The Little Things

It’s relatively easy to play Monday morning quarterback, to explain what happened in an election a few hours or a few days or even a few weeks after it is over. Not that those things don’t deserve to be done, of course. I just feel that bloggers and other media critics should make some pointed observations before the election.

You know, put some skin in the game.

I recognize that we are collectively drowning in a sea of twisted evil coming from some crazy people who use the language of our President and who wear his hats, and who chant “lock her up” with great regularity.

Then they say it’s only a joke, or the other side does it too, or the media is really anti-American and lies all the time. You know, the kind of excuses that  six-year-olds give when they are caught doing something really bad.

So, before the election, let me look at some little things. Why? Because the big things are already right out there in front of us, written in letters of fire 20 feet tall. They can only be ignored by people who will not see, and you know what the bible says about that.

Now I will not be talking about the ugly throbbing evil that came out from under a rock when the GOP candidates started saying it was all right to spout unchecked filth. You know - don’t take the President literally when he says he doesn’t know who David Duke is.

And I refuse - absolutely refuse - to get into any discussion of what is more evil - to kill a defenseless six year old school girl and lots of her classmates or to kill a 97 year old woman praying in a Temple and lots of her fellow congregants. Or even to condemn that violence one minute and encourage it the next.

Nor will I make predictions about what will happen after Election Day plays itself out. I will leave predictions of the election results to the Sunday newspapers and really good predictors like Nate Silver’s 538.

There is more than enough to look at some of the little things that are going on, almost unnoticed under those burning letters of fire. Lots of stuff will happen because of the election, and lots of stuff will happen despite it. And little things can mean a lot. It’s a lesson we learn over and over again.

So, here’s what I see us talking about after Election Day,  in no particular order. (The numbers are just ironic internal dialogue)

                                                               And Here It Is

1 - Just who is who? We will be asking this a lot before the 2020 vote. 

The question is a belated notice that a lot of the political advertising this year didn’t really show who was paying for the ads. Oh, they were tagged with a “paid for” label at the end, but I doubt if one person in a hundred bothered to track who was behind those sponsors, or behind the people behind them. Are you the candidate of big pharma, or big unions, or the military-industrial complex? How will we ever know unless those ads sport a party label.

Right now, we live under a convenient fiction - approved by the Supreme Court - that while donations to political parties must be reported, any corporation has the right to free speech and can give as much money as they like to “independent’ groups which promise - swear to god - that they are not co-ordinating their ads with political parties.

1a - A sub-group. A funny thing happened to a lot of political campaign signs in my neighborhood this year. You couldn’t tell which party was behind some of the candidates. They didn’t have traditional campaign colors, where every candidate in one party had one color scheme and every candidate in the other had a different one. Is it just an effort to show how independent the candidates are of the party that nominated them, carried petitions for them and is financing them? Or is it just a subtle effort to promote name recognition, kind of like those pictures of an attractive model and the brand name in the corner, without even showing the product?

Are we supposed to believe that people spending big money on the candidates picked by the Republicans and the Democrats really wants to support independent candidates who just happen to be running on those party lines?

That is kind of like a big company announcing they are conducting a nationwide search for a new vice president, and ending up with the current President’s son. Shocked, we should be. Shocked.

2 - Introspection, 2.0. Two years ago, after the election of Donald Trump and the total takeover of the federal government by the Republican Party, the big media outfits started looking inward (OK, most of them) to figure out what happened. The talked about how they covered lie after provable lie without calling out the liars, and allowing any outrageous claim to stand as true, for fear of being accused of censorship of a political candidate. Sound familiar? 

I hope we don’t go through that charade again. Just go out for a sandwich, admit you screwed up, and try not to do it again in 2020.  Remember that fairness and balance does not mean giving each side of a campaign the same amount of time and space. “Gee, Mr. Hitler, why do you want to attack France?’ shouldn’t be a topic for a 30 minute debate, with each side getting 12 minutes and three minutes for opening and closing statements.

3 - Red Meat. We used to make fun of the television mantra “if it bleeds, it leads.” It’s what the news show people used to use to decide which story should get the cherished lead spot on the evening news show. An in-depth financial analysis of the state budget? Nope. A fire with a lot of firemen running around? Maybe. A plane crash half way around the world that killed 243 people? Do we have video?

Well, the red meat of elections are baseless accusations, yelled loudly and presented as fact without actually being fact-checked. Remember the pledges of the news media to check out stories for factual content before they are run? How quaint that was.

4 - Love that face time. A lot of news, or what passes for news, seems to be taken up by people saying the same thing over and over again. Now, I know a lot of this is understandable - the audience won’t line up and all watch a news show at the same time, and the people who can’t see something at 9 a.m. deserve a chance to see it at 11 a.m. or 3 p.m. - but must everyone on the show (and I don’t care which show) smile and laugh at the same thing. Every time? 

There is not one single network commentator alive today who could hold a candle to Robin Williams or Jack Benny or Sinbad, so why not just report the news. Then people can be shocked or angry about it, or maybe just do what news people are supposed to do - be objective and not comment on the content of a story in any way. Leave that to The View and The Talk.

5 - Fact Check. It seems almost quaint now, but once - a long, long time ago - the claims of candidates were actually checked by the news media. Oh, it took a while in that long-ago age before high-speed computers, but we have a new tool that could be put to use to actually see if the things a candidate is saying are actually, well, true.

Imagine if there was some really good AI program  - or maybe a half dozen human researchers - turned loose on the claims of all candidates for national office, checking what they say against a world filled with data bases. Now you can’t check claims that candidate X or Y will truly bring prosperity and increase employment, but you can ask who “everybody’ is when a candidate or a press agent says “everybody says that’s the biggest problem.”  Want to talk about health care, then when you promise everyone will have access to a doctor, the little AI program would check to see if you actually have a plan. If not, the story should say Candidate Jones says he wants to do this, but doesn’t have any idea on how to do it.

You know, a list like this could go on forever. I’ll stop it here. Read it once or twice, have a good meal. Get lots of sleep, and go out and vote.

My World Turns Upside Down

William Shakespeare gave us a lot in his plays. In Hamlet, he had an old rambling character give this advice: Brevity is the soul of wit. Of course, he was neither brief nor wise in the speech, giving us one of the first examples of irony in an English play.

I woke up a few days ago and, just as I do every morning, I let the dogs out, fed the cats and then let the dogs back in and fed them, While they ate, I opened the front door and the cats marched out, single file, onto the front porch.

A normal beginning to a normal day. Then, as I was reading the paper, it hit me. Without ever realizing it, my whole life turned around. Intellectually, politically, morally - I still don’t know what is happening.

It started, I think, with a story about how Donald Trump wants to quit the nuclear arms treaty and build more missiles to counter Chinese military expansion in the Pacific. Or it could have been the story about the Russian woman indicted for trying to influence the 2018 political campaign by spreading fake news on Facebook. Or, maybe,  the mystery ads that have been running on the web in Britain - ads that suddenly vanished when the rules changed and the real people who were paying for them had to be made public.

But, there it was. All the things I have mocked almost all of my adult life have turned out to be true. Ronald Reagan was right. Moscow really is the beating heart of an Evil Empire.

Like much of life, that one simple thing led to a lot of more complex things. When I made fun of the House Un-American Activities Committee for its ceaseless (and often baseless) attack on liberals and Jews and blacks for being Communist agitators trying to undermine our country, was I mistaken? Do I owe someone an apology?

Communist agitators have been trying to undermine our country for a long, long time. Maybe long before Karl Marx created Communism. At least, the original form, which was unworkable.

And, if the Republican party stood for truth and justice and anti-Communism for all those long decades, just when did that mantle fall to the Democrats? Just where are the Republican anti-Communists now? Oh, some still talk a good game, but actions count. See any? And you can’t go back to Eisenhower.

Which brings up the way other things have been turned on their head. Just when did freedom of religion become freedom to impose your religion on other people. At least for some religions. Are we bringing back the old Blue Laws, that kept you from selling things and doing things on Sundays? Wait, why can’t I buy a beer until after noon or 1 p.m. So we don’t get drunk driving to a football game?

And now that we have a Supreme Court loaded with “original Constitutionalists,” what does that mean. There’s still no Constitutional Amendment to allow the federal government to create and fund an air force, or to give subsidies to farmers or to enforce any environmental regulations at all, except for that old elastic clause - you know, the one that says the government can do anything which is “necessary and proper” to provide for the needs of our nation.

(That is, of course, an overstatement. That’s why we need Supreme Court interpretations. The clause - article one, section eight - allows Congress to pass any law necessary for it to implement the powers it gets from the rest of the Constitution. Now, we need a court to define what necessary means, what those other powers originally mean and what implement means. I’m pretty sure that when it was written - back in the day of slaves, indentured servants and an average life span of about 40 years, it doesn’t cover health care.)

So, I’m holding off on my apology to the long-dead members of Congress who were active in HUAC (again, just look it up, Or, better still, watch The Front, an old Woody Allen movie) until I see how things play out.

Top Ten

So, let us assume that the disorganized Democrats will get control of the House of Representatives in November. And, let us suppose that President Donald Trump will take time off from golf and developing his friendships with dictators across the world and actually notice what happened.

Well, that is just idle speculation. He will certainly notice when his proposed federal budget isn’t passed without some major changes, and will certainly notice when the Supreme Court rules - as it certainly will - that the President can not impose a budget when Congress refuses to approve it.

So, the question becomes this -  who gets the blame?

Now, Donald Trump will tell us, for sure. But the fun of being a pundit - and the risk - is that you are supposed to predict things ahead of time, and let people know what is coming. Naturally, after decades of being in the media, I am skilled at avoiding such bold declarations. Instead, I will offer you a choice. 

So, in no particular order, here are the top ten reasons that a loss in the upcoming election will not be Donald Trump’s fault. Any reasons that do not get used for the next few weeks will be carefully put away, under seal, in the Presidential Library to be used in 2020. Or, alternately, can be used for his tweet after the polls close.

                               In No Particular Order, Here They Are

Paul Ryan - You know, where has he been all year? Since I gave him this big, beautiful tax cut victory, you haven’t heard a peep out of him. Shame.

Everybody  - You know everybody told me that we would win the election. I trusted them. They betrayed me. Everybody says they should be punished.

Lying Hillary - You know you can’t trust her. Then she goes around the country spreading lies and trying to co-opt the Me Too movement, just to take the heat off her husband, Lying Bill. Wait, we may have to appear on the same stage sometime - you know, presidents get honored all the time. Maybe we could lock him up the day before. Some of my good friends in North Korea may have some ideas about that.

Lazy Incumbents. - You know, people don’t get re-elected just because they are in office. You have to work for it. I gave them all a boost two years ago, and did they thank me - no. I gave them a tax cut, a beautiful tax cut for every voter in the country, and they didn’t even talk about it in their campaigns. I know all about that. Mike Pence told me.

The Russians - You know the Democrat people have been trying to blame Donald Trump for colluding with the Russians in Donald Trump’s historic win in the Presidential race that all the so-called experts and the lying media thought he (i, me, us...oh, never mind) would lose. Well, they colluded with the Democrats who wanted to destroy our country and rigged the election against me and the people I support. We will get revenge, bigly. I am asking Congressman Devin Nunez and his committee to investigate right away. Maybe the Attorney General was behind it.

The Attorney General - You know he had lots of chances to dig up dirt on the Democrats running for Congress. But, he  didn’t do anything. A lot of people say there were dozens of scandals he could of tracked down, from Uranium One to Pizzagate, Heck, if he couldn’t find anything himself, he could have just listened to Fox News for a few hours, maybe Sean Hannity could have set him straight. I should fire him, if only I could be sure that turtle neck Mitch McConnell could help get a new one confirmed.

Instincts - You know I have the best brain and the best instincts of anybody in Washington. But, it is not my fault that the local Republicans in all those states that lost picked a lot of losers to run for office against the traitor Democrat candidates. Now I have to figure out some way to keep them from being sworn in. And I don’t have much time.

Mike Pence - You know I picked him out of obscurity and gave him a star role at my inauguration. I even took him to a couple of parties that night, even one in my new hotel. And, how has he repaid me? Did he win even a single election for me. I asked, and all he said was “Mr. President, you are right. I love you. But I am not running for Congress in that state.” Well, how many Democrat voters did he put in jail, or draft, or do something else to them? Guess what low-energy candidate won’t be on my ballot in 2020.

Climate Change - You know the weather gets hot, then it gets cool. It happens every year. I explained that, and told people that it may be a little warmer now, but my best instincts - and I have very good instincts - tell me it will get cooler sooner or later. Now it’s a shame that so many people lost their houses here in the United States, and so many farmers lost their crops. But we can’t put those coal miners out of work like the lying democrats want to do. Hey, if we could fix everything in Puerto Rico in just a few weeks, we can certainly do just as good a job right here in America. Look, we’re making Georgia great again!

Melinia - You know I never asked her to give those interviews or wear that jacket or go to Africa and all those other places. And I never told her to talk to reporters. I thought that when we were talking about helping victims of troubled marriages and she said  “me too” she wasjust trying to win them over. I brought her parents over as immigrants - they didn’t cut the line, you know - and I gave her everything she could want. But you know she hasn’t helped, and she is getting a little old - too old for me, although she still looks pretty good to other guys - so maybe she is the one to blame for the loss. With her out of the White House, I would be the most eligible bachelor in the nation. They might even make a movie about me....I remember one about a bachelor president who had a nice young daughter.  Hmmmmm.