The Big Lie: A Simple Truth in Philadelphia

Watching a reporter interviewing a Black man in Philadelphia yesterday, I was stunned and delighted to hear this guy say, "Well, they think if they just say the biggest lie they can think of over and over, if they say it often enough, they get people to believe it." 
This guy sounded like Rocky Balboa, but, being Black, he didn't look a whole lot like Rocky.

The reporter was doing a story about Republican claims of voter fraud in Philadelphia, where in some districts (of a few hundred people) not a single vote was cast for Romney over Obama in the last election. The Republican claim was that zero vote was ipso facto proof of Democratic voter fraud and rigged elections. But a Republican member of the Philadelphia election commission later went by the district, interviewing everyone he could and he could not find a single Romney voter, and he concluded--nobody in this entirely Black twelve block area had voted for anyone but Obama. 

There were in fact similar zero vote for Obama districts in Utah where not a single vote was cast for Obama, but somehow the Republicans never claimed that was ipso facto proof of a rigged election in Utah.
Fact is, who would bother to rig an election in Utah or Philadelphia, where the opposition is not a factor? You want to rig an election, go rig it where the outcome is in doubt.

And none of these districts is large enough to matter much in the grand total.

The current big lie is Hillary is a criminal and belongs in prison.
That's the big lie Hillary has not answered, failing to learn what her husband learned--when they start trumpeting the big lie, you have to get out there with a brass band and blow hard against it.

The effect of not calling Trump out on the lie--Just exactly what is the crime I've committed? And he replies, "Oh, so many." And she retorts, "Well, you don't go to jail for oh so many. You actually have to had done something real and specific, little Donald. That's what's called 'justice.' But we wouldn't expect you to know about that. Of course,my major crime is calling you out. Mr. Trump U fraudster."
And all like that. 
But as Donald's idol once observed: Lie Big. It's harder to debase a big lie than a small one.

The Rat's Nest At the FBI

Eliot Ness

Two sources told Reuters that investigators in the FBI’s New York field office are “known to be hostile” to Clinton. On Thursday, The Guardian reported its sources described the FBI as a “Trumpland,” where agents have “deep antipathy” toward Clinton

The FBI has come a long way since Eliot Ness and the heroes of TV and film. I used to have FBI agents as patients when I practiced in Washington, DC and they struck me as being, for the most part, bored bureaucrats. They tended to be less explosive personalities than my policemen; if anything, they seemed a little dull, sort of Joe Friday detective types, if you remember "Dragnet, " world weary, a bit ground down.

More recently, the agents I've met are younger, often ex military, looking for adventure, guys who like to hang out at bars and tell war stories for the amusement of any females who might be impressed.

Now, we have the Huffington Post telling the tale of restlessness in the ranks, lower level agents who threatened to call Fox News if the innuendo story about Hillary Clinton was not released.

Hot Dog TV FBI: The hero of the new young Turks

"And there's more to come before the election," Rudolph Guliani, who has FBI connections, assures us.

So, we've come to this. The secret police, the Gestapo, intent on damaging a political rival to their own choice. 

Yikes!

Is this still America? Or is this Amerika?

Ground Game vs Air Attack

When I was a kid,  football was my favorite game. I was too little to play running back or fullback, but was fast enough to play receiver.


There were the coaches, adults, authorities, at my schools who would say, "When you throw the ball, three things can happen and two of them are bad."
I knew I would never play for them. All they would do was run the ball, usually up the middle.
Of course, when coaches arrived who knew how to use the passing game, those dinosaurs who did not believe in passing were quickly forgotten.  They simply were mired in old thinking and in sports, you have a final score. You win or you lose, so you can judge the truth of certain propositions.


Politics is like that now.  There are those in the know who claim the ground game will serve to propel Hillary Clinton to the Presidency.

I hope they are right, but I suspect they are like those old time coaches who just didn't have enough imagination, even nerve, enough willingness to risk.


I have been doing "ground game" for Hillary, canvassing, and I'm here to tell you: It looks pretty ineffective to me.

On a good day, we go to 40 doors and only 5 or 6 will even answer the knock or the ring. Most people at home on a weekend are annoyed, not inspired by a visit from a canvasser. Those who do answer saw our Hillary pins and answered because they are voting for her and it's like a group hug. About half, which is to say 3 or 4, are not going to vote for Hillary and try to end the conversation as quickly as possible.


We do not persuade anybody to vote for Hillary who would have voted for Trump.
Even if we did and even if you multiply the number of people we persuade by the total number of canvassers, we have changed only, at best, 100 minds, and God only knows how many of those will actually act on their new found embrace of Hillary and vote. How many later talk to their husbands who say, "What? Don't you know Hillary is a Crook?!" and so the visit changed nothing in the end vote.


There is a second reason to canvass: to be sure people actually go vote. Again, I can't see any data which shows a visit from a person they did not know, even if that person is a neighbor, really gets that voter to the polls.  I'd love to see a study showing comparisons of comparable neighborhoods where one was canvassed and one not and the outcome of how many voted from each. Of course, what you really want to know is how many voted the way you wanted them to vote.


I'd love to believe Politico and all the conventional academics who think people power can overcome the loud voice on the TV and the air game of a Donald Trump.


Having labored in the trenches, however, I don't believe the ground game makes a difference.

Hillary Haters: Invasion of the Brain Snatchers

They seem quite normal. Talk to them about the weather, the price of gas, how Winnacunnet High School's football season is going, about the drought and how it has killed all the lawns in town, and they seem quite normal.
But mention Hillary's name, and it happens.
It's like pressing on the abdomen of someone with appendicitis and they hit the chandelier.
It's like one of those horror movies where that lovely housewife next door who brings you a fruitcake suddenly opens her mouth to reveal dagger shaped incisors dripping with blood and her eyes turn red and she emits a roar like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The monster within explodes out.

"She should not even be allowed to run. She belongs in jail. She is the most corrupt person to ever run for office."

And, stepping back a step or two, if you don't fly from the room, you ask, "Well, but how do you know all this?

If they can site a source--like the wikileaks conversations between Podesta and Mook or whatnot--they have no real idea of where those came from or what they actually mean . They mean what the monster thinks they should mean.  They mean what Rush and Sean say they mean.
And they are just so certain. As Bertrand Russell observed: The trouble with life is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubts.
Their opinions are more than baked in. Their opinions are etched in stone.

Oh, she is just so corrupt. Very, very corrupt. (Mr. Trump has such good words.)
And they get pretty upset if you pursue, patiently, well how do you know. Oh, you heard it from him? Oh, you read it there. And how does he know? And how did it get there? That really sets them off. You are questioning their deeply held belief. If they cannot be sure of what they are most sure of, what can they be sure of?

It's not Hillary, the most examined person in public life, whose unleashed this horror.
It's the invasion of the brain snatchers. They are all around us.

Intimations of Impending Doom

Diary of a mad morning:


1. On the treadmill, "New Day" reviewing early voting trends in North Carolina: Early voting is up 50% among whites compared to last year, up only 15% among Blacks. Inference: Blacks are not coming out to vote for Hillary as they did to vote for Obama. You need a big Black vote to win North Carolina.
2. Driving in: NPR report on two reporters, one in England one in Pennsylvania. Town in coal country where everyone is voting Trump because "Hillary wants to kill coal. Washington has forgotten about us."  Brexit voters say the same thing about London. The elites in London are doing well and we are drowning in immigrants.
Inference: Trump is the American Brexit. He's the disrupter.
3. NPR report on a woman canvassing in Manchester, New Hampshire. She asks to speak to the wife, who she has listed on her computer spread sheet as a potential Democratic vote. Man answers the door says, "Nobody in this house is voting for Hillary. We're Trump. She should be in jail, for what she did. Shouldn't even be allowed to run. She belongs in jail."
By the time the canvasser has finished knocking on 39 doors, she has spoken with only one voter who wouldn't say how she was voting and the man who knows Hillary belongs in jail. And this is using what the Democratic party's computer says is a list of Democratic voters.


So much for the value of a "ground game." 

Why should I care?  Will my life, personally, change with President Trump? If the Ku Klux Klan marches down Lafayette Street, how will it affect my life? 
If the scoundrels and racists and Muslim, foreigner haters take control of the government, the Music Hall will still have concerts. I can still take the C&J bus to New York City and see my kids.

My father returned from a trip to Spain, years ago, when the dictator, Franco, was still in power. He was dismayed at how happy the Spaniards looked. "They're living under a dictatorship and they look happy!"

El Duce, not Franco--Mussolini

I imagine, if you lived in Austria, for most of the 1930's and even into the 1940's your life continued to be pretty pleasant, as long as you were not a Jew or a Gypsy.
Symphonies still played, operas still got sung. People went out to beer gardens and for hikes in the mountains.

You will say the odor wafting into town from the concentration camps must have unsettled the happy little blonde lives, but Americans keep their nastiness at a distance--in Gitmo, in the great empty spaces of the far West.
It's just an election. Just a government. And what Mr. Trump's supporters are reminding us is we don't need no freaking government.

November 9, 2016

President Donald John Trump, 45th President of these United States takes office on January, 2017.

Is he the worst human being to ever hold that office?  He has some stiff competition.
Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon--there have been some potential winners for that competition. Racists, paranoid near schizophrenics, simpletons, but it is hard to confect a more perfect combination of all the above, to which we add a twist of Mussolini/Berlusconi narcissism.

There might be a certain delicious quality of dreadful anxiety, anticipating his arrival at  the portico of the Capitol Building, to deliver what I am sure will be a memorable Inaugural Address to the American people, on a bright January day, when the clean, crisp air attempts  to wash clean a foul election campaign and we can sense a new beginning.

What an excruciating ride from the White House for President Obama, who will accompany his replacement, riding in the long black limousine, and who, I hope, will lean over and whisper in his ear, "You know, Donald. I can tell you now. You were right: I really was born in Kenya." Just one last effort to mess with the President elect's head.

In the interval between his election on the night of November 8, and his inauguration in January there have been cross burnings on the lawns of Blacks and Jews, but Muslim Americans have come in for special attention, as several men suspected of being Muslims have been dragged out of bars, grocery stores, Walmarts and beaten to death in parking lots, on sidewalks and alleys. One was dragged behind a car in Texas.


A crowd of men with AK 15 assault rifles roamed the streets of a Michigan town near Dearborn and fired on passers-by, killing a Shik man who was thought to be a Muslim. Store windows were broken and homes set afire.

In Nashville, Tennessee and Portsmouth, NH synagogues were defaced with swastikas and in Charleston, Richmond and  Birmingham synagogues and mosques were burned to the ground.


Mr. Trump vowed his promise to jail Mrs. Clinton would be fulfilled and he would appoint an attorney general whose first priority would be accomplishing that.
The inaugural balls scheduled for the evening after the address have been organized by the Miss Universe organization and every woman invited must be a 10, except for Maria Bartiromo, is invited even though she has gained weight, eating like a pig, but as long as she wears that red dress she wore at the Al Smith dinner, which caught Mr. Trump's eye, she can attend.

Such are the celebrations of Mr. Trump's election.
Listening to his oration, we can forget all that and simply enjoy the show.


Democracy reigns.

The Hatch Act: I Stand Corrected

Okay, so I got a little carried away and failed to inquire into the penalties for violation of the Hatch Act. Apparently, after further googling, Mr. Comey cannot be led away in hand cuffs--a pity--the only penalty is removal from office.

Listening to the talking heads on The PBS News Hour, Chris Hayes etc., opinion broke two ways--there are the forgiving Obama types who have known the man and think well of him, but thought he simply made a mistake and then there are others, who simply shrugged and said, "Of course he violated the Hatch Act. There have been few examples of a more flagrant violation."

There is a board which hears these cases and their verdict can be appealed in court. 

If Trump wins,  I doubt we'll see that process unfold.