The Republican Rapture

We give him no credit, but we should be applauding Donald Trump for helping the GOP face itself. Trump has shown them who they are. They’re so mean that most Republican women can ignore sexual assault. Many Republicans believe that Mother Nature made white skins superior to darker skins. Nature made men larger than women and better than women. To Republicans all of that is inescapably natural. Add that white culture builds the most comfortable cars, the slickest handguns, the richest ruling class. Didn’t Jesus, God’s only Son, come from Heaven to tell us our goal should be to grub for money?

Trump has not destroyed the Republican Party. He is the Republican Party. When the Party looks in the mirror, it sees Donald Trump. It sees his hair—to covert a bald spot, he hired a surgeon to split his scalp and then sew it back together in a new and more feathery way. That’s a thing millionaires do. The downside is that your features get pulled around a little and your  mouth may resemble a cat’s anus.

Thanks to Trump, who the Republicans have become is now obvious to the Republicans. 

Small wonder decent people have begun to shrink away from brutality. George Will has left the party. Is the Rapture happening in an unexpected arena? Who gets left behind? Is the Republican Party looking at End Times?

Trump's Fortune

Long ago Donald Trump had $200,000,000. If he had invested it in an index fund, today he would today have about 15 billion dollars, according to experts. Instead he has about 3 billion dollars. This is the dude who claimed that he would self-fund his presidential campaign. Instead he’s all over the internet begging for money.

You may know the classic story:  How do you make a small fortune? You inherit a large fortune and mismanage it. 

Wikileaks at War

When Wikileaks began, it was a site that published government whistle blowers. People who worked for governments sent in government secrets that sometimes helped us understand the ruling class.

Today, according to some, Wikileaks has added a second mission. It publishes material taken from private rather than government sources. Intelligence agencies claim that much of this new material comes from teams of hackers hired by governments to do mischief in other nations.  As Glenn Greenwald has said, Wikileaks does nothing to protect the privacy of the innocent. It disseminates private email--hacked by government spies--without verification or consideration. Greenwald doesn't argue that private, personal emails should be sacred, just that which ones to publish requires careful judgment. 

Greenwald is a journalist and he makes judgment calls on the material he uncovers. I'm not a journalist, so my concern is different. If, to invent an example, the government of France hires hackers to hack into the private files of Australian winemakers and then sends the files to Wikileaks, can we be sure the files are genuine? If we find in the files an email boasting that the way to make Australian wine is to buy wine from Chile and add water, how do we know if France has not thrown a forged email into the pile? We can't verify Wikileaks, and Wikileaks checks nothing.

Hugh Laurie

Last night Colbert asked Hugh Laurie what medical intervention might help Donald Trump with his many hangups and problems. Laurie, who often plays doctors on TV, ad libbed, "Breast feeding--it might be too late."

A Nasty Woman

Some commentators this morning seem deeply concerned because, at last night's debate, Donald Trump did not agree to accept the results of an American Presidential election. Who cares? I don't give a damn if Trump accepts one thing or another. I just don't want to see that deranged, shiftless, orange face again. (For Trump to make this notion the focus of the next week's TV discussion indicates that he has no hope left of winning. He's finished.)

Why can't Melania give him some make-up tips? Who uses an orange blusher? Why can't she slip him some of her botox?--anything to keep his features from that constant crawling. 

What Trump did say that was outrageous was that his opponent is a "nasty woman." Like many men, I would likely have missed the deeper import of that comment. Fortunately I was sitting with women when he made it, and they got it instantly. It was another of Trump's slightly indirect references to the contemptible odors and tastes that emanate from the female half of our life form (in his view). Trump really dislikes women. They understand, and now they have him targeted.

Hillary

Our ballots are about to arrive. it’s time to get serious.

I’m a veteran voter, having cast ballots for New Dealers like JFK and LBJ and then for Democrats who betrayed the New Deal: Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry. (I exempt Obama because he integrated gays and passed the Affordable Care Act.) 

I can’t explain why someone who voted for John Kerry should refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton. They are both centrists with a deep commitment to Wall Street and a few progressive ideas. They ran or run against Republicans who believe that God gave us life to grub for money. 

Some of my friends intend to vote for Jill Stein, who has no experience in leading a town or a nation or the world. Unlike Bernie Sanders, she’s not qualified. 

The problem we face, ultimately, is that capitalism constantly drifts toward becoming inhumane. From time to time, the ruling class ends up owning nearly everything. That’s a fact. Eventually people will change that. In the meantime, Hillary Clinton is the viable candidate who will do the poor the least harm. I’m voting for Hillary.

Jim Wood

As you may have noticed, the Press Corporate Democrat does endorse liberal Democrats for election when their election is likely anyway. They have endorsed Jim Wood for Assembly, 2nd district.

Jim, the incumbent, lives in Sonoma County, which he has represented in judiciously progressive ways. He is, unless I'm out of date, the only scientist in the state assembly. The importance of science in this age of information technology, global warming and personality disorders emanating from Donald Trump and the alternate radical-right universe is plain. I will vote for Jim Wood. 

Denial

DENIAL is a current movie, more or less a true story, about a  Holocaust denier who filed a libel suit against a historian who denounced him. The reviews have been so-so, but I found the film moving. Rachel Weisz employs a wicked Queens’ accent. And, no surprise, the movie made me think of Donald Trump.

DENIAL is about confronting human evil. At the moment we are confronting Trump, a global warming denier and so on, but, most telling, he denies his own history as a sexual predator. Right now 12 women have accused him, and soon it will be 120 women. He is on tape boasting of his predation. Yet Trump denies and denies and attacks the truth tellers. He presents raw lewdness in human form for us to see. We watch him cartoonishly writhing like a dying orange fire. His fate is public and loathsome and something ordinary family people like me can marvel at. 

Faking It?

We all saw Don Trump on TV last week bragging that he was a sexual predator. Later we saw him telling us that he'd merely been boasting--he'd never actually groped women and so on. In short, he now told us that he was a fake sexual predator, not a real one. That was good enough for the current Jerry Falwell, president of Liberty College, to endorse Trump.

Trump's new task is to convince us, as he has the pious Falwell, that what this nation needs is a President who confessed on TV to being a fake sexual predator.