For many years now, ISIS and other similar radical Islamic groups have caused problems for the world. But Donald Trump knows how to deal with them. When asked recently what to do, he made a bold promise:
“Me have plan. Plan good. Me solve problem.”
“I will convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction to, in 30 days, submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.”
“Of course!” the generals said, slapping their foreheads like David Byrne. “A plan! Why didn’t we think of that?”
Donald Trump knows more about ISIS than the generals. We know this because he told us so. (“Believe me.”)
“It’s why we no longer have to give him national security briefings as a candidate,” stated a White House spokesperson. “Instead, we just listen to him, since he knows more about it than those of us in the military and intelligence community who have dedicated our lives to just this thing.”
The White House and the generals assembled were pleased for the guidance Trump was providing. “A plan!” they said. “Dammit. If only we had considered that years ago.”
I am not a Gary Johnson fan by a long shot. And I don’t like setting a precedent of allowing candidates who are getting less than 10% be in the debates.
However, there would be two advantages to having Johnson participate in the debates.
First: It might make it more substantial. I can just imagine a debate moderator asking stupid questions about email servers and taco trucks and so on instead of real issues that Presidential candidates should be asked. With Johnson up there, perhaps the moderators will ignore some of the non-issues and ask real things just so he can be included.
Second: I am sure that the more that conservatives find out about Johnson, the more appealing he will be to them — and the more liberals find out about him, the less appealing he will be. Already, one major newspaper has endorsed him (The Richmond Times-Dispatch, my hometown paper, and one of the most conservative papers around). This can only help to split the Republican vote, and for a Democrat like me, that’s a very good thing.
So sure, I’ve changed my mind. Let Johnson debate. It will only help Hillary.
Hillary is ahead in all the polls, and pretty much has been except for one week right after the Republican convention where Trump enjoyed the traditional convention bump.
Nate Silver has her with a 70% chance of winning, and, as I pointed out two years ago, the Democrats begin any Presidential election with a large advantage in the electoral college.
The problem is in being complacent, because we Democrats have done a very good job of losing elections we should have won. And there are reasons for that:
We don’t get out and vote. These Trump supporters are maniacs. I see their signs all over the place, and they are not shy about yelling their support. At a recent county fair where I live, they yelled obscenities at the Democratic booth (with their kids watching — how pleasant!), punched a cardboard stand-up of Hillary Clinton next to the booth, and acted like the bullies that you would expect most Trump supporters would act like.
These people will vote. They are convinced that the white male Christian privileges they are used to (and which they think are “patriotic”) are disappearing, and they’re right. That’s what they mean when they say they want to “take America back” and “make America great again.” They are angry, and angry people vote.
There are more of us than there are of them, but they always vote in huge numbers and we don’t. And then we lose.
We split our vote because we think we’re being “pure.” Instead of being pragmatic, we’d rather shoot ourselves in the foot, watch the country go down the drain, and then say, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for him.” Well, sure, but not voting for the person who could stop him and wasting your vote on someone else has the same effect, so you might as well have voted for him.
Republicans do that too, of course, and some this year are going for Johnson as their protest vote. We should encourage this while not falling into the same trap.
We don’t always nominate the best candidate. One of the differences between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats tend to vote with the head and Republicans with the heart. We nominate the smartest nerd in the class and they nominate the most popular jock. Hillary is quite unpopular. Some of that is due to thirty years of meaningless smear attacks from the GOP but, let’s face it, she doesn’t have the charisma of her husband or of Barack Obama. If we had nominated someone with some charisma (or even Bernie Sanders, in my opinion) we’d be doing even better in the polls.
It is tremendously important this year that we come out to vote and vote down all the Republicans, including those in state races. Having a Democratic president who can get nothing accomplished because she’s fighting against Republicans doesn’t get us anywhere. But mostly, we need to send a signal. We need to destroy the current GOP so hugely that they finally reorganize themselves and do something to kick out the crazies and once more become a reasonable conservative party. We need to make sure they know that America will not stand for a candidate who preaches hate, divisiveness, and racism.
I’ve never heard of this Colin Kaepernick guy before today, but apparently people are mad at him because he used his Constitutional right to protest our National Anthem by not standing for it when it was played.
Of course, he’s now being attacked left and right (okay, mostly right) by people who think he should be punished for not standing up for the Anthem that represents the country that allows people to not be punished for not standing up for the Anthem. Funny, that.
And all of the attacks on him go after him as the messenger of something that they don’t like. Why? Because they can’t attack the message itself, which is this: The National Anthem supports slavery.
Seriously. You don’t hear it in the first verse that everyone knows, but later on the lyrics say this:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
What’s that about? Simple. The British were attacking us in 1812 and they promised to free the slaves when they won. They accepted escaped slaves, who fought with the British. Francis Scott Key was proud of the fact that the Americans were able to stop this, putting into the lyrics that we should feel patriotic that the slaves met “the gloom of the grave” for daring to rebel against the United States.
After the war, the US demanded the return of the escaped slaves who lived, but the British refused. So there’s at least that.
But yeah, I can see why someone would say that we shouldn’t have a National Anthem that glorifies war and slavery.
And protesting is more patriotic than blindly accepting something wrong any day.
“Why can’t I get a date?” some men ask. “I like women and I’m a nice guy.”
Then I see them post jokes where the punchline is some variation of “go make me a sandwich” — or they degrade Hillary Clinton’s looks instead of her politics — or they use words like “feminazi” to describe women who support equality.
While I hold that nothing should be free from jokes and satire (and yes, I have found some truly offensive things hilarious before and so have you, admit it), when I see you post these kinds of “jokes” over and over again, it tells me something. People who say “Hey, it’s just a joke” don’t realize how much the kind of joke you tell says more about you than anything else.
And what it tells me is that you don’t really like women; you just like sex with women. It’s not the same thing.
Maybe if you started to think of them as people deserving of respect, even when you disagree with them, you might get more dates and more long-term relationships. Maybe you’ll be more attractive to them if you build them up instead of tearing them down. I mean, isn’t that how you would like to be treated?
It’s not that hard of a concept, really.
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