Jail the Women

There's evidence now that Donald Trump did not intend to win the Republican nomination when he began his campaign. He wanted to finish second (as a protest candidate). That might explain why he opposes NATO and supports allowing South Korea to develop nuclear weapons. It might explain why he has attacked and alienated women, Latinos, gays, Moslems, the Pope, etc., while being soft on support for Israel and fetal rights. He's desperate not to win the nomination--but he can't afford to ruin the Trump brand. He can't look like a total loser. (He makes his living by franchising his name out to companies that sell water, wine, steaks, and so on.) Trump is caught in a bind.

Most recently Trump said that if it were illegal to have an abortion, then a woman who had one would have to be punished. That is logical, but of course almost no one is willing to jail half the women I know. (Some might like to suppress the women's vote, in the same way that the Black voters have been suppressed and disenfranchised.) 

Trump has since retreated to the standard Republican position, which is that only the doctor who performs the abortion should go to jail. The woman, Republicans claim, is a victim. All she has done is find an abortion provider, driven to his office, and paid him good money  to do as she asks. She's a victim. Now, as it happens, I can remember back when abortions were illegal. I knew a young woman who gave herself an abortion. Would Trump put her in prison while refusing to punish the victim? (We'll never know.)  
 

Angela Davis

This morning I watched Angela Davis on DEMOCRACY NOW commenting that Bernie Sanders' analyses are too centered on economic issues. She wasn't saying he was wrong, just that other things matter, too.  She was right in that, but I was amused to hear this reservation coming from our country's most famous Marxist back in the 1960s. That's what people used to say about her.
 
Davis was interesting and reasonable, well worth hearing out. Perhaps we've all been influenced by Marx's description of how capitalism works. That has become part of how even capitalist leaders see the world. But I was never at any point a Communist, because I believe in democracy. No dictatorships. (I'm voting for Bernie, who believes in democracy. I'm hoping this democracy experiment works out.)
 

Why Do Black Lives Matter?

In examining what has gone wrong in America, the first thing I might look at is class. Why does our justice system give poor men death sentences while no rich man ever faces execution for murder? And so on. Bernie Sanders is right about all this. The playing field isn't level.  Without inherited money and influence, Donald Trump and George W. Bush would be lucky to make a living by ineptly packing bags at Safeway, putting the heavy liquids on top.

But many factors make up the differences. It isn't just class or Mother Nature. For example, who is more apt to end up in prison, a penniless white hobo or a wealthy African American college graduate? Statistics say that it is prison for the rich man with the darker skin. That's what the BLM movement knows and wants to tell us. Class matters, yes, but if you have dark skin, class is not the only consideration. 

Trump and his party

Frank Rich wrote recently that Donald Trump isn't taking over the Republican party. Instead, Trump is the Republican party. Trump understands the voters, and the Republican Establishment does not.

All that the Republicans have going for them now is bigotry. Their establishment foreign policy has failed, and their social and financial policies are ludicrous. The Republican establishment is morally and practically bankrupt. The only issues they have left are support for racism, religious conflict, male domination, war and greed. Trump is the Republican choice.

You know that the major parties are collections of many different groups of people. Hillary and Bernie represent quite different wings of the Democratic party. Trump represents a large chunk of the most boneheaded Republican voters (few of them conservatives) while Paul Ryan represents Wall Street (little of which is conservative). Not even God knows what the Republicans believe "conservative" means--better ask the confused David Brooks and the rattled George Will.

For thirty years the Trump faction of the Republican party (which tends to be racist, authoritarian, empty headed, limping, women hating, gay baiting and as emotionally deranged as a tomcat searching for carnal pleasure) has lived on meager scraps thrown from the Wall Street table. Now the Trumpers want the table food, not the scraps. Their hunger grows fiercer day by day.

Shades of George Lakoff

Recent studies have shown that the most accurate predictor about who will support Donald Trump is not race, class, education, religion, age, etc. What best predicts a Trump voter is the person's attitude toward the traditional father-dominated family structure. If you believe that fathers know best and should be obeyed, you probably like Don Trump.

Trump's Rights

I heard a radio host describe Trump as looking like an orang utan with his foot caught in the door, and then he went on to add that Trump has a Constitutional right to express his racist political blather.

The First Amendment prohibits the making of any law abridging the freedom of speech or interfering with the right to peaceably assemble. No one has been passing laws abridging Trump, but there are some small groups whose leaders have stated their goal is to block certain Trump rallies and speeches. Freedom of speech is not absolute, of course. You are not free to lie under oath in a courtroom. You aren't free to say something that constitutes a clear and present danger. If Trump tells his crowd to rough up a demonstrator, he should be arrested and charged in my opinion (but I'm not an attorney).

I need to keep in mind that, for the most part, Trump has the right to say what he thinks. Also people have the right to disagree and assemble and demonstrate.

Trusting Hillary

I was watching President Obama this morning talk about the Transpacific Trade Pact, and in his comments he referred to its opponents (Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) as people "who don't believe in trade."  It's unlike Obama to make that kind of mistake. Hillary and Bernie (and everyone else on the planet) believe in trade. Obama (off the cuff) made the mistake of overlooking the context. In the larger context, we can safely say that Hillary and Bernie support trade but not this pact.

We see a related error when Hillary accuses Bernie of opposing loans our government made to save the automobile industry during the Bush recession. Bernie supported auto loans but opposed the Wall Street bailouts that came with it. Hillary knows that Bernie favored bailing out the auto companies but could not bring himself to bail out Wall Street.  She is proud she wanted to bail out both. That's the larger context. Hillary then goes on to say that the Wall Street bailout was repaid to the government--the larger context is that millions of retired people and home owners lost everything thanks to Wall Street, and no one repaid them.  

There's a way of telling the truth that isn't truthful. That's one reason Hillary has high negatives. The voters may not spend any time analyzing the logic of her commentary, but they don't trust her.

 





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Two Parties

This is a note for those who believe there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. That will be true when Hillary goes on national television to boast about her bra size while Bernie cracks jokes about circumcisions. 


  

Is Trump a Racist?

Larry Wilmore's TV show developed a few thoughts on Trump last night. They answered the question some people ask: Is Trump only pretending to be a racist?  

Come on. No one pretends to be racist. (Trump might think he is pretending, of course.)

Is Trump one of the great American racists like Robert E. Lee? Wilmore pointed out (in my language, not his) that thoughtful American racists approached racism intellectually, vending deep philosophical nonsense about the Bible and pseudo-science about inferiors, etc. Trump just blurts out racist insults like a ten-year-old. His racism is--Wilmore said it--thoughtless.

The College Roommate

I was the first member of my family to have a college roommate, and I didn't know what to make of them in 1952. About four years ago I looked up one of those roommates on the 'net to find out what had happened to him. Jack, a political radical, had married the girl he'd been dating. The Yankees had offered him a pitching contract, but he hadn't signed. Then he'd become an alcoholic. Finally he'd become a professor at a university. (Nearly all my old friends, I found out, none of them bookish, had become professors, which was downright odd.) Anyway, Jack and I exchanged a few emails, and then he went silent about three years ago. That's often how it goes when you look up someone from your distant pass. But yesterday I looked him up again and found out that he hadn't gone silent. He'd died.

One of my roommates my freshman year was a kindly political refugee from El Salvador. I didn't know what to make of that and now do not remember his name. My third roommate, Pete, was a local guy and a friend of Jack. My fourth roommate only lasted three weeks, and I don't remember his name either, but I remember what happened to him. For some reason he would not use our shower. He was intelligent and friendly but smelled pretty ripe. Finally Pete proposed that we get some other guys in the dorm to help us give him a shower. Where he'd gotten that idea I don't know. We all had different ideas about what it was like to live in a dorm and what the rules were. I knew little but did tell Pete that pushing someone into a shower was a bad idea. I told him no. About a week later maybe four or five guys stormed into our room, grabbed the offending freshman and rammed him into the shower (first taking off his watch, I think). I had not participated, but I hadn't stopped it, either. The next day the victim packed his bags and left college. I tried to talk him out of it, but his mind was made up. 
    

I Come Out for Trump

If I were a Republican, this is how I would see the competition for their Presidential nomination.

John Kasich:  His asset is that he doesn't tell dirty jokes on national television. He's an awful right winger but not insane, and he's not a factor in this race. A vote for him is wasted.

Little Marco Rubio: By telling penis jokes on TV, he's proved himself more vulgar than Donald Trump. If you were a 12-year-old girl who was raped by your father, he would make you carry the fetus and give birth to the baby. He's as heartless as a shrimp.

Ted Cruz: he's a religious nut from some truly nasty farther-than-the-far-right sect. He appears to be a sociopath. His friends don't like him.

Donald Trump: he's a blowhard racist. For him, women--well, he claims that he wants to date his own daughter. What makes him different from the other genuine contenders is that he sometimes shows a tiny smidgen of empathy and he has no real political beliefs. This man is the best of the much touted deep Republican bench. His nomination would signal the capture of the main Wall Street party by low information voters. This would probably force a remaking of the Republican party, which is overdue.

Wall Street prefers to control both parties, covering all bases.