James Gillen

Early voting in Nevada started this Saturday (October 22, 2016). I just went to my local shopping mall and voted. I want to go over the choices that I made as a sort of endorsement and analysis.

President of the United States

I have already addressed my reasons for endorsing Gary Johnson and choosing a third-party candidate over one of the “real” candidates, in particular Hillary Clinton. As of October 23, fivethirtyeight.com is projecting at least a 72 percent chance for Clinton to win Nevada, with initial turnout giving the Democrats a substantial edge.  Basically, things have gotten to the point with Donald Trump’s repulsive campaign that if Hillary Clinton somehow loses the presidential race, it’s because she deserves to. And up until fairly recently, that could not be ruled out. Because until Trump, there were no other candidates more incompetent at campaigning than Hillary Clinton and more unappealing to the voting public, and I didn’t think that was possible. The difference is that Clinton doesn’t GO OUT OF HER WAY to piss people off. The question is whether someone who doesn’t endorse Hillary Clinton should officially approve her coronation especially when the result is pretty much determined already.

And given that Trump is not really an outlier in the GOP but merely the most honest expression of the ideology they’ve been building for some time,  it gets to my long term assessment of why I would rather be in a third party than one of the majors. I would rather work to refine something that doesn’t have an institutional presence than an institution that doesn’t think it needs to reform. (As anyone who voted for Sanders and then went to a Democratic state convention might testify.) And after this election, anyone who’s still registered Republican needs to consider what the future of that party is and whether it is going to turn around when it has rather clearly declared that Trumpism is what it wants. As it stands, I think a lot of the people voting for Democrats this year will be in the same mind as Will McAvoy in The Newsroom when he said, “I’m a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I think hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure, and not gay marriage.”

I’ve also been willing to say that as a candidate in general and as an advocate for libertarianism, Johnson has screwed up. The thing that most pissed me off about Johnson’s Aleppo moment(s) was the realization that there IS NO good choice for president this year- not even on the sentimental, hypothetical level of “Gee, if only my vote was the only one that counted and it wasn’t gonna be drowned out by 65 million other people.” Because the Republican Party is that much more blatant in abandoning its public responsibility to present a serious candidate, and however qualified Hillary Clinton is, much of her resume is built on creating the stagnant economy and shaky foreign policy situation that Americans are objecting to in the first place.

I don’t think Gary Johnson is a good candidate for President. But at least he doesn’t disgust me.

United States Senate

The real problem with being a third-party voter in the short term is that your party is usually too small to run candidates in the “down-ballot” races. Take Nevada. I would like to vote for Libertarians in other offices, but the LP is not running anybody in the other federal races. The only third party that is is the Constitution/Independent American Party, which is basically where you go when you think that the Republicans are a bunch of godless pinkos. The two main candidates are Republican Joe Heck (currently a US Congressman) and Catherine Cortez Masto (formerly Nevada’s Attorney General). I don’t have anything against either candidate personally and think each did reasonably well in their prior jobs, but if the main issue other than the presidency is control of Congress and the Senate, the Republicans as a whole are sufficiently rotten and incompetent that where I didn’t get a chance to vote Libertarian, I went Democrat.

United States House of Representatives

Similarly I voted Dina Titus (Democrat) for the Congressional race for my district, since I know and like her well enough and didn’t think the other candidates matched up.

The Questions

The main issues that are up for vote in this state are the ballot questions, and these require examination in a certain level of detail. Because when you into detail it becomes clear that in many cases the question is worded in such a way as to convince people to vote for the opposite of what the ballot measure would actually do.

Question 1: Shall Chapter 202 of the Nevada Revised Statutes be amended to prohibit, except in certain circumstances, a person from selling or transferring a firearm to another person unless a federally-licensed dealer first conducts a federal background check on the potential buyer or transferee ?

I have no particular fondness for guns, but I am fond of the Constitution, including the Second Amendment. I also know that with the rate of civilian shootings in the last few years that many people have become concerned about “loopholes” to existing laws allowing people to get access to guns. The specific text of the measure says that it is intended to address the discrepancy allowing unlicensed sellers to transfer ownership of a firearm without a background check (which is now required for licensed sellers). Section 6 of the measure specifically exempts sale to law enforcement officers, sale of antique weapons, transfer to immediate family members, to trustees or executives of the owner’s estate, or temporary transfer at recognized shooting ranges and competitions. This basically covers most of the situations that “No” voters raise on the grounds of increasing bureaucracy. Arguably it doesn’t go far enough for “gun safety” advocates who say that many acts of gun violence occur within the home.

With some difficulty, I voted for Question 1, though I could have just as easily voted No. My main skepticism was whether any gun control law is actually going to accomplish its stated purpose. On balance I decided Question 1 actually accomplished the stated purpose of reducing the loophole of unregistered gun sales without creating an undue burden on private gun owners.

Question 2: Shall the Nevada Revised Statutes be amended to allow a person, 21 years old or older, to purchase, cultivate, possess, or consume a certain amount of marijuana or concentrated marijuana, as well as manufacture, possess, use, transport, purchase, distribute, or sell marijuana paraphernalia; impose a 15 percent excise tax on wholesale sales of marijuana; require the regulation and licensing of marijuana cultivators, testing facilities, distributors, suppliers, and retailers; and provide for certain criminal penalties?

This is a prime example of where what seems to be plain language on the ballot is something entirely different in the actual legal text. In this case the text states in Section 10 that a certified “marijuana establishment” cannot be located within 1000 feet of a public or private school, or 300 feet of a community facility, and to a limit of 80 licenses in a county with a population greater than 700,000. The provisions of legalization would render the possession of more than token amounts of marijuana, or the startup of a marijuana business, all but impossible to already wealthy interests. In all, the measure would be much like the 2014 measure in Ohio that failed because even legalization advocates saw it as a vehicle of established interests rather than protection of individual rights. And of course, until the Federal government re-classifies marijuana, a lot of this is technicality. I voted No on Question 2.

Question 3: Shall Article 1 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require the Legislature to provide by law for the establishment of an open, competitive retail electric energy market that prohibits the granting of monopolies and exclusive franchises for the generation of electricity?

Most of the state is under an official energy monopoly called NV Energy, which is ostensibly regulated by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to protect consumers. However, this same PUC decided last year to remove credits that were previously given to customers of private solar energy producers by allowing them to sell power back to the main grid, a practice called “net metering.”  The irony being that such a subsidy is supposed to be how liberalism ought to work, using the power of the state to protect the consumer while promoting more progressive policies (in this case, a cleaner energy system). In practice, the power of the state is more likely to be used to protect those who already have wealth and power. Removing NV Energy’s monopoly would if nothing else remove the question of whether competitor energy providers are taking “their” energy.

I voted Yes on Question 3, with the reservation that while both Questions 1 and 2 are very detailed in their provisions, Question 3 merely states that after passage, the state legislature shall pass legislation to provide for an open energy market. Ay, there’s the rub.

Question 4: Shall Article 10 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require the Legislature to provide by law for the exemption of durable medical equipment, oxygen delivery equipment, and mobility enhancing equipment prescribed for use by a licensed health care provider from any tax upon the sale, storage, use, or consumption of tangible personal property?

The ballot measure would add a Section 7 to the Article 10 of the state Constitution: “The legislature shall provide by law for the exemption of durable medical equipment, oxygen delivery equipment and mobility enhancing equipment prescribed for human use by a licensed provider of health care acting within his or her scope of practice from any tax upon the sale, storage, use or consumption of tangible personal property. ” So similar to Question 3, the matter is left up to the legislature. Still, this is pretty straightforward: People using durable medical equipment (DME) would not have to pay state taxes on what are often lifesaving devices and usually keep a person’s living standard from being debilitated. The main objection to Question 4 seems to be the concern that not having these taxes would create a budget shortfall, but anyone familiar with this state’s politics knows that it strains credulity to think that Nevada politicians won’t create some new consumption tax on the middle class when they want more money for something, as opposed to a tax on mining or income. I voted Yes on Question 4.

Question 5: Shall Clark County continue indexing fuel taxes to the rate of inflation, through December 31, 2026, the proceeds of which will be used solely for the purpose of improving public safety for roadway users and reducing traffic congestion by constructing and maintaining streets and highways in Clark County?

This is a Clark County (Southern Nevada) measure as opposed to a statewide measure. This simply allows the current practice of funding road construction and maintenance to be financed through fuel taxes through the next ten years. Since this is not really changing anything for the worse, I voted Yes on Question 5. Still, Las Vegas is a great rebuttal to the people who question libertarianism saying, “Without government, who would build the roads?” My response is, “We have government and taxes, and I don’t know if the roads are being built now or just ripped up.”

The next Clinton-Trump brawl is scheduled for Wednesday October 19^th, and Wednesday is a date that I usually go see friends, so I will most likely have to watch coverage after the fact. But I want to discuss certain things that have come up since, namely in regard to “Pussygate.”  As you remember, towards the end of the first debate, Hillary Clinton brought up Trump’s abuse of Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machado, the subject of which brought Trump nearly to rage even before Clinton specified Machado’s name. This caused Trump to respond that he was going to say something very bad about Clinton and her husband, but decided to stop himself. But never let Donald Trump be accused of class and restraint.

As you also know, on October 7, audio footage was released from 2005 of Trump and Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush having an on-mic conversation about Trump’s technique with women which included the lines “you just kiss…when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything…grab them by the pussy…” While Trump was unusually defensive and willing to apologize over his 2005 quotes, he also insisted that “this is nothing more than a distraction” and “Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.” Just the Sunday afternoon before the October 9 debate, Trump rounded up Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Kathy Shelton, the first three of whom had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or outright rape, and the latter being the plaintiff in a rape trial where Hillary Clinton was the defense lawyer who successfully plea-bargained her client’s case. Not only did these four women appear at a press conference where Trump openly accused Bill Clinton of assault, he had them appear as guests at the town hall debate that night. Since then he has told audiences that he is the victim of a great smear campaign and “character assassination”, and that the allegations against him since the Oct. 7 tape are “made up”.

Well, as many have pointed out, it isn’t Bill Clinton who’s running for president this time. Also, bad behavior on someone else’s part cannot be used to excuse bad behavior on your part. (Trump and conservatives may be unaware of this ethical principle, so it ought to be stressed at some point.) In any case, there’s also a factor of relevance. I mean, have you seen Bill Clinton lately? He’s deathly pale, near anorexic, he’s had heart problems, and cancer scares… let’s face it, his best raping days are behind him. Whereas Donald Trump is big, extroverted, and ruddy. Well, whatever that color is supposed to be. He looks like he could keep raping two, maybe three more years.

Another defense along similar lines is where Trumpers on social media show the picture of Miley Cyrus twerking her ass in front of Robin Thicke in that one awards show, or Beyonce in her stage outfit, and they’ll say something like “these are the liberals who say that Donald Trump is degrading women.” Well- for one thing, Miley Cyrus isn’t running for president either, and if she was, I would even vote for that tongue-wagging twerker before Trump. But however hypocritical or misplaced conservative criticisms of their opponents are, they aren’t totally lacking in point.

The actions of a politician or government official are potentially more corrosive to the public culture than the actions of an entertainer, partially for the obvious reason that entertainers do not have legal power over us. And because we recognize that the issue is different, we expect politicians to follow a different standard. We expect different behavior from George Clinton than from Bill Clinton.

But whether you think Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation should have gone into the matter of Bill Clinton’s affair in the Oval Office,  or whether such a thing is a “private matter”, consider that at the time the Clinton Administration was defending a policy under which gay military members could be forcibly discharged over their private affairs, partially on grounds of being a security risk.  When you see the president flat-out lie about an affair on camera and ultimately get away with it, it does create an impression that as far he’s concerned, laws and standards only apply to others. And when you see Hillary Clinton get absolved by the FBI for security breaches that WOULD have gotten anyone else at least reprimanded, you see the same issue at play.

Of course, it wasn’t even as simple as Bill Clinton getting impeached over perjury and then found not guilty by the Senate. During the House investigation leading to impeachment, Republican head of the Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde was revealed to have had an affair in office as a state legislator almost 30 years prior. Pornographer and Democratic partisan Larry Flynt used Hustler Magazine to expose Bob Livingston (R.-Louisiana) who was expected to be the next House Speaker, but had to step down in favor of Dennis Hastert.

Contrary to Michelle Obama, the Democrat standard is not “When they go low, we go high.” It’s “when they go low, we go lower.” To be sure, it’s not the Democrats’ fault if they have that much more opposition research to work with.

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.

Nor is the Right unique in demonizing their enemies, nor even pioneers in that regard. I can remember “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” In certain “progressive” circles anybody to the right of Che Guevara is a Fascist. And it’s not like right-wingers aren’t taking notes. Charlie Skyes is a NeverTrump conservative talk show host in the Midwest who’s been making the rounds on MSNBC and other places giving his takes on where the conservative movement is now. Recently he decided that the culture had gotten to the point that he decided to retire his show after this year. But he gave an interview to Vox magazine about that, and I found this exchange very interesting:

Charlie Sykes

Absolutely. And you have these websites out there, like Breitbart.com, which is like reading third-world propaganda. These guys like Breitbart are smart enough to know that they’re full of shit. But if you inhabit that world, you can’t push back without being seen as a sellout.

Now I will say this one thing on the flip side. Some of these people have flocked to sites like Breitbart and they’ve retreated into these dark corners because the left has too easily tossed words like “racist” and “xenophobe” and “sexist” around.

So what’s happened is that when a guy like me or anyone or you says, hey, you know, Donald Trump is a racist and a xenophobe and a sexist. The conservative media world, the consumers, they tell me we’ve been called that for 20 or 30 years. They’ve become conditioned to blow it off as crying wolf.

Sean Illing

I think that’s a fair point.

Charlie Sykes

I’m old enough to remember that being called a racist was the worst thing, the most devastating thing you could call someone — and now it’s lost all currency. I mean, people don’t even blink at it anymore. John McCain’s a racist, Mitt Romney’s a racist, Paul Ryan’s a racist.

But when Donald Trump comes, who is the real thing, we call him that and say we didn’t really mean it about those other guys. This is who we were warning you about. It’s blown off by a lot of the conservative base.

So when you see that one side plays by certain rules and expects you to play at a disadvantage, you resent it. If you’re expected to act in good faith but they get to call you Klansmen and Nazis, you decide to fuck good faith. Fuck negotiation or even acknowledging the other side’s humanity. If they really think you’re a caricature- or know better but act like they don’t- you think there’s no point in trying to disabuse them with proofs. But then if you hold that attitude long enough, you either don’t notice or don’t care that some of your new friends on the alternative-to-being-right are REAL Klansmen and neo-Nazis.

There is a phrase I use that I am going to keep going back to, as appropriate. It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.

A LONG time ago – a long enough time ago that it depresses me to think about how old I am – some of us judged the Lewinsky scandal and simultaneously decided that the President being an adulterous horndog was not the end of the world AND that it was still not a good thing for the country. It certainly was not a good thing that the President felt the need to commit perjury and get impeached over it. In any case, if an impeachment takes place in the Senate and they end up acquitting the defendant, then legally that’s it. Both the people and the government have spoken. The question then is, why would one bring up the matter again when it only brings up the point that you have more skeletons in the closet than Liberace’s Halloween Party, and in the broader picture, means that if we wash that one issue, forces us to consider your lack of record and competence in contrast to both Bill and Hillary’s political successes.

None of this justifies “conservatives” doubling down on immorality by supporting Trump, who magnifies all the Clintons’ vices while having none of their abilities, but if Democrats still can’t understand why some of us shake our heads at their invocation of morality, then Republicans aren’t the only ones with no sense of irony.

I did not immediately follow up on the October 9 Clinton-Trump debate, partially because I need a real job to pay the bills and mainly because I have spent the other part of the last 24 hours trying to find some way to thread a Brillo pad through my nasal cavity out my ear canal so I can scour my brain.

If the first debate was a steel cage match where Donald Trump got bladed, this one was a knife fight in the depths of the Calcutta sewers. Even if you won, you still are bleeding and contaminated with toxic shit.

With Hillary Clinton, she at least got a couple of opportunities to explain her resume and speak unapologetically about her agenda, including gun control and creating a more liberal Supreme Court. But she continues to give non-answers with regard to her emails and lack of regard for their security, and when she responded to the suggestion of being “two-faced” and said that she was referring to Abraham Lincoln’s policy of having one public policy on Civil War legislation while pursuing a different private policy, Trump was able to respond by mocking her use of “Honest Abe” as a defense of her mendacity. Again, Clinton overall comes off as far more knowledgeable and competent than Trump, and can be sincere about positions she actually cares about. But she still does not come off as honest, and thus she suffers in comparison to Trump, who at least conveys the appearance of honesty even if that’s only because Trump confuses “honesty” with “having no internal monologue.”

As for “Sniffy” himself… he fought back this time.  Whatever his prior feelings about his old friends the Clintons, he has shown himself willing to take on the concerns, however warped, of the Republican base.  More than ever, Trump has answered the question, “what if AM radio could run for President?” He played all the greatest hits: Benghazi, Juanita, the emails that Hillary “acid-washed” like trendy jeans. As the pundits kept saying Sunday and today, he stopped the bleeding. But mainly in the sense that he threw red meat to the base and kept them going, which he really didn’t do last debate. He didn’t persuade the rest of us, who have been nothing but appalled by him, to find a reason to vote for him. In fact he doubled down on the offensive stupidity. He did not explain (beyond removing the barriers between states for insurance policies) how he would make a better replacement for Obamacare. He did not explain how he would straighten out Syria, beyond bombing the shit out of everything, which has worked so well up to now. He did not reduce the suspicion of his dictatorial whims when he said (in between sniffs) that he would appoint a special prosecutor to dive into Hillary’s email accounts. He certainly did not appeal to female voters, some of whom happen to be Republican.   Trump continued to insist that Pussygate was just “locker room talk” as if between Friday and Sunday, social media had not shot down, skinned and dressed that argument. And he did not reduce the impression of being “rapey” when, during Hillary Clinton’s addresses to the audience, he glowered and paced around, showing behind her in camera, stalking her like a particularly lazy and overweight lion with sleep apnea.

And next debate is a week from Wednesday. In Las Vegas. People here have no clue how to drive in optimum conditions, and here we’re going to have TWO Secret Service details on the road.

Technical Winner: Hillary Clinton. But only by virtue of NOT being Donald Trump.

Real Winners: Gary Johnson (who can only look better in comparison) and anybody who skipped this thing to watch Sunday Night Football or Ash vs Evil Dead.

Losers: Intelligence, good taste, public service and the premise of a functional republic.

On October 4, the two running mates of the main presidential candidates, Democratic Governor of Virginia Tim Kaine and Republican Governor of Indiana Mike Pence, got together in their first and only national debate, in which the two-party system attempted to answer the question: “Which one of these two men is better suited to be president once their running mate is impeached?”

Whereas the last vice-presidential debate (Biden-Ryan) seemed fairly substantial and respectful, this one didn’t come off that well in my opinion. It didn’t even come off that well compared to the September 26 presidential debate, where at least Hillary Clinton came off as both professional and sociable. What was odd is that for the most part it was Tim Kaine who was doing all the pointless interrupting, which only gave Pence the opportunity to say “let me respond” and go off wasting time on that point rather than answer the questions that Elaine Quijano asked. Not that either one of them is that good. Both of them seemed to be composed of their respective party’s cliches about supporting working people when the person at the top of the ticket has managed to get very rich gaming the status quo. Kaine at least has the advantage of living in the reality-based community, although he didn’t benefit his party as much as Clinton did in September or Joe Biden did in 2012.

So: Kaine. Pence. Who won? The answer is obvious. Gary Johnson.

And now for something completely different.

Sunday October 2, HBO debuted its re-imagining of Westworld, which was based on a 1973 movie written and directed by Michael Crichton.  Westworld was a major example of the weird old days of 70s science fiction on film, of a piece with Rollerball, Logan’s Run and Silent Running.   In the film, there’s this major corporation running a sort of “adult” Disneyland (featuring Medieval World and Roman World in addition to West World) where the “animatronic” characters are actually androids capable of interacting with humans at almost any level.  But their programming starts to go awry (in what may be one of the first mentions of a computer virus on film), and the androids start killing the customers, so that the movie ends up as a horror-stalker scenario where star Richard Benjamin (and his 70s pornstache) is being hunted by a sinister android gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner and dressed almost exactly like his character in The Magnificent Seven).

The difference here is that in the movie the androids were an unknown Other attacking the human protagonists, while in the TV show, the human customers are largely an afterthought to the narrative, with secondary focus given to the corporate staff running the resort and maintaining the androids, with the ultimate focus going to the androids themselves, whose increasingly complex programming is causing some of them to realize that their world is artificial and everything in their lives – including their deaths – is scripted for the amusement of others.

Foremost of these androids is the pure, beautiful and ever-suffering Dolores (played by Evan Rachel Wood) who apparently exists to see her father get killed over and over again.  She and her father both start to encounter what their inventor calls “reveries” of past programming.  But since their real-time experiences occur within a repeated script, the pilot episode plays less like the Westworld movie and more like a weird cross between Groundhog Day and Deadwood.

The odd thing about this setup is that even though the android “hosts” are there as stock Western characters for human tourists, they also seem to have interaction with each other that may not be strictly necessary for the purpose of the business.  For instance, the pilot episode sets up a romance between Dolores and Teddy (James Marsden), one of the “Newcomers” who just came to town.  But then Teddy gets killed, more than once, and is revealed to be one of the hosts.  It raises the question of whether the characters were “built” to be involved with anyone else, especially since their scripts change in response to customer interaction but otherwise repeat.

Meanwhile, the evil gunslinger in black is revealed to be a human (Ed Harris), who seems to be pursuing some quest within the setting that is unexplained at this point.  Back in the company labs, the head of the programmers (veteran character actor Jeffrey Wright) is trying to integrate the new programming codes with the help of the company’s founder, Ford (Anthony Hopkins).  Ford is both gentlemanly and sinister, a man who genuinely thinks of himself as a loving God in control of the perfect world he created.  The sort of role Anthony Hopkins could do in his sleep.

Otherwise, again, the focus is away from the humans (other than a small story with Currie Graham as a deputized crimefighter) which produces a deliberately alienating effect when one sees how they treat the androids.  The female hosts (not all of whom are prostitutes) are used to prurient ends by the male guests, and when two of those guests hire Teddy as a local guide, they raise the question of whether they should take him out to the wilderness and kill him just because they can.  So once again James Marsden is cast as the nice, handsome guy who exists to get stomped on.  It seems to be his karma for some reason.

That artificiality makes the show seem rather sterile, though I’m pretty sure that’s by design.  But that, and the question of how long it will take the whole situation to blow up, raises the question of whether this premise can be stretched out past one season, although it seems like it would be a very interesting miniseries.

 

 

 

 

That’s a question I see a lot of liberals asking on social media. The gist of the query was probably best summarized by celebrity George Takei on Twitter September 24: “Libertarian Johnson supports TPP, fracking, Citizens United, and no min wage. How any Sanders supporters could back him is baffling to me. ”

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, has gotten a lot more attention than most third-party candidates, often for the wrong reasons. But while never having much of a chance, Johnson cannot seem to be killed. Even despite his own best efforts. I had thought that this means that Johnson has learned from Donald Trump that any publicity is good publicity. But I have also said that the primary lesson of the Trump campaign is that voters will lean toward you if they identify with your own ignorance. It seems that others agree. The Christian Science Monitor had a recent article citing the polls on Johnson’s foreign policy gaffes.

“It isn’t that foreign policy doesn’t matter to young voters, although older people do place slightly more importance on it. … But the young also tend to view foreign policy differently. A 2015 study by the libertarian Cato Institute concluded that Millennials – defined here as those born between 1980 and 1997 – see the world as “significantly less threatening than their elders,” and policies drawn up to deal with foreign threats as less urgent. They’re also more supportive of international cooperation, and far less keen on the use of military force, the report found.  Both major candidates are considerably more hawkish than this standard. In comparison, Johnson’s floundering on foreign policy questions might seem relatively benign. ”

Indeed, his polls don’t seem to be going down. The same article says, “The lapse didn’t hurt him in the polls: for months, about 7 or 8 percent of likely voters have said they would support him.  His peak, of just over 9 percent? According to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, it came from Sept 8-14: the days immediately following the first incident.”

And more than that: On September 27, Johnson was endorsed by the Detroit News.  This was followed two days later by his most prominent newspaper endorsement to date, when the Chicago Tribune officially endorsed Johnson for president.

In context, what makes these endorsements that much more remarkable is that they were issued AFTER Gary Johnson started having his “Aleppo moments.”

I direct the reader to the Tribune article, because it’s one of the better opinion columns I’ve read on this subject and the 2016 campaign in general. It goes over why (despite his problems) Gary Johnson is a serious and qualified candidate for President, and why Clinton, despite her obvious superiority to Trump, has too many problems to endorse, addressing much the same points that I did earlier, but in much greater journalistic detail.

I’m sure these editors, like the rest of us, are perfectly aware that “third” parties don’t win elections, at least for president, because to get Electoral College votes you need to win at least one state, and third parties don’t have enough votes to do that (without effectively supplanting one of the other ruling parties) and they certainly don’t have those votes this year.  Knowing that, and knowing that other conservative papers have endorsed Clinton, I take these endorsements to be a “no confidence vote” in our political system from a center-to-Right community that is not “with Hillary” and also recognizes that the Republican Party, at least currently, is too broken to fix.

What then of all those lefty “progressive” Millennials who supposedly should be voting for Clinton? Why are they looking at the “neoliberal”, pro-market, pro-privatization Gary Johnson and preferring him to Hillary Clinton or even Jill Stein? It’s actually a good question.

Because if I were a “progressive”, I’d probably follow the logic of Bernie Sanders: Run for the Democratic Party nomination on the premise that they are a more effective vehicle for my ideas than the Green Party or an independent run, and if I win the nomination (unlikely given my lack of network in the party), that’s great and I can move on to the general election. If I don’t win (likely because of the structure of the party) I can still use my support base to agitate for reform of the convention platform- and at that point, I will endorse the eventual nominee on the premise that she now IS the most effective vehicle for my ideas.

Of course I’m not a progressive, but broadly speaking, the Democrats have done a fair job adapting to that community, to the extent that the party has experienced less internal dissent than the Republicans with their civil war of Tea Partiers versus “Republicans In Name Only”. But a lot of leftists do remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t seriously endorse gay marriage until after the Obama Administration did. With the Affordable Care Act, there were several opportunities to make the final project more “progressive” and closer to single-payer (like the public option) than the corporatist project that the ACA became. And the main reason it had to be compromised down was not to win Republicans, who were already a bloc against any Obama legislation but were not yet a majority, but moderate (often pro-corporate) Democrats. Not only that, Senator Barack Obama had promised as a candidate to roll back the security state that George W. Bush and Congress had created in the wake of 9-11, and his record in that area has been uneven at best. And if a young and woke Barack Obama has proved disappointing by “progressive” standards, they won’t be much more enthused by Hillary, who as Senator voted for an Iraq invasion that Senator Obama opposed.

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 that ended up is part of why they still don’t trust Clinton.

During the Clinton-Sanders run to the Democratic Party nomination, Clinton ended up winning a majority of states without counting superdelegates, although there were several states where results were close enough and tabulations were vague enough that the outcome was in doubt, and Sanders voters felt the need to investigate. The state of Nevada was the most prominent example. Under the caucus process, which is questionable to begin with, Clinton ended up winning a majority in Nevada, but that simply meant electing delegates to represent candidates at the county conventions, which would then send delegates to the state convention to vote at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. To the surprise of the Democratic Party in Clark County, more Sanders people showed to the Clark County convention than Clinton people, despite their pre-emptive suspension of the party credentials chairwoman for allegedly being pro-Sanders. So going into the State convention, Sanders people had a technical majority, except that this time the party got more Clinton people to show up. According to party rules, delegates had to be approved by two-thirds voice vote, which party chairwoman Roberta Lange ruled for Clinton. Even a Politifact article which was sympathetic to the party position conceded “trying to determine the outcome of a voice vote from a video of around 3,000 delegates is somewhat arbitrary to begin with. The only person with authority to call for a different voting mechanism is the convention chair: Lange.” And: “Volunteers circulating the petitions changing the rules abandoned their efforts after the permanent rules were adopted, saying they missed their chance to introduce them. Either way, any rule change would require a two-thirds majority vote which would be highly unlikely given the Clinton campaign’s public opposition to any rules changes.”

Now with me, I think that the September 26 debate proved Clinton to be far superior to Trump in both knowledge and temperament, while Johnson is getting problematic in both areas (although STILL better than Trump). But the liberals ‘shakin my head’ as to why Sanders fans would pick Johnson apparently didn’t remember that the lackluster past eight years inspired a “change” campaign with both Trump and Sanders after Obama’s “change” failed to give us much. They forget that some of us were physically present (and posting on social media in real time) about the “Democratic” establishment ginning the results at party conventions. And establishment liberals look at something like Secretary Clinton’s email issues (which the press has obfuscated as much as illuminated) and ask why she is considered “untrustworthy” as though not being forthright on email security was one isolated reason why she would be considered untrustworthy.

This undermines the final promise of the Sanders campaign: that even in the likely event that he lost the nomination, he would still have an influence. A party establishment that goes to such lengths to control results can’t be trusted to maintain its promises more than it absolutely has to. Yes, a lot of the dissenters are grousing because they’re “kids who don’t understand how the world works”, but I’m not sure that anybody who gets into American politics for the first time would come away thinking that it DOES work.

And a lot of those folks look around and if they’ve rejected the Green Party (because it has that much less organization, registration and exposure than the Libertarians) they look at the Libertarian Party and think, “okay, these guys aren’t really aligned with me on a lot of things, but they are with me on some things, and they seem like they would actually LISTEN.”

Not only that, but there’s the impression that Donald Trump could be a Central Casting villain recruited by a Democratic focus group to trigger all the buttons of feminist/liberal support networks, AND is so incompetent at running his own campaign that he might as well be throwing the race, and it just contributes to a sense that the fix is in.

Indeed, this resistance (subconscious or otherwise) to the establishment foist of Queen Hillary the Inevitable would explain not only why the anti-Trump majority hasn’t fully rallied around Clinton but why Trump remains competitive in the polls despite his kamikaze debate performance in September, not to mention despite objective reality.

 

 

On Wednesday, Chris Matthews at MSNBC deigned to have the Libertarian presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld appear at 7 pm Eastern time at a town hall at the University of New Hampshire. While the ticket did take some time to dispel a few strawmen (Johnson DOES believe climate change is man-made, and does believe we should have an EPA), events did not all turn out well. Not only was Johnson a bit… agitated (at one point predicting that Hillary Clinton could ‘press the button’ in a war), he didn’t seem to get Matthews’ question as to why marijuana is called dope (answer: it makes you a dope), and there was one point Matthews held a lightning round, promising “maybe you’ll make some news.” He asked, “who’s your favorite foreign leader?” Johnson said Shimon Peres of Israel – who has just died. Matthews specified it had to be a living leader. Johnson confessed, “I guess I’m having an ‘Aleppo moment’ in the former president of Mexico.” (Vicente Fox, by the way.)

So out of all the other things (good and bad) that came out of Johnson’s mouth, GUESS WHAT WAS THE ONE THING THE PRESS WILL. NOT. SHUT. UP. ABOUT.

In one respect, this just confirms it’s a bad idea for libertarians to appear on MSNBC (or as I call it, MSDNC), given that most of their hosts, including Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, love libertarianism the way an Orthodox rabbi loves bacon cheeseburgers, but really it confirms a point I’ve made here more than once: If a “third” party candidate wants to be taken seriously by the press, they need to ACT like a serious candidate and bone up. Again, you are NOT Donald Trump. People will not watch you do a spontaneous monologue from Ubu Roi on national TV and say, “Aw, that’s not fair, his mic was bad.”

Well, cheer up, liberals. If you’re a Clinton fan (or just someone who doesn’t want Trump to get elected and make his first executive order the restoration of droit du seigneur), Johnson’s apparent quest to destroy what credibility he might have had will greatly reduce the chances that a third-party vote will “spoil” a state for Hillary. But then, you won’t be able to blame Johnson if Hillary chokes anyway, so everything’s a tradeoff.

If however Johnson retains his previous poll numbers or actually increases them, it will mean that Gary Johnson has absorbed the primary lesson of the Donald Trump campaign, which is that people will vote for you if they identify with your ignorance. Either that, or Americans hate Hillary THAT FUCKING MUCH.

Meanwhile, the lesson I take from this, which the Libertarian Party should note for 2020, is that just because marijuana use should not be a bigger crime than armed robbery, that does not mean that you want a marijuana user to be your presidential nominee.

Just sayin’.

Well. That was definitely a thing. I’m not sure what kind of thing it was, but it definitely was one.

The first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was actually very exciting and almost substantial. Here’s my short take.

Clinton: After being constantly told to smile more, Clinton seems to have overdid the advice a bit, smiling even when it was quite obvious that she wanted to go full Louis Black on Trump’s ass. It was still a pleasant contrast to Trump in split screen with his (sorry, feminists) Resting Bitch Face.

What actually impressed me is where she went after Trump on all the issues where people have been waiting on the press to grill him for years. Like, how can he say that he knows how to manage money when he’s stiffed most of his contractors in Atlantic City? She did defend her record – not that well, but less defensively than she did with Matt Lauer. And in head-to-head comparison with Trump, it wasn’t that hard to look good.

Trump: Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK WAS WITH THE SNIFFING???

To me, Chump’s best moment was challenging Clinton on an email scandal where any other official in the same situation would have been at least censured. It was also a good ante to say he would (finally) release his tax returns IF Clinton releases the “33,000 deleted emails.” It’s just by this point, it comes off as Boy Who Cried Wolf. We already know how Trump reacts to a challenge. If the birther thing is any guide, if Hillary somehow releases deleted data, he’s gonna bullshit continuously for three more years regardless before finally conceding the issue in such a way as to blame the Democrats for him making himself look stupid in the first place.

The other problem being that half of what this guy says is what Freudians would call “projecting.” Trump says (with some accuracy) that Clinton and the Obama Administration didn’t stop the spread of ISIS, but his main policy seems to be hitting up allies like NATO and Japan for extra money to cover their treaty obligations or we’ll pull out of them. He said, “I also have a much better temperament than she has” – which might have been the biggest laugh line of the night. And then, apparently thinking that he’d hit on some magic mantra to invoke Clinton’s 9/11 collapse, he said, “She doesn’t have the Stamina. I said she doesn’t have the STAMINA. To be president, you have to have the STA-MI-NA.”

Yeah, whatever you say, Sniffy.

Sad thing (for anybody who has issues with the Democrats) is that Trump did, again, have the opportunity to score some serious points on Clinton, over the emails, over ISIS, and all he could do was bluster and insult without giving a serious answer as to what he would do better. But then when confronted with his own venality, Trump doesn’t rely on a Big Lie technique. He relies on a Golden BB technique. This is basically where you fire so much rapid-fire bullshit downrange that there’s no way anybody can dodge it all. The drawback is that people get a bit… tired of it. Like when Lester Holt said, “we need to move ON…” Whereas when confronted about her issues, Clinton downplays them. Like, “I did apologize for the term ‘superpredators’, let’s move on.” Or, “Yes, I voted for Iraq, and I helped President Obama stage a withdrawal. Let’s move on.” She has to do this, because apparently unlike Trump, she is aware that the press has this new Weird Science invention called videotape that they can use to compare what you just said to what you said then.

The media conventional wisdom was that Hillary just needed to be competent and professional and also pleasant in demeanor, while Trump just needed to speak words good not drool. My estimation is that Clinton somewhat exceeded expectations and Trump somewhat disappointed his.

Well, as it turns out, SINCE I went off on Gary Johnson’s “and what is Aleppo?” fiasco, he actually topped himself in a press conference where someone asked him to address global climate change and he said, “the long-term view is that in billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right. So global warming is in our future. ” Now, he’d said just before that, “I just argue that the result (of government spending on climate change) is completely inconsequential to the money that we would end up spending, and that we could direct those monies in other ways that would be much more beneficial to mankind.”  But that doesn’t really go into serious detail as to what should be done, if anything, and as we’ve seen, the same press that gives Donald Trump credit for walking on two legs and says that his not displaying symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome is “professionalism” will dive on any comment Johnson makes and make that a Libertarian Straw Man the size of Godzilla.

What’s weird is that despite Gary Johnson turning himself into the San Diego Chargers of political candidates, he’s still at least 8 percent in a lot of polls.  Which is to say, he hasn’t gone up any, but he hasn’t gone down either. Seriously, why is that? All I can say for myself is that Johnson’s comments ought to be disqualifying to any serious candidate for president. The problem is that at least one of the two “serious” parties doesn’t have a serious candidate for president. And no, liberals, this isn’t a “both sides are the same fallacy.” I know damn well that President Clinton would not be the same as President Trump. President Hillary Clinton would not mount a giant gold-plated T on the roof of the White House. President Hillary Clinton would not make Wednesdays Hot Oil Wrestling Night in the Blue Room. And Hillary Clinton did not say she would turn her business holdings over to her offspring as a “blind trust” the way Trump did –  even though many people have pointed out that having family in charge of the assets is the opposite of a “blind trust.”

That in itself should be enough reason to make sure Donald Trump does not become President. Another would be the use of donations from other people to his Trump Foundation charity for private purposes, buying personal gifts, and making political contributions  – which is not just skeevy or unethical but outright illegal. Yet, after crashing in the wake of the two party conventions, Trump is now leading polls over Clinton in several key states like Florida. And liberals are casting about looking for someone to blame, from “third” parties to double standards to the idea that anyone not bowing down to Hillary is being “unrealistic” because their candidate isn’t “perfect.” In fact, that’s the argument being puked out in multiple sources.  Do an internet search on “Hillary Clinton is flawed” and you’ll get Daily Kos going “Cause, you know, I’m flawed. And you are flawed. And Bernie Sanders is flawed and Barack Obama is flawed and even Michelle Obama is flawed. But the difference between all of them and me–and probably you, is that they have all given their flawed lives to public service. And now, they are all working together in their inevitably flawed ways, to save all of us, and the whole world from a sociopathic narcissist. ” Or Jonathan Chait going “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” This is a bullshit argument, and the fact that liberals seriously seem to think that this is the best they can say is proof of how defensive and desperate they are. Do you really think that Chump voters aren’t aware by now that their guy is “flawed”? When a car dealer wants to sell a Hyundai Elantra, he doesn’t start out by saying that it’s not a Lamborghini. All we want is a car that will get us to work and back without blowing up within two years. That’s the problem here. The whole country, Left and Right, is sick of business-as-usual, “Normal” politicians, and constant war.  We don’t know if Clinton will go full neocon or let her paranoia turn her into a left-wing Nixon.

Look: If we’re going to be “realistic” here – which is what all the liberals who are desperately afraid that their Perfect Inevitable Queen may lose are always telling me to do – then we first need to dismiss both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Because whatever their merits OR flaws, neither has the voter base necessary to get a majority or even a three-way plurality of votes, or even win on a state-by-state level, which is what is actually required for the Electoral College system. (That’s why Gore didn’t get elected, remember?) Then you have to consider that Donald Trump declares himself more disqualified to be president with every public appearance he makes, because apparently he just can’t help himself. So you’re left with the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable president after all. So that means going over her record becomes that much more important for navigating the next four years, not less. Things being what we’ve seen, the second Clinton Administration may get itself into yet another paralyzing and possibly impeachment-worthy scandal, and it won’t necessarily ALL be the fault of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (TM) of Republican meanies.

 

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.

In my example: I’d already decided that after George Herbert Walker Bush, I was never going to vote for another Bush on principle. (Even then, I didn’t realize that Bush Junior would make Senior look like Eisenhower.) That’s part of why I ended up supporting Libertarian candidates. But Michael Badnarik was appealing only insofar as he wasn’t Bush or Kerry. In 2008, the Libertarian Party nominated conservative ex-Republican Bob Barr while the Democrats picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, and Republicans nominated Senator John McCain – who’d picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, the woman who turned out to be the John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Cheeto Jesus.

With that decision, I knew I couldn’t go Republican. I also didn’t trust Bob Barr, being one of those social conservatives who turned me off to the Republican Party in the first place. So in 2008, I voted for Obama. And not just as a “lesser evil.” Indeed, I think that was the only time I voted for a candidate that I liked AND that had at least an even chance to win. He didn’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian; I wasn’t a doctrinaire libertarian. He just had to be good on balance, and I didn’t think Barr or McCain were.

Over the next four years of Obama’s first term, he was disappointing on a lot of issues, certainly on civil libertarian issues like Guantanamo detentions and the “War on Terror.” On the Affordable Care Act, the Administration was, depending on perspective, either too socialist or not socialist enough. By 2012, I wasn’t too enthused about Obama but I thought the Republicans (under Romney-Ryan) hadn’t learned anything. On the other hand, Gary Johnson had gained the Libertarian nomination, and as a former New Mexico governor who had successfully run things with a strong Democratic opposition, he seemed like the kind of practical right-winger that Republicans used to promote and have since actively rejected. So I voted for him.

Now, I continue to have serious issues with the Obama Administration, but I would actually rather have Barack Obama serve a third term than have either Clinton or Trump, two dysfunctional, power-hungry creatures, be president of the United States. And while Gary Johnson, with his increasingly dippy statements, is no longer somebody I would support over Obama, I would STILL rather have HIM as President than Clinton or Trump. Because if Johnson doesn’t know where Aleppo is, Clinton helped make Aleppo the way it is, and Trump would end up making a real estate deal with the Russians to buy Syria dirt cheap for hotel properties.

There are reasons why it normally doesn’t pay to vote third party. Constitutionally, we have a “first past the post” election system, not a runoff or parliamentary system. Politically, even beyond the constitutional structure, we have an entrenched duopoly that has ginned up the laws to force any possible competitors through a prohibitive series of legal hoops to cut off even the diminished level of dissent that they would normally have. However when people who apologize for the status quo (usually liberals) tell the rest of us this stuff, they’re “mansplaining” this to people who already KNOW that going “third” party is unproductive, if only because gross vote nationwide does not translate directly to Electoral College votes.   (Which is why Ross Perot never got Electoral College votes.)  But what it really comes down to is that the third parties are “third” because those few people who do look them up find their platforms too immoral, or too impractical, or they like the platform but don’t think enough people (in their state) will vote with them.

The problem with using that logic to support the status quo, though, is that it still applies to one of the major parties if it becomes unpopular enough in a certain state. If you live in California, voting for Trump is just as much a vain, throwaway vote as voting for Johnson or Stein. But if you’re in Georgia or Texas, voting for Clinton would be the equivalent of a “third” party vote.

A point that Clinton apologists either do not address or actively dodge.

The problem with “but the other candidate is worse!” point is that it reveals that the binary logic of the two-party system has already reached its terminal point of absurdity. The expected result of such a system would be polarization. But polarization pays off only if the whole voter base is polarized, and in equal degrees. In practice, when that doesn’t happen, one party polarizes by purging all of its “squish” voters and candidates, which means that all the relatively moderate people who have been made unwelcome by their old party are refugees who get scooped up by the other party without them having to change their positions much at all – even if ultimately those new people are really not a good fit. So when the Republicans purged all their Jon Huntsman moderates, their Gary Johnson libertarians, their Colin Powell neocons, their RINOs, their get-alongs-to-go-alongs, they were essentially left with either the kind of people who actually take Trump seriously and those who know better but want the votes of the former group. And that latter group, like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, are the next on the chopping block, whether they admit this to themselves or not. Meanwhile, all those other guys either became official Libertarians like Johnson, publicly decided to sit things out this time, or actively declared they were voting for Clinton. So these center-to-right people, by definition, are the kind of people who have already rejected the premise ‘You HAVE to vote for the Republican, because the Democrat is always worse!’ So why would you expect them to obey a faulty programming code just because you switched the nouns?

The people on the Right who accept that premise, like Ted Cruz, are the people who are trying to rationalize voting for Trump, even if (or especially if) they know better. They’re already rehearsing their rationalizations for 2020: “Look, our nominee may be a fire-breathing demon with acid for blood and maybe he just raped an entire orphanage including the nuns, but at least he’s not Hillary Clinton.”

So the irony is that if Trump DOES win the election, it will be mainly because the Republicans embrace liberal “logic” more than the Democrats do. Because the people in the middle that the Democrats need are the ones who reject binary partisanship, and the ones who embrace it are the wrong team.

What then of the largely “progressive” Millennials? You would think that they would accept the premise “You HAVE to vote for A because B is so much worse” if only because it is so undeniably true this time. But as I keep telling people,  it is not the Right that Hillary needs to worry about so much. The substantial complaints about her are from the Left. Hillary Clinton is not trusted, because she is not trustworthy. For Millennials and the Left, this does not have so much to do with Benghazi and emails as the fact that Hillary Clinton has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to every one of the “progressive” positions she currently (for the duration of expediency) holds. “Progressives” may be stupid about a lot of things, but not in this case. Again, even setting aside the constitutional and political reasons against voting for a third party, the reasons an individual doesn’t vote for one usually come to: The platform (or candidate) is immoral, the platform is impractical, or one thinks that the party won’t get enough votes. And while the Constitution effectively dictates that there can only be two effective parties, liberals do not (or will not) point out that they haven’t always been the same two parties in history. At some point in the cycle of absurdity, one of the two parties will be considered by the majority to be too immoral, too impractical, or too unpopular to get enough Electoral College votes. It’s just a question of which party that happens to first. So if enough people decide that Hillary Clinton is too immoral to support, or can’t get her platform through Congress, or think that she doesn’t have enough votes in their state…

Well, hi, liberals. Welcome to MY world. I don’t know why you’re not happy here, you did so much to create it.

Not like this is more than academic in my case. In recent weeks, polls in my home state of Nevada have brought Trump to competition or an outright lead over Clinton when after the conventions her margin in the state was about 60-40. So according to my own logic,  I have to vote for her if that trend keeps up. I still think that with the major “blue” states being near-impossible to dislodge from her bloc, Clinton will still ultimately win an Electoral College victory, but I still want to take my state away from Trump in order to prevent it from inflicting on itself a disgrace even worse than the Sharron Angle fiasco that we barely avoided not long ago.

Fuck this dumb-ass country and fuck my dumb-assed state. Because the ONE good thing about Trump getting elected would be the sense of Schadenfreude I would feel when the reality of Trump actually becoming president and having to take responsibility for something invokes a fit of whining, pants-shitting terror in the people I hate the most.

First and foremost of these being, Donald Trump.

I was going to go over some more thoughts in the wake of Gary Johnson’s self-sabotage, namely on the point that despite that apparently reduced threat, Hillary Clinton is still losing her lead over Donald Trump. But in the midst of all the, uh, excitement surrounding this campaign, I forgot that the first presidential debate is September 26, or next Monday. At such occasions, the media will often pose questions from members of the audience. As I plan to be washing my hair and/or laundry that day, I do not expect to be present for the debate, but I did at least want to pose these questions for discussion.

 

Donald Trump

1. Did you know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal does not involve China?
2. Even if we renegotiate bad trade deals with China and other nations, what would your administration actually do to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States?
3. In March, you posted a memo to the Washington Post saying that you would use the “know your customer” provisions of the Patriot Act to prevent wire transfers from Mexican workers in America to their families back home, in order to pressure the Mexican government into paying for the border wall. Was this how you were actually expecting to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and do you honestly think their government will take you seriously?

4. In August 2015, you told a CNN interviewer that the secret to your success was that, quote, “I do whine because I want to win. And I’m not happy if I’m not winning. And I am a whiner. And I’m a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.”   Mr. Trump, I do not consider that a proper attitude for an ADULT, let alone the President of the United States, and that is one reason I will not vote for you, one reason of many.    What is your response to that statement?

Hillary Clinton

1. Secretary Clinton, I ask you the same question I asked of Donald Trump: What would your economic policies do to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US?
2. Secretary Clinton, when you did the “Commander in Chief” interview with Matt Lauer, you told the audience that we would never go back to having boots on the ground in Iraq. But several sources have confirmed that we do have special forces in both Iraq and Syria assisting against ISIS as well as official advisors to Iraqi forces, along with of course air support against the Assad regime. What would your policy be toward the region in general- specifically, what is your policy toward the Bashar al-Assad regime? Would you support it as the legitimate government of Syria or work to have him leave office? And in answering that question, how would your policy be supported by diplomatic and military means?
3. Mrs. Clinton, FBI Director James Comey, in his report to Congress on the issue of your email account as Secretary of State, said that you and your staff were “extremely careless” with emails you later said were “retroactively classified.” At the Commander in Chief event, an audience member said he was a naval officer who had held a top secret clearance, and had he not communicated information according to protocols, he could have been prosecuted. Yet you are saying the nation’s top diplomatic official is under lesser restrictions, and that the system your department was using was unclassified, which is why you were using a separate system. Can you at least understand that this issue- among others- is a major example of why so many Americans think you ARE secretive, you are suspicious, you are controlling, you can’t be trusted, and – more important than such opinion – that the system IS rigged to protect people at the top, like you?

——

Thank you, and God bless America.

 

Today (September 8 2016) Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson actually got on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, which would normally be great exposure, especially for a third party candidate trying to get into the national debates. But frequent panelist Mike Barnicle of The Daily Beast asked him at one point, what would you do about Aleppo? Johnson responded, “And what is Aleppo?”  And Barnicle said, “You’re kidding.” Host Joe Scarborough asked, rationally, “do you really think that foreign policy is so insignificant, that somebody running for president of the United States shouldn’t know what Aleppo is, where Aleppo is, why Aleppo is so important?” Johnson demurred, “I understand the crisis that is going on,” but at this point his stammering defense wasn’t convincing.

Never mind that Barnicle himself forgave Johnson’s flub,  apparently on grounds that not too many other people know what and where Aleppo is. For example, the reporters at The New York Times.  It doesn’t matter. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Not that I am much for public speaking myself, but if asked, I would probably say something like: “Aleppo is a humanitarian crisis. But it is a crisis because of Bashir Assad. As a libertarian, and believer in constitutional government, I think that America should only involve itself through humanitarian aid. But that may not be enough. If it is not enough, the president has to ask Congress if it is worth going to war against Assad. I don’t think it is, but I could make that case, because Assad’s war is the main cause of the refugee crisis that affects Greece, Turkey, and NATO partners further in Europe. If we withdraw, that situation will get worse, and Russia and Iran fill the vacuum. Any decision we make will have consequences, including the decision to do nothing. What we CANNOT do is do what Barack Obama did, which was to draw a line in the sand, and then do nothing when Assad crossed it. We cannot wash our hands of the thing and then act surprised when Russia brings Syria into their sphere of influence. And we cannot cluck that ‘someone needs to stop the bloodshed’ and then contribute to it without doing anything to conclude the war.”

One of the problems, if not the problem, with American politics is its tribalism. Rather than follow a party because it holds to your favorite policies, more and more, people change their policies to promote their party.  So I suppose one good thing about being a “third” party supporter whose candidates have slim to no chance of election is that we do not have to bend over backwards to pretend bending over backwards will help them. Unlike, say, Paul Ryan, we can call a spade a spade. So I’m glad that the libertarian community’s general reaction to Gary Johnson’s brainfart is about the same as everybody else’s.

You cannot ask to be on the same stage as the big kids and then, when asked a debate-level question, give a non-response that isn’t even Trump-level bullshit. This is why I have kept saying: If you’re in a third party you need to be able to answer the question of what you would do when you actually have power. Because not only are major-party candidates not sufficiently grilled on that matter themselves, the less serious the two major parties become, the more people will look for alternatives, and someday some journalist will actually come to you, Third-Party Candidate, and ask a serious policy question- in the expectation of a serious answer. And guess what? That someday was today. And as we have since observed, the media which pretended you didn’t exist no matter how much you jumped up and down for attention will give you ALL THE ATTENTION IN THE FUCKING WORLD as long as it causes the maximum embarrassment to you and your political movement.

Which goes to something else I’ve said:  Take the process seriously, so that people think you deserve to be elected. Because you will not be carried. There is a double standard against you. The system does not change, because various people, including the Beltway press and the Commission on Presidential Debates, make a living by not letting it change. You are PETA, and they are Colonel Sanders. Their people will be given every excuse, and they will damn you to Hell for one mistake. You are not “cool.” You are not Donald Trump. You will not be given credit for being the smartest paste-eater in the Special Ed class just because your daddy bought the school.

But speaking of which:

The biggest political news last night prior to the Johnson fiasco was the ultimately bigger fiasco with the “Commander-in-Chief Forum” hosted by a veterans’ organization and broadcast by the NBC networks. If there is anyone who has been more ridiculed than Gary Johnson, it is Today‘s Matt Lauer, who was hammered in real time by social media for being as hard on Hillary Clinton as he was easy on Donald Trump.  But while both Clinton and Trump were asked not asked about the city in Aleppo in particular, they were both asked about Middle East policy, and their answers were hardly more satisfying than Gary Johnson’s. I am not sure if that is consoling or depressing.

Hillary Clinton had to take questions from both military Right and pacifist Left members of the audience, and was at pains to stress why she had taken positions – especially on supporting the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq- that are now unpopular. While she now takes responsibility and regrets that mistake, she defended her more recent decision as Secretary of State to support the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya, knowing that if the US did nothing, his regime would cause a humanitarian crisis. Which is a great point actually, but it doesn’t change the fact that, as with Iraq, we intervened and did not do a good job of helping to create a stable, effective and responsible civilian government for the country, even though the Libya rebellion was a spontaneous uprising and not an American takeover like the conquest of Iraq. And while Clinton defensively insisted that we will not go back to having boots on the ground, it’s been pointed out that the Obama Administration has already sent “advisors” and even Special Forces to help Iraq against ISIS on the Mosul front.

After that, Lauer started his interview with Trump, who boasted that unlike Hillary, he was always against the Iraq War – even though Clinton had warned Lauer minutes before that Trump was in fact in favor of the war at that time, and had said so in interviews with Howard Stern and others. And when Trump was sort of pressed on what he would do to defeat ISIS in Syria, Trump at first said he had a plan, but “I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is.”  Isn’t that like where Nancy Pelosi said, “we have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it“?  Oh, I forgot, it’s okay when YOUR party has the White House.

But that should give you an idea of how fucked America and the “international community” will be after this election: On the matter of Syria, Trump is doing his usual con man spiel, Clinton will “take responsibility” for her past policies but has no vision for how to resolve the conflict without getting us further involved, and Gary Johnson, the last hope of sensible people, has no grasp of the matter whatsoever.

The best a libertarian can say for Johnson – and this is charity – is that he is no more clueless than the two “respectable” party nominees, to say nothing of a superficial mainstream media that has decided for the rest of us which two candidates get to be “respectable” and which are beneath notice. But if you’re no less clueless than the establishment, that defeats the purpose of replacing it.

Having gone over the problems with the current two-party setup, it gets to the matter of why we need to even consider alternative “third” parties. Why not just wait out this bad patch? Why not hope the Democrats and Republicans will just get back to normal? Well, as I’ve said, part of the issue with a two-party “first past the post” system is that if there is no motivation for anyone to vote for other than the two current ruling parties, likewise those parties have no motivation to seek votes from anyone other than those who already take their most partisan positions. This is part of why America has one of the lowest voter-participation levels of any democracy, because participation of the majority doesn’t matter, only the participation of those who are motivated to show up.

The usual result of this in politics is a “polarization” where the two parties operate at extremes – the Democrats were peaceniks who wanted a strong welfare state, Republicans were warhawks who wanted to do away with the safety net – but the result of the last few election cycles has been something similar but not identical to what is meant by polarization. The drive to the extreme has taken place mainly on the Republican side, as practicality is deemed inferior to ideological purity. This is where we get internal insults among conservatives like “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) or “cuckservative.” This is the cycle that got Republicans from the mainstream Right to the Tea Party to the “alt-right”, where “alt” is short for “alternative” and thus “alt-right” means “an alternative to being right.”

In turn, the result of that internal purge is that the Democratic Party looks more attractive to “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” ex-Republicans, or even some socially conservative voters who can no longer keep up with the Right’s version of political correctness. Being an essentially pragmatist party, the Democratic Party can handle “political immigration” better than the Republicans can. This has caused criticism within the more left-wing parts of the Democratic Party because of their leaders’ willingness to accommodate Big Business while dragging their feet on “progressive” social issues, but then, the Democrats are the ones winning presidential elections, and thus setting the national agenda. Their own internal weaknesses have caused them to fall behind in Congressional elections and state governors’ races, but as the Republican Party continues to make itself less attractive, even that disadvantage may lessen.

So if you’re a “progressive” or a Democrat who disagrees with the direction taken by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, you can still hope that the party’s gradualist approach will work in your favor, and that factors of social change will make the party take your position, as now seems to be happening with gay/trans issues.

If you’re a right-winger, whether libertarian or “True Conservative”, you have a much bigger problem, because “your” Republican Party doesn’t seem to be following the same direction as you whatsoever, and to the extent that it goes in any direction, it’s following the voters who are most likely to undermine the Party’s chances of electing candidates, and of getting legislation passed even if they do get elected.

And that’s because of a much deeper issue with what is called “conservatism.” The ideologues who bitch that hardcore, anti-abortion Republicans like John McCain and John Boehner are “RINOs” might be naive about what it takes for a political party to get things done, but they have a point. What IS it that Republicans want to get done? Why don’t they get serious about a constitutional amendment on abortion? What would promote American business, more freedom or more protectionism? If the Affordable Care Act is so horrible, what would they replace it with? Come to think of it, wasn’t Obamacare basically a national version of Romneycare in Massachusetts?

Conservatives don’t get anything done because they don’t know what they want. And they don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they ARE.

What does “conservatism” mean? What is it trying to “conserve? To the extent that the term has a common definition, it means not changing things, or not changing things more than required. The real problem here is that ultimately, conservatism is NOT a political philosophy. It is a governing approach TOWARDS a political philosophy. 

For example, when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, he was not trying to get rid of Leninist Communism. He was simply trying to reform it socially with “glasnost” and with greater economic freedoms (which the Soviets had actually experimented with before Stalin). But in this he was opposed by those in the Communist Party elite who preferred the previous centralized and undemocratic system. At the time, political analysts referred to this hardcore faction as “conservatives.” But doesn’t “conservatism” in America mean the exact opposite of Marxism-Leninism? Yes, in America. Because the American philosophy is liberal representative democracy, or at least what used to be called liberalism. The Soviet philosophy was Marxism-Leninism. Conservatism in Marxist-Leninist states means protecting the ideology against “reforms” that dilute its purity (in this respect, conservatives succeeded in Cuba and failed in China). So already, the fact that “conservatism” in America means protecting an essentially liberal political project creates a contradiction. (Part of which is based on how the term ‘liberal’ was co-opted by the American Left in the 20^th Century before the Left decided to rebrand themselves as ‘progressives.’ More recently, though, right-wingers have been willing to say that things like opposing mandatory speech codes and religious dress codes are defenses of liberal Western civilization. Meanwhile, ‘progressives’ insist on using the term ‘neoliberal’ only in a pejorative sense, and often synonymously with the insult ‘neoconservative’, which demonstrates not only how vague and useless our political labels can be, but that the Left was probably not in favor of classical liberalism in the first place.)

Another contradiction is the idea of our free-market, classical liberal system being based in a religious conception of humanity, going so far as to being fundamentalist Christian. It is quite true that the Founding Fathers were if not Christians then at least deists who believed in God. It’s also true that their concept of God did not have much in common with the modern Republican one.  It’s even more true that the crowned heads of Europe were operating on a concept of Christianity that was that much more “conservative” than what Americans conceive of, and even then, the policies between Great Britain, Ancient Regime France, Protestant Prussia and autocratic Russia differed from each other greatly.

In short, even though religion is supposed to reflect an ultimate or universal value system, it is most often a subjective one that is applied subjectively. This is why the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights made “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” part of the First Amendment. The very fact that our government does not base its policies on theology is why pluralism and tolerance of different religions is possible.

This is one reason that “liberalism” (meaning, the mainstream Left ideology that Europeans would call social democracy) largely avoids basing its modern philosophy in theology, even though many of the great liberals, from the Kennedy family to Dr. Martin Luther King, were also devout Christians. And also huge philanderers, but I digress.

Where Ayn Rand would say that the fundamental contradiction of conservatism is its insistence on conflating religious altruism with secular capitalism, I would say the issue goes deeper. Again, it is a matter of our political system applying labels long past their point of usefulness. Just as the tag “liberal” is now associated with a large amount of politically correct, state capitalist and ultimately illiberal ideas, “conservative” is a tag associated with a grab bag of ideas that ultimately cannot work together, because their only common point is that they were once thought of as traditional practices – often at different times – and therefore must be conserved regardless of whether they work now, or ever did work.

Which is where the “alt-right” and Trump come in.

According to the Wikipedia article, “The alt-right has no official ideology. The Associated Press stated that there is “no one way to define its ideology” and the BBC has called it an “amorphous movement”. “Commonalities shared across the loosely-defined alt-right include disdain for mainstream politics and support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.”

It seems like an incoherent mess fueled by resentment. And if that seems like a great description of Donald Trump, that may or may not be coincidence. Donald Trump is not exactly a theorist, but he just happens to be saying what many on the Right have been saying when not running in general elections. They’re against “crooked” politicians and financial elites, which is why they support Donald Trump, one of America’s most crooked financial elites. They don’t care so much about abortion or the welfare state, but they do care that immigrants are using the system. They don’t care too much about gays, but they’re saying that Muslims (even in assimilated families that have been here for generations) are a threat to American culture. And in regard to that culture, they’re willing to say the most sexist things about women, but still think they’re defending our values.

The secret to Donald Trump’s political success is that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump supporter would be if he had money.  That’s why he won against people who had lots of campaign funds and more conservative credentials.  He prevailed because he seized upon an opportunity to make personality and celebrity bigger factors than consistent ideology.  But that opportunity didn’t just arise out of nowhere.

Conor Friedersdorf had an excellent column in The Atlantic where he talked about how one of Rush Limbaugh’s own listeners (along with a columnist at RedState) called him on supporting Trump even when it was clear to many he would flip-flop on immigration, even when Rush said “I never took him seriously on this!”

But that’s something I picked up on a while ago. Back when I was still conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh’s show, I remembered that right up to the last week of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign against Rick Fazio, he was predicting that she would find some reason to back out. Or that she would end up losing. Of course, she didn’t. I distinctly remember the day after the 2006 midterm elections (when Democrats under President George W. Bush regained the House) when Limbaugh angrily confessed,  “I feel liberated. … I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.” Heck, way back in 1992 (when Rush had a TV show) I remember a TV Guide cover with a blurb on an article, “Rush Limbaugh: I’m so-o-o happy Clinton won!”

Other people have made this point, but whereas there used to be serious intellectual discussion in media like National Review, that has mostly degenerated to presenting politics as pure entertainment, with recognizable good guys and bad guys- much like pro wrestling- and the consequences of political action are not dwelled upon. In fact, we can see in Congress that Republicans (in direct contrast with the ‘Contract With America’ era) are not at all interested in initiating action or shifting the terms of political debate, only reacting against whatever President Obama wants, even if, as with Obamacare, it was largely their idea to start with. Even better, rather than be a party engaged in the political process (and thus either have the enemy take credit for your best ideas, or win a majority and actually have to take responsibility), always be a party in opposition so you can stoke resentment and righteous indignation. The Republicans have become like the hunter in that joke where the bear pokes the hunter in the shoulder and goes “You didn’t come here for the huntin’, didja?”

It’s almost as if a large part of the conservative base was conditioned by experience to conclude that politics is worthless, and every politician is a liar, and even when they aren’t, the system won’t let them get anything done.

Why not then vote for an outright joke? Why not vote for a candidate whose core dogmas (like ‘we’ll build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it’) cannot be taken seriously, even by conservative standards?
It’s basically the reason pro wrestling ate boxing’s audience: Everybody knows the fight is fixed, but they at least want it to be entertaining.

So if Trump has a “softening” on his core immigration policy,  and even Mr. Tell It Like It Is turns out to be a lying politician, then so much the better. If Republicans continue to follow him when they know he is lying, then their self-deception is just emulating their new role model.
Or as W.C. Fields put it, “you can’t cheat an honest man.”

Conservatism today is an essentially unserious, even nihilist approach to politics, that at worst regards the democratic process as inherently flawed compared to direct rulership by a strongman,  even when the strongman in this case is not very strong, intelligent or competent.

The Republicans cannot be called the GOP – Grand Old Party – any more. They are now the POT. Party Of Trump. (Which would make his supporters the POTheads.)

But in retrospect it’s not very surprising that things turned out like this, even if it is pathetic that Republican elites seem surprised that their racket got taken over by somebody who’s better at it than they are.

This attitude has been going on for quite some time, at least by the start of the second Obama term. The Republican Party has been Trump’s party for years. They were just waiting for him to show up.