A Long One

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Trump's shocking rise and spectacular fall have been a singular disaster for U.S. politics. Built up in the press as the American Hitler, he was unmasked in the end as a pathetic little prankster who ruined himself, his family and half of America's two-party political system for what was probably a half-assed ego trip all along, adventure tourism for the idiot rich.

That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation's history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience. Trump picked exactly the wrong time to launch his mirror-gazing rampage to nowhere. He ran at a time when Americans on both sides of the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class, anger that was finally ready to express itself at the ballot box.

The only thing that could get in the way of real change – if not now, then surely very soon – was a rebellion so maladroit, ill-conceived and irresponsible that even the severest critics of the system would become zealots for the status quo.

As is usual for Taibbi, it's kind of long and navel-gaze-y and it's a bit emotionally nihilistic, but there's a truth to it that needs to be said, which is not just "Stoopid GOP - what the hell happened to you guys!?!"  

It is in fact partly that, but it's mostly: Hillary's not the horrible thing so many people are so eager to identify her as being, but she's also not the change agent so many of us think we need (at least she hasn't been for quite a while).

And for my own bad self, even though it's almost certain she'll win this thing, don't get happy. Don't start thinking we can hire her into the Oval Office and every shitty thing the GOP's been trying to pull will magically disappear.  The GOP will go on trying to pull shitty things, and a good politician like Hillary Clinton will go along with some of them in order to get a deal on some of things she wants to do.

Constant public pressure and the election of "left-leaning" congress critters will help Hillary stay with what we think we're electing her to do.

Don't Be Fooled

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Democrat Hillary Clinton has opened a 15-point lead over Republican Donald Trump in Virginia among likely voters following the release of a 2005 tape in which Trump bragged about groping women, according to a new tracking survey by Christopher Newport University.

In the CNU survey out Sunday, Clinton leads statewide among likely voters with 44 percent to 29 percent for Trump, 11 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson, 3 percent for independent Evan McMullin and 2 percent for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Clinton has more than doubled her advantage in Virginia since CNU released its first tracking poll on Sept. 26.

“It’s crystal clear why the Trump campaign pulled staff out of Virginia this week,” said Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at CNU.

But did you catch that delicate undertone?
44 Hillary
29 Trump
11 Johnson
  3 McMullin
  2 Stein

If it holds - and if it indicates a strategy of the anti-Trump establishment GOP to help the vote-splitting 3rd parties maintain a double-digit total - this opens the shitty little negativity narrative of "Hillary has no mandate - too many Americans don't like her / don't trust her / think she's always lying etc etc etc".

Gingrich and Lott (I think) used the plurality thing against Bill Clinton in the 90s.  There's no reason for me to think we shouldn't expect McConnell and Ryan et al to come out with "Someone has to represent the x% of Americans who didn't vote for Mrs Clinton".

Whatever that percentage actually is, they're likely to do their damnedest to spin it twist it and warp it into something they can pretend is a majority. Just listen for one of their favorite weasel-terms - "the American people" - and know they're simply inviting the inference that they have the majority on their side and those "others" are trying to steal things away from us and blah blah blah.

And here we go again.

Ya heard it here first, kids.

Today's Tweets

The guy can't help himself.  Nothing goes by without a response.  He has no sense of proportionality - correction: he has no sense at all.

Watched Saturday Night Live hit job on me.Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016

Trump was wearing his underwear when I gave him notes at SNL and believe me, I wasn't impressed.

— Paula Pell (@perlapell) October 15, 2016

Heavenly

One good thing I gotta say about this rolling clusterfuck of an election is that it's been a little slice of Meme-y heaven.

hat tip = MockPaperScissors

More Democracy, Not Less

Whenever democracy itself is in trouble, the solution never includes less democracy.

Is this election rigged?

In 2016, the independent democracy non-profit Freedom House scored the United States electoral process as 11 out of 12.

A 2014 university study found only 31 cases of voter fraud out of one billion ballots cast since 2000.

"...by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare" - Report by NYU Brennan Center For Justice. 

Elections are run independently at the local level, by local citizens, under the supervision of both parties. More info in this thread

Better Get It While You Can

Today's Tweet

I've always wondered about this pic.twitter.com/btbSTtMYp0

— SciencePorn 🚀 (@SciencePorn) October 11, 2016

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

What I've suspected for a while.  I can count on Keith to track it down and articulate for me.

Repubs could've glommed onto the main point of the Benghazi thing and gotten after Clinton, but they knew Benghazi was no worse a fuckup than all the other fuckups that get our State Department people hurt and killed on a regular basis. So they didn't pursue it to get at Clinton as the Secretary, and they sure as fuck didn't do it to be noble protectors of our valiant diplomacy warriors. They coulda done that by simply not cutting the State Dept's Security Budgets. 

Those hearings were pure theater - as always.  But none of that was really the point. The point was to damage Hillary Clinton politically for 2016 (Kevin McCarthy admitted as much on the record), and to maintain the "issue" so they could make money off the issue; money that gets them re-elected.

But that's not the onliest thing.  One other thing is how odd it seems that every email portrays Hillary or Podesta or Blumenthal in the worst possible light - and like Keith has said, never a word about GOP or Trump.  But here's the kicker: up until a coupla months ago, a lot of these "leaked emails" were slagging Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for doing shady things to fuck over Bernie. Now, suddenly (ie: magically?), Donna Brazile is the one who spent all that time and energy conspiring and conniving, while Wasserman-Schultz has disappeared completely.

Gee, it's almost like "Chairman Brezhnev has a touch of the flu and is currently under a doctor's care in a secure and undisclosed location."

This has smelled like bear shit for a long time now.

Thank the magic sky-goblin for Keith Olbermann.

They're Donald Right Or Wrong

It's The Consent, Stoopid

The overlooked irony of this photo is that the shirt itself constitutes consent. The lack of which is the entire crux of the issue. pic.twitter.com/7dEoQ4IISa

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) October 14, 2016

Ex-Trump executive Barbara Res says she believes the allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against Trump https://t.co/qeO85Oz44J pic.twitter.com/VsH1UvvLA5

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 13, 2016

I can say I've walked way too close to whatever line there is that separates Healthy Expression from Sexual Assault.  

While we're at it, I have to admit I've crossed a line or two on more than one occasion.

And I won't try to hide behind "too young and too stupid, or too high or too drunk to know better" or "yeah - hormones - whaddaya gonna do?"

For my part - I'm sorry. 

I'm always trying to do better.

Because it's what a man does - a man stands up.

From Across The Pond

The world watches us pretty closely most of the time, but it's still a pretty neat trick when you've made the Brits notice just how fucked up our politics really is.

The lead article:

HOW do people learn to accept what they once found unacceptable? In 1927 Frederic Thrasher published a “natural history” of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Each of them lived by a set of unwritten rules that had come to make sense to gang members but were still repellent to everyone else. So it is with Donald Trump and many of his supporters. By normalising attitudes that, before he came along, were publicly taboo, Mr Trump has taken a knuckle-duster to American political culture.

The recording of him boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy”, long before he was a candidate, was unpleasant enough. More worrying still has been the insistence by many Trump supporters that his behaviour was normal. So too his threat, issued in the second presidential debate, to have Hillary Clinton thrown into jail if he wins. In a more fragile democracy that sort of talk would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend.

And in light of some of our less than sterling political moments - Swift Boat, Iraq's WMD, Whitewater, Willie Horton, Iran-Contra, The Enemies List, Southern Strategy, Joe McCarthy (the list goes on and on) - the fact that this one stands out in bold relief is depressing.

Today's Pix

Today's Tweet

They're just after Trump because he's exposing the vast conspiracy of women who don't like to be groped and ogled by gross men.

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) October 13, 2016

NYT

Please allow me to be the first to pat myself on the back. Obviously, my relentless criticism of (and the level of my contempt for) The Press Poodles in USAmerica Inc's media biz is paying dividends. 

Here's the letter NYT published in response to Trump's threat to sue them for libel:

At great personal expense, I've enlisted the smart and capable Kristen Bell to translate in a way even Trump (and a few of his devoted rubes) can understand. Take it away, Ms Bell:

Way to go, guys - build on that, OK?

What He Brags About

Listen for what a guy brags about most, and that'll tell you what's false about him.

O'Donnell has a good record when it comes to calling these things - especially when it's about Donald Trump.

It Counts

hat tip = FB pal Vicki W-E

One From driftglass

driftglass (a coupla days ago):

Today was the day when the Republican party's nominee for president declared open war on the leadership of the Republican party for finally daring to timidly whisper about various, glaringly observable realities (h/t @Billmon).

BTW - nobody does PhotoShop better:

 

Sometimes You Vote With Your Checkbook

Reuters:

Kerry Woolard, the 37-year-old manager of Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, went online in June and made her first political contribution: A $250 donation to the campaign of her boss, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Woolard's donation was unusual.

Only a dozen of an estimated 22,450 people employed at Trump's companies have donated more than $200 to the celebrity businessman's bid for the U.S. presidency, a Reuters review of federal campaign finance records through August shows. Those who gave less to either Trump's campaign or his joint fundraising committees would not have shown up in the review.

The contributors, including an office cleaner, a golf course groundskeeper, a bartender and an attorney, have given $5,298 to Trump's campaign, a fraction of the $112 million Trump's political operation has received from donors and joint fundraisers.

An employee at Trump enterprises gave $275 to the campaign of her employer’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. A 13th Trump employee, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, contributed to a Trump Super PAC, giving $1,000. 

Kids These Days

WaPo:

Students at Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as young conservatives at colleges across the state reconsider support for his campaign.

A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made extremely lewd comments about women in a 2005 video. The students wrote that Falwell’s support for Trump had cast a stain on the school’s reputation.

“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the statement said. “Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him. … He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”

--and also too--

The Liberty University student manifesto against Trump comes as college Republican groups across the country reconsider support for the candidate. On Tuesday the University of Virginia College Republicans announced that the group voted to rescind its endorsement of his candidacy for president. The chairman of the College Republicans at Hampden-Sydney College, Tanner Beck, posted a statement on Facebook noting that Trump “has gone from simply being an embarrassment to our party, to a potentially permanent stain on our brand and our country.”

The statement was posted online as a petition

I'm not holding out a lot of hope that this will flip any given Trumpster, and I don't really give a rat's ass what anybody thinks their imaginary friend has to say about politics (or anything else for that matter).  

That said, maybe I can take it as a good sign that some of these young adults are forming political identities that aren't simply Red vs Blue and My-Team-No-Matter-What, in spite of the submissive authoritarian crap that gets drilled into them at a "Religious University".

Realistically, some of these "kids" will go on to become the next buncha blue-nosed pinch-faced purity warriors that plague every system everywhere, but some will also grow into regular human-type people who can change things where they are with the tools they have at hand.

A guy can hope, can't he?

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

And yesterday's Keith:

Watch this video on The Scene.