The question came up in a recent discussion, “Why are you so sure if more people had voted they would have voted for Hillary?” Well, I’m not. I am fairly certain most of them would not have voted for Trump. I base that on a very simple number: Trump pulled the base that always votes that way and in fact received fewer votes than Mitt Romney. You can try to spin that any way you like, but to my mind that says something very significant. Namely that the GOP in its current manifestation is utterly dependent on two things to stay in office—that base and keeping the rest of the country disaffected from the political process.…
Tag: racism
So What Do We Do Now?
It has been clear for all of the campaign season and is now becoming clearer that Donald Trump should not be president. He is temperamentally unsuited to the position, he does not have the working knowledge of how things work in a government, and he is wildly unpredictable. He is also as thin-skinned as they come.
But so what? He has been elected. For better or worse, unless something remarkable happens, he will be president for the next four years.
By remarkable I mean any of several possible legal scenarios.
There is a petition circulating to request the Electors of the Electoral College change their vote.…
47
The number will make sense presently.
It’s Friday. I’ve spent the last few days trying to process what happened Tuesday. It is not going well. I’m angry, frightened, and more than a little disgusted by the fact that we allowed Donald Trump to be elected president. I’m a cynic most days, an optimist forced by reality to concede that the world is perhaps more malign than not. But I’m also, marginally, an intellectual. By that I mean someone who deals with that reality by trying to understand it and make it cogent. By looking at things through the lens of causality, knowing that events are products, usually of combinations of factors no one person can see.…
New Look
Maybe I should have waited till January, but then again maybe I’ll change the theme again then. But I was starting to get bored with the old one and decided that–because I’m older now, but why that should matter I don’t know–it was time for a new look. This one has sliding images on the header. I grabbed a couple at random but I’ll likely change those at some point.
This has been a fascinating year. My boss asked me–because I’m older–if I’d ever witnessed an election cycle this bizarre.
No.
Contentious, yes. Clownish, surreal, weird–no. It’s been suggested that you’d have to go back to Lincoln’s election to find one even close to this in unpredictably oddball strangeness, and that’s a good contender, what with the near-demise of the Democratic Party as it split into three smaller parties, the Know Nothings, variations of fence-sitters, nativist groups, and the odd prediction of the apocalypse.…
Stumpf and the Body On The Pavement
Watching Elizabeth Warren disassemble Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is a gotcha moment, one wherein we assume the bad guy has been handed his still steaming intestines by the champion and justice will soon be served. Much as I hate to admit this, I doubt it.
I doubt it because…look at him. He’s looking at her with an almost-blank expression, but there is enough there to tell. To tell that he just doesn’t Get It. He’s listening to her, he’s answering her questions with well-advised Policy Speak, doing his best to evade a direct answer until she pins him to the wall, and even then there seems to be a kind of “okay, sure, but so what?”…
A Couple Of Observations About The Culture
I’ve been working my way through Mario Vargas Llosa’s intriguing little book Notes On The Death Of Culture, which intends to be a general critique on the state of high culture and the impact its enervation has had on the world at large. Reading that and watching the election campaigns is a strange thing.
One of Llosa’s main themes here is that we have demoted “high” culture through a process of democratization of self-brutalization via social media and a mistaken acceptance of the idea that everyone’s opinion carries equal weight. That we no longer value wisdom, quality, or know how to appreciate it as distinct from middle or lowbrow culture, so-called “popular” culture.…
Embracing Stupid
I’m hearing from some folks about Brexit and by and large what I’m hearing says this is a calamity. The idiots “broke the U.K.”
There were plenty of people explaining what would likely happen if they did this, but hey, what do experts know?
Well, quite a lot, actually, but that fact alone makes them unpalatable to the voters who actually cast a Leave vote. We see precisely that kind of—what would we call it?—“learning fatigue” here. Who do you think supports Trump? People who know little or all the most useless things when it comes to politics and economics and quite adamantly do not want to know, because knowing would contradict the fantasy world in which they stand forth at weekend keggers loudly proclaiming positions that might hold some value in a Game of Thrones episode, but since the folks they’re holding forth to know just as little or less, no one challenges them and they feel justified in clinging to their ignorance.…
Phobic Identity
Here’s a the thing. If you need someone to be in some way “less” than you in order for you to feel good—or even adequate—about yourself, you have a problem. It’s not their problem, it’s yours.
This “pastor” who spewed all over Twitter that we shouldn’t feel bad about the Orlando killings because they were “perverts” is a prime example. If he’s really a pastor, a religious leader, there is no reason for him to say any of that unless he’s just trying to assert superiority. Which is entirely not the point of Christianity, as I understand it. The point is to embrace the commonalities among people, not sort them out into boxes labeled “Preferred Types” and “Types To Be Condemned.” …
Make America…Again
Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican candidate. One may wonder how things have gotten to this, but it’s not that hard to understand, just hard to accept.
There is a good side to this. Ted Cruz will not be the next president. We may see him try again, but not this time. All the rest of the slate that began last year has fallen by the wayside and rarely have we seen a scarier bunch of potentials. It’s not even so much their policies as that they seemed so incredibly unintelligent and uninformed.
But this is America and if it’s one thing we have plenty of it is unintelligent and uniformed people. …
…and now a word from the stupid
President Obama has announced his supreme court nominee.
A couple of things. Merrick Garland is not, as claimed by the current spiel from Mitch McConnell and company, an ideologue. There is a track record of bi-partisan endorsements dating back to the 90s to so testify. No one who has ever worked with the man has ever called him an ideologue. This is not open for dispute. He is a jurist and from all the evidence a man of integrity.
Two, while they keep bringing up the Biden Rule, bear in mind the Biden Rule was a statement on what the Senate is constitutionally required to do and, further, an opinion, one which the Democratic Party has never adhered to even when it sounded like they might. …