Author: admin

I know it is too soon to predict these things, but I will take a stab at it anyway. If I were him, I would spend the next four years focusing on making sure I don’t end up in jail afterward.

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for rounding up millions of families in America and throwing them in internment camps. Or am I being too optimistic?

The outcome of the election was not completely surprising. As James Carville famously said “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In the wake of the pandemic, the economies of most countries have consistently tanked, and sure enough, whoever has been in power has been voted out in most democracies that have held national elections. This worldwide phenomenon goes way beyond whatever idiot happens to be running against the incumbent party.

In our case, the hope is that our incumbent will be consistent with his past behavior. He says fiery things to scare people into voting for him, and then once in office he does very little.

This particular incumbent does not have the discipline, the inclination or the organizational skills to do anything other than line his own pockets and the pockets of his friends. He doesn’t particularly believe in anything other than his own self-interest, which in this case may be a good thing.

So I am hopeful that we will not actually see him pushing for dismantling healthcare, rounding up millions of Americans into internment camps, criminalizing political speech he doesn’t like, destroying international trade via punitive tariffs, or any of the other nutty things he said in order to get elected. With any luck, we will mostly see him playing golf and hawking commemorative coins on-line.

And then, in another four years, when the economy continues to tank because nobody in Washington is doing anything useful for the average American, the pendulum will swing the other way, like it generally does. That, at least, is the hope.

Last night we watched Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy. I had been curious to revisit this old comedy favorite. I was not expecting it to resonate so strongly.

And I was certainly not expecting the eerie and disturbing way that the idiotic political rallies in the movie’s dystopian future resembled the Republican presidential candidate’s October 28 rally in Madison Square Garden. How far our nation has traveled in 18 years.

If you had said to anyone in 2006 that those bizarre movie scenes would one day become our nation’s political reality, I am sure they wouldn’t have believed you. The person you were talking to could just point out that such a thing couldn’t actually happen, because real life political candidates are neither that coarse nor that stupid.

Yet here we are. Happy Election Day.

To recap, tomorrow millions of Americans will have an opportunity to choose, as their leader, a man who is a convicted felon, a serial rapist and molester of women, an enforcer of racist housing policies, a bumbling denier of medical science whose mismanagement caused millions of Americans to die unnecessarily in a pandemic, a man who spreads disgusting rumors that immigrants eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs (ok, that one’s been around a while — it’s been used on Chinese and Italian immigrants and others at various times in U.S. history), who uses racist dogwhistles against blacks, Jews, hispanics and anyone else he thinks his audience of the moment might enjoy hating, who cannot put two sentences together without rambling like an idiot, who is trying very hard to position himself as American women’s worst nightmare come true, a man who led a violent insurrection against the United States, who literally threatens his political opponents with physical violence, who is promising, if elected, to throw millions of Americans into concentration camps, to abandon our international allies (that one might just be a favor for his bestie Vladimir Putin), to impose punishing tariffs on imports that will end up being paid for by the American working class, to repeal the first healthcare plan we’ve gotten that is actually working, and to fill our government with yes-men and lackeys so that his power will go unchecked.

In short, a creep.

Or those Americans can choose to elect an actual human being, someone who has shown compassion, thoughtfulness and common sense, has presented a detailed and well thought out economic plan for the middle class, and in a one-on-one debate displayed the discipline and intelligence to run circles around her addled, hate-spouting opponent.

Tough choice, isn’t it?

Just today the creep told his supporters that he never should have left the White House. He said it in a way that made it sound like he had a choice.

I wonder whether he really believes he had a choice. Maybe he’s thinking “I should not have been so nice when they politely invited me to leave.” Which begs the question — if he really believes, as he keeps saying, that he won four years ago, why didn’t he just stay? Was he forced to leave even though he had won?

That sequence of events only makes sense if you believe that the entire apparatus of our democratic voting system is a sham and a fraud. That there has been a vast conspiracy to deny that man his rightful victory. An enormous conspiracy with everyone in on it — our elected officials, the Press, the many thousands of volunteers at election venues who have never met each other — all coordinating to create a make-believe election result.

If people are willing to believe something like that, then they are willing to believe anything. So I suspect that if the creep loses in a few days, he might manage to convince a lot of people that the fix was in the whole time, and that the only remaining choice may be violent insurrection.

I don’t know about you, but that worries me.

There are so many weird things about those Republican candidates. But what really impresses me is the Veepacreep — that guy who is following in his master’s footsteps.

It seems that his particular focus is taking away the rights of women. Maybe there is something about women — about the whole concept that they are human beings with equal rights — which drives him crazy.

It seems to me that there should be an apt nickname for such a person. Someone who follows along blindly as his master enumerates one hateful statement after another.

What do you call someone who was created by the creep, and then trained to follow behind him blindly? Maybe we should call him the “Handmade tail”.

When it comes to the creep, every day is a new astonishment. Just today he gave a speech where he fantasized about violence against one of his political critics. His exact words: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Imagine any other public figure saying such a thing in public. It would not only be the end of their political career. It would also cause people to seriously question their sanity.

And yet the creep has gradually trained millions of people to accept not just falsehoods, but even violently insane statements as simply business as usual. The trick is to repeat them over and over again.

I think that’s a technique he learned from one of his heroes. In the original German it is called “große Lüge”.

I realized today that I had totally underestimated the creep. Despite all of my doubts, this morning he managed to capture the true spirit of Halloween.

The goal of this delightfully ghoulish holiday is to embody the scary monster, the dark visitor, the specter of evil, the stuff of your worst nightmares. Some people go as Freddy Krueger, others as Michael Myers.

But today the creep managed to embody the scariest monster of them all — the abusive partner in an intimate relationship. That figure of horror haunts the nightmares of many of the 130 million women eligible to vote in this country.

Today the creep said he “will protect women, whether they like it or not.” That, of course, perfectly mirrors what a controlling and insecure man will say about his spouse, the day before she shows up in public with a black eye.

So hats off, credit where credit is due. In honor of this fun and spooky day, the creep managed to put on the scariest costume of them all.

Assuming, that is, it was a costume.

I like the economic proposals of Vice President Harris. I also like her compassion, and her determination to help our middle class.

But I don’t think those are her greatest assets in this election. Her greatest asset is turning out to be her opponent.

In case you missed it, the creep seems to be doing everything he can to throw this election, by alienating one large bloc of voters after another. And creeping people out with rambling hate speech turns out to be something that he’s really good at.

Until now, I thought the only thing he was really good at was managing to kill millions of older Americans by botching the pandemic response. Which is already not a great look.

Yes, I understand that it’s offensive to throw paper towels at people in Puerto Rico while they are suffering from the devastating effects of a hurricane. But arguably it’s even worse, through sheer incompetence and indifference, to kill off Grandma and Grandpa.

I am curious about the end game strategy of the creep. It seems to consist of trying to lose entire blocs of votes.

The insults to latinos and Puerto Ricans are the most obvious, but there are others as well. For example, the creep has made it clear that Jews are also on his list of “people who are not really Americans”.

Just in the last week, he attacked The Atlantic magazine by going after its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. His exact words describing the publication were “a failing magazine run by a guy named Goldberg.” You can practically hear the “Nudge, nudge, wink wink”.

As dog whistles go, that one was pretty darned loud. From where I sit, it seems that any Jewish person would need to be crazy to vote for a guy who promotes that kind of hatred toward Jews.

I find myself wondering whether that hat he wears actually stands for Make America Goy Again.