Only saw the last 50 minutes of the town hall debate, but I'd have to say, if there are still any undecided or potentially dissuade-able voters out there, it had to help Donald Trump. Any time you allow a lunatic or a demagogue look like just another actor on the stage, he has already achieved something important.
Shakespeare knew this--"In speech, there is logic." By which he meant, just saying something makes it sound true, unless it is promptly slapped down. Parading across Shakespeare's stages were villains of every description, who the audience could see were deplorable, wicked, sometimes obviously, sometime subtly evil, and it was his genius to make the most nasty villain human, in some ways understandable, or at least recognizable. Ms. Clinton possesses by no such genius.
To pick just one of hundreds of examples--when Donald Trump says Hillary wants to kill all the coal miners' jobs because she hates them and by the way, it's unnecessary because there is such a thing as clean coal. She can reply, "I am the coal miners' friend, not their enemy. And I'd love to embrace 'clean coal' if it were only a reality, but then again, I'd love to eat ice cream and cake and never get fat, but nobody has ever, and likely will, never figure out how to do that and we are no closer to clean coal than we are to body friendly calories. This is just another example of pie in the sky from Donald Trump. When he's not selling fantasy solutions he's dreaming up fantasy hobgoblins."
Or words to that effect.
And to not have a better response to the "deplorables" question is beyond comprehension? Why not simply say, "When a man says all Muslims hate us, that is deplorable. When a crowd cheers that then every last member of that crowd who cheered is equally deplorable. I still believe that. It's not just the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who is deplorable, it's every other person in a white sheet."
Why Ms. Clinton fails to prepare that sort of answer effectively is an imponderable. If she loses to Mr. Trump, one can only say, well there is only one person to blame.
Not that Hillary Clinton needs my help disemboweling Donald Joffrey, but at the town hall format, she may need some help with the John Q. Citizens they will dredge up.
So, here's my two cents:
Q: Ms. Clinton: How can you say you will put Main Street before Wall Street when you gave speeches to Goldman Sacks for $250,000 a pop and you still refuse to release the transcripts?
A: There's really two questions here: How could I be venal enough to give speeches for $250,000 a pop and why am I unwilling to release those transcripts?
The answer to the first is I needed the money. When we left the White House, we were broke. The way you cash in on fame is to give high priced speeches. That doesn't mean you have to get into bed with anyone, but if they want to pay you for showing up so they can get your photo for their brag wall and they want to pay you that much, who among you would not jump at the chance? Does it look like they were paying me for votes or for access? Well, for votes, no. Nobody in all of Mr. Trump's opposition research regiments has ever been able to find a case of me voting for Wall Street and against Main Street, because I never have and never will. Sure, I took their money, if they are that eager to give it.
As far as releasing the transcripts, sure it makes it look like I've got something to hide, and frankly, I'm afraid if you sent Mr. Trump's troops through those speeches they could do a snip and clip job, a sound bite which would sound bad, out of context, just the way Republicans have always done with selective editing.
When President Obama expressed sympathy for the sorry lot of people in the rust belt who had lost their jobs when American factory owners closed shop and moved overseas, leaving workers unemployed and communities collapsing he said, "What do they have left but their religion and their guns?" And that was made to sound like President Obama held them, their religion and their love of guns in contempt. But, of course, while he despaired about their love of guns, he was not contemptuous of their religion. But he was made to sound arrogant and condescending.
Well, I don't want that happening, in other ways, with my transcripts. Oh, what a feeding frenzy.
Q: Ms. Clinton: What about those emails. Why did you have your people destroy phones and computers with hammers?
A: Because I wanted those emails destroyed. Not because there was anything incriminating or embarrassing in them but because they had information about the thinking of people I worked with, and my thinking, I did not want to share with Vladimir Putin, among others, and as it turns out, maybe that was not a bad idea, given the Russian state sponsored hackers.
But let me ask you: What is the worst thing you can imagine might have been contained in those emails? What deep, dark secret could I possibly be trying to hide in those emails?
Q: You could have revealed state secrets, compromised our national security.
A: Well, that is within the realm of possibility; trouble is, there was no such security breach. The FBI looked for one, but none of those mundane, boring emails had anything juicy or important in them.
Q: Why, after 30 years in public life with you serving as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State is the country in such a terrible state? Why should we want more of the same?
A: You should want more progress, is what you should want. You should look at where we were when the Republicans left office in 2009, how we fell off the precipice which trickle down economics and T party politics brought us to, and how we have recovered, slowly, too slowly for sure, but steadily ever since. Crime rates are down. Gas prices are down. Al Qaeda is emasculated. True ISIS has sprung up, but we're on them now.
The sad truth is, we are never going to get manufacturing jobs back to Kodak, or the steel mills or some of the manufacturing plants. Those jobs were lost, not because of trade deals but because of robots and lots of other forces, including globalization and those particular jobs are never coming back. If you are making film when the world goes digital it's not the fault of government or the Secretary of State that your company goes belly up.
There will be new jobs, better jobs for more people. But we can't just wish this into being. We have to have government helping business.
The government created the internet, and it can build infrastructure if we give it half a chance. But the truth is no one government official whether she is a US Senator or a Secretary of State can single handedly govern. A Senator, a Secretary of State, even a President, has to work with other people. She can't just issue orders from on high the way a CEO of a drug company can do. She can't just haul in the Speaker of the House and say, "You're fired!"
I can't take sole credit for programs insuring kids, or for routing Bin Laden, but I was part of the effort.
And I paid my income taxes to the federal government because that, for me, was an act of patriotism.
Patriotism cannot be patriotism with sacrifice and risk. Singing the Star Spangle Banner at the ball game is fine fun, but it's not patriotism. Fighting for your country is patriotism. Paying your fair share of taxes is patriotism. Patriotism costs you. All the other stuff is just bluster.
The Donald's reply to why he paid no federal income taxes was two pronged:
1. He was too smart to pay taxes
2. If he had paid taxes people like Hillary Clinton would have squandered them.
It must be remembered where Donald is coming from: The New York class of business people who believe paying taxes is for chumps, and of course, this was given it's clearest and fullest expression by Leona Helmsley, who famously said, "Only the little people pay taxes."
But, in Mr. Trump's defense, he is definitely not a racist, because he built a really beautiful--you wouldn't believe how beautiful (and I don't)--country club in Florida, and it admits Black people, if they are rich enough.
So there.
No surprises this debate. The Donald was Donald, for all the world to see and Hillary Clinton was, Hillary--smart, controlled, on topic.
Afterwards, Mark Shields kept insisting she has to open up, to be warmer, to reveal herself, but as Gwen Ifill asked, "Why doesn't anybody ever ask Donald Trump to be more of a good egg?"
Because men can be men and that makes them strong.
Women have to be warm, nurturing, non threatening.
Personally, I wish Ms. Clinton had a better answer to his attack on her stamina. "You pride yourself on an animal faculty..." you know the rest.
Oh, well.
Yesterday, the New York Times ran an editorial supporting Hillary Clinton for President.
Today, it ran an editorial itemizing why Donald Trump should not be President.
I'm not sure who those people are out there who are so isolated from political discourse in this nation they have not made up their minds about Donald Trump.
I sincerely hope anyone who hasn't made up his or her mind by now will not vote on November 8, because anyone who still cannot see through Mr. Trump has no business voting. You really have to wonder about the mind of a person who cannot see through Mr. Trump.
It's just not that difficult.
This morning, on NPR they interviewed a Trump supporter in Georgia, an auto mechanic who was proud his wife was a stay at home mother because that is the way you produce good children. Okay, so far. But then he mentioned he took down the Confederate flag because his kids' friends were "made uncomfortable by it," although he still has a full length portrait of Robert E. Lee hanging above his mantel in his living room and and he has joined a militia because if Hillary Clinton is elected, he foresees a civil war between patriots who will defend the Constitution (presumably the 2nd Amendment) and those of the power elites who want to destroy it.
So he is in that basket of deplorables. A 20th century head of state exhorted his people: Do not be guided by thinking. Think with your heart: It will never lead you wrong.
But can there be enough of these predictable deplorables to elect a President in a country of 300,000,000 people?
There are people who get their news and entertainment from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News--we always knew that.
Cokie Roberts told a story about interviewing people after the Ronald Reagan/ Jimmy Carter debate. Ronald Reagan came across as funny, benign, congenial and that was enough to convince them that he would be a good alternative to Jimmy Carter, who had worn out his welcome.
My great fear is that Donald Trump can pull off the same trick.
The man who exhorted people to think with their hearts did it. He took off his brown shirt and Swastika arm band and dressed up in a respectable, conventional suit and walked with Hindenberg and looked safe for a day. Then he reverted to form.
People see what they want to see.
As Jeb Bush et al discovered, it's not easy debating D.J. Trump. Most people enter debates thinking about making points which, when fact checked or analyzed by the chattering legions of post debate on camera faces, hold up.
Mr. Trump operates in an alternative universe--the solar system of the grade school play ground in which you answer your antagonist by braying, "Oh, you're so ugly."
Actually, even at the upper strata of intellect, this technique has been applied with effect: Drunk at a dinner party, Winston Churchill was upbraided by a society doyen, in her diamond necklace and silk dress, looking down her nose at him, she intoned in her best upper class scandalized accent, "Sir, you are drunk!"
To which Churchill responded. "Madame, you are correct. I am drunk. But in the the morning, I shall be sober and you shall still be ugly."
For the Donald, at the low end of the intellectual spectrum it was enough to simply deride Marco Rubio as being small of stature, or Jeb Bush as being "low energy."
He'll look down at the diminutive Hillary Clinton and tell her she is short and fat, tired, worn out, menopausal and harboring some un named illness which disqualifies her.
Ms. Clinton, who has studied the preparation notebook for the debate and is ready to do her best court room analytics will have problems responding.
One hopes she is working not on the details contained in that 500 page notebook, but on counter punches to the jibes.
"Mr. Trump you pride yourself on an animal faculty, in which the chimpanzee is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior." (My favorite.)
"Mr. Trump, you mistake physical size for largeness of spirit: If ever there was a person who proved the two are not always connected, it must be you."
"Mr. Trump you mistake libido for valor. You may excel at the former but you have shown no evidence of the latter."
"Mr. Trump, I would rather be the wife of Bill Clinton than any of your--how many?--wives."
"Mr. Trump, you mistake a loud voice for a clear head."
"Mr. Trump, on what planet do you spend the majority of your time?"
"Mr. Trump in what alternative universe are you living--in which a wall can prevent illegal immigration and in which every Muslim is an enemy by virtue of their faith?"
"Mr. Trump you vilify Muslims and Hispanics as dangerous enemies not because of what they have done, but because of where they come from."
And all like that.
But what are the chances?
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| Harinder "Harry" Bains |
Every once in a while you see something on CNN which surprises you.
Chris Cuomo interviewed Harinder (Harry) Bains, the owner of the Linden, New Jersey bar who called the cops when he recognized the bomber shown on CNN.
After having Bains describe the sequence of events, Cuomo asked Bains if people were coming into his place to thank him for what he did.
"We're all glad you called and you saved us all from a lot of harm, no doubt," Cuomo said.
"Anyone would have," Bains replied, then added, "Whether he's Jewish or Muslim, or Christian. I'm Sikh myself, but we are all Americans." Bains speaks in a light subcontinent accent. And he wears a baseball hat. The New York newspapers call him "Harry" Bains. Maybe a name he's adapted to assimilate.
People do assimilate.
It looked unrehearsed, spontaneous, and he did not seem to be making a speech, just saying something simple and obvious. Of course, Sikhs, who are often mistaken for Muslims, have been the targets of nativist violence and venom.
Hopefully, Hillary Clinton's people will be smart enough to get a clip of that interview and run with it.
For months Ms. Clinton has been saying we need to enlist not alienate people of all faiths, Muslims included, to be the eyes and ears in communities where terrorists try to blend in. Hillary Clinton could not have written a better script. Here is a modest guy in a baseball hat, trying to be a good American, saying just what those who oppose Trump have been arguing: We're stronger together.
Here's the link:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/us/harinder-bains-sikh-faith-trnd/
Moby Dick was not simply a whale. He was a symbol.
I am now coming to understand the hold Donald Trump has on the 40% or possibly the 51% of the country he holds under his spell. It was all so obvious, hiding in plain site. His call for a wall coupled with his battle cry, "Make America Great Again," is simply a call to return to what things were, when white guys who stopped going to organized school after the 12th grade, at age 17 or 18 could walk down the street or take a bus across town to the plant and get a job for the next 30 years working in the plant and save enough to buy a house, could support a family and take paid vacations and retire on the company pension, as people did in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Gary, Indiana.
If you were "working class" all that slipped away forty or fifty years ago and now your kids are looking at their lives and realizing although they left high school at age 17, as their parents had, their lives will not be nearly so successful. They will live in trailers on the scruffy side of town and when they go to see the doctor she will be Indian or Pakistani or maybe even Black and when they drive their F 150 pickup along the highway, they see dark skinned coloreds driving BMW's and Mercedes, headed to the gated communities.
These white people have lost power but Mr. Trump, who is a puffy white guy promises to give it back to them, to make America White again. The reality of the moment is not important: It's the fantasy of turning back the clock, of reversing this thing called globalization, of bringing back those lunch pail days of good factory jobs, of throwing out all those dark skinned people we see among us, of going white again which animates Mr. Trump and his followers.
He looks at the reality of an America which is changing which will no longer be majority white, and the most potent symbol of that change, that shift of power, Barack Obama, and he roars: That is not America! That man is not American!
Mr. Trump, like the fabled ancient king, walks down to the shore and commands the incoming tide to stop.
Ken Burns has, in one of his most canny executions of timing, focused a new film on the story of Mr. and Mrs. Sharp, who rescued Jewish refugees, children mostly, from the devouring maw of the Third Reich. He raised the image of people who saw desperate children, terrified parents and these people hid the hunted, took risks with their own lives and their own families on behalf of the "other."
Of course, Mr. Burns knows how to tie the past to the present.
Of all the stories of the holocaust, the one which most disturbed the generation of Germans who lived in Germany and Austria during those years was the story of the people who sheltered the Jews rather than turning their backs on them, as 99% of Germans did. The stories of those sympathetic, heroic (there is no other word for it) people is memorialized at every Holocaust museum, the Christians who were not in the cross hairs but who chose to place themselves in danger.
And Burns is asking: Which type of person are you, in today's edition of this story?
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| Ken Burns: Sharps' War |
