it up.

You have to take into consideration the haplessness of the Democratic Party when you assess the value of this most recent Trump fiasco.  Whether Hillary Clinton will be able to articulate the ways in which Trump has failed to make good to substantial effect is an open question.  Conclusory statements about how she sees Trump's stumbling through the real world won't do.  But she has advisors and the debates are about to take place.  She needs for them to give her a pat description of Trump, using all of these mishandled statements and deeds as examples of not just failure, but of incompetence, and more important, lack of judgment...overreaching in particular.  It worked in her campaign against Bernie Sanders, and he was a far more popular figure than Trump will ever be.  Let's hope she can do it again.

Your friend,

Mike

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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from September 2016 listed from newest to oldest.

August 2016 is the previous archive.

October 2016 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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