Too Late Already

I, for one, am tired of hearing people say we should give Trump a chance as president. Sorry, but ... no. I don’t base my opposition to Trump merely on the fact that I believe he will be a lousy, corrupt politician. I base it on the fact that he’s already proven himself to be a poor excuse for a man. He’s bigoted, homophobic, misogynistic, and a serial sex predator; he’s a greedy, bullying would-be autocrat with a narcissist complex; he’s a congenital liar, a con man, and he thinks Americans are too stupid to realize that he’s pulling the wool over their eyes, that he has no intention of doing anything he promises. I wouldn’t want Trump in MY house, much less the White House. So, no, I won’t give him a chance. In my book, he’s already shown himself unworthy of one.

What Every Trump Voter Should Hear

“I tried to be polite, but now I just don’t give a damn. Because let’s be honest, we don’t live in polite America anymore. We live in grab-’em-by-the-pussy America now. So thank you for that.”

Responsibility

I keep hearing that people who voted Trump into office shouldn’t be universally denigrated, because many of them supported him for reasons other than the hatred and arrogant disregard for others that he demonstrated. OK, I can have sympathy for them.

But while all of that may be true, it’s also true that every one of those people who voted for him now OWNS what Trump will do next, whether it’s stealing health care coverage away from 20 million Americans, forcibly deporting millions of undocumented immigrants from our shores, working to undermine and then destroy Medicare and Social Security, banning abortion, undermining efforts necessary to rein in climate change, abrogating international treaties and leaving the United States with fewer and fewer allies it may need in case of attack, or ignoring the Constitution in his efforts to curb press freedoms and limit free speech. Some voters may have somehow succeeded in ignoring or dismissing the clear and present danger bigoted billionaire Trump represented, but that does not absolve them of blame for the damage he and his fellow Republicans intend to do to America’s future.

READ MORE: “Screw Your Feelings, Trump Voters,” by Aleksandar Hemon (Slate).

Disaster in the Making

This word will be much in use over the next four years:

kakistocracy

PRONUNCIATION:
(kak-i-STOK-ruh-see, kah-ki-)

MEANING:
noun: Government by the least qualified or worst persons.

Mencken Turned Out to Be Quite a Prophet

Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Hillary

I’ve dropped two longish personal posts onto my Facebook page since last night, and thought it might be worth sharing them here, too. They clearly define my mood. First, from last night:

It’s 10 p.m. in Seattle, and I need to go to bed. But I do so with fear in my heart. If prognostications are correct, and if all the pollsters were wrong, the United States has just elected a bigoted, incompetent, inexperienced, misogynistic hatemonger, serial liar, and would-be tyrant as its next president. I never thought I would see the country of my birth set out on such a sure course to disaster.

Before I head off to bed, I want to first apologize to the rest of the world for my country inflicting upon it what will surely be four years of new wars, economic decline, diplomatic tensions, and a wave of hatred and xenophobic violence. If Trump does indeed become the next president, international trust in the United States will inevitably decline, and this country’s stature as a shining beacon of hope will dim severely, if not be extinguished entirely.

This sharp detour toward misfortune was none of my doing; I did not, and would never, vote into the White House somebody as hateful, vengeful, and willfully ignorant as Trump. Whatever motivated others among my countrymen to cast their votes in his favor, I cannot fathom. All I can do is hope that the United States somehow weathers this horror and puts itself to rights once more, even if I don’t live long enough to see how that is accomplished.

I am an American. But tonight I am ashamed of what my country has done.

And then from earlier today:

To any Facebook “friends” who voted for Trump: please unfriend me now.

I don’t care why you voted against Hillary Clinton. It’s what you voted FOR that distresses me. You voted for a more hateful country; a country that thumbs its nose at the rest of the world; a country that is OK with bigotry and racism and sexism; a country that denigrates people because of who they love; a country that doesn't care about affordable health care for all; a country that thinks women are mere objects for male entertainment; a country that accepts vulgar pronouncements from our “leaders,” without regard to how such language divides us and harms our youngest citizens; a country where elected officials encourage violence in order to maintain their fragile hold on power; a country that despises people for being well-educated and well-informed; a country where Big Business is allowed to run rampant, without legislative checks, and the rich are applauded for not paying their share of taxes; a country with a banana republic government and a megalomaniac at the helm; a country that fears international alliances and therefore must spend more and more money in hopes of self-protection; a country where short-term gains trump long-term accomplishments; a country that is not the country in which I was born.

Our views of the world, and of a productive U.S. future and what is right are too different to share the same space. You’ve voted for isolationism—get used to that by unfriending me now.

It’s Time to Step Up and Vote!

Americans, at least those who have not already participated in early voting drives, have the opportunity today—November 8—to cast their ballots in what more than a few commentators have called one of the most important elections in modern U.S. history. It’s historic not simply because it may well result in this country being led for the first time in more than two centuries by a woman president; but also because her opponent has demonstrated a rank disregard for political norms such as disclosing his tax returns and graciously accepting defeat, and an authoritarian antipathy toward not only a free press and civil political discourse, but also shocking disrespect for entire swaths of the American electorate, including immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

Nobody who knows me personally or who has read Limbo over the years should be in any doubt of who I’m voting for this year. My enthusiastic support goes to Democrat Hillary Clinton, whose qualifications for the Oval Office (former secretary of state, former U.S. senator, former first lady of both Arkansas and the nation) are without dispute, and whose temperament and grasp of the issues and tough decisions facing this country over the next four years is far superior to her adversary’s. I didn’t vote for Hillary back in 2008, when she was running for the Democratic nomination against the more charismatic and inspirational Barack Obama. But I have more closely watched her perform on the international and national stage during the last eight years, and been mightily impressed.

Hillary Clinton may not be a perfect candidate for the U.S. presidency: no human being can be. Yet, in the face of often ugly, destructive propaganda from the Republican Party—born amid fevered partisan delusions and take-no-prisoners hatred in the 1990s, when her husband, Bill Clinton, was president, and still infecting politics two decades later—Hillary has maintained a steady and determined demeanor, and been a consistent and assertive voice for such things as human rights, women’s rights, and voting rights. Unlike her bombastic adversary, Hillary believes in the value of science and the dangers inherent in not acting against threats of global warming; believes in the value of maintaining historical alliances with other countries that the United States may need in the event of any emergency; believes that affordable health care should be a right of all Americans, not just those with deep pockets; and believes that the Supreme Court of the United States has an important role in improving our lot as citizens, and should never be held hostage to over-grown schoolyard bullies who contend that only Republican presidents have a right to choose new justices for that high bench.

As The New York Times wrote in its September endorsement of Mrs. Clinton to be the 45th U.S. chief executive:

The next president will take office with bigoted, tribalist movements and their leaders on the march. In the Middle East and across Asia, in Russia and Eastern Europe, even in Britain and the United States, war, terrorism and the pressures of globalization are eroding democratic values, fraying alliances and challenging the ideals of tolerance and charity.

The 2016 campaign has brought to the surface the despair and rage of poor and middle-class Americans who say their government has done little to ease the burdens that recession, technological change, foreign competition and war have heaped on their families.

Over 40 years in public life, Hillary Clinton has studied these forces and weighed responses to these problems. Our endorsement is rooted in respect for her intellect, experience, toughness and courage over a career of almost continuous public service, often as the first or only woman in the arena. …

Through war and recession, Americans born since 9/11 have had to grow up fast, and they deserve a grown-up president. A lifetime’s commitment to solving problems in the real world qualifies Hillary Clinton for this job, and the country should put her to work.

Of Hillary’s Republican rival … well, here’s what The New Yorker said about would-be demagogue and notorious pussy-grabber Trump:

On every issue of consequence, including economic policy, the environment, and foreign affairs, Hillary Clinton is a distinctly capable candidate: experienced, serious, schooled, resilient. When the race began, Clinton, who has always been a better office-holder than a campaigner, might have anticipated a clash of ideas and personalities on the conventional scale, against, say, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Instead, the Democratic nominee has ended up playing a sometimes secondary role in a squalid American epic. If she is elected, she will have weathered a prolonged battle against a trash-talking, burn-it-to-the-ground demagogue. Unfortunately, the drama is not likely to end soon. The aftereffects of this campaign may befoul our civic life for some time to come.

If the prospect of a female President represents a departure in the history of American politics, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the real-estate mogul and Republican nominee, does, too—a chilling one. He is manifestly unqualified and unfit for office. Trained in the arts of real-estate promotion and reality television, he exhibits scant interest in or familiarity with policy. He favors conspiracy theory and fantasy, deriving his knowledge from the darker recesses of the Internet and “the shows.” He has never held office or otherwise served his country, never acceded to the authority of competing visions and democratic resolutions.

Worse still, he does not accept the authority of constitutional republicanism—its norms, its faiths and practices, its explicit rules and implicit understandings. That much is clear from his statements about targeting press freedoms, infringing on an independent judiciary, banning Muslim immigration, deporting undocumented immigrants without a fair hearing, reviving the practice of torture, and, in the third and final [presidential] debate, his refusal to say that he will accept the outcome of the election. Trump has even threatened to prosecute and imprison his opponent. The American demagogues from the past century who most closely resemble him—Father [Charles] Coughlin and Senator Joseph McCarthy among them—were dangers to the republic, but they never captured the Presidential nomination of a major political party. Father Coughlin commanded a radio show and its audience. President Trump would command the armed forces of the United States, control its nuclear codes, appoint judges, propose legislation, and conduct foreign policy. It is a convention of our quadrennial pieties to insist that this election is singularly important. But Trump really does represent something singular. The prospect of such a President—erratic, empty, cruel, intolerant, and corrupt—represents a form of national emergency.

Sadly, Trump has pulled the entire Republican Party down to his mud-wrestling level, endangering the future stability of our democratic republic and worsening tensions between the two major political parties. The deceptive practices, racism, sexism, petty vengefulness, and general hatreds Trump demonstrates, and which his fellow Republican candidates all across the country have endorsed (either overtly or through their timorous silence), have convinced me that what was once known as the Grand Old Party has fallen on hard times and must be reconceived; in the meantime, it cannot be trusted anymore with the levers of power. Therefore, not only have I voted for Hillary Clinton as president this year, but I’m casting a straight Democratic ticket. I want to be sure that the new President Clinton enters the White House supported by a serious, cooperative Congress that, beginning in 2017, can go back to legislating for the benefit of all Americans, not just Republican scorched-earthers.

Today promises a new era in U.S. history, whether favorable or divisive, depending on the vote outcomes. It’s up to all of us to take part in deciding what sort of country we want: one where voices are raised in optimism and mutual support, or where the angry shouts of right-wing extremists overcome common sense? So cast your ballot thoughtfully, as if your future depended on it … because it does.

READ MORE: “The Imperative of Voting for Hillary Clinton,” by Richard North Patterson (The Huffington Post); “Hillary Clinton Has to Be Gracious to Donald Trump. The Rest of Us Don’t,” by Paul Waldman (The Washington Post).

Trump’s Failures Build

Based on this editorial in yesterday’s New York Times—pointing out the ridiculousness of Republican Donald Trump’s recent charge that President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton somehow co-founded ISIS—Daniel W. Drezner, an American professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, suggests on Twitter that Trump has “stumbled into a campaign doom loop”:

1. Trump’s polling gets a negative shock
2. Fewer moderates attend his rallies
3. Only hardcore supporters go see Trump
4. Trump tailors speeches to get a rise out of his audience
5. With an audience of crazies, Trump needs to sound
even crazier
6. In sounding crazier, Trump’s poll numbers sink, more voters
turned off
7. Back to #2

Clinton Wins the Character Contest

This is a surprise. The Houston Chronicle, one of the largest newspapers in Texas (and a previous backer of Republican Mitt Romney) has just endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.

And in no uncertain terms.

On Nov. 8, 2016, the American people will decide between two presidential contenders who represent the starkest political choice in living memory. They will choose between one candidate with vast experience and a lifelong dedication to public service and another totally lacking in qualifications to be president. They will decide whether they prefer someone deeply familiar with the issues that are important to this nation or a person whose paper-thin, bumper-sticker proposals would be dangerous to the nation and the world if somehow they were enacted.

The Chronicle editorial page does not typically endorse early in an election cycle; we prefer waiting for the campaign to play out and for issues to emerge and be addressed. We make an exception in the 2016 presidential race, because the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not merely political. It is something much more basic than party preference.

An election between the Democrat Clinton and, let's say, the Republican Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Marco Rubio, even the hyper-ideological Ted Cruz, would spark a much-needed debate about the role of government and the nation's future, about each candidate's experience and abilities. But those Republican hopefuls have been vanquished. To choose the candidate who defeated them—fairly and decisively, we should point out—is to repudiate the most basic notions of competence and capability.

Any one of Trump's less-than-sterling qualities—his erratic temperament, his dodgy business practices, his racism, his Putin-like strongman inclinations and faux-populist demagoguery, his contempt for the rule of law, his ignorance—is enough to be disqualifying. His convention-speech comment, "I alone can fix it," should make every American shudder. He is, we believe, a danger to the Republic.

The paper goes on to applaud Clinton’s opposition to Trump’s “ridiculous border-wall,” her support of the Affordable Care Act and immigration reform, and her serious approach to climate change before concluding:

These are unsettling times, even if they're not the dark, dystopian end times that Trump lays out. They require a steady hand. That's not Donald Trump.

The times also require a person who envisions a hopeful future for this nation, a person who has faith in the strong, prosperous and confident America we hope to bequeath our children and grandchildren, as first lady Michelle Obama so eloquently envisioned in Philadelphia. That's not Donald Trump's America.

It is Hillary Clinton's, who reminded her listeners Thursday night that "When there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit."

America's first female president would be in the Oval Office more than a century and a half after a determined group of women launched the women's suffrage movement, almost a century after women in this country won the right to vote. It's a milestone, to be sure. Few could have imagined it would be so consequential.

You can read the whole editorial here.

Right-Wing Hatred Boils Over

Following violent clashes on Friday between angry supporters of Republican presidential contender Donald Trump and protesters in Chicago, Illinois, MSNBC News host Rachel Maddow devoted a segment of her evening show to “a video timeline of … Trump’s comments at rallies that have stoked hostility and incited violence …” An incredulous Maddow remarks at the end of this segment: “American presidential politics isn’t like this for anybody else. American presidential politics did not get this way on its own. This is the work of an American presidential candidate who deliberately made this happen. And the Republican Party is about to nominate him for president.”

Click here to watch the entire segment.

READ MORE: “No One Is Violating Donald Trump’s First Amendment Rights,” by Kiley Kroh (Think Progress).

Just Fire Him Now

“The Republican candidates may have a lot of fun campaigning for office, but they haven’t a prayer of knowing what to do if they ever enter the White House.” -- The New York Times, October 15, 2015

Trump’s America vs. Clinton’s America

After slogging her way through the three 2016 Republican presidential debates so far, and also last night’s more substantive Democratic face-off, Heather Digby Parton--who writes the political blog Hullabaloo--sums up the radically different ways that Republicans and Democrats look at our modern world in this piece for Salon:

Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that’s just for starters.

Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all.

A little over a year from now voters are going to decide which country they want to live in. Let’s hope they choose wisely. The rest of us are going to have to live in it too.

READ MORE: “Sorry, Haters: Hillary Clinton Won the Democratic Debate,” by Amanda Marcotte (Salon); “Hillary Clinton Won the CNN Debate with a Surprisingly Spectacular Performance,” by Josh Voorhees (Slate); “Why Clinton’s Debate Dominance May Change the 2016 Race,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “Hillary Clinton Passes Her First Major Test and Momentum Is on Her Side” (NBC News).

How Far Down Can They Go?

This cartoon is the work of Randy Moulton, who works for the Asheville, North Carolina, Mountain XPress.

GOPers Fear the Monster They Made

In a piece posted today on the Washington Post Web site, columnist Paul Waldman nicely sums up the nightmare Republicans face as they try desperately to figure out what they can do to prevent off-the-rails presidential candidate Donald Trump from further damaging the GOP’s chances with America’s minority and mainstream voters:

I think there’s something going on here that goes beyond Trump, and beyond the issue of immigration (on which all the Republican candidates have essentially the same position). It’s been said before that Democrats hate their base while Republicans fear their base, and the second part seems to be more true now than ever. The Tea Party experience of the last six years, which helped them win off-year elections and also produced rebellions against incumbent Republicans, has left them living in abject terror of their own voters.

It’s as though the GOP got itself a vicious dog because it was having an argument with its neighbor, only to find that the dog kept biting members of its own family. And now it finds itself tiptoeing around the house, paralyzed by the fear that it might startle the dog and get a set of jaws clamped around its ankle.

READ MORE: “Why Trump’s Surge Among GOP Voters Matters,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “How Did This Monster Get Created? The Decades of GOP Lies that Brought Us Donald Trump, Republican Frontrunner,” by Heather Cox Richardson (Salon).

Certainly Not the Best Advisors

Following reports that the would-be Republican’t candidates for president in 2016 have been looking to members of George W. Bush’s failed administration for advice on foreign policy, Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog had this to say:

House Republicans sought out Dick Cheney for guidance on foreign policy, as if he has some credibility on the issue. Condoleezza Rice is lecturing Americans on why she wants us to get over our war “weariness.” And 2016 candidates are making a concerted effort to “court” Donald Rumsfeld, as if associating with him will bolster their national aspirations.

Perhaps now would be a good time to point out some inconvenient details: these folks were wrong about everything. Their decisions brought deadly, catastrophic consequences. To pretend that these people have something worthwhile to offer in the areas of foreign policy and/or global leadership is to pretend reality simply has no meaning.

Put it this way: in 1940, were Republican presidential hopefuls courting Hoover’s economic team? I rather doubt it. So why is Rumsfeld in demand now?

You can read all of Benen’s piece here.

Bridge Scandal Sinks Christie’s 2016 Hopes

This comes from Salon editor-at-large Joan Walsh:

Although I’m on record saying a year ago that [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie would never be president, precisely because of his vengeful and bullying temperament, I actually did see a route for him to win a GOP primary, which many people dismiss. It was the same route Mitt Romney took: being the guy with the money who let the Tea Party crazies knock each other off. Romney was never the frontrunner in polls, but as each rival took his or her turn in the lead (yes, Michele Bachmann was taken seriously after the Ames, Iowa straw poll), and even won a primary here or there, Romney steadily racked up delegates and cash and wound up the last man standing, despite the loathing of the far-right base.

Christie might have done the same thing, if Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Marco Rubio all jumped in, alongside Rick Perry and maybe for some real fun, Iowa’s Steve King. But if Christie, like the Tea Partiers, has to endure a mini-primary to win the Establishment and big donor crown, he would be in big trouble.

Now he’s in big trouble already, and you can bet GOP operatives are combing the record along with Rachel Maddow’s staff and dozens if not hundreds of local and national reporters, to tell the story of the real Chris Christie. That’s in addition to the state and federal investigators who will be looking for evidence that Christie knew more about the Fort Lee plot than he’s shared. Christie will be spending more time with lawyers than with GOP donors in the months to come, and he may have to focus on keeping his job rather than winning the White House. His path to the White House is all but closed, even if some national pundits can’t bear to admit it yet.

Her entire piece about Christie’s political and legal woes is here.

READ MORE: “Forget 2016, Chris Christie May Not Even Be Governor Much Longer,” by Joan Walsh (Salon); “Chris Christie: Dimwitted Dupe or Demented Liar?,” by Brian Beutler (Salon); “At the Heart of the Scandal,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “Christie’s Either Naive or a Liar. Neither Makes Him Presidential,” by David Garber (Political Carnival); “Obama Sees a Problem, Says I Will Fix It. Christie Sees a Problem and Says Not My Fault,” by Jason Easley (PoliticsUSA); “Christie Bridge Scandal: Five Outrageous Examples of Political Revenge,” by Erin McCann (The Guardian).