liberal N proud

liberal N proud's Journal

September 28, 2016

How many more Kahns and Machados does the Hillary Clinton campaign have?

How many more times can Hillary present someone who Trump will not be able to stop attacking because they are normal people calling him on his racism, sexism, or other hate?

If they can keep presenting a different person every few weeks, Trump will surely implode completely before the election.

September 28, 2016

Hillary Clinton Gets Gored (as in Al Gore)

Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election — bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.

You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.

Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.

And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.

True, there aren’t many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he’s being graded on a curve. If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention.

Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/hillary-clinton-gets-gored.html?WT.mc_id=2016-SEPT-FB-MidMC-AUD_DEV-0908&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVGate&_r=0
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This is about how the media and republicans have propped up their completely flawed candidate while taking down the qualified Democratic candidate.

And here’s a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t. George W. Bush’s policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today.

In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can’t afford another election tipped by innuendo.

September 27, 2016

NY Times: By any normal standard, Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the first presidential deb

By any normal standard, Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the first presidential debate.

By Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times contributing editor

Trump was erratic, inconsistent and incoherent. He did not make a memorable case on any issue except perhaps his call for law and order.

His justification for refusing to release his taxes, his claim that “my strongest asset by far is my temperament,” his defense of his bankruptcies, his use of debt and his failure to pay creditors, his support for reducing taxes on the wealthy, and his failure to document such broad claims as “we have the greatest mess you have even seen” all rang weak.

This same pattern became obvious as Trump tried to claim he actually did Obama a favor by pushing for the release of his birth certificate and failed to explain why he continued to make birther claims for years afterward.

Trump’s weaknesses were compounded by confused syntax, irritating intrusiveness and disregard for the efforts of Lester Holt, the moderator, to move the debate along.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/clinton-trump-first-debate-election-2016/no-more-mr-nice-guy?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article