Hillary at Wellesley

 For too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.
--Hillary Rodham, Wellesley, Address to the Class of 1969, at her graduation

Sitting in the audience when Hillary Rodham rose to deliver her address to graduating seniors in 1969 was a woman who I had known since I was 13 years old. Her name was Kristie Anne Hansen, and she had been my heart throb, until we both left Bethesda in 1965 to go to off to college.

In 1964, I had run against Kristie for president of the student government and there was a big assembly of the whole school in the field house. I had written my speech with lots of references to drinking beer and I tried to appeal to the hoi polloi, the guys I knew from the locker rooms, the varsities, the future frat boys and sorority girls. I was not among the crowd that was winning, but I was doing my best impression of that, not very successfully.
 I was going low. Kristie went high. 
She went directly at the biggest problem her candidacy had: She was a girl running for the office of president. Girls ran for secretary, sometimes for treasurer, but never president. "But why should a girl not be president?" Kristie asked the stunned audience. "If that girl has been captain of the cheerleaders, has worked hard in the Montgomery County student government?" She went on to list all the things a high school girl could do, which, admittedly was not much, but she was really saying, girls should be taken seriously. 
By the time she was finished, I was ready to vote for her. There were two boys running and I don't remember the other boy's speech or my own, but I remember Kristie's. She was nervy and bold.

She beat me and the other guy running: I'm guessing it was a landslide.

But by the time Kristie found herself listening to Hillary Rodham that day in 1969, much had changed. The war in Vietnam had gained full steam. Gloria Steinem had caught the public's attention. Martin Luther King had delivered his speech on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial and had been slain in Memphis. "Hair" had hit Broadway.  Bob Dylan had risen. Bob Dylan wouldn't have cared much about who won a high school election or what college she went to. Bob spoke of that debutante who knows what you need, but not what you want.  In my mind, Kristie faded into that class of debutantes and chosen people who were just distant memories in a world which no longer existed.

The first time I heard "Like A Rolling Stone." I was sitting in a lifeguard chair at Old Farm swimming pool with my transistor radio plugged into my ear and just about fell out of the chair. "Ah, you went to the finest school alright, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it."  And I thought of Kristie. She had been on top, just like the girl in the song, and I wondered if she had wound up on the street , once she had to leave the Promised Land of elite colleges. I suspected nobody had ever taught her how to live out on the street.

Actually,  I hadn't heard from her or much about her, after high school.  I only learned about her indirectly, when I read Richard Holbrooke's eulogy of Kurt Schork. I had  heard Kristie  married Kurt Schork, who had got a Rhodes scholarship but while they were  still at Oxford, the marriage fell apart and I imagined Kristie without a home, no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone. 

Kurt later became a war correspondent, covered Sarajevo and was killed in Sierra Leone. He was a nervy, bold guy, but that was his undoing. 

In high school, everyone said Kristie Hansen would be the first woman President of the United States.  They thought she deserved to be that.

I don't know what happened to her. I can't find her on Wikipedia. I heard she went to law school and went back to Washington to work in the government on student loans or something. I saw her at a high school reunion, but we never talked. 

There must have been a lot of girls like her at Wellesley. Bright stars, the creme de la creme. The debutante parade, all the girls who just wanted to be on the side that's winning. I used to be among that crowd. It was positively Fourth Street.

But one of those women that I know of...Hillary Rodham, seemed to come out on the other side, and do okay.

Hillary for Jail? What the Trump?

Trump Chumps in Full Flower: Is that a Glock in Your pocket?

Okay, I admit, I may not be the sharpest blade in the drawer, maybe not all the lights are on upstairs, but what's with this "Hillary for Jail" thing?

I've tried looking this up on line and all I can find Donald Trump or any of his acolytes accusing her of is mishandling of classified documents, or setting up an illegal server, or destroying emails.

And what is the worst thing they are saying she could be hiding by all this?

What it comes down to is "She must have done something really bad, she's trying to cover up."


But what exactly are they thinking? 


The closest I can come to an actual theory of crime was from that airhead Congresswoman from Alabama who implied during the Benghazi hearings that Hillary went home from the State Department at 3 AM the night of Benghazi for a tryst with a lover, which was finally enough for Hillary to burst out laughing, and when the Congresswoman said indignantly, "Well, I don't see anything funny," Hillary just shook her head, and of course everyone else in the room saw something very funny, as the airhead sat there looking dumb and dumber.

Alabama's finest: Heaven Help Alabama

Of course, had I been the voice in Hillary's ear phone during the hearings, I would have said, "Oh, Congresswoman, you have found me out. I spent the night alone, until General Petraeus came over for a late night tryst."  Maybe, in fact, someone did say that to Hillary in her earphone and that's why she was laughing. I don't know.


But to get back to the Hillary for Jail thing--this has become a chant among Trump Chumps, but whenever I ask one he just says, "Well, the emails," or "Well, the server," or "Well...you know."


Which says, of course, none of these guys has thought past the chant.


Enlighten me here. What am I missing?

Punched Out?

Muhammad Ali's strategy for the George Foreman fight was to allow Foreman to wail away on him and "punch himself out." Once Foreman's arms were too weary to throw another punch, Ali moved in for the knockout.

Predictions for Foreman's victory were unwavering and universal, so much so that Foreman actually prayed before the fight he would not kill Ali in the ring.

Watching Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, David Gregory and all the pundits on TV this morning I thought I was seeing Trump in a rope a dope.  No more mention of building a wall, kissing women, fat women, disgusting, nasty women, no more mention of forbidding Muslims from crossing our borders--now it's all about bringing back the factories for all those Ohio and Pennsylvania workers. You can all just go back to the factories now, get your paycheck. Ain't America great again. 

Never mind when those factories re open the 3,000 jobs once held by your fathers will be done by 2,000 robots and 100 workers.

Donald has learned what works and in the last two weeks he's lulling everyone to sleep, playing rope a dope. All he has to do is simply not be outrageous, and people forget all those wild things he said. He looks calm and a safe option.

Republicans come home--your boy is all grown up now.

Fathered by an Orangutan?

Just stumbled over a list of people Donald Joffrey Trump has threatened to sue.  Bill Maher made the list for claiming the Donald was fathered by an orangutan.

On the surface, Mr. Trump might appear to have a case, until you look at the actual orange peach and then back at the orangutan. 
I don't know. I might volunteer to represent Mr. Maher. This may be a strong family resemblance. 
On the other hand, the orangutan might have the more significant cause for complaint, if you are talking about sullied images. 

P.S.:
Ms. Maud has raised the horrific image of Donald Joffrey's conception--the Great White Wail, indeed.
This is in a long tradition of animal/human intercourse. As we all recall, Zeus assumed the form of a swan, which he knew no human female could resist, and he conceived some offspring with Leda.

Michael Moore Explains President Trump

Michael Moore hangs out with "real" Americans--White, high school (un)educated, work a day Americans.  He explains why they love Donald Trump.


These are the losers in our capitalistic society, the masses of workers who do not own shops, do not invent things, but who more or less passively passed through the doors of factories where they were taught to assemble cars, computers, shoes, clothes and were paid a living wage to do it.


They often had little schemes and scams on the side to supplement their wages, and they had health insurance and even some of them had pensions. Actually, they never had any of this stuff--their parents who worked at GM and Ford and US Steel had these things, and the current masses remember dimly this Ozzie and Harriet life, which seemed, through the nostalgic lenses, a Great America.


Now Mr. Trump promises to bring those golden days back again--factories back to Flint and Dearborn and Pittsburg and Cleveland and Gary and Oakland and with those factories, jobs, jobs, jobs.


Of course, those factory jobs ain't never coming back. The factories may come back, but the workers will be a thousand robots and three dozens workers supervising the robots.

But never mind.


The fact is, the country under President Trump will be Christian again--no Muslims will get across our borders because radical Islamic terrorists want to chop off American heads and we don't have to stand for that. 


And no more Obamacare--those 20 million newly insured will have health care savings accounts, which their first hospitalizations will drain dry.


And no more abortions, or gay marriages or transgenders using the locker rooms or Black guys getting away with shooting White police, and maybe, if Mr. Trump's fans are really lucky, we'll go back to the days when women stayed at home and took care of the kids, like June Cleaver or Edith Bunker.

We'll all be happy again, just the way we were in the 1950's, when nobody talked about sex, and Blacks could not eat at a lunch counter or stay in a White's only motel or vote, when abortions were done in motel rooms, when we started on the long road to endless war, beginning in Korea, and slogging through Vietnam and beyond, when most people lived in homes which to today's Americans would look like carpeted chicken coops and luxury was having a box TV, a clothes washer and dryer and maybe even central air conditioning, when cars got 12 miles to the gallon, but gas was only 29 cents a gallon, when most adults smoked and died of lung cancer or heart attacks by age 63, when there were only three TV channels and the interstate highway system hadn't been built yet, so most people shopped in their local towns and never got much beyond their home towns, except for those adventurous vacations to Florida or Maine, which took two weeks, and you packed a bag of sandwiches in the car because you couldn't afford to stop at Hot Shoppes. But mostly you camped out or went to the beach and that was Great American life.


All that Mr. Moore's people know is they feel like losers; they see the glitzy world soaring past them and they get no respect. I see the same thing in Haverhill, Methuen and Lawrence, Massachusetts and in Salem, Kingston and Stratum, New Hampshire.


There are people out there who just stew in their own juices, or as Anon has said, time and time again, "Can't fix stupid."

How Trump Can Win

Donald Trump is not morally, spiritually, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably, merely dead, not sincerely dead.

He can definitely, positively, undeniably, negatively win.

How?

His enthusiastic, orgiastic, nihilistic voters can swarm out of their caves and vote, while the best and the brightest find other things to do November 8.


Or, his friends in the Kremlin can target power outages in New York City, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chapel Hill, Durham--you get the idea.
It's easy to target Democratic voters because they are concentrated where the power grid is most stressed. Just a little cyber attack on some or all of these cities--and it doesn't have to last all day, just an hour or two, enough to make people give up and go home...Why just a week ago internet went out for the entire East Coast. Suppose the same thing happens on November 8?


The Donald is correct about one thing: I cannot close my eyes and imagine the process by which votes are counted.  It's not a bunch of people in a room opening up a cardboard box and hand counting ballots--except in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire.


For the most part, it's obscure, opaque, out of sight and we all simply accept the stuff we see flitting across our TV screens because the optics of national news are so colorful and bright and convincing.


I mean, how do we KNOW?


Well, there are polls going in and exit polls going out, but the correlation with exit polls in the last election were significantly wrong.


Exit polls? How can you get it wrong with an exit poll?


All I can think is Churchill's observation that democracy is the worst form of government--except for all the others.


The last time a bunch of pugnacious, gun toting louts refused to accept the results of an election, we had a war which lasted 4 years and took more American lives than all the others combined.


But, you know, it did clean out some nasty pus down South.  As Clemenza tells Michael Corleone, "Things gotta happen every five years. Ten. Cleans out the bad blood."


We shall see.

If Kelly Ayotte Wins

If Kelly Ayotte is returned to the United States Senate we can expect to see her work for the following:

1/ Converting Social Security into a voucher system
2/ Killing Obamacare and any system of nation wide health care coverage
3/ Making Medicare a voucher system
4/ Sending ground troops to the Middle East
5/ Insuring gun sales have no restrictions
6/ Reversing marriage equality
7/ Reversing Roe v Wade and making abortion illegal again

Birds of a Feather

That enough?

People accuse Hillary Clinton about all sorts of nefarious things which are never confirmed by public record, but in Kelly Ayotte's case there is an instance which is on the public record, and nobody seems interested enough to even read it.

Mark Connolly wrote about Ms. Ayotte's indifference to the most massive Ponzi scheme in New Hampshire's history in a book called "Cover Up."  And a sorry tale it is, with Kelly Ayotte right at the center.

Flock Together

The largest financial fiasco in New Hampshire history, which bilked hundreds of families out of their life savings was the Lakes Region Ponzi Scheme, which Financial Resources Mortgage, Inc perpertrated, but Ms. Ayotte, as attorney general, failed to prosecute because somehow Ms. Ayotte didn't see an injury.

Odd thing, that.

Ms. Ayotte is a bosom buddy of the "Toughest Sheriff in America"  Sheriff Arpaio, of Maricopa County, Arizona--you know, the guy who arrests people for looking like wetbacks and then parades them down the street in pink underpants, BEFORE they are even tried.  Senator Ayotte has appeared with the Sheriff and sung his praises, because he is tough on crime, she says. Would that she had had absorbed some of that toughness on crime in the Ponzi case--maybe the miscreants who stole millions from innocent New Hampshire families would be behind bars today, rather than living on their yachts and in their vacation homes.

Good Buddies

You have to see her appeal: All dimples and youthful looks, but looks can be deceiving. She has not been content to dance with the devil, she is what she was when she was elected: A Tea Party gal. She may look pretty but she is a spider wasp, intent on destroying government--all government--from within. 


The only thing she likes about government is its war making machinery--for that she is willing to spend us into the poor house. But heaven forbid we might want to build hospital or cure a disease. Oh, no! That would cost money. And you know what THAT would mean: Taxes!  Taxes are fine if they are spent to support the munitions manufacturers of Alabama and South Carolina. But tax money for health insurance in New Hampshire, for all those undeserving citizens, no way.

Oh, Kelly, we hardly know ye.