Month: September 2016

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Trump Ceiling, Clinton Floor, People Basement

donkey-elephant-usa

The national election of one of the world’s great democracies is now two months away and our moment of truth is soon upon us.  On November 8th, 2016, the American people will take on their Constitutionally granted duty and select among perhaps the two worst candidates ever nominated by the major parties for the job of Chief Executive.  Horrors.

The seeming ease for those of us most resolved to stand back and not in engage in the misery was but a month ago a Hobson’s choice.  The supposed competent Criminal was going to beat the incompetent Clown like a screen door in a hurricane.  Well, the  political competence of the Criminal has proven to be – not so competent.  The polls now suggest the election has tightened to the point where we might all go around on November 9th and hear those immortal, nightmare inducing words of 2000 – how do you count a hanging chad?

The swing states of Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Colorado are now swinging because the Orange One has managed to get his mojo together and show some real prescience and discipline, and the Ethically Challenged One has managed to be herself.  The establishment media, which is used to parroting lockstep the meme that will reinforce the good guy liberal  bad guy conservative story to an effective conclusion in November, has struggled mightily with the seeming disinterest of the public in what they have to say.  The media obviously has not been helped by the chosen one’s incredible weakness as a candidate to the point where it appears she may have to be physically carried across the doorstep to victory.

Hillary Clinton’s aversion to the truth and obsession for secrecy to obscure her lies has proven to be genetic.  William Safire so many years ago nailed her persona precisely.  She lies to prevent real malfeasance from coming to light, and we have let her off the hook each and every time.  The latest blizzard is connected to the bottomless pit of lying she has performed regarding the never ending email saga.  Every remark she has ever made about it is a lie, and every lie she tells, attempts to cover a lie she told.  Now that’s a real liar.  Many might say, so what, we all lie a bit as our reality is often less sexy or self enhancing.  But as our mothers all once admonished us, lying will make you sick.  For Hillary, whether its the lies that making her sick, or the lies about her real sickness, the two devastating blows to her character are showing a rickety and sagging floor in her voter’s enthusiasm for her, and it might be terminal.  Even a party like the Democrat Party, which has such voting discipline when it counts that one might rename it the Hold Your Nose Party, is struggling mightily with this Clinton.  You don’t need enthusiasm for New York, Illinois, and California – those states are so long gone to rational debate that Mrs. Clinton could abdicate and she would still beat her opponent.  You do need it however in the large swath of the country that still foolishly believes an election should be a debate about the future, and there,  the Clinton screen door is banging loose from its hinges.

Then there is Donald Trump, who was supposed to have a real ceiling of enthusiasm, and oh boy what a rigid ceiling.  Its bad enough having the Democrats decrying your blissful ignorance regarding every conceivable policy debate, but what do you do when at least a quarter of your own voters think you are a knucklehead?  Well, maybe its not a quarter of the republican vote any more.  Trump’s last month of simply avoiding every single cow pie of his own making, has made him looking like, dare I say, the competent one.  The apparent ceiling of 40 % of the voter’s who would vote for  Mr. Moose  to effect change is now a ceiling no more.  Mr. Trump is in a statistical heat with Mrs. Clinton and it is reflecting not only on swing states but even the supposed lock down states like Michigan and Nevada that Mrs. Clinton’s union brigades were going to bring home for her.  The adage that 60% percent of the country couldn’t possibly vote for a clownish, completely unprepared figure like Trump for our nation’s most complex political position, is abutting the realization that 55% may not be able to vote for the alternative. Trump has helped the perception of a rising ceiling with a heretofore unrevealed discipline to follow the script of competence, even if his id wants to drive him into nonsensical ‘lookatme’-ism.

So here we, the American People,  stand in the basement, the ceiling above pushing on the floor below, just waiting for the whole unstable pile to crash down on us.  From our dim perspective the future does not look very bright, but what it is definitely looking like more and more, is unpredictable.  The first debate comes at the end of September and we will all be drawn to watch like moths to a flame.  Can Hillary stand on her feet for a half hour under bright lights without collapsing?  Can Donald Trump go five minutes without stepping in a cowpie so huge even his own hugeness can not extricate himself from it? Can a formative debate occur where literally no one is capable of telling the truth about anything?  Are we so beaten down that we can’t any longer discern the difference?

Don’t lie. You want to watch.  Reality television has become – reality.

 

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15 Years

September 11, 2011 abcnews.go.com
September 11, 2001
abcnews.go.com

 

We are 15 years removed from one of those seminal events in history when a shared recollection is seared into our consciousness for all time. The shock of the first impact on the North tower on one of the most serenely beautiful September mornings. The confusion as to how such an accident could happen, only to be followed shortly later by subsequent second strike to the South tower, with the agonizing realization of the premeditation. Then a brutal morning of accelerating chaos and death. A third plane strikes the Pentagon in Washington DC. The immolated south tower of the World Trade Center collapses. A hijacked fourth plane headed to destroy the nation’s capitol is driven to the ground by brave passengers in a field in Pennsylvania. The North tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

It has been 102 minutes since the onset. Thousands are dead. The nation is paralyzed. Air traffic is grounded. The President of the most powerful country in the history of the world, is sequestered in Armageddon mode.

Fifteen years has not been long enough to remove fully the memory of the raw emotions of helplessness as one watched in real time the unfolding horror. The confusion, the fear of potentially more events, and the slowly building outrage that over the next weeks fused the nation’s will to act are equally memorable.

The great sacrifices of that morning, the indescribable courage, and the subsequent responses are known more intensely and personally to the families of those directly involved. The passenger brigade that selflessly chose communal suicide to stop the terrorists who planned to use Flight 93 for further horrible destruction. The police and firemen who went into the burning towers to rescue as many as they could before the sequential collapse took many of their own lives. The pilots of unarmed fighter jets preparing to take down through impact any plane that remained in the air as a potential terrorist weapon against Americans.

All are remembered as the indications of the national character. What is less remembered because it does not fit for some the political narrative for some is the performance of the nation’s government to identify the ringleaders and hunt them down, eliminate the terror cells at their source in Afghanistan, and most impressively, for eight years prevent any further terror events on the nation’s soil.

The great coming together through national calamity has been clouded over the distance of fifteen years by a progressive sense of detachment, despite multiple events of recent revealing the ongoing and very real present danger that has percolated from the death cults of radical Islam. We are somehow anesthetized to the concept of struggle and what is at stake. We accept “events” as workplace violence or mental illness, when the perpetrators clearly announce their motivations. We stand in long security lines to travel, to attend public events, losing our own freedoms to pretend to protect us against ourselves, when the evil is before for all to see. We have been hacked, Snowdened, even bullied by our own government to reveal our most personal information as a side effect of the death cult piggybacking itself upon modern technology. Most devastatingly, we have begun to reject actual history for made up narratives that impugn the leaders who responded that day, and the decisions that led to enormous sacrifice of treasure and our nation’s finest people in conflicts borne from the violence.

In New York City this morning, at a remembrance ceremony, two candidates desiring to lead this nation through future challenges, two candidates who are commissioned to help this great nation stay the course in a sea of danger and threat, were present to attempt to suggest they were up to the job. Two old, tired, and reactionary candidates. One could not even get through the entire event without having to be helped from the public stage. Our full history is not yet written from the calamity of 09/11/2001, and the reality of sclerotic leaders must make America look to her enemies as a very vulnerable and wounded prey.
Fifteen years is a long time, but in the tides of history an eye-blink. We must try to hold on through our time of inwardness and sclerosis to remember what it is that they hate about us, and what is at stake. Ideas that are eternal, and eternally young. Freedom. Liberty. Opportunity. Civility. Justice.

A world that remembers such things, and treasures such things, will ultimately triumph. No death cult can long weather the illumination of ideals of such innate human power.  We shall be strong.