Election Views #16

There has been a great deal of talk from Donald Trump lately about rigged elections. Trump would have us believe that the Democratic Party will be out there on Election Day, stuffing ballot boxes and acquiring the votes of the dead. What a crock! Over the years our election process has been the most honest, the most stable in the world and when there have been holes in it they were created not by the Democrats but by the Republicans. The GOP instigated the only instances of presidential election fraud and they benefited Richard Nixon and George Bush. The real voter fraud, the one that permeates the nation is the fight by the GOP to keep minority voters from registering. So it seems that all the voter fraud problems have come from the Republicans. For those of you who have forgotten or are trying to deny it, Trump is running as a Republican.

Trump’s accusations about rigging the election come from the fact that he is an egomaniac with all the wrong values. In his life the worst crime is to be called a loser. He sees that he is losing this election. The election is the biggest thing he has ever undertaken in his pathetic life, and he is terrified that if, in fact, Hillary wins, he will be labeled, “THE LOSER.”

After spending his life denigrating all his opponents as losers, this would be a label he could not sustain, so he insures against his loss by saying out front, the game is rigged. Trump is, of course, a man who knows from rigging the game. He openly admits that he has done this in his businesses all his life; that he has bribed everyone he has come in contact with to achieve his ends.

Trump’s surrogates, including Mike Pence and Newt Gingrich, understanding that this dog won’t hunt, have attempted to change the narrative by stating that what Trump means is, it’s the media being universally against him that has rigged the election. This is a dog that won’t even crawl out of the barn.

It’s true that there are a large number, maybe even a majority of journalists whose opinions lean to the left. If that is true and I believe it is, it is because they have observed the facts of the world, digested them and report what they believe to be true. But to say that the control the media is either a lie or a statement by men who do not understand how things work and neither Pence nor Gingrich can ever be accused of not knowing how things work.

The facts are very clear. 80% of all media in this country is owned and controlled by six organizations. None of those organizations are under the control of Democrats or left leaning leaders. Sure they give their journalists a certain amount of leeway in their reporting, but anyone who thinks that these news organizations lean to the left just isn’t paying attention.

The history of major news organizations is replete with examples of journalists being dumped for their left leaning opinions. You can start with Phil Donahue and his opposition to the Vietnam War and go to Bill Maher and his left leaning and anti-religious comments, which cost him his show on NBC. If you can consider all the treatment of whistleblowers over the years and the downplaying of any commentary that accuses the tobacco, the fossil fuel or the munitions industries of what they have perpetrated against the people of this country, you can see that the corporate oligarchs that own the media are definitely not left leaning in any way shape or form. In fact, they may hate Trump but That’s something Trump brought on himself. The rich protect the rich and crush dissent and the rich are, for the most part, Republicans and so are the sponsors of most media.

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Watched a bunch of Republicans whine about what’s wrong with this country and they weren’t altogether wrong but they missed the point when they talked about how after Obama lost congress he didn’t get anything done. Why? Well that’s the whole story about all the failures of the Obama administration and there have been a number of those. But even to the most radical conservative it has to be obvious that an all GOP congress wasn’t about to let Obama do anything that would make him look good. Let’s not forget the only thing that Mitch McConnell ever said that was true, was that his only job for the next four years would be to keep Obama from getting re-elected. Of course McConnell failed at that even as he has failed at so much else, all while he collected a salary from the American people. His failed mission still illustrates how congress wasn’t willing to do anything to help the American people if it, in any way, made Obama look good.

The current Trump supporters, realizing that they are the ones who got screwed in this deal, and unwilling to vote for any of the GOP establishment assholes that collected paychecks while doing nothing for them or any other Americans, have picked someone who is as far from the GOP establishment as possible with no regard to what a pariah he really is. In their zeal to change the way things are done in Washington, these people are willing to accept a man they normally wouldn’t let in their garage let alone their homes. They are willing to vote for a man with no moral, intellectual or even civilized character traits, a degenerate sociopath who has already made this nation a laughing stock around the world and one who will destroy us if he is ever elected.

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It was most enlightening to watch two panels on Face the Nation. The first was made of up third level Trump apologists and the other by renowned historian John Meacham, Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Watergate exposer Bob Woodward and probably our top international journalist, David Ignatius. I don’t know who set this up but the interesting thing about the panels was their affiliations. Of course the initial panel which extoled the benefits of a Trump presidency without condition were then offset by the second panel, none of whom were Democrats or Clinton supporters. Meacham and Woodward are Republicans. Dowd is a sometimes-virulent anti-Clinton writer and Ignatius who has covered his political tracks extremely well usually leans slightly to the right.

All were unanimous in their condemnation of Trump as unfit to be president. All gave reasoned, intelligent opinions as to why Clinton would be a superior president. Meacham went so far as to say that Clinton had the best credentials of any candidate in his memory. I mean, what more do you want?

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Donald Trump has had a lot of problems because of his constant battle with the truth, but it was when he switched his attack from Hillary’s emails to the accusation that President Obama had founded ISIS, that he really ran into a wall. Trump’s problem isn’t that he’s a liar. Lots of politicians lie. Trump’s problem is that he is an ignorant liar. He lies about stuff that is already accredited as fact and he is therefore forced to face the evidence of his lies almost immediately. This is not exactly the case with Obama’s founding of ISIS but it’s almost as bad, because if anyone can be truthfully accused of founding ISIS it would have to be former GOP president George Bush.

After all, it was Bush that invaded Iraq for no reason, laying the groundwork on which ISIS was founded. Before he left office, Bush solidified that groundwork by installing Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite hack to run a country that was mostly Sunni. Then Bush set up a withdrawal timeline that Obama inherited when he took office.

Even if Obama wanted to ignore Bush’s schedule and keep troops in Iraq, he was faced with an all but insurmountable problem. The Iraqis led by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr refused to sign a Status of Forces Agreement that would protect US forces that were in Iraq, acting a peacekeepers. Without this agreement American soldiers would be responsible to Iraqi courts for anything they did while in country. Obama could not allow the American soldiers to be stripped of all protections, so he went ahead with the Bush scheduled withdrawal. The Iraqi’s wanted us out so we got out. That the Iraqi’s weren’t up to running their country isn’t Obama’s fault. To be fair it isn’t even Bush’s fault. The Iraqi’s are just incompetent tribal slime, still living in the seventh century.

When the war to get rid of Asaad developed in Syria, elements of al-Qaeda from Afghanistan went to fight in it. There had been no al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush invaded. They went there from other countries to fight the Americans. Now with a new war in Syria they flooded into that country. So by invading Iraq and bringing al-Queda into that fight Bush, if anyone, founded ISIS and the mess created by the Bush appointed al-Maliki in Iraq allowed it to thrive in that country.

And in the face of these facts Trump has doubled and tripled down on his statement about Obama founding ISIS. It is one thing to be ignorant and another to be a liar, but to affect both guises and to revel in them is beyond acceptance, even for a clown like Trump.