News in the presidential campaign is breaking so fast it’s hard to keep up.
What the recent emails released by WikiLeaks prove is that the collusion between the Clinton campaign, the mainstream media, the White House, the Clinton Foundation and the US Justice Department is as bad as the whacko conspiracy theorists said it was.
The Justice Department was coordinating the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails with her campaign. The mainstream media, to no one’s surprise, have been working behind the scenes to help the Hillary Clinton campaign from the beginning.
*****
Donald Trump’s comments about women 11 years ago were rude, crude and distasteful. However, I can’t say that I’m surprised that he made those comments in talking to another man who certainly appears to be also rude and crude.
Some men talk like that about women.
Some women talk like that about men, although I don’t think it’s as common, but that may be because I am more often privy to private talk among men than among women.
I think we all say things in private conversations that would embarrass us if they were made public. It might be comment about a mutual friend or acquaintance that you wouldn’t want the subject of the conversation to hear. It might be a random comment about a member of the opposite sex that is made as if that person were an object and not a person.
The mainstream media have behaved as if Trump is the only person who has ever been caught saying something untoward near a mic that he didn’t know was live.
Vice President Joe Biden said to President Barack Hussein Obama, “This is a big f—ing deal.” The mike caught the comment. Obama didn’t jump back, startled that his vice president had used that word to him, which would make one think that Biden uses that word with some regularity. But it’s OK because Biden is a Democrat.
According to three witnesses, over 20 years ago Hillary Clinton called Bill Clinton’s campaign manager a “F—ing Jew bastard.” Fortunately for Hillary Clinton there is no video of her saying that, so she can deny it – just like she denied that there was any classified information on her personal email server – but she didn’t file suit when it was reported in a book.
Trump made some sexist comments, but look at Democratic icon former Congressman Barney Frank. When Frank was serving in Congress it was a discovered that Frank’s boyfriend was running a male prostitution ring out of Frank’s home, but that was considered hardly worth mentioning. It was also rarely mentioned that Frank met his boyfriend when his boyfriend was a male prostitute, and that was OK also.
Can you imagine the mainstream media’s outcry if it was discovered that, say, Rep. Trey Gowdy had a prostitution ring operating out of his home?
But for Democrats it’s acceptable. Republicans make nasty comments and it means they aren’t qualified to hold public office; Democrats do far worse and it isn’t even considered worth a news story.
*****
Trump is a loudmouthed braggart. Anybody who has heard him speak knows that everything is “huge,” “great,” “the best.” He uses superlatives like he bought them at a 10-for-one sale.
Men like Trump brag and exaggerate. It doesn’t let him off the hook for what he said, but he brags and exaggerates about everything else in his life, why wouldn’t he do the same about his exploits with women? Anyone who is surprised by his comments hasn’t been listening to Trump speak very much.
It’s the way he is, but there is nothing in his background to suggest that his actions caused four brave Americans to die for their country. Hillary Clinton should have prevented Benghazi from ever happening, and once the attack started she should have done everything in her power to get help to the Americans under siege in Benghazi – even if that meant going to the White House and banging on the Obamas’ bedroom door. When people’s lives are at stake, extraordinary measures are not just called for but demanded. Hillary Clinton knew that lives were at stake and she did nothing.
For her that 3 a.m. call came, and we found out she answers it, not by taking decisive action but by saying, “Call me back in the morning and tell me what happened so I can get my press people to put the right spin on it.”
That is just what Hillary Clinton did. I have no idea what her words were, but that was what she did.
*****
Trump is correct that the foreign policies of Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS.
If Obama had not pulled all the American troops out of Afghanistan, ISIS would not have had the vacuum in which to form and grow in Syria and Iraq.
If Obama and Hillary Clinton had not ignored ISIS when it was growing in strength, it could have been wiped out in a matter of days. All of the men and women who have lost their lives fighting ISIS are deaths caused by the appeasement policies of Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Trump degraded women with his locker room banter. Hillary Clinton allowed ISIS to form and make hundreds or perhaps thousands of woman sex slaves. Which is more detrimental to women, having some blowhard objectify them or have the weakness of US policy allow a terrorist group to make women into sex slaves?
Iraq, Syria, Libya, the current wars and turmoil in the Middle East can be largely attributed to the failed policies of Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Hillary Clinton says she has worked her whole life for women and children. What about the millions of women and children who have fled those countries because of the ongoing wars? What about the thousands who have died trying to get out of those countries and into Europe? What about the thousands who are currently living in tents or shanties trying to get some place they can settle down? It was the policies that she promoted that caused the refugee crisis in Europe.
But, according to the mainstream media, Trump making crude comments is worse for women than making them not just homeless but country-less.
*****
Hillary Clinton was in charge of US foreign policy for four years. What country do we have a better relationship with now than when she became secretary of state in 2009? Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China or any country you want to name, the US relationship with our major allies as well as our enemies is worse – with one notable exception.
The US has a much better relationship with the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, Iran, because of the Iran deal. Hillary Clinton was not secretary of state when that deal was finalized, but she did participate in setting up the negotiations that ended with the US giving Iran $1.7 billion in cash, including a $400 million ransom for four American hostages.
Hillary Clinton didn’t do the deal but she does support it.
*****
The emails released from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta by WikiLeaks are full of troubling information. Most of it points to the fact that, even during the primaries, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Obama White House and the mainstream media were all working together to get Hillary Clinton the nomination, and then to win her the election.
The White House should have stayed out of the primaries, but instead it leaked information from the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
But what is most disturbing is the proof that the mainstream media are not simply supporting Hillary Clinton but working with the Clinton campaign. The emails from John Harwood of The New York Times and NBC News back and forth with Podesta prove beyond any doubt that Harwood is working to help the Clinton campaign, providing it with information and feedback.
There is a certain amount of give and take that goes on between reporters and politicians. Reporters trade information they have for more information. It goes on all the time. But for a reporter who is supposed to be an unbiased observer of the election to be working with the campaign of one candidate is a gross dereliction of duty. How could Harwood possibly be an unbiased debate moderator (he served as a moderator during a Republican primary debate in 2015) when he is working hand in glove to assist the Hillary Clinton campaign?
Harwood should be fired, and if it had been discovered that he was working the same way with the Trump campaign he would already be out on the streets. But breaking all precedents in American journalism, The New York Times has publicly given its reporters permission to help the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Once again, it is inconceivable that the Republican National Committee (RNC) would allow this type of collusion to go on between supposedly unbiased moderators and the Democratic campaign. It would make one believe that the RNC is as opposed to Trump as the Democratic National Committee (DNC), except that year after year the RNC allows moderators to appear on nationally televised debates who are in the tank for the Democrats.
There is absolutely no reason for the RNC to agree to the moderators that it has other than the fact that the RNC is made up of a bunch of Republicans in name only, who actually don’t want the Republicans to win.
If Trump manages to pull this one out and get elected, his first order of business should be to fire every employee of the RNC and then he can move on to making changes in the federal government without worrying about being stabbed in the back by his own party.
*****
Speaking of stabbed in the back by his own party, Speaker Paul Ryan is now a Hillary Clinton supporter. He hasn’t come out and said it, but Ryan has said that he is no longer publicly supporting Trump.
One of two people in this country is going to be the next president, either Trump or Hillary Clinton. If you are not for Trump then you are for Hillary Clinton.
Ryan is not for Trump. If he had the courage to voice his convictions he would publicly state that he is for Hillary Clinton, but Ryan won’t admit reality. Trump is right about Ryan, since he won’t support the Republican nominee for president he should not be the Republican speaker of the House. As speaker he has proven that he is not a conservative, what he has become is simply a Washington insider.
Trump didn’t get the nomination by a lottery or coin toss, he won the Republican nomination because in state after state more Republicans voted for him than for any other candidate. He is the choice of rank-and-file Republican voters across the country. Ryan is turning his back, not on Trump, but on the Republican voters.
*****
I love the fact that I am supposed to be worried because the international economic experts don’t like Trump’s trade policies. If these experts knew anything they would have predicted the Great Recession of 2008. If they knew anything about how real economics works we would not be in the longest economic recovery period after a recession ever.
All these guys seem to know, if they know anything, is how things are supposed to work in books. How things work in the real world seems to be a complete mystery to all of them. I don’t know how they kept their jobs after the worst economic recession since the Depression caught them completely off guard, but they did and the mainstream media still behave as if they actually knew how the economy works.
It’s like a meteorologist predicting the weather in Miami will be sunny and warm and two hours later a Category 5 hurricane rips the city apart. Although meteorologists are not known for accuracy, I think that level of error would cost one his job. But these international economic experts were as stunned as anyone by the 2008 recession, and here we are eight years later listening to the same drivel.
I don’t know squat about international economics, but I know a few things about small business economics, and everything the government did to help small businesses after the recession hurt rather than helped. It’s always been hard for a small business to borrow money unless it didn’t need any money, but after the recession, with all the new bank reforms, it became nearly impossible.
The big banks did great, but the small businesses suffered. Isn’t it interesting that the economic experts who work for big banks and big finance recommended measures that saved the large financial institutions and killed thousands of small businesses?
To all those who say I’ve already admitted I don’t know anything about international economics therefore I should be ignored, I say, I don’t know anything about surgery, but if I went in for a heart transplant and came out of surgery discovering that I’d had my knee replaced instead, I’d know something was wrong with my doctor. If you’re supposed to have an appendectomy and come out of surgery with a facelift, you don’t have to have been to medical school to know that the surgeons messed up. And to be fair, a surgeon that did either one of those things would lose his license and probably go to prison. But the people whose advice ruined our economy just keep plugging along.
I think we’d get better economic advice if all of those guys were fired and the real men behind The Big Short took over economic policy. They actually knew what was happening to the economy. Not what the books said was supposed to happen but what was actually happening.
It reminds me of a journalism professor I had for one of my two journalism courses – the one who convinced me it would be a waste of time to get a master’s degree in journalism. He had written obituaries for a newspaper for six months and decided that he hated being a journalist, so he went to grad school and started teaching journalism. He knew nothing about real journalism, just what the books said about journalism. It was like being taught a course about rhinoceros by a man who had never seen one but had only read what other people, who may or may not have ever seen one, wrote.
*****
One of the great fears of Republicans about the election of Hillary Clinton as president is what she will do to the Supreme Court.
Currently there are eight members of the court because the Republican-led Senate has refused to consider the nomination by President Obama of Merrick Garland. The Supreme Court is operating with an even number of justices, which in its current configuration means the court is not overturning the liberal decisions of lower courts. A tie vote means the lower court decision stands.
But there is nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to approve any Supreme Court nominee. When the country has had a Republican president and a Democratic majority in the Senate, the Democrats have made it abundantly clear that they would not approve a conservative justice. It’s how former Justice David Souter ended up on the Supreme Court. Nobody really knew anything about him. President George H.W. Bush assumed he was a conservative. Souter turned out to be more liberal than some of the justices appointed by Democrats.
The Republicans have not held the Democratic presidents such as Obama to the same standard and have approved wildly liberal justices rather than go to war with the president.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, the Republican-led Senate should simply refuse to appoint anyone with whom they disagree about how the Constitution should be interpreted.
What if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who appears to be in failing health, could no longer serve? The court would then have a four-to-three conservative majority. It would be foolish for the Republicans in the Senate to approve a new liberal justice and give up that majority.
But for this to be accomplished the Senate would have to get rid of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is always ready to give the Democrats what they want to keep peace in his house. Get rid of McConnell, put a strong conservative in his place and if Hillary Clinton wants to appoint justices to the Supreme Court they will have to be constitutional conservatives. If she nominates liberals like Obama has, the Republicans should let it be known that the nomination is dead on arrival.
The Democrats have done it, perhaps not so stridently, but the effect has been the same. So why don’t the Republicans take a card out of the Democratic playbook and enhance it a little?
If the Republican senators don’t, then they might as well go home because the liberal justices on the Supreme Court don’t see their job as interpreting the Constitution as written but rewriting it as they think it should have been written.
There is no doubt that not a single founding father would have seen the Constitution they wrote as making gay marriage the law of the land, nor for that matter would any of them have seen abortion on demand as a right granted by the Constitution.
*****
It’s fairly amusing that mainstream Republicans are making a big deal of not supporting Donald Trump because of the sexist statements he made that have been released on the eve of the election.
The Trump supporters who gave Trump the Republican nomination did so despite the fact that the mainstream Republicans were fighting tooth and nail against him all the way through the primaries. Does anyone think these Trump supporters suddenly care how the mainstream Republicans, who could just as easily be mainstream Democrats, feel about Trump?
Trump ran against the Republican establishment, including the RNC, in the primaries. What is rarely pointed out is that either Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president. All of these Republican establishment types who say they aren’t supporting Trump are therefore supporting Hillary Clinton. It’s one or the other, as they know.
Sen. John McCain, who is certainly the leader of the Republican in name only movement, is a prime example of what is wrong in Washington and what Trump is running against. McCain wanted to have Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2008, the same man who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. If that isn’t proof that McCain is a Republican in name only, I can’t imagine what is.
McCain, when he did run for president, appeared to be doing everything in his power to get Obama elected. He is not stupid and has been involved in politics for 30 years. He knows what a winning campaign strategy looks like, and clearly he knows how to throw the fight and take a fall in the eighth round when he suddenly finds himself ahead on points and knows that it is not in his best interest to win.
*****
It is incredible to me that when it was discovered that President Bill Clinton was having sex with a young White House intern, often in the Oval Office, the American people were told by the mainstream media that what two consenting adults did in private was their own business. Even in the case where one of those consenting adults was the most powerful man in the world and the other was a White House intern, we were told that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the president of the United States using his power to have a sexual relationship with a young intern working in the White House.
We were also told that there was nothing wrong with the governor of Arkansas having a low-level state employee brought to his hotel room and then exposing himself to her and trying to force himself on her. This was OK because the low-level employee was what the Clinton staff described as someone from a “trailer park,” implying that women who live in trailer parks don’t deserve the same protections against sexual assault as women who live in the country club neighborhood.
The mainstream media supported this point of view and routinely made fun of Paula Corbin Jones because she didn’t speak well and didn’t dress according to their standards. In the end it turned out that even women from trailer parks deserve protection and Bill Clinton was forced to pay Jones $800,000, a fact that is rarely mentioned by the media.
Trump made some rude and crude statements. He has publicly apologized for those statements. Has Bill Clinton ever apologized to Jones? Has Bill Clinton ever apologized to Monica Lewinsky for taking advantage of her? More importantly, has Hillary Clinton ever apologized to the women that Bill Clinton abused for the statements she made about them?
Has Hillary Clinton ever apologized for saying that the entire Lewinsky scandal was the result of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”?
The stance of Hillary and Bill Clinton on all the sexual allegations against him has always been that the women were lying. It’s what Hillary and Bill Clinton said about Lewinsky until she produced the blue dress.
The evidence in the case of Jones was overwhelming in favor of the version of the story Jones told. There was no official reason for the governor of Arkansas to have law enforcement officers seek out a low-level employee and escort her to a private meeting with the governor in a hotel room.
If Highway Patrol officers tell a state employee that the governor is summoning her to his hotel room, does she really have the freedom to say no? Technically, of course she could say no, but in the real world, when men wearing guns tell people to do something, they usually believe they have no choice but to comply.
*****
During the second presidential debate, Hillary Clinton immediately contradicted herself when speaking about the war in Syria, but of course the moderators didn’t point it out and ask her which answer was true. The moderators didn’t ask a follow-up, probably because they were hoping that nobody noticed, or perhaps because they were under orders not to press Hillary Clinton on any of her mistakes.
Hillary Clinton said that she would absolutely not send any troops to Syria. Then she said she would send “special operators” to Syria. Special Forces troops are troops. The Special Forces are America’s most elite troops, but they are still troops. You can’t not send any troops and send Special Forces troops. Even for Hillary Clinton it was a glaring example of trying to take both sides of the issue.
Two possible follow-ups would have put more light on the subject. One is, if she really meant no troops in Syria, does that mean she would immediately pull out the troops Obama has sent to Syria? And the other is, how could she send troops to Syria if she planned to have no troops in Syria?
According to the mainstream media, Hillary Clinton can do no wrong. If she says that she plans to send no troops to Syria and that she plans to send Special Forces troops to Syria, then clearly in the opinion of the mainstream media there is nothing wrong with that statement.
*****
For years Republicans have been accusing the mainstream media of colluding with the Democrats. Both the mainstream media and the Democrats denied any improper cooperation between the two.
Now that emails are being released, there is absolute proof that the mainstream media worked with the DNC and with campaign committees to make sure the candidates didn’t get asked questions they didn’t want to answer and knew what questions they would be asked ahead of time.
Donna Brazile, who is now chairman of the DNC and at the time worked for CNN, leaked a town hall question in advance to the Clinton campaign. It’s no wonder that Hillary Clinton’s answers all sound like they have been practiced over and over again. If you know the questions it would be foolish not to be prepared for them.
In fact, thanks to the leaked emails, we now know that the campaign staff tells Hillary Clinton when to smile. Most adults know when a smile is appropriate. It is frightening that someone who doesn’t may be the next president, but that is actually one of the least frightening things about Hillary Clinton.
*****
The pronouncement that the Democrats are going to win control of the Senate from the mainstream media is getting louder. Remember the last time the mainstream media reported the Democrats were on the cusp of winning back control of the Senate? It was in 2014, and the Republicans ended election night with a four-seat majority.
As the votes were being counted, the mainstream media pundits were talking about what would happen if the Democrats fell short and the Senate was evenly split. It turned out the Democrats didn’t come close. The on-air pundits were forced to spend time speculating about why they were so wrong.
The point is that you can’t trust the mainstream media to report the news because they long ago gave up that as their objective. The mainstream media have morphed before our very eyes into a lobbying arm for the Democratic Party.
People like to have voted for a winner. If you can convince people that a candidate is going to win, sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is why you see more and more mainstream media types talking about how Hillary Clinton has already won.
Hillary Clinton hasn’t won. But the thing about this election is going to be who gets in the last shot before Nov. 8. No doubt the Democrats will find more tapes of Donald Trump saying stupid stuff and WikiLeaks is still promising a big document dump before the election. But the way this election is seesawing, it may come down to who gets in the best last shot.
*****
This is an interesting aside, but it explains some of Bill Clinton’s recent comments, like that Obamacare was the craziest thing ever. According to Ed Klein, who has just published another book about Hillary Clinton, Guilty as Sin, Bill Clinton is ambivalent about Hillary getting elected.
Bill currently lives in a penthouse apartment on top of his presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas He likes the privacy and the ability to invite young women up to the penthouse. Maybe they play Parcheesi, but I doubt it.
And he has no intention of giving up his current lifestyle to become the first gentleman with the press constantly snooping around.
But if she loses then they lose their policitical power, which will be a big hit for the Clinton money machine also known as the Clinton Foundation.
*****
I find it amazing that Trump taking a tax deduction of close to $1 billion is still such a big deal. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that it was an improper tax deduction.
People like President Obama who have no experience in the private sector make fun of him for losing so much money. But I’ve yet to hear anyone say that it was illegal for him to take the deduction.
Who doesn’t take all the tax deductions to which they are entitled? I’ve been filing federal income tax for over 40 years. There are a lot of tax deductions I haven’t taken, but it was because I didn’t know about them. I’ve always taken every possible deduction I knew I could and I think most people do the same thing.
Trump owned a lot of buildings and something in the tax code made it possible for him to take a billion dollar loss one year, so he did. I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t. Every homeowner I know writes off their mortgage interest because it is allowed by law.
Trump used the tax laws as they existed at the time to his advantage. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see anything wrong with it.
