2016 Election Update:  No Trump Supporter Friends for Me!

I have determined that any one of my friends who supports Trump can no longer be my friend.  It is very fundamental.  Trump is, I am convinced, clinically and definitionally deranged.  Words come out of his mouth like a tossed salad with no syntactical connection.  It would be impossible to diagram one of his sentences.  His mind is free floating mush.  He has no defining morality.  He is incurious and does read books, newspapers or white papers.  He watches the "shows" and listens to his own prodigious mind for insight on the issues facing our nation and our world.  His election to the presidency would be a disaster domestically and internationally.  He draws support from a significant part of the American population.  Keep in mind that 50% of the population has an IQ of less than 100.  That is not a very encouraging thought.  Long term loyal Republicans are trapped by party orthodoxy.  You must always support your party.  They must be agonizing over the dilemma Trump creates for them.

As a long term Democrat I can say that I am not thrilled by Hillary Clinton.  I will vote for her and be very happy to do so in the current context.  I had wanted Joe Biden to run because Joe is authentic and qualified.  Yes, he can say some ridiculous things but he is a solid and diligent politician.  I have suffered Hillary fatigue.  I have felt that fatigue largely because the Clinton's have been around for a generation and I am simply tired of them.  I do believe Hillary is very qualified to be president.  And I do not believe that she is a liar or dishonest.  She has been attacked for the past 20 plus years by the right wing attack machine.  I pay that no mind.  Whitewater etc are all so much bullshit.  Hillary will make a very good president and will keep the country on an even keel.  Most important, her appointments to the Supreme Court will be qualified candidates.  They will not be right wing ideologues in the same vein as Scalia, Thomas or Alito.  Praise the Lord for that result.

So...tell me you are voting for Trump and you and I are done forever.  Farewell will be my last words to you.

2016!

I have not posted on my blog, Political Itch, for four years.  While the primary season is now well underway, I have not felt compelled to post.  The Republican candidates for President are distressingly bad with the exception of John Kasich who is clearly the most qualified and most thoughtful of the current lot.

Jeb Bush gives the impression that he would rather being doing something else.  I don't think he really wants to be running for President.  It was expected of him and it was his turn so he felt compelled to get in the race.  I think he is fundamentally a decent person but he should not be running for President.

Rubio, Cruz and Trump are equally terrifying, each for their own reasons.  Trump defines narcissism!
He is a blowhard and very difficult to take seriously, but I think we must.  At the end of the day he is not electable.   I have been calling him the Pillsbury dough-boy!   His physician said he was in the best condition of anyone who had ever run for President.  How ridiculous!  Everything about Trump exudes hyperbole and excess. 

Cruz defines mendacity.  He will say anything to curry favor with and pander to the electorate.  He is similar to Trump in his self-promotion and ambition.  He looks like a rat and acts like one as well.  Some make light of the fact that he has no friends and no supporters in the US Senate.  But, can't you tell a person by the friends they keep....and if you keep none doesn't that mean something as well?
His one professed friend is Peter Thiel, the libertartian investor who wants to create a floating nation free from the constraints of government....to be inhabited one imagines by the one percent and served by "illegal immigrants."  The fact that Cruz wears cowboy boots also offends me.  He may be from Texas, but he is Ivy League at heart and a big hat, no cattle kind of guy.

Rubio looks like a teenager and is clearly not ready for prime time.  The arc of his career, his education and background provide to me the picture of a person who has been perpetually ahead of his skis!  And, he wears shoes with high heels!  Pretty funny.

I like the fact that Bernie Sanders is raising serious issues and moving them into the national dialogue.  That is important.  I will write more about that in the future.  And poor Hillary.  I have such Hillary fatigue.  More about that later as well.

Barack Obama has been the coolest President we have had in a long time.  David Brooks wrote a wistful piece on Obama which is interesting coming from his Republican (albeit it centrist and moderate point of view).  Here is a link to that column:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/opinion/i-miss-barack-obama.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fdavid-brooks&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection&_r=0

Stay tuned!  The world is a bit upside down right now!  That seems to be a rather constant state since the days of Ozzie and Harriet.  Although, the 1958 that the Republicans want to embrace only exists on television re-runs.  

This political season has been mind-numbing. The primary campaign on the Republican side was comprised of the seven dwarfs...idiots all. Willard Mitt Romney, the Mormon with the magic underwear and the 180 position pivot on every issue that mattered to the hard right Tea Party was the inevitable nominee...as he was the most reasonable of a very sorry crowd. While Obama has disappointed the most rabid progressives he has done an admirable job on most issues and is undeniably smart. In fact, he may be his intelligence which causes him most of his difficulties...as his internal dialogue is no doubt: "Do I really have to deal with these idiots....with no intellectual integrity and no pragmatic sense of what is good for America?" His Denver debate performance underscored that tendency. I haven't posted this season...it just seemed too ridiculous to point out the obvious. But, I have heard people, otherwise fairly decent straight forward folks say they were voting for Romney...usually by repeating some canard from the Republican right about the economy. I have voted early...and I voted for Obama. I gave Romney no consideration whatsoever. How people could vote for Obama four years ago and not this time I will never understand....other than their vote was, sadly, uninformed on both occasions. The New Yorker has endorsed Obama. As a reader of that elite publication I feel confirmed in my vote. They put well the reasons for another Obama term. The reasons are many: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/10/29/121029taco_talk_editors More later...

Newt is a nut case!

Yesterday on a Sunday television talk show, Newt Gingrich, recently soaring into the lead in the Republican Presidential polls, upped the ante and increased the ferocity of his rhetoric in the face of eroding support. It seemed to be classic Newt! He has had a historical tendency to engage in rhetorical flourish and verbal pyrotechnics. It seems to be a way for him to garner attention. It fits with his self-absorbed "look at me" adolescent way of gaining attention.

So, yesterday Newt said that he would use the Capitol police or the US Marshall's service to arrest judges whose rulings violate Gingrich's self appointed sense of US Constitutional rectitude. In Newt's view, these errant judges would be brought before the Congress to explain their ruling and if they failed to do so they would be impeached. The impeachment process has historically been used as a consequence of personal indiscretion. In Newt's view, a judicial ruling at odds with the view of a portion of the public (Tea Party nut cases for example)would be subject to review and correction.

Newt is an alleged scholar with a PhD from Tulane. I presume he has never read Marbury vs. Madison and understood the underpinnings of our independent judiciary.
Newt's notion would destroy the independence of the judiciary. It is an appalling idea.

The polarized political environment in which we live causes candidates with insufficient intellectual mettle to pander to a narrow core constituency that lives in a fear based reality. In Newt's view and theirs, the world would be a better place but for those "activist" judges. If it were only that simple.

What a crazy time! I can't wait for the next ridiculous proposal from Newt.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

During the early 1970’s I attended law school at the University of California at Davis. The law school, named King Hall, after the then recently assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, attracted a fair number of students who were active participants in that tumultuous period in our history.

A group of my fellow law students and I organized an effort to blockade trains carrying munitions to the Port of Oakland for shipment to Vietnam. The campus and local police cleared the tracks, with a few arrests but no pepper spray or other such acts of violence. Then sitting California Governor Ronald Reagan told a newspaper that the activists in Davis were “bums.”

Bums?

Hardly! We were law students exercising our first amendment rights.
We responded to the Governor’s mischaracterization of us by putting on suits (some of us had to borrow one – see photo below) and ties and headed to the Governor’s office in Sacramento.

We called for law students from all over the Bay Area to join us in a peaceful demonstration in Reagan’s office. Our fellow law students responded and we engaged in a “sit-in” and for hours read the United States Constitution aloud, over and over again.

Our hope was that we” bums” could teach the governor something about protest in a free society.

From his record as Governor and President I am not sure we taught the great communicator anything. But we did capture the attention of the media and people across the country, who applauded our efforts.

Now, forty years later, I watched in shock at the videos of the UC Davis police pepper spraying students who were peacefully sitting on the Quad in the middle of campus. The Quad at UC Davis is the primary gathering place for students. It is akin to Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. On the Quad, card tables with literature promoting student organizations, and spontaneous political protests compete with Frisbees and undergraduate mating rituals for attention.

The vivid images from the campus of UC Davis galvanized my fellow alums. We flooded the Chancellor’s office with emails. We implored the Dean of the law school to take action and along with the law students and faculty to support the protesters rights and monitor the situation while creating a teaching moment.

Those of us who read the constitution to the governor that day years ago have spent long careers as lawyers, judges, businessmen and elected officials trying to make positive and lasting change in our society. Now the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the events at Davis have invigorated us again to remember that striving for equality and an open society never ceases.

As an aging Boomer, I am now re-engaged in part because of the peaceful protest at my alma mater, and the outrageous police reaction to that protest. The Occupy Wall Street movement gains traction in part as a consequence of the over reaction by police. Thanks to those excesses my own support for the inchoate goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement will no longer be passive. And, with less hair on my head and a ready supply of suits and ties, I can join the protesters without being called a bum.

Ground Hog Day!

I have decided to reactivate and once again begin to scratch my Political Itch! I do have a sense of deja vu. It seems just moments ago that we were experiencing the run up to the 2008 election. These four years have had a velocity that is breathtaking. I suppose that is, in part, a consequence of my ever increasing age. Four years is a smaller portion of my life with each passing day! That velocity may also be a function of the acceleration of our lives through the ever strident 24/7 news flood and the broad reach of social media. I suppose that I will have to tweet my posts to Political Itch and post them to my Facebook wall. LOL! Pretty funny.

So, here goes again. Look forward to my rants. In the words of a forgotten hipster from the 1960's "Stay high, keep moving and give all of yourself away!"

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who, over the past twelve months, read my posts on Political Itch.
What an amazing political year it was. I will no longer be scratching my political itch. I will, however, reactivate my other blogs, www.cybersamizdat.blogspot.com and www.poetrysmackdown.blogspot.com

Thanks for visiting.