November 2016 Archives

Dear America,

Now that Donald Trump has gotten what he wished for, he has to put up because he didn't shut up.  He started by going over to the New York Times (they apparently wouldn't come to him as a matter of principle) where he had to answer questions about things he claimed and promised during the campaign.  And as the interview progressed, it became clear that he was only kidding about a lot of things.  For example, he isn't going to lock Hillary Clinton up as he promised he would.  He says she has had enough; "I don't want to hurt the Clintons.  They're good people," he said.  And as for "Obamacare"...well, maybe he was a little hasty about some of it, which he now thinks has to be saved, though which parts was left a little vague.  They talked about The Wall, Syria and lots of other areas of candidate Trump's fulminations, and as it turns out, President-Elect Trump wants to keep an open mind now that he's gotten what he wanted by insisting that his mind was closed on these subjects...and many more.  Climate change...the jury's still out.  Expelling 11-14 million illegal aliens...well, we'll start with the criminals, and we'll see about the rest of them.  I didn't read the interview, if a transcript even exists, but I heard accounts of it on the news...and of course I read some in the New York Times.  It seems that in the name Donald J. Trump, the "J" stands for waffle, which is just about as reasonable as most of what he stands for.  So, what does it all mean.

Well, to begin with, Donald Trump seems to be learning, albeit in small increments but rapidly, what "being presidential" really means.  For example, sometimes you have to eat a little crow to get things done, such as his contemplated nomination of Mitt Romney for Secretary of State.  He needs someone who can look like a sane, mature surrogate for the United States and be one in the bargain.  That isn't Rudy "the self-promoter" Giuliani, and Trump isn't too dumb to see that, though some of his other appointments do point in the other direction on the issue of dumbness.  He has also discovered that when he wants to fill positions in his cabinet, he doesn't want any from the now-proverbial basket of deplorables either.  He did pick a rabid former general for his security team, but when it comes to education, for example, he doesn't want some experienced high level administrator from the plebian class, he wants a fellow sybarite who spouts off about vouchers whenever she gets the chance.  After all, Trump won't want to send his young son, Baron, to a D.C. public school, he'll want him to go to Sydwell Friends with all the other monied minority kids in The District, and someone has to pay for it, so it may as well be the government.  He's got his Vice President, Mike Pence, to liaise with Paul Ryan and the former anti-Trump contingent of The House and The Senate, which will be a necessity if Trump actually wants to get anything done by the end of the next four years, or until he gets impeached for taking an emolument from a foreign government, whichever comes first, and no doubt someone on his campaign team thought that up in advance...another stroke of pragmatism.  Then there's the Times interview itself, which the old, pre-election Trump would have blown off after making the excuse he made about changing terms for the event...changes that he wanted to make it turns out.  He apparently realized that the other leaders of the western world read the New York Times, and what they say matters, so he had to get into their good book if he wanted to have any chance at all not to be savaged in print every time he did something stupid.

The signs are all there.  Trump won't be the radical he claimed he would be because he can't do it alone.  He now understands that he needs congress, which isn't about to cede its power to him so that he can grab the limelight, not to mention the credit, credit being his absolute favorite thing in one way or another.  And he needs the press too, because without good press, the bad kind that got him elected won't do him any good at all.  My guess is that the next lesson he will learn is that Twitter is a vice in his case, not an instrument of governance, and he will desist in demanding apologies and ranting about this thing that he doesn't like or that one.  It's reality time in the Trump camp, and only time will tell whether it is going to serve him or us.  We can hope though, can't we.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Let me elaborate a bit on what I said last time, that is, that the Democratic Party has to devise a platform that addresses the fundamental problem of lack of opportunity in America.  That is, the Democratic Party must convince the voting public that changing what is wrong is both their intent and a thing that they want to be judged upon accomplishing or failing to accomplish.  In my opinion, it will take some kind of formulaic approach to defining and measuring the problem for the Democrats to succeed, and here is my suggestion.

There are two statistical terms, which may be confused with one another, that should be useful: mean and midrange.  The mean is the average of a group of things.  The midrange is the number at mid-point between the biggest number and the smallest.  Just to be clear, statistics provides for lots of other numbers deriving from a group of numbers like the incomes of Americans, but these are the material ones for this purpose.  So, if we apply those two statistical factors to the incomes of Americans, they will look something like this.  The mean will be something between several billion, and of course, zero, which is as low as income gets (though somehow many rich people manage to earn less than zero in given years).   That can be equated with, say, the average income of the American family of four: $55,775 according to the U.S. Census Department.  The midrange is the average of the highest income in the nation--let's say Bill Gates' annual yearly income of approximately $11.5 billion--and again, let's say $0, the amount the poorest of us earn though some rich people have fake zero incomes too.  Thus, the midrange income is $5.75 billion.  Now, compare the mean income to the midrange and you have a disparity of, well let's not be punctilious, a little less than $5.5 billion.  Therefore, the Democratic Party's avowed goal should be to bring the difference between the midrange and the mean down by, (let's start with a manageable number) say, a mere $10,000 dollars.  One way in which that could be accomplished would be by taking a commensurate amount from Bill Gates, but he would still be obscenely rich, and no one else would be any better off.  In the alternative, we could bring the average income, that is the mean, up by $10,000: not an easy task.  But bringing the disparity between the midrange and the mean down by $10,000 does seems feasible.  You could give more money to the lowest on the income ladder, but in general to all those below the midrange, but with emphasis on helping those with lower rather than higher incomes.  You could increase the minimum wage, for example.  And with regard to bringing down those at the top so that they are closer to those at the bottom, you could also increase the tax rate for those in the top brackets while reducing it in the middle and the bottom of the range.  And there are lots of other things that could be done too, but the goal has to be to reduce the gap between the midrange and the bottom so that it looks more like the gap between the midrange and the top, even if only a little.  That's a way to measure the progress of the Democrats in achieving their goal of leveling out the peaks and valleys in our income range.  And that's how they should explain the Democratic platform to the American people.

Of course, it could be made simpler in the end, but the point that has to be made is that the Democrats' goal is to decrease the disparity between super high earners and super low earners to...decrease the number of both, and increase the number of members of the vaunted middle class.  That's how the Democrats could make their point graphically, so that everyone could understand what is going on in practical terms; a couple of simple numbers should make all the difference.

Of course there were other issues in this past campaign, most of them canards created by Donald Trimp's go-to phrase that sufficed for his constituents as proof of his point: "believe me" (it has to be uttered twice to be considered probative, as in "believe me, folks, believe me").  The defense against that kind of demagoguery is again, numbers.  For example, a Trumper recently said to me that in order for our elections to be fair, we have to close our southern border...apparently the problem is only Mexicans, not Canadians.  The reason, he opined, is that Mexicans are illegally crossing the border and when they do, they vote Democrat, and he reached this conclusion in spite of the fact that the consensus is that voter fraud is not a problem of any significance in our elections.  I need not get into the fact that an illegal resident isn't likely to risk drawing attention to himself by trying to vote.   Rationality has nothing to do with these things, which is where numbers come in.  But rationality in elections is a topic for another time.  For now, lets just focus on distilling the most salient issue--income inequality--into irrefutable form...numbers.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

While listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning, I heard an interview with the organizer of a liberal PAC talking about what the Democratic Party should be doing to win the next election.  The interviewer kept coming back to the same, now-familiar refrain about white middleclass voters feeling abandoned by the party, and the interviewee kept resisting the attempt to make that the central issue for his party to address.  His point, one that I have concluded to be salient myself, was that there isn't a single class of voters or a color that needs to hear policy planks on a particular set of measures and then see the party trying to manifest them.  He felt that no one or two demographics was the key to the next election either.  His contention seemed to be--at least this is how I interpret his remarks--that we have to find a way to cause wealth to actually trickle down rather than positing means of doing so that never seem to work like tax cuts for entrepreneurs and big business.  But along with his seeming contention was the underlying observation that our new insistence on dividing the voters into discrete groups to whom we have to pander is a misguided approach.  What are needed is policies to effect change in our socio-economic framework so as to address social ills that affect our society as a whole, and I agree.  We have to accept at some point that our divisions are chimerical at their cores because the monster among us isn't immigrants taking jobs that Americans could...or would...want.  It isn't members of certain ethnicities getting a free ride.  We have been divided, and thus politically conquered, and we have to direct or attention to the real problems, one in particular, and insist that our politicians address them...for the benefit of each of us, not just what each of us perceives to be someone else.  We have to be specific and reject the hypotheses of those whom we have trusted in the past to identify our problems for us, and that includes the news media.

You certainly noticed if you watched election coverage two weeks ago that the subject of the conversation on the air was the fragments of our society: white voters under thirty, voters with college degrees, blue collar voters, blacks, whites, Asians...Martians.  But in the final analysis, we are all just Americans, and the problems we have as a society are not indigenous to the lives of single social groupings, because the effect of our ills on one group spill over onto members of other groups, and thus become universal ills rather than white ones, or rural ones, or ills specific to any group, class, creed or ethnicity.  They all have one thing in common: they devolve from the distribution of not just wealth, but something far less dramatic: opportunity to prosper.  Not everyone wants to be rich, but everyone wants a good roof over his head and decent food to eat as well as presentable clothes and reliable transportation, just to name a few indicia of prosperity.  We don't all want to be free from the obligation to work in order to have those things, but we all want to be able to get them if we do work for them.  In other words, tax policy may be useful in redistributing the wealth that exists now, but it is remediation of a symptom, not a cause.  The pilots at the airline Lufthansa have declared a one-day strike for today because they haven't had a raise in three years while members of management have gotten raises totaling 30% or more during that period, and the members of the board of directors have received even greater raises, and those raises were just for going to a few meetings a year.  All the pilots are asking for is 3.7%, and management, which includes the sybaritic members of the board, is resisting.  Of course, airline pilots do alright as it is, but the principal in operation in Lufthansa's case is the same as that in operation two weeks ago.  Donald Trump, a sybarite himself, pushed the issue of lost opportunity as a central issue, veiled in various subterfuges that will in the end amount to more of the same support for the moneyed oligarchy in the United States.  No Trump supporter realizes that yet, but they all will eventually.  It was the same ploy used by Ronald Reagan in 1984.  "Are you better off today than you were four years ago," was his subtle mantra.  Implicit in it was the claim that he was responsible for it, which is a matter open to debate on several levels, including the fundamental question of whether a president can do anything but stop congress from doing bad things and make suggestions.  Congress frames our society, and in the end, congress runs it as well as is evinced by the argument of Trump and the current Republican leaders of congress.  In eight years, President Obama has vetoed only twelve bills.  If nothing good has happened it is because congress hasn't passed anything that redounded to our collective benefit, not because, as Trump claimed, Obamacare or the Democrats...or President Obama himself was a disaster.  We are where we are because congress didn't rein in business exportation of our jobs and obscene executive compensation.  It didn't give shareholders any power to control the leadership of corporations at annual meetings where corporate by-laws make it virtually impossible for the shareholders to be heard.  Congress didn't change the tax code, nor did it offer up a bill to render our immigration laws rational and advantageous to us as a nation.  And it did nothing to encourage a fair wage for the people who do the work in this country.

So Democrats, here's the task for the next four years, assuming that the goal is results rather than hegemony.  Make taxation fair.  Constrain corporate management.  Increase the wages of those on the bottom of our economic ladder, that is, increase the minimum wage, and do it adequately rather than as a token effort, etcera.  Forget about tailoring the message to the various percentages of our population and issue one message to all.  I hope the party gets the message because Trump will be a disaster, whether anyone uses the word or not, and it will be for the Democrats to find a way to fix it.

Your friend,

Mike      

Dear America,

This last election manifests a point I have been making for years; the denominations "Republican" and "Democrat" are no longer functional designations of political philosophy.  They are no longer utile as rubrics for sorting out our democratic preferences, and since that is the case, our democracy--small d--is jeopardized by them.  We are not a nation broken down into the abstractions constituted by those party names.  We are a nation divided into two essential camps of sentiment: conservative and liberal.  Certainly there are millions of us who are neither, but none of us, or at least none of us who would admit it, want anything other than democracy, and no one would admit to thinking that anything but a republic would serve our democratic aspirations.  Thus, the party names, Democrat and Republican, tell us nothing about candidates for public office, much less about ourselves.  It is time for a change from Democrat and Republican to Progressive and Conservative respectively.  Everyone should be able to tell who is who in politics so that we can make appropriate choices when we go to the polls, and let's not kid ourselves.  Within each party, the political malapropisms that the parties names are in the final analysis taint even the primary selection process, so  national elections like the one this November do not offer us what we might have selected if only our preliminary process for selection...the party primaries...had been broken down into like minded groups.  If we had had liberal and conservative parties for this election, Bernie Sanders might have faced Marco Rubio, and then the nation would have actually made a choice about its direction instead of deciding to wander into the future guided by a capricious, narcissistic demagogue who made a bunch of promises to his faithful on which he now probably will have to admit that he cannot deliver.  In addition, we probably wouldn't have the collateral damage that Trump's appointments and nominations for high offices within his administration will certainly constitute.  Jeff Sessions will be the antithesis of what southern Democrat Lyndon Johnson was.  General Flynn will be the anti-Powell; though he won't fill the same office, he will be the military influence at the heart of the administration.  And Steve Bannon, he may well be the anti-Christ, given the sway he seems to have over the nihilist Donald Trump.  We are in deep trouble, my friends, and it is largely because we haven't been calling things by their right names since the Whigs joined with conservative Democrats to form the Republican Party.  That happened in the post-Civil War period, and we haven't rethought it since.  It's time.

The duality in this country isn't between two contrived names, and I say contrived because neither party stands for what its name purports.  The parties names are arbitrarily chosen and not even symbolic anymore because at least in some historical sense, they are suggestive of the reverses of what they actually mean.  Republicans don't want central government to be dominant over the state governments and Democrats do.  What Republicans do want is a conservative, now retrospective bent in our society that central government fosters with institutional ennui allowing them to do what they want with guns, for example, but not letting the majority of the nation have, also for example, same-sex marriage, which that majority advocates.  As to the Democrats, they don't want an emphasis on one school of political thought or moral creed, but they eschew the militia mentality and the libertarian didacticism of the sanctimonious right in favor of individual rights guaranteed by a central government universally in light of the fact that the individual states and municipalities can't be trusted to do so.  Progressives want the future.  Conservatives want the past.  And those two rubrics make that distinction clear.

Our parties names should constitute an overt, comprehendible, transparent taxonomy of national political thought, and one looking on at the election process should be able to tell what every candidate is by his or her party affiliation.  There should be no guessing as to whether one is voting for a conservative or a progressive since there are progressive Republicans...at least to one degree or another...just as there are conservative Democrats, like the "Blue Dogs".  But since we are all "small d democrats", and of practical necessity, "small r republicans", we need to know who is who on the basis of philosophy rather than by virtue only of partisan identity.   So, since Donald Trump wants to "drain the swamp" and eschew political correctness as well as the official party under whose banner he ran, let's encourage him to precipitate the change.  My feeling is that everyone should know who everyone else is, so maybe the man who's philosophy no one can identify will be the one who makes that possible. 

Your friend,

Mike  

Dear America,

If "A" then "B", and "A".  Therefore "B".  And, if not "A" then not "B".   Not "B".  Therefore, not "A".  Those are two rules of logic known as Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens respectively.  What they mean is that if you know that two things always go together, if one of them occurs then both of them will.  Conversely, if you know that one of them definitely will not occur, then the other definitely won't either.  That basic logic is relevant today, in the period just prior to the assumption of complete control of our government by the Republican Party, because there are some things that are as they are by necessity because of other things that they have insisted on and the lack of some things that they have prevented.  The Affordable Care Act...Obamacare...is a perfect example.

Obamacare was a web of supplemental provisions that all worked together, albeit imperfectly, because all of them existed.  When you remove one of them, Modus Tollens begins to have an effect.  For example, the consensus view is that the success of the program depends on near universal coverage.  But some people still can't afford health insurance, so they don't sign up with any company.  And then there are the young and healthy who think nothing can happen to them.  They don't sign up either, but in the final analysis, the entire ensured population is a single symbiotic organism.  Each of us depends on the others' premium contributions just as all the others depend on each of ours.  So, there have to be inducements to participate, such as subsidies for the poor and avoidance of a tax for those who opt not to participate for their own reasons, be they affordability or just perceived lack of need.  If you take away those inducements, other provisions, and in fact the whole program, begin to fail.  The Affordable Care Act is a living tissue that, when wounded, shrivels and dies.  So, now comes Donald Trump and the conservative Republican Party.  They don't like this and they don't like that.  They don't like government control of anything, which they characterize the ACA as being.  And if you're Donald Trump, you don't even need a reason to call it "a disaster," which is Trump's way of saying, "I don't like it so it has to go."   Thus, they have set out to...and Trump has promised that they would...repeal Obamacare, and as an afterthought, replace it.  But lately Trump says that some parts of the program have to stay: the bar to denial of coverage because of prior conditions and the maintenance of insureds' children until they reach 26.  But those things have to be paid for, and that is why the ACA included several taxes and fee adjustments paid to insurance companies and hospitals.  They fund the program, and without them, taxes have to go up...either taxes or the national debt and the yearly budget deficit.  So, what's a body...a conservative body...to do.  Damned if they know.  What they do know is that they don't want a program created by any damned Democrat, so it has to go.  Here's the rub...or several of them.

First, there are 20 million people on insurance they got through the ACA.  You can't just cast them out into the cold.  Second, if you keep the provisions that everyone likes--and there are more than just the two I mentioned, but few people talk about them--how do you pay for them, especially when you have promised to cut taxes too.  Then, what about the people who are benefiting from expanded Medicaid.  There are millions of them too, and that was part of the ACA too.  Trump's suggestion that you substitute HSA's or Health Savings Accounts makes no sense in light of the problem that the ACA addresses.  It's like the old joke: "If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need the talcum powder."  People who can't afford health insurance can't put money away to pay for health care either.  They will need subsidies, so what's the advantage over Obamacare.  And the fact of all these problems, which militate against the creation of other problems, is what has kept the Republicans from coming up with an alternative to the ACA thus far, so again, what's a conservative body to do.

Well, the answer is no longer the problem of us progressives.  We wanted at least a "public option" in the ACA if not a single payer system for everyone, like Medicare.  That's what all of the other thirty most industrialized, modern nations in the world have, that or an Obamacare type system, and there's a reason for that.  It saves money in the long run and augments our economy.  It doesn't diminish prosperity; it enhances prosperity...for everyone.  So Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, this is what I have to say to you.  You weren't careful what you wished for...and now you've got it.

Your friend

Mike 

Dear America,

Have you noticed that despite the fact that the election is over, Donald Trump is still the main subject of every news cast.  As a nation we yearned for the election not to come, but to go...to be over, and now it appears that it never will be.  Discussion of Trump and the election--incessant post-mortem analysis--continues unabated.  Trump and our national fate now that he has astonishingly been elected are like an earworm...a song...a refrain that we can never get out of our collective head.  But all that being said, I am going to join the chorus and say one last thing about the election.  The consensus view is that this was a "change election" intended to sweep out the old and deliver something new in its place, but that is just a subterfuge for the fact that none of us knows what really happened, and here's the proof, other than this: there certainly has been no change.

The only thing that was altered by this election was the occupant of the White House.  The Republicans continue to control congress...both houses.  Conservative goals continue to portend reversion to what were the bad old days...or the good old days depending on your perspective, and progress toward a new, functional Washington to supplant the old dysfunctional one still are not even a pipe dream.  Change for the better is a fanciful delusion that no one believes underneath it all.  The problem with our government is, and has been for decades...a congress that runs on process rather than outcome.  We are not a democracy, though the indoctrinated chauvinists of our country will insist that we are.  Rule by the majority is a myth in which we indulge as a nation, not a practice by which we govern ourselves.  The reality is that the oligarchs of congress, The Senate in particular, rule in such a way procedurally as to make it possible for them not only to prevent majority will from controlling but to obscure the fact that they have done so as well, and no one seems to care, much less is anyone willing to expose these fiduciaries of our democratic rights and their hypocrisy.  We are governed pursuant to a couple of "gentleman's agreements" called the filibuster in The Senate, and  in The House, where The Speaker determines if and when a vote is to be taken, by the "Hastert Rule," which proscribes a vote on any bill for which there isn't support by a majority of the Majority.  This rule was created by, and is observed only by, the Republicans.  By use of those tools, none of our representatives have to vote on any issue; instead, they can just vote not to vote, and legislation to benefit the majority of Americans...all of us...becomes nothing but unwritten history.  Congress was barely altered at all by this election, which means that change had nothing to do with it.  Our nation left the problem untouched, and instead aggravated the symptoms profoundly by empowering those who have stood in our way at least since 2010 when The House was taken over by the Republican Party...the Tea Party contingent of it in particular.  A conservative minority controls everything, and until that changes, nothing else will.

So, the notion that the people of this country were seeking change and thus elected Donald Trump is nothing but a mask on the face of the real chimera of our democracy: congressional procedure, all of which is changeable by the members if they have the will to change it.  To be blunt, the only way our nation is going to change is if the Republicans once again become the minority in both houses of congress, and if the Democratic Party doesn't elect more "Blue Dog" Democrats to despoil the power of the majority once the Democrats reacquire it.  Here it is in a nutshell.  If conservatives continue to control popular elections, which they didn't do in the presidential election--Hillary Clinton won the majority of the popular vote this year--we will continue to harbor the same viper in our democratic bosom for the foreseeable future.  There can be no change as long as conservatives, almost by definition, control either house of our congress.  And when I say conservatives, I mean conservatives of both parties.  The Affordable Care Act doesn't include a public option, which would solve everyone's access problem when it comes to healthcare, because of the aforementioned Blue Dog contingent within what was then a Democratic majority in The House.

I am all in favor of change if it's an improvement, and God knows we need some improvement.  I would be all in favor of Donald Trump if his election portended to bring it, but it doesn't.  The Republicans control congress, and given the vice president Trump chose and the appointments that Trump is making, big money will return to control of the real world in which we all live...big money and moral sanctimony that is really nothing but unctuous judgmentalism and dictatorial false piety.   That isn't improvement.  It's regression.  So much for change.  So much for Donald Trump.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am in the grips of a host of negative emotions this morning after the election of Donald Trump.  His presidency will most likely be something between the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush and the horrific chancellor-ship of Adolph Hitler, who ascended to power on the tide of hyper-nationalism like inspired by the same kind of  "poor us, we've been abused by the world" puling as Trump used to win this election.  Trump's tax proposal would raise the taxes of many middle class earners while lowering the taxes of big business and the wealthy--evinced by our president elect himself--in a fashion much like fascism, while raising the deficit and the national debt by near-geometric proportions.  His bellicosity may well lead to another long war like Afghanistan or Iraq, both continuing to this day courtesy of George W.  The tariffs and deregulation of financial institutions he proposes may lead to the kind of financial ruin wreaked upon us by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.  And perhaps most ominous of all, his ignorance of foreign policy, and international dynamics in particular, portends trouble of perhaps the most profound kind when it comes to North Korea, our allies in Europe and Russia, the last being the most acquisitive and imperialistic nation on earth today.  The history surrounding people who think in the various ways in which Trump does is forbidding, and anyone who doesn't at least entertain the notion that his presidency could be a disaster of profound proportions is kidding himself.

The way I look at it is this.  The glee among Trump supporters is palpable.  It is based on the premise that they have not just voted for, but elected change incarnate...a dubious proposition at best.  But even if it is true, the vote of those same people was not for change, as they profess, in that they reelected the congress and senate that were there when they voted yesterday, and the congress is the real problem.  Republicans have made obstruction the norm, and they continue to insist on using procedure to effect their philosophy at any given moment rather than permitting democracy to prevail.  They prevented constructive governance when they were a minority in the four years from 2006 to 2010, and they have continued to do so since becoming the majority during the presidency of a Democratic President, whose every initiative has been prevented, or failing in their effort to prevent it, thwarted in its implementation.  The Affordable Care Act and financial regulation pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act--a pale imitation of Glass-Steagall to begin with--are perfect examples.  Change is not imminent.  In fact, many members of Trump's own party loath him and fear being branded as sympathetic to his principles.  Juxtapose a congress so inclined with a president who presumably--given his temperament and his dedication to doing things his own way--will wield the veto power of the presidency with impunity and very little restraint...or prudence for that matter.  And as to the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia will be replace by an epigone, and the result will be that we will be no worse off than we were before he died in his sleep.  But what about when Justice Ginsburg retires, which could be at any time given her health (she has pancreatic cancer, but people live for some time with that disease these days, as she has already).  There are also Justices Kennedy and Breyer to consider, so that by the time Trump is through, we could have a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority that could control American law for over a generation.  Trump represents the potential for an era as bad as the thirties depression and the war of the forties...or worse.

So, while the Trumpites chortle over their morning coffee as they savor assuming the driver's seat in American politics, they may not have long to gloat.  I estimate that it will take as little as one year for us all to appreciate the consequences of yesterday's election, and believe it or not, unlike the conservatives and the Republicans, I am rooting for the success of their political hegemony.  No one will be happier than I if we go into a golden age to replace today's gilded age.  But what are the odds.

As I always say, on election day, the majority always gets what it deserves.  Often unfortunately though, the rest of us get it too.

Your friend

Mike

Dear America,

It's the day before election day and if attitude is a portent of the results we can expect, Hillary Clinton is about to become our first woman president.  Clinton has seemed to emerge from the miasma of negative campaigning in the past few days, even before the most recent Comey epistle, and she is quite firmly ensconced on the high ground.  As to the Trump campaign, the story is quite different.  I watched CNN for a few hours last night as a series of their news luminaries were questioned by the usual suspects: Wolf Blitzer, Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper.  Kellyanne Conway, who became Trump's campaign manager in August, replacing the second campaign manager Trump had hired and fired, seemed at the time to be the closest to thing to a sincere and honest human being that Trump had been associated with to that date.  Corey Lewandowski had been a shill for Trump, and still is, and Paul Manafort, Lewandowski's successor, was quite nearly possessed of integrity.  When he was fired I assumed it was because of that integrity, and when Conway was hired in his stead, I thought was perplexed because she seemed as candid and forthcoming as I had perceived Manafort to be, but she evolved, or perhaps devolved would be a better choice of words.  At first she was just an apologist for Trump and his hench-people.  It was to be expected; what can you do when you are working for Donald Trump, the mad tweeter.

But as time passed, it appeared that she began to believe in what Trump was doing, and she started to participate herself.  As they say these days, she "drank the KoolAid."  Thus, last night she was as combative, evasive and bent on distraction as any of the rest of Trump's surrogates.  When interviewed by Anderson Cooper, she essentially declined to respond to legitimate questions about tactical choices being made by the campaign, and she eventually resorted to the same kind of deflective jibing that Trump uses to avoid having to defend the positions he takes and the near mythic hyperbole on which his campaign is based and in which he indulges perpetually.  While she was circumspect when she was first involved in the Trump campaign...before she became the campaign manager when she was just a credible talking head for Trump... she has become just another shill for Trump trying to slip the shackles of rational thought in his defense, and seemingly being content to do so.  With Cooper, she used misdirection, the sort of "well, your mother wears  combat boots" defense that Trump has engaged in probably since he actually was back on the playground, deliberate obtuseness and refusal to admit what everyone knows in order to claim that Trump was being unfairly used by the media while Clinton was being coddled, even by the FBI.  And she wasn't alone in all this.

In a panel discussion moderated by Lemon, Lemon almost had to pillory Corey Lewandowski  to get him to answer a question about Trump's demeanor in the frequent phone calls Lewandowski shares with him.  And when he did answer the question it was all puffery.  On other topics, Lewandowski was like a broken record touting Trump and his prospects as if the world wasn't really turning and all was right with the campaign.  It was the same with a woman bearing the unique name, Scottie Nell Hughes.  As fervent as Lewandowski, and as committed to denial of reality, Hughes was nearly unintelligible in her refusal to acknowledge facts and insistence on repetition of the Trump line.  But their ardor was oddly contrasted by the relative calm and rationality of the Clinton surrogates on this panel and elsewhere during the evening while the shab of the day before seemed supplanted by a sense of resigned desperation in the Trump camp.  Of course, I am a partisan myself, and I have to admit that I am biased, but the relative aplomb of the Democrats on CNN last night was reassuring.  I have been dreading election day since the first Comey letter hit the fan and Clinton's momentum vaporized, but at last I am feeling almost cheerful in contrast to the lugubriousness that hung over me like that little cloud that follows the Charlie Brown character, Pig Pen, everywhere.  To quote James Brown in both word and tone, "I feel good" again.

So now all that remains is the vote itself, though the aftermath of this election seems likely to be as unpleasant as the campaign itself was.  An ego like Trump's doesn't slip its tail between its legs and do what Trump committed to doing a few weeks ago: go on a long vacation.  We are going to suffer through Trump's wounded pride right along with him, and I worry that some of his more ardent fans will do more than suffer along.  But we can cross that bridge when we get to it.  I'm sure the FBI knows who the real threats are, and we can hope that they will do something worthwhile for a refreshing, post-election change.  Are you listening, Jim?  Maybe you can still save your ass.

Your friend,

Mike