Deep Cleansing Breath

Oliver described the FBI’s announcement as the equivalent of a mystery box.
“And like the box from the end of ‘Seven,’ it could contain anything from nothing to Gwyneth Paltrow’s head,” he said. “Although it almost definitely contains Anthony Weiner’s penis.” --RE: JOHN OLIVER SHOW


OY, what a story! The October Surprise. Trump gloating, triumphant. I told you so!

Told us what?

Fact is, nothing.  Nothing's changed.

In "The West Wing" the Republican candidate is undone by an October surprise when a nuclear power plant in his home state nearly melts down. He had advocated for more nuclear power in a debate with his opponent and now this comes back to bite him just before the voting.  He never recovers and loses the election.
But that was different. That was a policy thing.


If Hillary Clinton is elected, the Republicans in Congress will be investigating her from day one through her last day in office, spending millions of taxpayer dollars in their single minded obsession to prove they were right all along.
They'll continue to infect the government with gridlock.
Survivalists in Idaho and the Dakotas will continue to stockpile arms in anticipation of the apocalyptic attack of the black helicopters. Rush Limbaugh and Trump radio will continue to accuse Hillary of dark, undiscovered crimes against humanity and the Republic.
South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Utah, the Dakotas, Idaho and Wyoming and likely Texas will continue to be home to people who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya or on Mars, and Hillary and the Democrats are plotting to take away your guns, and the federal government should not be allowed to own land, and there are space aliens in Area 51.  Oh, yes, and there is a vast, world wide conspiracy nobody in the liberal media will tell you about to do bad things nobody is quite sure of, but it's bad.
Worst of all, we'll have Donald Trump on TV every day, and he'll lead every news program every night. He'll be so ubiquitous he'll make Big Brother look like a recluse.

I have a button which says, "Shut the Trump Up."
But, of course, we can never do that. Wouldn't really want to. After all, there is a reason freedom of speech is in the FIRST amendment. It's the most important freedom of all. 
If Trump wins, having to listen to stories about him, but actually, I was forgetting--there is an even worse than worst part:  We'll have to deal with stories about those he inspires, enables and emboldens.
That is the real horror show.

But, in a better world, if Hillary Clinton does win, and if she wins by a wide margin, then it might reassure a broad swath of the nation that Americans are not fools, that we can listen to Trump and all those who travel with him without being convinced.

If Hillary wins a squeaker, that would be less therapeutic, especially if she has to face a Republican Senate.

If she loses, likely the news about Obamacare premiums rising will be more important than the schemes of James Comey, the screams of Rush Limbaugh.


Now, just a week until we know.

Where is the Warrant for the Arrest of James Comey?

Harry Reid tells Director of the FBI, James Comey, he "may" have violated the Hatch Act.  The New York Times says if the election goes to Mr. Trump, then Mr. Comey "might" be guilty of violating the law which forbids federal employees from using their offices to influence political activity, elections.

All this implies there is some doubt about whether Mr. Comey violated the law. 
The Times, and others, point out Mr. Comey's intent must be assessed to convict him of violating the law.

Yes, that's what trials are about, weighing alternative interpretations of actions.
But this is also what arrests are about, and what timing is about. And what law is about. 
Judges have a process by which they can issue an interim decision when timing is critical to outcomes. 
Unless I'm mistaken, the only remedy for the current situation is to publicly arrest Mr. Comey, and make him do a perp walk in handcuffs, to say to those impressionable voters out there who are wondering if the FBI investigation of emails associated with Mrs. Clinton implies she has done something wrong or even illegal, to say to these folks, no, actually it's the Director of the FBI who has done something wrong. 

He has taken action which can only be seen on face value as one which was motivated by trying to influence an election.  He can be tried on this charge. We can take all the time he needs to prepare his defense, but for now, he belongs in jail.

Jail Jimmy: Indict Jimmy Comey for Hatch Act Violation

The Hatch Act is not my favorite law, but sometimes bad law can be put to good uses.  In 1939 the act was passed to prevent federal government employees from engaging in "pernicious political activity."  It was actually inspired by the use of government employees to intimidate voters on behalf of certain candidates, but over the years it's meant that federal government employees cannot drive to work in Washington, D.C. with bumper stickers for candidates for federal office.

Over the years, there have been some questions about its implied restrictions of freedom of speech for the employees, but in the Case of James Comey, current director of the FBI, it should be used to send federal officers to his office and slap him in hand cuffs for trying to perniciously sway a federal election by insinuating Hillary Clinton is under investigation as a crook, when in fact it is the director and his underlings who have violated the law.

The really sleazey part of Comey's actions is that he did not have to accuse Ms. Clinton of anything. He only had to say, "She's under investigation, or maybe not, again."

So, yes. Let the Attorney General send some officers, preferably not FBI agents--with all the police agencies in Washington, D.C., they ought to be able to find somebody carrying handcuffs, who knows how to use them.

John Randolph: Citizen of the Republic of Reason

I am a citizen of the Republic of Reason. 
--John Randolph

Reading about John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia, born 1773, who served in the nascent United States House of Representatives and the Senate is both thrilling and reassuring, here and now in 2016. 

Randolph was a slave owning master of a Virginian plantation, a son of Virginia aristocracy and bizarrely, a distant relative of none other than Pocahontas. (This should be a comfort to Elizabeth Warren. Not all descendants of Pocahontas look like Cher.)

He was a prodigious horseman, whose feats upon stallions were well known and much admired in hunt country, but he was also clearly a eunuch. His biographers speculate about the source of his testosterone deficiency, speculating him to be  a victim of Klinefelter's Syndrome, but all we really know is at his autopsy, he had only a remnant of one atrophic testicle. Whatever caused this, it likely happened before puberty was fully completed, leaving him with long legs, no beard growth and a high pitched voice.

It was Randolph, reacting to another Congressman's taunt about his lack of virility, who said, "Sir, you pride yourself on an animal faculty, in which the Negro is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior."
Oh, that we had Congressmen with that sort of mind today--but without the racist tinge. 
As if in compensation for his lack of manliness, he became pugnacious and physically fearless.  His home plantation was called, "Bizarre." And bizarre he was.

But he was also important and reading about him is much more than merely entertaining and enthralling: It is enlightening. 

Randolph vehemently opposed the proposition the federal government ought to raise and support a standing army in peacetime.  For Randolph, the idea of paying an army of mercenaries to defend the citizens of America was an anathema. 
"A people who mean to continue free must be prepared to meet danger in person, not to rely on the fallacious protection of mercenary armies. When citizen and soldier shall be synonymous terms, then will you be safe."
As a student at Columbia, he had listened to debates in the United States Congress, then in New York, about the idea of allowing militia to keep and bear arms.  He thought arming the militia a bad idea. Citizens should arm themselves.
This provides a new insight into the origins of the Second Amendment. Clearly, the Second Amendment was meant to arm militias, not individuals. Randolph thought the Constitution should guarantee an individual's right to bear arms and was appalled it ceded that right only to members of a militia.
Somehow, this escaped the attention of Justice Scalia and others as they found the Second Amendment guaranteeing an individual's right to keep and bear arms in what they claimed was the original intent of the founding fathers. (What did Scalia actually know about what the founding fathers thought?)
Randolph was offended by the idea of paying men to be soldiers when there was no war to fight. These fighting men, with no fight before them would simply be "mercenary loungers and ragamuffins." 

Oddly, the idea that peacetime soldiers might be described as slackers or hired guns did not so much offend the military as the description, "ragamuffin," and Randolph felt compelled to walk back that term, but he stuck to his guns about the slacker (lounger) and mercenary parts.

I cannot know for sure, but from what I've read, those off the grid white supremacists living out in Idaho and North Dakota would likely agree with Randolph about the imperative to be self sufficient and to be prepared and willing to defend yourself and your home personally and they are arming themselves to fight the standing army of the federal government. Now we think of these people as lunatics, but Randolph, coming from a Virginia plantation was describing this mentality explicitly.

Distrust of others, unwillingness to place power in the hands of people outside your family, your plantation is sewn into the fabric of those Trump supporters who pack heat and show up at his rallies. These people are profoundly, often sociopath ically, anti social. Theirs is a distrust of the losing class, the kids who were told in grade school they were stupid, who were denigrated by their teachers in middle school, who were never going to get past high school.  Institutions of the government rejected them, told them they were worthless losers. And they never fully recovered, even if they went on to earn decent livings as HVAC repairmen, plumbers, electricians and wood workers.

Clinging to their guns.

But the really interesting thing is the unraveling of threads we today think of as interwoven.  Clinging to their guns and their religion. Not so in Randolph, who like Jefferson and so many other founding fathers was a "deist, and therefor an atheist."  Deist, as Jefferson described it, hoped for the existence of a God and an afterlife, but had no faith in any earthly religion connecting them to that.

Randolph would not have embraced today's Second Amendment crowd. He detested the idea of equality, and no gun could make you his equal.

It's pretty clear the current gun toting Second Amendment character feels powerful, the equal of any man when he straps on his Glock or slings his AK-15 over his shoulder and walks down the street or shows up at an Obama rally to protest.

Randolph had no illusions about even the biggest hand gun or rifle making you all powerful. The Revolution had been fought with cannon and howitzers--even in the late 18th and early 19th century, armies could crush any individual or plantation owner. 

My right to enslave others

Oddly, Randolph and Jefferson and the early Republican-Democrats loved the French revolutionaries, who were heavily into chopping off heads.  The heads they were after were aristocrats and the government they were advancing was one of citizen equality. And Jefferson and Randolph were aristocrats. But what they did not like was the idea of a government which could intervene on behalf of the have nots to impose power over them in their own little plantation kingdoms. 

Much as today's anti government Trumpees revile the whole notion of government. 

The odd evolution has, however, brought our present day anti government types into the military fold. Kelly Ayotte extols the virtues of our present day ragamuffins at every opportunity. Of course, you can argue that we no longer have a peacetime army in our world of eternal, constant war.  But she loves the idea of hiring others to do our fighting for us, rather than making citizens defend themselves in person. 

But Ayotte and her Tea Party lovers do share that Jeffersonian, Randolph desire to live without a government.  

You want guns: I'll give you guns

"Given the choice between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I'd choose the latter," Jefferson said.

Which means, for all his dismissal of the value of any real government, Mr. Trump has not embraced the alternative. 

Only I Know What Hillary Is Hiding

Oh, that villain

While David Brooks and Mark Shields blather on about the pyschological effect of Jimmy Comey's recent letter to Republican Congressman on that unicorn of a voter who hasn't already made up his or her own mind, I alone know what is in all those emails, on that private server, what Hillary is desperate not be revealed:

1/ Hillary arranged for those State Department employees to die at Benghazi
2/ Hillary covertly shipped grenade launchers, rock propelled grenades, tanks, airplanes, Black Hawk helicopters and sharp head lopping off swords to ISIS and used the money ISIS sent her to fund late term abortions in the Congo and Texas through the Clinton foundation
3/ Hillary diverted State Department funds to Planned Parenthood to search out women recently pregnant who might be persuaded to have late term abortions
4/ Hillary sought to buy the silence of all those women who her sexual predator husband Bill continued to bed because she was afraid one of those women might speak up and implicate her in Bill's assignations. She was furious when some of them refused and instead showed up in the front row of the debates, having taken Trump's better offer of roles on the next Celebrity Apprentice
5/ General Petraeus is Hillary's secret lover, one among many. Others include: Bernie Sanders, Tim Kane, Harry Reid, Sheriff Arpaio (of Arizona), Sitting Bull (in another life), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonin Scalia (who she had murdered because he threatened to talk), Clarence Thomas (who is only alive because he never talks.)

I don't see what's so funny

And that only scratches the surface of what I know about what's on those emails. 
But I'm not going to let it all out just now. I'm going to send it to Wikileaks so they can dribble it out, day by day until November 8.

Remember only I know the truth.
Eat your heart out, Donnie John.

J. Edgar Hoover, Comey and the Tooth Fairy

Oh, just a little notice to Congress, we have a new computer to look at and it belonged to the former wife of one of the most embarrassing Democrats ever and it may have her emails violating security and she's a friend of Hillary so let the headlines read: FBI investigating Hillary. AGAIN!
She's just SO corrupt. But, of course, that's not for me to say. 
I'm just saying. We are just investigating, or not. Maybe. We're looking into it.
Eleven days to go, we had to do something.
It's an old FBI tradition. You know, like when J. Edgar went after Martin Luther King. And that was the beginning of a tradition around here. 

But I'm just doing my job. Got to get those statements out right now.
Don't want this coming out after the election. Might make the bureau look bad. 

So, this may or may not be germane to our investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, but it is certainly not  motivated by a desire to affect the election.

Just me doing my job, just pure as the driven snow. Just like J. Edgar before me...
But here's the thing. What do you think is the worst possible thing that could be on any of Ms. Clinton's emails? 
Nobody ever talks about that.
Like, suppose there was top secret stuff which could have hurt "national security." Like what? Exactly. 
Actually, this computer didn't really have Ms. Clinton's emails, just her friend's emails and some of the husband's. Well, maybe some of Hillary's. I'm not saying.
But back to the good stuff: What could be in Mrs. Clinton's emails?
Maybe she is secretly Vladimir Putin's mistress! Or maybe she was having a thing with Qaddafi and that's why she was so keen to get him. Lover's spat. Hell hath no fury like a woman spurned or what not. I mean. I'll just leave it to your imagination. 
Not even Donald can come up with something specific. He just says, Oh, it's just so bad. So corrupt. So, very, very, very corrupt. (He doesn't have a lot of words, so he just repeats himself. But he has the best words.)
Well, the less said, the better, I always say.

That's my boy, Jimmy Comey

Hillary v Trump: Michael v Sonny Corleone

Flawed candidates. That's what we hear daily.  "I find Hillary repugnant," they say. "I just can't vote for that conniver."  Then again, "Trump--he might start World War III."


The fact is, we do not know either Hillary or Trump. We think we do, but we don't.


We have to look to experience outside our own to extrapolate to the idea: What kind of person is this?


For a while, I thought Trump was simply Tony Soprano, but Soprano, for all his thug sound was infinity more subtle, had many more shades to his character.


King Joffrey of Game of Thrones comes closer, the cowardly child put on the throne who becomes willful, orders the head of the good John Stark chopped off, but Joffrey quakes in fear and is immobilized when face with real danger and his dwarf uncle has to rescue him by the exercise of real cunning.


But the real and best touchstone, for my money, is "The Godfather." 
There you have the cool, calculating, quiet plotter, the leader who does not reveal himself, who organizes quietly, effectively in Michael Corleone.

Sonny is Trump, explosive, fun to watch, but, in the end, as his father observes, "A bad Don."


Talking to people while canvassing, I'm frequently confronted with people who cannot express what they don't like about the Machiavellian Clinton, and aren't much better at saying what bothers them about Trump.


From now on, if they are old enough to have seen "The Godfather," it's going to be: "Would you rather have Michael or Sonny Corleone as your godfather? Who would you rather have in charge of the family?"