W.J. Astore
In the last formal debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, here are a few things I heard:
1. Hillary thinks Trump is unqualified to be president. Trump thinks Hillary should be locked up as a criminal.
2. Trump thinks Hillary is a nasty woman. Hillary thinks Trump is a Russian puppet.
3. Hillary thinks Trump may start a nuclear war. Trump thinks Hillary is a loser who will make America vulnerable to foreign powers.
4. Trump thinks the election is rigged and that the media is firmly in Hillary’s corner. Hillary thinks Trump is encouraging Russia to hack and manipulate the election.
5. Trump thinks Hillary supports the ripping of babies from the wombs of mothers (late-term abortions). Hillary thinks Trump is a serial assaulter of women.
6. Trump says all nine women who accused him of unwanted sexual advances/assaults are either opportunists seeking a few minutes of fame, or stooges in the employ of the Clinton campaign. Clinton says Trump is a tax dodger, an exploiter of immigrant labor, and an enthusiast for cheap Chinese steel at the expense of American workers.
7. Trump says Clinton is all talk and no action. Clinton says Trump is a man who never apologizes and who never takes responsibility for his actions.
Yes, it was that bad. Usually the question is “Who won the debate,” and the answer is clear: we the American people lost. Put on the spot, I’d say that Hillary won because of Trump’s refusal to say whether he’d accept the result of the election. That refusal to accept the will of the voters is fundamentally undemocratic. To me, it made Trump look like a sore loser even before he’s lost.
I can’t imagine Trump or Hillary supporters had their minds changed while watching this debate. But I can guess that Hillary picked up more undecided or fence-straddling voters. Why? Because Trump’s message (as well as his demeanor) was so relentlessly negative. My wife could hardly stand being in the same room with Trump on the TV: he was, in a literal sense, giving her the creeps. Something tells me many other women across America were similarly repulsed by Trump. He was more than combative toward Hillary: he was sneering, condescending, and insulting.
Image is important in debates, and Hillary came across as the fresher of the two, the more likable, the more positive, the more focused. As I watched Trump rant, I told my wife that he reminded me of the Grinch who stole Christmas, with his snarl and his hate and his withered heart.
Will the Grinch steal the election? From the Grinch’s perspective, the election has already been stolen from him. That’s my takeaway from the debate: that Trump is a sore loser even before he’s lost.
My post-debate prediction: Welcome to four more years of the Clintons, America. See you in 2020.
Bracing Views 
“We came. We saw. He died. Ha. Ha.”
Talk about a withered heart.
And doesn’t someone have to possess a heart to begin with before it can wither?
My work-in-progress take on the clown-car circus of a U.S. “election”:
A Pestilential Debate
(After the style of Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”)
His knowledge seems a little spotty,
as compared to You-Know-Her’s.
His mouth, untrained, reeks of the potty
while she has learned to couch her slurs
in technocratic jargon tilted
towards the blank, opaque, and stilted
wonkish bureaucratic noise
never overheard when boys,
in locker rooms misogynistic,
taunt the less-than-macho dude
(with All-About-Him’s attitude,
self-centered, vain, and narcissistic,
pointing to his own brass balls):
“Why don’t you go play with your dolls?”
But You-Know-Her in pantsuit chubby
has an albatross to bear.
To wit: her horn-dog, errant hubby
Bill who makes bizarre look square
when throwing stones from houses glassy
filled with bimbos young and sassy;
interns with thong underwear
on the make for an affair
with Big Dog Bill, the sugar daddy.
White House Oval Office walls,
carpets in the White House halls,
dresses blue, the girl unclad, he
sprayed them with his DNA.
His “territory” marked that way.
Comes now Donald, keen to rumble
with the inbred DC tribe.
Not to whisper, not to mumble,
but to vent his vicious vibe:
Culture War, the right-wing staple
fallible as all things papal
Always worked before. But now?
Could be things have changed? But how
did You-Know-Her’s campaign co-opt
the filthy rich, the quagmire fights,
the corporations’ free-speech rights?
What can Republicans adopt
that Clinton Democrats have not
already stolen from their pot?
Polls now tell us that it’s over
When, just yesterday, they screamed
that more e-mail leaks had drove her
numbers down so that it seemed
she’d have to blame some Russians quickly:
“Vladimir made me look sickly.”
Not that Parkinson’s disease
that Don says she’s got. Oh, Please.
Lavrov smirks at our erections.
Interviewed the other day,
what did Russia’s FM say?
“So many pussies in your elections.”
Not to choose the Hen or Hun.
Just the pussy, both in one.
Gotterdammerung the Second,
now the Twilight of the Girls.
Wagner surely never reckoned
On a Valkyrie in pearls:
venal, nouveau riche, and jaded
skin and soul both wrinkled, faded,
picking heroes from the banks
Not from those who die in tanks
fighting dogs-of-war jihadis:
mercenary proxy tools,
hopeless, jobless, angry fools
funded by her friends, the Saudis,
Turks, Israelis, NATO, too.
Think she’s got a plan? Poor you.
Still, the Russians must have done it.
What they did, whenever, where.
Donald had it lost, then won it?
How’d that happen? Who would dare
commit the crime of journalism?
Speaking truth, fomenting schism
in the land where group-think reigns,
orthodoxy favors chains.
Feeding rubes some information
might cause thinking. Can’t have that.
Vote Mosquito! No, vote gnat!
Sturm und drang! Such consternation!
Must we watch this TV show?
Who’s to care and what’s to know?
In Bosnia she dodged a sniper’s
bullets. Really. Hey! Don’t laugh!
Then appeared two fake Pied Pipers
(John Podesta’s e-mail gaff):
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
You-Know-Her’s twin subcommanders
one for rats and one for kids.
“Lead them to their doom,” she bids.
Campaign strategy uncovered
on computers in her home,
right next to the soap and comb,
not a byte left undiscovered.
Easy for the novice nerd
To record her every word.
“Change the subject fast,” she threatens,
“or I’ll slime the messenger.”
Anything to save the cretins
lining up to work for her.
Nuland, Flournoy, Rice, and Power:
see the witches fume and glower.
Can’t wait to unleash the bomb.
Spread the fallout, Nome to Guam.
Never fired a shot in anger,
Never heard the angry bee
whizzing by, too fast to see,
raised in sheltered peace and languor.
By the thumbs stuck up their butts
Something sick surrounds these nuts.
Michael Murry, The Misfortune Teller, Copyright 2016
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Yes, these are grim times, Mike. My mother-in-law had a saying: “Have a heart if you’ve got a heart.” That’s a big “if,” isn’t it?
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Speaking of You-Know-Her and hearts reminds me of that line in the movie Sabrina (1995 remake) where Linus Larrabee (Harrison Ford) learns that people call him “the world’s only living heart donor.” When Sabrina asks her father (the Larrabee family chauffeur) what Linus was like as a child, he replies in a single word: “shorter.” In You-Know-Her’s case, I would call her the world’s shortest living heart donor — with Dick Cheney the designated recipient. “But what did You-Know-Her get in return for her donation?” you might ask. Easy answer: “Victoria Nuland.” If that doesn’t explain how bad things have gotten, nothing will.
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you know, i was despairing of ANYONE picking up on the fact that t-rump (Required Disclaimer: Narcissist, Serial Groper, Buffoon, All Around No-Goodnik. *sheesh* the hoops you have to jump through to be PC-er -than-thou are simply exhausting) DID and DOES have a point about ANYONE accepting the results from our corrupted and broken election system… there is a good deconstruction of this (by no means complete) over at counterpunch, by a mssr draister, sumpin’ like that…
simply a fact… to deny the -supposed- basic mechanism of small-dee democracy is broken, is to deny reality…
i don’t have to spend a hundred hours going googly-eyed to figure that out, here is the thing:
you are telling me we have PROPRIETARY hardware/software ‘counting’ our votes, with KNOWN hackable machines (which can often be controlled remotely!), that are essentially UNAUDITABLE (except for printing out the SAME tally as before, oh, look, 100% accurate!), and i am supposed to ‘trust’ that, um, because, um, WHY THE FUCK AM I “TRUSTING” that ‘system’ ? ? ?
no…
not just no, HELL NO, that is not a sufficient system for the biggest, bestest, mostest democracy-iest country on the planet, evah ! ! !
it is possible to make a trustworthy and auditable computer-based voting system.. we do not have such now, and under the present regime of Empire, we will not…
*however*, it is possible to do an end-run around Empire’s control of such systems, and institute a reasonable reform:
Paper Ballots
Hand Counted
Locally Reported
(of course, that would switch even more ‘voter fraud’ -actually insider corruption stealing elections- to absentee and early voting, but that can be dealt with easier than an unauditable system)
i will continue to beat the drum for ranked choice/instant runoff voting methods, which provide a significant toehold for third/fourth/etc parties and candidates to get a fighting chance…
(which, by the way, would have ZERO chance of affecting change IF a corrupt computer-based system is still in place… in fact, it would probably be EASIER for the power elites to steal elections…)
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