Suck It, 2016

In memoriam, here is a partial list of the many, many, many important deaths in 2016:

David Bowie

Prince

Kenny Baker

Alan Rickman

The last remaining shred of the Republican Party’s sense of shame

Ted Cruz’ political career

Al Franken’s sense of humor

Keith Emerson

Muhammad Ali

Arnold Palmer

Leonard Cohen

Greg Lake

Fidel Castro (and if there is no Hell, let one be created for him alone)

Zsa Zsa Gabor

George Michael

Carrie Fisher AND Debbie Reynolds

The entire city of Aleppo

And the American people’s faith in a constitutional republic

Review: Rogue One

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story strikes me as being an example of fan fiction that just happens to have been produced by the owners of the intellectual property. I say this as the highest form of compliment.

Fan fiction started off with the Star Trek community, as authors (mostly female) distributed “slash” stories (like Kirk/Spock) detailing gay relationships between principal characters, and other salacious ideas that would never have been approved by producers or censors. But as fandom became more popular (and respectable), fanfic evolved to a more professional quality, and fans even got to making their own video productions, like James Cawley’s Phase II (creating new adventures for the original Star Trek characters years before J.J. Abrams’ 2009 film).  But the main thing these productions had in common is that they were creating original stories for established characters (or an established setting) that the owners of the property didn’t want to produce themselves. But Paramount Pictures, the owners of Star Trek, seem to have reversed their tolerance for such things, quashing the recent fan project Star Trek: Axanar with a lawsuit.

Which from a fan perspective is too bad, because these ideas help expand the concept of what is possible in a fictional setting and ask questions not answered in official “canon.”

For example: What happened in the nearly 20 years between Star Wars Episodes III and IV?

The Star Wars prequels established that Palpatine had been planning to build his Death Star years before he became Emperor, and before Luke Skywalker was born. Rogue One is the story of how the new Rebel Alliance plotted to gain the plans to the space station, hoping to learn its structural flaws. (‘Spoiler alert- they found one.’ -Jimmy Kimmel) It centers on former Rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) who, like Rey in Episode VII, is a strong, likable heroine who is at the center of the action rather than being a support character or damsel in distress. She is recruited by Rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), who wants her to find her father, an Imperial scientist, but doesn’t tell her exactly why. Their mission goes south but they learn that the Empire has just completed its “planet killer” space station, and when the Rebel Alliance refuses to organize, Jyn resolves to find the plans to the base herself. As such, the movie takes cues from those old World War II movies where commandos have to perform a secret mission in occupied Europe, and you know someone is getting killed, you just aren’t sure who and how.

This greater realism (relative to Star Wars) is increased by the fact that apart from Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones!), there are no Jedi in the piece, although martial arts star Donnie Yen plays a variant of the Blind Master archetype, who was a monk at one of the last temples of the Force. This shift in emphasis is important in at least a minor way, given that while you did have a vast universe to explore with the Star Wars setting, the stories so far have mainly been about the journey of a prospective Jedi into mastery – while Luke (and Rey) had a large group around them with their own stories, once they developed their powers, they started spending more time away from the team. The prequels, meanwhile, were almost entirely about the Jedi Order.

So that in itself makes Rogue One, as launching point for Lucasfilm’s “anthology” concept, very valuable.  It ISN’T really stand-alone, given that the story ends almost exactly at the point where Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) begins. And again, we know how that worked out, and it isn’t too hard to guess what happens to these characters. But they are given a certain level of depth that the main series (especially the prequels) were not known for. Put another way, if you have an acquaintance who for some reason can’t stand Star Wars, you might ask them to see Rogue One with you. It works as a Star Wars story, and it works outside of being a Star Wars story. I hope it is a sign of things to come.

Your Damn Emails

Shortly after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, she had met with some of her campaign donors and told them that a decisive factor in the result was the decision of FBI Director James Comey to resume inquiries on her use of email on a private server while she was Secretary of State, 11 days before the election.  This despite the point that Comey had already told the Department of Justice on July 5 that there should be no criminal charges brought on the case. While some pundits have considered Clinton’s statement (and similar opinions from campaign chairman John Podesta) as defensive rationalizing, I think it’s on target. Given the margin of victory and Clinton’s lead in the polls, Clinton had reason to believe that simply bringing up the matter again, even to Clinton’s apparent favor, “stopped our (campaign’s) momentum” and undercut her advantage with white suburban women. Before the election, a Clinton spokesman had even said that by “dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing [Vladimir] Putin’s dirty work to help elect Donald Trump. The FBI is now investigating this crime, the unanswered questions are why Donald Trump strangely won’t condemn it and whether any of his associates are involved.”

It turns out that there is some outside support for the theory.  According to a CIA statement on December 9, “Moscow was not only interfering with the election, but that its actions were intended to help Trump, according to a senior U.S. official. The assessment is based in part on evidence that Russian actors had hacked Republicans as well as Democrats but were only releasing information harmful to Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.”

As a result of such information, President Obama has ordered an investigation of the elections, but it wasn’t just the Russians who brought up Clinton’s emails. Obviously Comey did too, and no one believes he is compromised by the Russians. Whether he had motive to bring Clinton down, he had the ability to do so, because what Bernie Sanders called Hillary’s “damn emails” remained a weakness that the Clinton campaign did not minimize and largely did not recognize.

Along with numerous other issues (that I’m sure many books will be written on), Clinton’s campaign was undermined by her persistent use of private email services for her communications as Secretary of State. She never used an official (state.gov) email address. Her email accounts were not disclosed to senior State Department personnel. The State Department’s policy as of 2005 (Clinton joined in 2009) is that employees must “generally” use department systems to conduct official business. Furthermore the Department had issued numerous warnings with regard to cybersecurity owing to known attacks on State Department posts. On March 2011, the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security sent a memorandum directly to Secretary Clinton,  saying: “Threat analysis by the DS cyber security team and related incident reports indicate a dramatic increase since January 2011 in attempts by cyber actors to compromise the private home e-mail accounts of senior Department officials.” The State Department confirmed that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had used a private email server, although Washington staff had also confirmed that at the time Powell was in office, other employees did not have Internet connection on their desktop computers and that the Department “was not aware at the time of the magnitude of the security risks associated with information technology.  By Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the Department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated.”

Emails sent to Clinton’s private address were first discovered in 2013, when the hacker “Guccifer” hacked the email account of Clinton family associate Sid Blumenthal, including communications about the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  Blumenthal did not have a State Department clearance when he received material that has since been classified by the State Department.   

By contrast, Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (ne‘ Bradley) Manning has been given a 35-year sentence at Leavenworth for providing information to WikiLeaks (the same site that helped leak some of Clinton’s State Department emails) and former CIA Director David Petraeus has had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for providing his mistress classified information.   (Of course, as President-elect, Donald Trump had entertained the possibility of appointing Petraeus HIS Secretary of State, and when he recently went on a victory-lap tour of the heartland, and the crowd yelled ‘Lock Her Up’ in their now stock-chant against Hillary, Trump said flat-out: ‘No, forget it.  That plays great before the election.  Now we don’t care, right?’)

Only after Clinton left her position at State did the Congress pass the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, specifically forbidding an executive department employee from using personal emails for government business unless submitted for archive.

The best that could be said in this case is the Clinton team was able to operate that loosely with electronic security because the rules were that undefined, which is not exactly a defense of the way things were run, by either party. The worst that can be said is that the Clinton team’s relative nonchalance on the matter of electronic security made it that much easier for the Russian hackers to compromise their communications and make the emails an even bigger politcal issue than they would have been. I mean, I’m glad that Democrats think that a government official’s emails are a security interest now. But do they think that rival powers only spy on us when it’s an election year?

The thing is, if the election turned out to be that close, and the emails were a long-term weakness that Republicans were able to exploit, and the press kept going for them, why didn’t Clinton and her team consider the matter serious enough to decisively address? No, it wasn’t fair that she got taken out largely by a “nothingburger” issue, especially given Trump’s far greater level of corruption, which he has gone out of his way to emphasize since becoming president-elect. No, it isn’t fair that Republicans made her connection to Goldman-Sachs an issue when Trump is making at least two Goldman-Sachs veterans members of his Administration. No it isn’t fair that she lost only because of the Electoral College. But Clinton, like Trump, like Al Gore, and like every other candidate, knew what the terms of getting elected were, and it reflects on the candidate if they can’t meet them.

Hillary Clinton failed as a candidate by the obvious test that she failed to prove to enough people that she was a better president (or at least more ethical than) Donald Trump, which should be the easiest thing in the world. But to look at it another way: As weak a candidate as she was, she was going up against DONALD TRUMP. And were it not for the Electoral College system, she would have won the presidential race with a clear majority of votes. It makes you wonder how well she would have done if she had felt as threatened by Trump as she was by Bernie Sanders. But this is just the most obvious example of how the mainstream Left falls into complacency in its sense of superiority to the Right spectrum of opinion, even if that superiority is akin to the comparison of a 300-pound chainsmoking couch potato to a paraplegic with an IQ of 70 and delusions of being God.

As it stood, the Left based its case on screaming, “We HAVE to elect Hillary Clinton! Hillary is the only way to stop Trump! If we don’t elect Hillary Clinton, the gates of Hell will open up and swallow the Earth!” and a lot of the country went: “…fuck it, let’s see what Hell looks like.”

You Done Fucked Up

“It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear. “

-Ayn Rand, 1962

“Keep your lies consistent.”

-Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #60

Since The Election, Donald Trump has been not quite as boorish as I expected, but still basically true to form.  Most recently he’s twitted that anybody who burns the flag needs to have their citizenship revoked. Most likely to distract from recent accusations that his son-in-law has conflict of interest problems.  Or, to rally all those people who got bent out of shape when liberals did mass street protests against Trump’s victory. I mean, look at it this way: When the Left gets angry, they go en masse into the streets, protest, and kick stuff over. When the Right gets angry, they go en masse into the polls and elect Donald Trump. Over the next four years, it remains to be seen which temper tantrum will cause more property damage and disruption of human life.

Because that’s what this amounted to. Half of the recent distrust of Hillary Clinton was her vague to non-existent defense on her lack of email and phone security as Secretary of State. But it turns out that Trump as president-elect has carried out a phone conversation (on a non-secured line) with the president of Argentina, a conversation that Ivanka Trump was also privy to.  Did all the Trump voters who wanted a cleaner Washington really think that Trump, with his declared reputation for shady dealing, was going to be cleaner than the Clintons?

All you Bible-thumpers, did you really believe Trump when he said his favorite New Testament book was “Two Corinthians”?

Did you really believe Trump when you said he was an outsider? That he would drain the swamp?  Do you believe him now when he nominates Goldman Sachs veteran Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, and is entertaining both David “Actually Gave Out Classified Information” Petraeus and Mitt Romney, the ultimate flip-flopper, as Secretary of State? Did you believe that Trump was going to staff Washington with outsiders, when all of his nominees are veterans of the system- because they know Washington, and he doesn’t?

Did you really believe him? No. Of course not.

I have joked that if Donald Trump could get the endorsement of both David Duke and Sheldon Adelson, that’s a pretty big tent.

It’s not really a joke. In fact, this point is at the core of the cognitive dissonance required to be a Trump voter.

Adelson is an arch-Zionist. Duke is an arch-anti-Semite. Trump CANNOT want what they both want. Either he is lying to one of them, or at least one of them is lying to himself about Trump. That is what it takes to support Trump. You have to convince yourself “Oh, he won’t do that crazy thing” (that someone else wants him to do) but he WILL do that crazy thing that YOU want him to do.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes. A pompous, stupid Emperor gets fleeced by a con artist who sells him weightless, invisible clothing which is “magic” and can only be seen by those who are “virtuous.” Well, the Emperor doesn’t want to admit he isn’t virtuous, so he takes the deal for non-clothing. And because he’s the Emperor, everyone around him has to go along with the deal. And they all have to exaggerate how wonderful his clothing looks. Until he goes out on parade showing his naked ass, and an innocent child (whom no one could accuse of being unvirtuous) says, “But he’s got nothing on!”

Well, this point in history is kind of the opposite of that. The Emperor’s subjects had to go along with the scam as long as they did BECAUSE he was the Emperor, and could cut off their heads if they didn’t agree with him. Trump started out with wealth and prestige, but he wasn’t the Emperor. We, The People gave him the power to cut off heads because we looked at his lumpy, naked ass and declared he was wearing the most sumptuous clothing, and no amount of evidence would convince us otherwise.

The fact is, that you, the Trumpets, want to be lied to. There is no better way to put it.

You want to be lied to.

You would just prefer to be whipped and beaten by a Liar-in-Chief with an “R” next to his name instead of a “D.” Well, Trumpets, you are about to learn the same lesson as Chris Christie: In politics, there is no such thing as topping from the bottom. And all you liberals who wonder why I have a problem with Big Government- you’re about to find out.

I have tried to come up with some way of getting across exactly how moronic and counterproductive and anti-reason the Trump vote was, and then the analogy hit me. Boy, did it hit me.

A few days back, just before Thanksgiving, I had to save money until payday, I didn’t have much in the cupboard, but I still had some leftover lasagna from a family dinner at an Italian restaurant and I figured I could eat that after work. I mean, I hadn’t gotten around to eating it for about… seven days… after I took it home, but there wasn’t much of it, and it didn’t look bad… I figured, “what’s the worst that could happen?”

And on the same night, I had a bottle of a prescription antibiotic that my dentist had prescribed in order to treat gum infection, prior to him doing an extraction. I was feeling a little bad the week before, just before the Italian dinner, so I temporarily quit the antibiotic. I looked it up on the Internet, and the potential side effects include (among others I did not experience) chills, difficulty with breathing, difficulty with swallowing, general body swelling, increased thirst, itching, nausea, rash, and shortness of breath. So I had not taken the antibiotic for a week, and was feeling better, but I still had at least another week before the dental appointment, and I wasn’t quite sure that I had gotten side effects from the prescription or whether I was just affected by a change in the weather, and I wanted to make sure the prescription wasn’t the cause of my illness. Only one capsule. At the same time as the lasagna. I figured, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Well- ladies and gentlemen, after two solid hours of projectile vomiting from my diaphragm while leaking liquid fire out of my anus, I can tell you EXACTLY what the worst was that could happen.

Now, you the reader, may look at this account, and think: “James. What. The. Fuck. Do you have no sense? Were you not capable of making judgments from previous data? Did you HAVE to learn this lesson the hard way?

“Wasn’t your choice REMARKABLY STUPID?“

Well yes. Yes it was. Remarkably stupid.

I still feel okay in that my catastrophic fuckups in life only affect me and do not inflict collateral damage on my entire country and its position in the world.

Yes, I did vote for Gary Johnson. I have gone into great detail in explaining why. I have also said that if one is thinking of going third-party that one must think strategically.  I felt safe in voting third-party in Nevada because Nevada is basically two states: the Democratic-to-independent Greater Las Vegas area versus Cliven Bundy Land,  and the votes of the former usually drown out the latter. That was not the case in other “swing” states. I also said that if one cannot transcend binary thinking, or if polling in one’s state was that close, that an establishment politician with Machiavellian survival skills was still a better steward of the nuclear codes than a spoiled little rich boy who doesn’t know which end of the fork to use.

Yes, I did not vote for Hillary Clinton. I have gone into great detail as to why she was a bad candidate, for reasons having nothing to do with her emails (although I plan to address that subject in a future post). But if the two major candidates, and even the third and fourth candidates, were not worth supporting, that does not justify actively endorsing the worst of them. Put it this way: if all the people who voted against Hillary Clinton had voted for Hillary Clinton- we would have President Hillary Clinton. And as P.J. O’Rourke put it, “she would be a terrible president, but she would be terrible on conventional standards.” If all the people who voted against Hillary had voted for Gary Johnson, most likely we would have President Gary Johnson. The worst-case scenario there is IF he overcame Democratic AND Republican opposition, Johnson would have crafted a policy agenda that would horrify “progressives,” but he would not be a sexist, he would not be a racist, and he would not be a blithering idiot. Well, okay, he might be a blithering idiot, but he would not be a sexist and racist. But the vast majority of people who voted against Clinton voted for Trump, so the scenario now is a sexist AND racist AND blithering idiot WITH the lockstep support of the majority party.

And all because so many took to heart something Trump kept saying on the campaign trail, ostensibly as an appeal to blacks and Hispanics in “terrible” neighborhoods, but really intended to white people in terrible neighborhoods: “What have you got to lose?”

What have you got to lose? Like, what did I have to lose by not eating rancid lasagna and risking a pharmaceutical allergy? Well, I could have lost the agony and physical exhaustion of autofire Bazooka blasting from both ends of my digestive tract. But that was two hours. You Trumpets decided to inflict the political equivalent of that experience on yourselves and the rest of the country for four years. And you had A LOT more fair warning than I did.

You done fucked up.

So now the last step between the current status quo and Orange Julius Caesar is the actual vote of the Electoral College on December 19, and the hope that some “faithless electors” will prevent the formality of Trump’s election. This week one of those Republican Texas electors, Art Sisneros, announced that he could not vote for Trump, but rather than “vote his conscience” (as Ted Cruz might ask him to do) he decided to withdraw from his position, presumably so that the Republicans could fill the position with someone who will make the choice he opposes. He explained his decision, sort of, in a blog post, and however self-righteous, Christian and hand-wringing his position is, he does explain why it is unlikely that the Electoral College will actually perform its regulatory function in the system: “The Electoral College was corrupted from its original intent once states started dictating the votes of the Electors.  The two biggest aggressors to the original system were from political parties and the switch to winner-take-all states. The rise of political parties, as George Washington prophetically predicted, [in his Farewell Address] has had a “baneful effect” on our nation. …Originally Electors were free from political parties and their pledges. What mattered most was the character and qualifications of the candidate, not the viability of their path to victory (primaries) or the team that any candidate represented. The Electors were also free from these statewide popular vote contests that run all but two states today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Breakdown_and_revision “When James Madison and Hamilton, two of the most important architects of the Electoral College, saw this strategy [statewide popular vote] being taken by some states, they protested strongly. Madison and Hamilton both made it clear this approach violated the spirit of the Constitution. Hamilton considered a pre-pledged elector to violate the spirit of Article II of the Constitution insofar as such electors could make no ‘analysis’ or ‘deliberate’ concerning the candidates. Madison agreed entirely, saying that when the Constitution was written, all of its authors assumed individual electors would be elected in their districts and it was inconceivable a ‘general ticket’ of electors dictated by a state would supplant the concept. Madison wrote, ‘The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; & was exchanged for the general ticket.”
And thus it becomes more clear that the real Original Sin of the constitutional system was not the tolerance of slavery, as poisonous as that was. The fundamental flaw was that the Founders recognized that party politics was a major liability in the old British system, but they considered it to be an aberration that they would deliberately avoid rather than a political default, and put no thought into countering or balancing such partisanship in the system. And thus we are where we are now.

Where we are now is that the Electoral College, which was intended as a safeguard against the common people electing a downright moron, is now the mechanism being used to engineer that result. Which is why I am starting to agree with those who want to get rid of it. I am not entirely on board with such an idea, because we still have the matter that if the presidential election is simply a national popularity contest, the political-media complex will be that much more fixated on New York, Florida and California than it is now. I had made a similar point to a liberal Facebook friend who told me, (if I recall correctly) “if the ‘red’ states are being overtaken in population and the majority vote is now on the coasts, I don’t see why that’s not fair.”

I responded: “Ask the people who are being overtaken.”

In that regard, one could say that this Electoral College result is the response of flyover country to the sentiment of “screw you peasants as long as the Dow Jones is up.”

It could be said that this Electoral College result is the response of flyover country to the establishment position of “0.5 percent job growth IS an economic recovery, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.”

But- when there were at least two other alternatives to the Democratic agenda, it is also true that this Electoral College result means that Donald Trump gained the brand-name reputation of the other major party, not to mention the legitimacy provided by free media, and used that reputation to present himself as even more of a lying sack of shit than Hillary Clinton, overtly bigoted, that much more eager to go to the gutter, reflexively positioning himself to the lowest common denominator, and enough voters, in enough states, were okay with taking such evil in a package deal, insofar as they were not actively endorsing it.

Because if Trump had won the popular vote but Hillary Clinton got elected anyway through an Electoral College majority, the trappings of the Republic would be saved, but the implications for democracy would be that much more dire. As it stands, I consider that the last time America asked itself the question, “do we want a minority of belligerent rednecks to reverse the course of our nation?” we ended up fighting a civil war, and decided that the answer was “NO.”

 

Another Suggestion to Wes Benedict

To: Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party

Subject: Another Idea for the LP Store

Hi Wes,

I had written to you shortly before the election saying that the LP should start selling T-Shirts and bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Gary Johnson.”  I had cause to regret that immediately after the election when it became clear that the margin of voters who voted for Johnson in certain states could have won the election for Clinton.  I calmed down once everyone on social media had vented and come to the realization that if the choice was between X and Donald Trump and Donald Trump had at least an even chance of winning, then the race was already lost.  Even so, “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted Libertarian” seems like it would best appeal to the Nicholas Sarwark contingent that just wants to make liberals cry.  Mind you, if ticking off liberals was the only thing that mattered about voting, Donald Trump WOULD have gotten a popular vote majority.

So while “Don’t Blame Me” is still a good idea, I think I have an even better one.

I’m sure you’ve seen this picture:

We should sell this with the caption: “BE THIS GUY – VOTE LIBERTARIAN”

I think it would have more universal appeal, and be a more direct way of making the point.

Sincerely,

JAMES GILLEN

Fuck You, CNN

So in the course of everybody Monday-morning quarterbacking The Election, I saw this one thing on Facebook from CNN titled “How Gary Johnson and Jill Stein helped elect Donald Trump.”

Let me just print out the link, cause it took almost 20 minutes to find this article on CNN’s CRAPPY search engine.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/gary-johnson-jill-stein-spoiler/index.html

This is basically another review of the point that “if all of Jill Stein’s voters and half of Gary Johnson’s voters had gone to Clinton” she would have won Florida, and Michigan, AND Pennsylvania.

Which does of course assume that it violates the laws of God and Reality to vote for someone to vote for someone other than a Republican or Democrat. Which assumes that Hillary Clinton actually earned the votes of the public. Which she did not.  Which assumes that it was not more critical that 44.4% of the voting age population did not turn out AT ALL.  Which assumes it didn’t make a little bit of difference that 42% of white women voted for TRUMP.  White women. Isn’t that Hillary’s demographic? Isn’t that like 42% of the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving? I think liberals will agree with me when I look at that New York Times graphic and say “WHAT THE FUCK???”

And while we’re at it, all you liberals who wanna guilt-trip me over voting for Gary Johnson: Would it make you cry more if I accepted your premise that NOT voting for Dolores Umbridge is the same as choosing Voldemort? Fine then. I voted for Trump. (I voted for Johnson.) I ELECTED TRUMP. (Y’know, even though Clinton won my state anyway.) In fact, I killed the Lindbergh Baby. AND Ned Stark. You happy now?

Just the other day, a hardcore conservative Christian friend on Facebook posted that “Nevada would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. Colorado would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. New Mexico ditto. Minnesota ditto. Maine ditto. Popular vote total ditto.” And then he went, “I am glad that your (Libertarian) votes didn’t allow Hillary to win, but that last entry would at least have kept some of her supporters from being so disruptive.”

And I wrote: “Thank you so SO much. I am going to bring up this point EVERY SINGLE TIME some liberal wants to read me the riot act cause I voted for Gary Johnson. Because we all know that if Hillary had won the Electoral College, your side would be calling me an Antichrist and their side would be buying me a beer.”

But of all the statistics, there’s one we haven’t gone over: According to their Wikipedia entry, as of 2015, CNN was available in over 96 million households in the United States. Officially, as of April 2016, CNN is no longer a news network.  CNN was simply one of the most prominent media outlets to start covering Donald Trump’s campaign as an actual political decision and not a cheesy publicity stunt, a decision that many people have cause to regret, possibly including Donald Trump. They were of course, not alone. Les Moonves, CEO of CBS was famously quoted during this campaign as saying that Trump’s presence in the campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

CNN, as opposed to the more openly liberal MSNBC or the openly conservative Fox, hired the Trump sycophant Jeffrey Lord as a regular discussion panelist, basically as the house organ of the Trump campaign. In an profile from Vanity Fair,  Lord said he had gotten the job after Trump taped an interview with Anderson Cooper in July 2015. “According to Lord, “Trump says something to the effect that, ‘Every time you have me on, you have someone following me, one of those Bush guys, who hate me. Why don’t you put on one of those guys who likes me?’” (CNN declined to comment when asked to confirm the story.) Soon after, Lord was on air. And within months, he was the only Trump supporter on regularly with people like David Axelrod, James Carville, and Ana Navarro—people whom Trump himself called “killers,” always trying to bury Jeff. “Those panels, those are horrible panels. I feel so sorry for Jeffrey Lord,” he once told a rally in Davenport, Iowa.” The article later mentions an episode caught on camera: “One recent evening, as Lord and his CNN colleagues were on air discussing the Republican convention, his cell phone rang behind his desk. As Cooper gave him a strange look and tried to keep the cameras on the other panelists, Lord says that he listened to an irate Trump, fuming that the rest of the panel was criticizing his convention. “You tell Anderson Cooper,” Lord recalled Trump saying. Seconds after, Trump hung up and the cameras panned back to Lord, who grinned at Cooper: “Well, Anderson, as a matter of fact, I’ve just spoken to Donald Trump, and he has a message for you!”

CNN more famously hired as panelist Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, whom Trump let go after being charged with simple battery against a Breitbart campaign reporter.  Lewandowski was still under the non-disclosure agreement he’d signed as part of Trump’s team, and as a CNN commentator was still receiving severance pay from the Trump campaign.

But according to one of your staff, CNN, it was Jill Stein and Gary Johnson that put the republic in danger.

WE did this? Not YOU??

You did make certain ideologies unacceptable. Followers of right-wing classical liberalism might as well be the last believers in a hokey old religion. Democratic socialists are just kooks. But Trump calling Mexicans rapists and drug smugglers? Saying that we need to ban immigrants on the basis of religion or national origin? “Great for ratings.”

But WE did this?

After all the free publicity you gave that tailored orangutan and all you have done (over the years) to make third-party candidates unpersons?

How many more people watch CNN than voted for Johnson and Stein? How many CNN viewers even know who Jill Stein is? They certainly wouldn’t have found out watching CNN campaign coverage.

Suck my big Mwamba, CNN. I am never watching you again.

There is now a greater-than-zero chance that Donald Trump will start World War III – most likely cause the dictator of North Korea hit his hands – and just as Nazi Germany started World War II and ended up losing, we will lose, because while we, like Nazi Germany, have military and technical superiority, we, like Nazi Germany will end up pissing off almost the entire rest of the planet. And once it’s over and the allied coalition occupies our nation, they will have to find the least radioactive city in North America to stage the next Nuremberg Trials. And when they do they are going to round up every surviving member of the Trump Administration along with every surviving executive of the mainstream media, and put them on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as the Allies ended up doing with publisher Julius Streicher.

Because while free speech is as close to an absolute as we have in America- and that DOES include what the Left calls “hate speech”- there is no requirement or obligation on the part of a news outlet or other corporation to give free publicity to a race-baiter who has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and there is no obligation on the part of a broadcaster to legitimize such a demagogue by treating his opinions as though they deserved a public hearing, as though we had not already rejected such opinions long ago as toxic to a humane society, as if we had not already fought wars to put such philosophies into the ground, and as if they deserved more credence than the opinions of libertarians and democratic socialists, simply because the wannabe fascist in question is an entertaining buffoon who’s good for ratings. And when you actively promote and endorse such positions, you have abrogated your responsibility as a news medium (to the extent that you are one) and you are complicit in whatever comes to pass.

Fuck you, CNN.

Was I Wrong?

Blame me. I voted for Gary Johnson.

That was not enough to cause my state of Nevada to go for Donald Trump in the presidential election. But it must be stated: In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost the state by a margin of 1.4 percent- when Libertarian Gary Johnson got 2.2 percent of the vote. Trump won Michigan by about 0.3 percent- and Johnson won 3.6 percent. Pennsylvania, crucial to Clinton and what’s left of the Democrats’ working-class base, went for Trump by 1.1 percent of the vote. Gary Johnson got 2.4 percent of the vote there.

In other words, you have the “Blame Nader” 2000 election scenario again, although this time based on facts. And a margin not nearly as close.

What’s amazing is that believe it or not, it’s not like the Libertarian Party wasn’t trying to HELP. Not only did Gary Johnson give non-answers to direct questions from the press, his running mate Bill Weld went on Rachel Maddow’s show to “vouch” for the character and record of Hillary Clinton, something the press gave a lot more attention to than Weld’s more frequent speeches vouching for his own candidate. Of course that in itself may have been telling.

Trump’s wins were not entirely due to racism (though that’s not the same as saying that they didn’t have A LOT to do with racism). What pisses me off about this election is not only that liberals were right about the third-party factor but that Michael Moore was right about anything.

A lot of people out there are downright PISSED at me and people like me. And you have a right to be pissed. I cannot speak for other Libertarians. But I have to answer the question: Why did I not vote for Hillary Clinton?

Policy issues weren’t that important. In theory, I ought to sympathize with Republicans more than Democrats. But since I’ve seen Republican government in practice, I have no respect for their theory. I care more about getting things done. I am not a “progressive.” But I would have voted for Bernie Sanders over Trump. Hell, I would have voted for President Obama if he were eligible, rather than Trump. Because Sanders and Obama, like Clinton, know things, and Trump doesn’t. But Sanders and Obama can also make people believe in them. And Trump, whatever you think of him, can do that too. Hillary Clinton cannot.

Why did I not vote for Hillary Clinton? Because I had to wonder why I should be confident about her if liberals weren’t. Because their arguments for her were scared and defensive. Because the only partisan defense on her mendacity was that every politician has to present a public position versus a private position, that they all have to glide on the truth- avoiding the repeated messages, even from the Left, that that is exactly what Americans are sick and tired of in politics. Because even throwing ethics out, she was a horrible campaigner and could not present herself as an effective politician on the level of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Because she could not do the easiest thing in the world: Convince people that she (or anyone) would be a better president than Donald Trump. Because this election was simply the absurd resolution of the dynamic of “you HAVE to vote for the candidate you don’t like to stop the candidate you like less.” Because if that’s all liberals had, and they were asking me, as a non-supporter, to give Clinton more enthusiasm than they were willing to muster themselves, then this thing was already lost.

For those carping that Libertarians’ desire for “purity” cost their candidate the election, I point out again that Clinton won my home state despite my not voting for her. Would I have felt more “pure” if I’d discarded my preference, done the pragmatic thing, voted for Clinton, and lost the election anyway?

I knew damn well that my position meant taking a risk. Was I wrong to take the position I did? Was my observation of events incorrect?

People are frantically asking themselves, “Why is it so hard to convince people that Hillary Clinton would be a better president than a pathological liar and sex maniac??” And I thought, “Well, they thought her husband was okay.”

A while back, I said:

“The ultimate lesson here, if you’re a Democratic partisan, is that the Republicans are living in a glass house built next to a rock quarry. But Democrats need to keep in mind that all those Millennial voters (who for some reason they can’t understand, don’t trust Hillary Clinton) were not paying attention to this scandal factory right from the beginning. And if Bill Clinton is not as relevant to this election as Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton is a good deal more relevant than Ken Starr, Dennis Hastert or any other of the conservative meanies from the Whitewater period who either got in their own sex scandals or had to retire from public life while Clinton continued to become more important.

So if Democrats don’t understand that after all this time, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is undermined by the same defensive tactics that she used to defend her husband long ago, then they can’t understand why voters loathe both her in particular and this political system in general.”

Was I wrong?

I said on more than one occasion:

“In any case, objections to the Clintons from the Right are of decades’ vintage, and there has been plenty of time to go over them, and most people who aren’t conservative dittoheads have dismissed them. But these days the most strenuous objections to Hillary Clinton are from the Left. The last time she ran in 2008, most Democrats had no objection to Mr. And Mrs. Clinton; they thought Bill was a great President and Hillary was a great Senator. They just thought Senator Obama had more to offer as a presidential candidate. But this year people are not objecting to Benghazi, or Vince Foster. The attacks on Hillary Clinton are coming from leftists offering critique of the last eight years of economic policy in comparison to the Clinton’s Administration’s push of NAFTA and its results on the American and international economies. In short, they’re a good deal more relevant to the average person than what the National Enquirer or Sean Hannity thinks of Hillary Clinton or her husband. And again, Clinton’s sense of optics is flawed: She is no more willing to reveal what she said in her speeches to Goldman Sachs than Trump is willing to reveal his full tax returns.

… Hillary’s best selling points are that she is a more experienced candidate who represents the sensible establishment position. But the reason Trump ate the Republican Party and Sanders almost snuck up on Hillary is because after eight years of Obama, (however much better he is in comparison to McCain and Romney) there’s no more hope and people have no more change in their pockets. Obama won because people were sick of the old way of doing things, and now they’re that much sicker. Trump is running as the opposite of the establishment mentality and Clinton is running as the representative of it. And it’s going to be that much more of a problem because of who she is. Obama at least has some ability to think outside the box. Whereas Hillary Clinton not only doesn’t think outside the box, she practically is the box. ”

And:

“Part of the issue is that when “first past the post” means that only two parties have a realistic chance of support, the issue of “can this candidate win?” takes almost exclusive precedence over what should be at least as important a question: “should this candidate win?” One of the problems with that mentality, as Hillary Clinton is discovering, is that not wanting Candidate B to win is not the same thing as wanting Candidate A to win. ”

Was I wrong?

When people asked, with good reason, why anyone on the Left would not vote for Clinton, I said:

“It’s pretty clear that just from the standpoint of not making things worse, a center-to-Left voter ought not to choose Trump, or even to abstain from voting Clinton if she is the most realistic way of stopping Trump. But on economic issues at least, a lot of voters are seeing “progress” only in drips and drops, often despite and not because of the Democratic Party. This is why a lot of them supported Bernie Sanders in the first place. And the way (the nomination) ended up is part of why they still don’t trust Clinton.”

Was I wrong?

And just on Election Eve I said:

“I say the same thing now I (said about the 2000 election): It isn’t the fault of third-party voters if your candidate sucks and nobody likes them.  It ought to be that much more damn obvious when the stakes are that much more dire.  If it’s a simple choice of Hillary Clinton versus Orange Julius Caesar, and you STILL have people hedging their bets, what the fuck does that TELL you??

It tells me that Democrats have pinned their hopes and this country’s future on Hillary Clinton, who symbolizes everything that Americans are sick of and do not want in American politics, a career politician who has all the appeal of soggy shredded wheat and would be that much less likely to end the war in Syria.”

 

 

Was I wrong?

Election Night Preview

So.  It’s almost Election Day.  And on social media, I’ve been getting a lot of flak for voting for Gary Johnson, or at least not being rah-rah-sis-boom-bah for Hillary Clinton.  “It’s Good vs. Evil!  It’s the end of civilization itself!  Don’t you understand the stakes?  Don’t you remember Bush vs. Gore???”

Well, YES.  How the fuck could I FORGET Bush vs. Gore when liberals have spent the last 16 years reminding me of the 2000 election because they need to rationalize the fact that Democratic candidates other than Obama have been both unpopular and incompetent?  I say the same thing now I say then: It isn’t the fault of third-party voters if your candidate sucks and nobody likes them.  It ought to be that much more damn obvious when the stakes are that much more dire.  If it’s a simple choice of Hillary Clinton versus Orange Julius Caesar, and you STILL have people hedging their bets, what the fuck does that TELL you??

It tells me that Democrats have pinned their hopes and this country’s future on Hillary Clinton, who symbolizes everything that Americans are sick of and do not want in American politics, a career politician who has all the appeal of soggy shredded wheat and would be that much less likely to end the war in Syria.

She just happens to have the good fortune of running against Donald Trump, who has exacerbated all the demographic issues the Republicans identified in their “autopsy” of the Romney campaign, adding onto that a schism within the Republican Party itself.  Either some Republicans didn’t get the memo that they were supposed to be appealing to racism all along, or they were okay with that but just don’t like being so tacky.

In retrospect, the main lesson Donald Trump seems to have learned in life is that he can get whatever he wants and do whatever he wants and act as boorishly as he wants because neither society nor reality has ever forced him to pay the consequences for his incompetence and malice.  And I suspect that in the back of his mind, he realizes this.  And so the only way Trump can justify his inflated self-image is to attain the office that actually would make him all-powerful and unaccountable.

So here’s my prediction for tomorrow: Sometime around 7 Pacific/10 pm Eastern, Trump will come out to make his speech.  He will be preceded by his entourage of family and sycophants.  And then he will waddle towards the podium with that Resting Trump Face of his.  And then he will take the mic and fire off so many profanities in the course of two minutes that he will make Andrew Dice Clay look like Pope Francis.  And then he will mount the podium and bellow for ten seconds.  Then he will lock eyes with the nearest male reporter, jump off the podium, land on the reporter feet first, then pull down his pants and shit on the guy’s face.  And then he will run down the nearest female reporter, force her to her knees, and skullfuck her for the twenty seconds or so it takes him to reach climax.

And that’s if he wins.

Review: Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange is the latest film in the Marvel Studios series of comicbook adaptations, in this case featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Marvel’s “Sorcerer Supreme”.  The character is probably lesser-known than Iron Man and Spider-Man, but still has a serious following as the Marvel Universe’s primary mystical hero.  When the character was first introduced (by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in the anthology comic Strange Tales #110), he was a vaguely Chinese-looking mystic with a Tibetan guru (The Ancient One) and a four-color morality in keeping with a superhero dedicated to fighting supernatural evil.

In this regard, the interesting thing about Doctor Strange was his origin story, which wasn’t revealed until five issues after his debut.  As it turned out, Stephen Strange was a doctor, in fact one of the top surgeons in New York, but was consumed by ego and greed, refusing to see patients who couldn’t pay his fees.  (Cumberbatch has a history of playing arrogant geniuses, so this was great casting.)  But Strange’s career ended when he got in a car accident that caused nerve damage to his hands which prevented him from doing surgery again.  Such was his reputation that he still could have made a decent living as a consulting surgeon, but his pride refused to let him work under another doctor.  He wasted his fortune on fruitless leads until at the end of his rope he traveled to the Himalayas in pursuit of “the Ancient One” and a miracle cure.  It was also at this point in the comics that Strange met his future archenemy, Mordo, who was the Ancient One’s main student.  Strange refused to believe in magic until he discovered that Mordo was using spells to try to murder the Ancient One, and when Strange tried to warn the old man, Mordo used another spell to silence him.  Strange realized that he would be helpless against Mordo unless he learned magic himself.  So he petitioned the Ancient One to become his new disciple, and at that point the archmage revealed that he was aware of Mordo’s evil but preferred to keep him at his monastery where he could watch him.  But from that point, Doctor Strange became the Ancient One’s new pupil, and eventual successor.

The movie changes this story significantly.  Not only did Marvel Studios famously “whitewash” the Ancient One from an Asian man to the Caucasian Tilda Swinton, Mordo (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a polite, low-key disciple who ends up being Strange’s main friend in the monastery as he begins mystic studies.  The relationship between Strange, Mordo and the Ancient One is complex and changes significantly over the movie.  In the meantime, Strange gets involved as the mystic community has to defend against Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), an evil ex-pupil of the Ancient One whose exposure to the Dark Dimension has given him the worst case of pinkeye in the Multiverse.  Other characters include Benedict Wong as… Wong (who in this version is not Strange’s butler but one of his tutors) and Rachel McAdams as Dr. Christine Palmer, Strange’s colleague and ex-lover, who doesn’t really figure into the main story but is symbolically significant in being Strange’s only emotional connection to the human world, even when he was still a surgeon.

The movie is not especially original – the fabulous “space folding” effects were more famously used in the movie Inception, although not so extensively.  And the story is a bit familiar in being a Hollywood version of “the Hero’s Journey” where an arrogant person is brought low, forced to adapt to a new environment, and then turns out to be a Chosen One who learns great abilities that take other students many years to master.  But it’s all very well done and very well-acted.  And in terms of the broader universe, just as Guardians of the Galaxy introduced a whole space-faring civilization of humans and other races that the people of Marvel Earth are totally unaware of, Doctor Strange introduces the mythology and magical elements of the Marvel Comics to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which of course means that in the end the movie ties into the larger narrative that will lead to Marvel Studios’ “Infinity War.”  So as both an action movie and a comicbook movie, I highly recommend it.

 

And remember: Driving while distracted can be hazardous.  Please drive responsibly.

If I May Make A Suggestion

Letter from James Gillen to Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party

Subject: The LP Store

Dear Wes,

As a card-carrying Libertarian, I’m glad to get notices and ads from you, but I’m sorry that I am not able to buy the election/promotional materials you advertise for the Johnson/Weld campaign.  I am in fact so broke that I wasn’t able to afford the parking fee to attend the Gary Johnson event at the MGM in October, where you were handing out the materials.

In any case, I’m afraid there isn’t much to advertise.  You see, I did early voting in Nevada, and I did vote for Gary Johnson.  I had wanted to vote Libertarian all the way down ballot, but there was one problem: There WERE no other Libertarian candidates.  For the Senate, for my Congressional District, or my State Assembly district.  We DO have candidates for the Independent American Party, and they’re the guys who want the Bible taught in schools.  I think that in the next series of elections, especially the midterms, you would be much better served by putting such resources you have into recruiting candidates for offices OTHER than President, so I can tell people that there are other people to vote for.

If I may make a suggestion for the immediate future: Do you have any T-Shirts or bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Gary Johnson”?  I predict those will be VERY popular in the next 12 months.

Sincerely,

JAMES GILLEN

 (UPDATE: Response from Wes Benedict:

Soon, we’ll be offering a sticker that says “Don’t blame me, I voted Libertarian”. When you see us promoting it, send me an email and I’ll send you a free one.

We’ll be encourage people to run for more Libertarian offices in 2018. This year we do have people running in 600 offices, but not many are in Nevada.

Thanks for your interest.

Wes Benedict, Executive Director Libertarian National Committee, Inc.

—

Thanks, Wes!)

 

Jack Chick, RIP

Another apropos-of-nothing post, but out of the many, many famous and semi-famous people who have died in 2016, Jack Chick died on Sunday October 23.

Chick was famous, or semi-famous, for being the author or at least publisher of a vast number of little cartoon booklets printed very cheap and en masse and laid around at various places so that people would pick them up and maybe learn the Gospel, or at least Chick’s version of it.  These tracts varied wildly in artistic quality between fairly realistic comic-book style and childish-attempt-at-velvet-painting style, but the tone was always very consistent: Repent and accept Jesus (the REAL Jesus, not the fake Catholic or Episcopal Jesus) or Burn In Hell.  Not only did this tone, along with the childish art, undermine the evangelism, it also demonstrates the main flaw of so many evangelists’ approach: Not that Jesus is a loving God, but that people must be scared into submission by telling them that if they don’t obey orders in this life, they will spend Eternity in a roasting pit filled with thieves, drunkards and prostitutes.

I live in Las Vegas.  It’s not THAT bad.

But I figured I should at least share the particular Chick tract that made the strongest impression on me.

A few years ago I’d gone to the South Point hotel to attend an event, only to find that the admission line was so damn long that I couldn’t attend and still get up in time for work the next morning.  So I walked back out to my car in the parking lot, and nearby my car, on the ground, I found a Chick tract, “on the ground littering the parking lot” being the place where most of us find Chick tracts.

This particular tract was called “Who Is He?”  If you want, you can follow along.  It’s one of the free samples on Chick’s website: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1049/1049_01.asp  But I read it, and here’s the part that got me thinking:

Look at the power Jesus holds… IT’S AWESOME!

“For in him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible or invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: All things were created by him, and for him.”  (Colossians 1:16)

What keeps the universe from flying apart?  IT’S JESUS!

“And he (Jesus) is before all things, and by him all things consist (are held together).”  (Col. 1:17)

Jesus is in complete control.

And this really explained a lot to me.

I realized why the universe works the way it does.

You remember, when you were a kid, and you prayed that you would get a puppy on Christmas?  And you didn’t get one?  And later, you remember praying to God so that your Daddy wouldn’t lose his job so that you wouldn’t have to leave your nice home and go to a cruddy apartment, only he did lose his job and you did have to move?  And you remember years after that, when your Mom was dying of cancer, and you prayed and you prayed and you bargained and pleaded, and finally screamed for God to save her?  And she died anyway?

Well, as it turns out, there’s a reason that God didn’t answer your prayers.

It’s because He was busy keeping the universe from flying apart.

And that’s a tough job.

I mean, you know how hard it is to multitask.

Like, you’re working at your cubicle on Monday and you have to catch up on the backlog over the weekend, and you’re trying to concentrate on that, and one of your co-workers comes up to your desk asking you to look into a request he wants you to forward to HR, and you can’t handle both things at once, and you get thrown off.

Now, imagine that you’re up in Heaven, and you’re doing your job, holding the universe together, keeping all physical phenomena in maintenance, and on a stray impulse, you pick up on some frightened Yazidi girl praying over and over again that ISIS won’t capture and enslave her, and all of a sudden- WHOOPS! There goes Alpha Centauri.

So on this somber occasion, I would like to look back at the life of Jack Chick and thank him for giving Christianity some necessary perspective.