Donald Trump: Candidate Y2K16

Remember the late 90s, when everybody was in a tizzy over the imminent end of the world because the geeks hadn't fixed the clocks in computers? And remember how we woke up on January 1, 2000 to an intense hangover of continuing life, our money still in the bank, electricity still thrumming through the grid.. and most important of all, intact and crystal clear cell phone and Internet connections?

This time around, the disaster hysteria revolves around the very slim chance that a different kind of virus known as Donald J. Trump will usher in Armageddon.  If Trump is elected, Putin will invade America, take over the Internet, and super-rich people will be fleeing the country in droves. It couldn't get any worse than that last part.  

And it would be all your fault because, even if you personally voted for Hillary Clinton, you obviously didn't work for her hard enough, guilt-tripping your friends and neighbors into voting for her too. This failure to work for free for a quarter-billionaire is the new original sin. Because only Hillary can save the planet. The Guardian said so right in a front page editorial over the weekend.

What really had the serious people freaking out over the weekend was revered odds-making guru Nate Silver giving Donald Trump about a 35 percent chance of beating Hillary. As a result, he is being declared a jerk and a traitor by the HillHuffPo. How dare he crunch numbers that are not, at minimum, one hundred percent favorable to Hillary Clinton? Nate Silver is causing unnecessary "waves of panic" all across the landscape. By putting his thumbs on the math scales, he is almost as dastardly as FBI Director James Comey himself.

The declaration of treachery in turn unleashed an F bomb-laced, 14-part Tweet-storm from Nate Silver, who in his own defense was even forced to partially plagiarize Michelle Obama.

"When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time," the math whiz fumed.

But Nate Silver's feelings getting hurt is nothing compared to the angst that The Market is experiencing in the End Times. They're in a downright shuddering frenzy. With Donald Trump's poll numbers improving, the S&P 500 was down for the ninth straight day on Friday, something that hasn't happened since 1980. The Donald Bug has led to the most prolonged selloff in stocks since the '08 financial crisis.  Even the manufactured Y2K Bug-Panic of '99 didn't have the power of Trump.

So it's only natural that media pundits would also be scared out of what passes for their wits.

Frank Bruni, who only last week vowed to quickly get over his Trump coverage addiction, isn't quite there yet. He admits to being "terrified" by Election Armageddon. Even if we all wake up Wednesday morning breathing a sigh of post-Trumpian relief, our fear will linger on like a really bad case of the measles:

There’s no end here, just a punctuation mark, a measly comma between the rancor that has built until this point and the fury to come. And there’s no way to un-see what all of us have seen over these last 18 months, to bottle up what has been un-bottled.

Election Day will redeem and settle nothing, not this time around. No matter who declares victory, tens of millions of Americans will be convinced — truly convinced — that the outcome isn’t legitimate because untoward forces intervened. Whether balloons fall on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, there will be bolder divisions in America than there were at the start of it all and even less faith in the country’s most important institutions.

I know exactly what he means. The FBI, which has been in its own frenzy of fear-mongering through entrapment of marginalized people into fake terror plots while ignoring warnings of real terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers, is a prime example. It's been such a well-regarded public institution for well over a century. And just look at it now. James Comey's re-opening of the Clinton email investigation and meddling in our free and fair elections has seriously tarnished its stellar reputation. It has effectively neutered its recent noble accomplishment of secretly scanning millions of our Yahoo email accounts. If we can't all be considered terrorists until never proven otherwise, we might as well become atheists and refuse to recite the Pledge. If we're going to be divisive, we may as well go whole hog and be boldly divisive.

And the rest of the world respecting us? Forget about it. Donald Trump has been such an embarrassment. He is doing untold damage to the reputation of Barack Obama, so beloved throughout the globe for his humanitarian wars and drone assassinations. If Trump wins, the rich and famous people had better think of emigrating to Waziristan so they can huddle in the safety of the tribal regions. Better to hear drones constantly buzzing above your heads than to have to listen to Donald's potty mouth all the time.

In its recent survey of global attitudes,  Pew researchers discovered that the majority of residents of other countries strongly disapprove of both the Obama administration's drone attacks and its widespread surveillance upon ordinary citizens. Trump would seriously erode these ratings, because he would probably be prone to bragging about the atrocities. The United States might not get as many Likes in the global popularity sweepstakes under Trump. It would lose the favorability it still enjoys, against all odds. Even Nate Silver might be flummoxed.

And what a toll a Trump presidency would take on freedom of the press. His serial insults of news agencies and reporters might even cause the USA to drop from its current dismal 41st place in Reporters Without Borders' annual ranking list. What a dreadful blow to our national reputation it would be for Mauritania or Slovenia or Niger to beat us in the event of a Trump victory. It's already bad enough that the highly ranked Scandinavian countries are as transparent about informing the public as they are generous in their "people first" social welfare programs.

Of course, much of the fear-mongering about the Trump of Doom is for crass purposes of last minute fund-raising for the Democrapublican Party and its respective offshoots. So any email you're receiving slugged "Dead Heat!"  is bound to contain a panic-stricken appeal for cash.

Here's former Bernie Sanders supporter Robert Reich mongering on behalf of  MoveOn, one of the biggest Democratic veal pens in existence:

By now, we all know the stakes of this election—and the choice between a dangerous authoritarian demagogue or a woman of great experience and commitment, running on the most progressive major-party platform ever.

We all know the real threat that Donald Trump could win. The polls have tightened to a dead heat this week, with Trump ahead in many battleground states.

Even the normally cool President Obama is siding with Nate Silver and pretending to push the Trump panic button. “This should not be a close race, but it’s going to be a close race," he warned North Carolina voters last week.

Obama should just relax. 

I, for one, am feeling very relaxed. I just mailed in my ballot, and feminist that I am, voted for four fine women: Jill Stein of the Green Party for president; Robin Laverne Wilson of the Green Party for U.S. Senate; Zephyr Teachout of the Democratic Party for U.S. House of Representatives; and  Pramilla Malick of the Democratic Party for New York State Senate.

(Malick is really something of a miracle in these parts. Although the GOP incumbent has run unopposed for decades, more people have chosen "blank" on their ballots than have actually voted for him. Senator Blank has been the real victor for way too long. So it's nice to actually have a real human choice for change.)

I'll be back after Election Day... assuming that there is no shocking TrumPutin Armageddon and I still have an Internet connection.

Vote! And don't let anybody tell you you're throwing your vote away if you choose to diverge from the Duopoly. That line of bull got stale a long time ago.

As Corey Robin lays out in an excellent post, we mustn't let the inevitable gaslighting by Hillary supporters get to us:

 Liberals in the media, academia, political circles, and on social media who support Clinton act as if your one vote—out of the more than 100 million cast—determines the fate of the republic. If you vote for Stein (whether in a safe state or not), you are personally responsible for Trump’s inauguration.
These voices are often the very same people who, when challenged about Clinton’s voting record in the Senate or Obama’s policies, will say: Clinton was only one voice in a Senate, out of…a hundred voices. Obama was one lonely man arrayed against…three veto points.
Somewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith has a passage about how we identify with the trials and travails of a king, giving him all of our sympathy and understanding, yet are so repelled by the tribulations of the lowly that we can scarce understand what they’re going through.

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” ― Charles Dickens

 

Wargasms

It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for President Obama. It was almost enough to make you applaud the drone president for "standing his ground" when sprayed by a flood of saber-rattling spittle from the corporate press corps, some of whom had traveled to Turkey to "cover" the G-20 summit instead of to Paris to milk the terror for all that it's worth to their defense contractor sponsors.

And exploiting and enhancing and even creating terror is worth a whole hell of a lot to them. Glenn Greenwald has a chart showing that the stock of weapons manufacturers has taken off like a nuclear-fired missile since the Paris massacre. The so-called journalists bombarding Obama with their double-dog-dares disguised as questions all had their marching orders. And they marched in perfect lockstep.

Here's part of the official transcript. 

Margaret Brennan, CBS.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. A more than year-long bombing campaign in Iraq and in Syria has failed to contain the ambition and the ability of ISIS to launch attacks in the West. Have you underestimated their abilities? And will you widen the rules of engagement for U.S. forces to take more aggressive action?

Jim Acosta, CNN.
Q Thank you very much, Mr. President. I wanted to go back to something that you said to Margaret earlier when you said that you have not underestimated ISIS’s abilities. This is an organization that you once described as a JV team that evolved into a force that has now occupied territory in Iraq and Syria and is now able to use that safe haven to launch attacks in other parts of the world. How is that not underestimating their capabilities? And how is that contained, quite frankly? And I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is -- and if you’ll forgive the language -- is why can't we take out these bastards?

Ron Allen, NBC.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. I think a lot of people around the world and in America are concerned because given the strategy that you’re pursuing -- and it’s been more than a year now -- ISIS’s capabilities seem to be expanding. Were you aware that they had the capability of pulling off the kind of attack that they did in Paris? Are you concerned? And do you think they have that same capability to strike in the United States?
And do you think that given all you’ve learned about ISIS over the past year or so, and given all the criticism about your underestimating them, do you think you really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland?

So Obama is standing his ground, for now. But you have to ask yourself whether this whole "him against the world" performance was a big fat set-up. He had to have known that by selecting CNN, the official Terror Channel, he'd be pressured to vengefully bomb, strafe, slaughter, and bomb again. Is this the way that he justifies starting another war, or more accurately, revving up the one(s) he's already been waging, both secretly and openly? Is this press conference one of the ways he again gets to portray himself as a mythical reluctant warrior, being dragged kicking and screaming into yet more death and destruction and billions of dollars in added profits for the war and surveillance industries?

Given that his own CIA director is also stirring up the bellicose paranoid fever, I suspect that this is very much the case. Back in the safety of the Homeland, John Brennan hand-wringlingly denounced all the pacifist "hand-wringing" (which actually amounts to a few pinkie fingers vaguely twitching on the outskirts of Peaceville) and demanded even more blanket surveillance of ordinary citizens. While he was at it, he tacitly blamed the abuses of the government spying programs and war crimes on the very whistle-blowers, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who have exposed the abuses and the war crimes. One is in exile and the other is in prison while the abuses of Superpower go on, unimpeded by either popular protest or the prosecutions and impeachments of past and present government officials.

It must be so, so hard for one set of murderous sociopaths to keep track of another set of murderous sociopaths. Pity the poor CIA, which unleashed a half-century-long torrent of Islamophobia when it deposed the democratic government of Iran in order to make the world safe for BP.