Monday, October 17, 2016

"These are the stakes...."


He's really beginning to resemble the guy on the street corner talking loudly to himself as he takes his shirt off and puts it back on, and glares at the passing traffic.








Just a random selection, but which is it?  Is Trump winning, and so Clinton is engaged in Watergate-like crimes to stop him in Durham, NC (a stronghold of Democratic NC voters)?  Are the stories of his improprieties having an impact, or is the problem voter fraud?  Of course, don't ask if there's evidence for any of this.

I saw my first Trump TV ad the other night.  Usually I don't watch the major networks (I'm too old for their target audience, I guess); but an ad came on that may have been running for months, and I wouldn't know.  An earnest young woman describes how she was assaulted and only fended off the attacker, who meant to kill her, because she had a gun.  I'm watching because I'm wondering what's going on, and at this point I smell a rat.  I noticed later she never gave her name nor any specifics that could prove this story true, and she's clearly a professional:  she's very comfortable on camera.  No Kenneth Bone, she.  She goes on to claim Hillary Clinton wants to take away our guns and our right to self-defense, which would of course leave this young woman dead on a street somewhere in the hellscape of modern America.  To prevent this, we must all vote for Trump.

As I watched I thought:  no, Heller was based on the individual right of self-defense, so Clinton can't take away that right, or your guns, even if she wanted to.  It was such a profound misunderstanding of the way Constitutional government works that it took me a minute to realize it was also a profound lie.  The incident itself was undoubtedly fictional, the whole ad a major leap beyond the implied instability of Goldwater in LBJ's famous "Daisy" ad.  That ad never mentioned Goldwater, and only slyly implied his Presidency would lead to nuclear war (although I'm not sure Goldwater wouldn't have used nukes in Vietnam.  He publicly stated he saw no reason not to, in order to win the war.).  Trump's ad, on the other hand, is an outright lie, with no basis in fact at all.  Every word in it is a lie, in the famous summation, including "and" and "the."

Or do we go into the dark?




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