I was raised never to blame anyone else for my failures. If things didn’t work out the way I hoped or intended, well, suck it up and own it. I didn’t follow through, work hard enough, smart enough, long enough, plan, save, do the necessary, make the sacrifice, or pay sufficient attention. It was no one’s fault but my own if things went wrong or simply never came to fruition. Blaming someone else for your problems was the surest way to never succeed. If it doesn’t work out this time, start over, try again, slam your head against that wall until it caves in, but don’t quit and under no circumstances complain that forces are arrayed against you.…
Tag: presidential campaigning
A Problem Of Legitimacy
I’ve been trying to compose my thoughts about what transpired last November that has left us with one of the most uncertain political situations we have faced in so long that I find it difficult to make a comparison. Possibly Rutherford B. Hayes. Possibly Harding.
The aspect of this that has baffled me most is the fact that sixty million of my fellow citizens cast a ballot for a man they do not trust.
An odd statement, I know, but in all the rhetoric I’ve seen, both before and after the election, I see very little that suggests anyone actually trusts Trump.…
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.…
Electors
Talk is heating up about the possibility that the Electoral College might displace Trump and select Clinton. I have a couple of thoughts on this.
Firstly, this would be perfectly legitimate. If you need a historical reference, check Federalist #68, which discusses the electoral college and its purpose. Remember, the United States was formulated as a republic, which is not the same thing as a democracy. The Founders wanted to keep a firewall between The People and their government. Over the course of time, we have gotten used to the idea that We The People directly elect our national representatives. We do not, although it certainly appears that way and most folks can be forgiven for believing otherwise.…
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.…
Endorsement
With only a couple weeks now till the election, I’ve decided to make it plain (if i I haven’t already) that I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton.
I have a number of reasons for doing so, some of which are not quantifiable, but if I may I’d like to state a few of them.
First off, she is opposed, disrespected, and outright hated by all the right people. Her list of detractors is a grocery list of those I would like to see ousted from their own positions in government. This includes people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, Representative Issa, and just about every firebreathing Tea Party moron who has been miring the workings of my government in the muck of intransigence like a child refusing to eat their vegetables for far too long. …
Trump Card
Just a couple of thoughts. We’ve been hearing for months, here and there, how Donald Trump might be a trojan horse placed by the Democrats to discredit the Republican Party. That, presumably, a deal was done between The Donald and Hillary to run the most absurd campaign and make her look like the only viable choice. Not a bad idea for a potboiler political thriller. And the closer to the election we get, some variation of that idea is making more sense.
However. Despite what pessimists might say, the American electoral landscape is not really that controllable. And any such actual plan would long since have been discovered and revealed. …
Consensus Delusion
Reading and listening to the jeremiads of impending doom and catastrophe electing Hillary Clinton will bring, it becomes clear that a significant part of her opposition is flat out delusional. It’s not just her, it’s this whole “lib’ral agenda” thing, wrapped up with the gay agenda and the persecution of christians and on and on. Some people obviously believe she descends into a secret temple every night to eat the livers of virgin meerkats and praise Cthulhu while demoniacally laughing in anticipation of the power about to come into her hands by which she can trample on our freedoms with the abandon of a Godzilla.…
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.…
Why We Need To Teach Civics
Listening to the debates, not between the candidates but among the potential voters, it becomes clear that for many the workings of our government are a thing of deep mystery and frustratingly obscure. Donald hammered on Hillary repeatedly that in 30 plus years in office she had an opportunity to “do something” about certain issues and she did nothing.
She was a senator and then she was secretary of state.
Neither position affords anyone the power to just “do something” about any damn thing they want.
While morality may not be relative, politics is entirely so. The problem is this: you have a hundred people in a room who have been given a problem to solve. …