lies

To All Men: It’s About You


Somebody's Mom

Somebody’s Mom

Reading time – 1:43; Viewing time – 3:19  .  .  .

It’s not at all unusual to refrain from contributing to research on, say, Parkinson’s Disease – until your mom’s voice begins to shake and she has trouble getting her hands to do the most ordinary of things.

It’s just human nature to have cared when Malaysia Flight 370 went missing, but it’s likely you went about your day in an ordinary fashion. Unless you had loved ones on that airplane.

And so it is as we react to the revelations about Donald Trump and his sexual assaults. You care, but if it wasn’t you or yours, perhaps you just go about your business.

It wasn’t just the so called “locker room” tape from years ago that made this so awful, because there is now a steady drumbeat of women coming forward and disclosing his lewd, bullying and apparently illegal behavior that harmed them. Women across the country have rejected Trump because of his obvious misogyny.

There have been appeals to men on the grounds that they may have daughters, wives or sisters, so they should be able to relate to this brutality and abhor Trump and his abuses. After all, that would affect them. But that rather misses the mark, because some men don’t have daughters, a wife or sisters. Does that excuse them from the imperative to reject Trump?

Anna Marie Cox said it best after the Trump “locker room” recording was released. She said the obvious, that every man had a mother.

So, to all the men who had a mother: Is being abused by Trump the way you would have wanted your mother to be treated when she was 19 or 25? If she was beautiful, would you have thought that her beauty made her fair game for sexual ambush? Would it have been okay if she had been in the Miss Teen USA contest when she was 15 years old and Trump had walked into her dressing room while she was undressed? Would it have been okay if she had been assaulted by lewd comments as she did nothing more provocative than walk down the sidewalk or show up for work?

Perhaps it has to be that close – it has to affect we humans personally – in order for us to truly feel the empathy and sometimes the outrage we should feel over the undeserved suffering of others. Now, though, you don’t have to be a woman who was leered at or groped or raped or pinned against a wall, nor do those things have to have happened to your daughter, your wife or your sister. You’re not exempt from the imperative to reject Trump, because you had a mother. So, this is personal. This is about you.

Oh, and by the way  .  .  .

When I’m wrong, it’s important that I admit it, and so it is that I offer this ‘fess up.

A while ago I claimed in a post right here that those who support Trump aren’t idiots. They are simply people who are angry over being blown off and abused for so very long and Trump is the voice of their rage. Now, though, we’re told that 27% of American women still support Trump. Clearly, I was wrong. They really are idiots.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Where?


Reading time – 1:01; Viewing time – 2:41  .  .  .

Uh-oh. Some snark follows. Sensitive readers should squint.

What candidates say matters. And to paraphrase Barney Frank, you want your next president to be someone who spends the majority of his/her time on this planet. Well, here’s how Politifact scored the candidates’ claims made in the second so-called debate. (Here’s the New York Times’ fact checking). NOTE: There is a pop quiz following the charts.

second-debate-politifact-clinton

Clinton Scorecard, 2nd Debate

Trump Scorecard, 2nd Debate

Trump Scorecard, 2nd Debate

Pop Quiz

  1. Do you notice any differences, any imbalance between the charts? Compare and contrast, especially the False and Pants on Fire statements. No credit will be given for incomplete, weenie answers.
  2. Which candidate appears to spend the majority of his/her time on this planet? Explain your answer using a language common to Earth.
  3. For extra credit: Exactly how much do you believe that Donald Trump is sincere, much less contrite, in his apology for his misogynistic, “locker room” comments in which he confessed to having committed criminal sexual assault?
  4. When did you first recognize the warts that identify this reptile?

Enter your answers in the What Do You Think? section below. Your score on this quiz will become 50% of your letter grade for the semester and will affect all of your future life options.

One more thing.

Following the first debate many people were speculating about the cause of Donald Trump’s frequent sniffling. Did he have a head cold? Was he really sad? Did a bug fly up his nose? The sniffing was far more pronounced throughout the second debate. Oddly, he doesn’t do that at his rallies, so what’s going on? Let’s put the speculation about this into the Donald Trump style of rhetoric:

Many people are saying – I don’t believe this myself – but many people are saying that he might be doing coke. This I am hearing. I don’t know if this is a fact. I’m just saying that people are saying these things. Believe me. This is true. I am hearing this. I’m a very successful businessman – I am the best – and I got that way because I know how to read people. He’s a total disaster. A total loser. Believe me.

So tell us, Donald, how do you you like it when that kind of crap is aimed at you?

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Bonus Section – You absolutely must read this piece of clarity from David Leonhardt, Opinion Editor, New York Times. Plus, here is his guide to second debate, Trump fact-checking:

He lied about a sex tape.
He lied about his lies about ‘birtherism.
He lied about the growth rate of the American economy.
He lied about the state of the job market.
He lied about the trade deficit.
He lied about tax rates.
He lied about his own position on the Iraq War, again.
He lied about ISIS.
He lied about the Benghazi attack.
He lied about the war in Syria.
He lied about Syrian refugees.
He lied about Russia’s hacking.
He lied about the San Bernardino terrorist attack.
He lied about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan.
He lied about her health care plan.
He lied about her immigration plan.
He lied about her email deletion.
He lied about Obamacare, more than once.
He lied about the rape of a 12-year-old girl.
He lied about his history of groping women without their consent.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Insidious


putin-on-a-bearReading time – 1:49 plus 44 seconds for the Bonus Section; Viewing time – 2:31  .  .  .

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and he penned a most interesting essay in the New York Times entitled How a Russian Fascist Is Meddling in America’s Election. It is a worthwhile read if you want to understand a bit of Vladimir Putin’s anti-America behavior. It seems that Putin, the object of Donald Trump’s heart-pitty-pat bromance, is much enamored of the now deceased Ivan Ilyin, whom Snyder described as “a prophet of Russian fascism”.

Ilyin was all about the demise of individuality and democrace, which he saw as evil, both of which he saw as evil. He believed in some idealistic oneness of Russia ruled by a “national dictator” who would be “inspired by the spirit of totality,” whatever that means. If you are an ordinary Russian citizen and a hammer and sickle Russian fanatic, that might sound pretty good to you, And it will stay that way until the commissars snatch you from your home in the middle of the night and send you to a Siberian labor camp. And why wouldn’t they do that if individuals – you – are evil and have no individual value?

It’s so very Soviet Union yesterday.

Which isn’t the main point for us, but it does provide context. Snyder writes,

“For a decade, Russia has been sponsoring right-wing extremists as “election observers” – most recently, in the farcical referendums in the Crimea and in the Donbas region of Ukraine – in order to discredit both elections and their observation. Since democracy is a sham, as Ilyin believed, then it is right and good to imitate its language and procedures in order to discredit it. It is noteworthy that the Trump campaign has now imitated this very practice, supplying both its own private “observers” and the advance conclusion about the fraud they will find. [emphasis mine}

“The technique of undermining democracy abroad is to generate doubt where there had been certainty. If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, then democratic ideas will seem questionable as well. And so America would become more like Russia, which is the general idea. If Mr. Trump wins, Russia wins. But if Mr. Trump loses and people doubt the outcome, Russia also wins.” [emphasis mine]

How in the world can Donald Trump be about making America great when all that he says and all that he does rips at the very fabric of our democracy?

BONUS SECTION – PLEASE ASK THIS QUESTION AT THE DEBATE:

Mr. Trump, before and during this campaign you have said ugly things about women, including calling them dogs and worse, as well as fat-shaming one of your own Miss Universe winners. You have steadfastly refused to moderate your comments and you have refused to apologize to people you have harmed with your cruel words, much less to the rest of the women of America. Now we have seen a video of you clearly objectifying women, making cruel and lewd statements about them and claiming with pride that you are free to commit sex crimes with women because you’re a star. You responded to the unveiling of your horrific statements with a limp apology.

Given that your words and your actions loudly proclaim your disdain for women, explain to all Americans why we should even consider the possibility that as president you would care about and respect over half of us – girls, women, daughters, spouses, mothers, sisters, friends – and look out for their welfare. And don’t tell us yet again that you respect women, because it’s manifestly clear from your words and actions that you don’t.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA

– See more at: https://jaxpolitix.com/7836-2/#sthash.J67dlWgD.dpuf


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Not About You Know Who


no-trump-silouetteReading time – 1:23; Viewing time – 3:01  .  .  .

There is no perfect candidate. There never has been. There never will be.

So, here’s a Dr. Phil prescription for your candidate ennui: Get over it.

On the one hand, Hillary has very real flaws. On the other hand, Hillary’s list of flaws has become far more than misleading; much of it is flat wrong.

  • Three different special prosecutors could find no wrongdoing over her Republican advertised Whitewater “scandal”.
  • Seven Congressional investigations could find no wrongdoing over her Republican advertised Benghazi “scandal”.
  • Nobody could find any connection whatsoever to the Republican advertised connection between Hillary and Vince Foster’s suicide.
  • The FBI could find nothing criminal about Hillary’s private email server.
  • No one has found a connection between Bill Clinton’s philandering and any Hillary “scandal”.
  • There is no evidence that contributions to The Clinton Foundation while Clinton was Secretary of State resulted in anything of any benefit whatsoever to contributors.

This list could go on for pages, but you get the idea. The right wing foaming mouth babblers have continued to promote Hillary scandals, even as they have been proven false again and again.

Have a look at this piece from the Wall Street Journal about Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome. More importantly, read some of the comments that follow the article, because they are the most instructive. You’ll see assumptions of criminal guilt, treason, and accusations that Hillary promotes cop killing (“If you want dead cops, vote for Hillary.”). One calls Hillary Evita, saying that he wouldn’t vote for her because of, “.  .  .  her collusion to place Israel in Iran’s nuclear cross hairs.” Another writes, “Clinton is corrupt to the core and belongs in jail, not in the White House.”

That last – belongs in jail – for what? The private email server was dumb, bad, irresponsible and all the other things James Comey said it was. Accepting large foundation contributions while she was Secretary of State is bad optics for sure. But criminal and she “belongs in jail”? If that’s what you want to see, then that’s what you will see. And the Derangement crowd is fixed on that vision. For that matter, though, get over the stars in your eyes for Hillary, if that’s what you see.

There is no perfect candidate. Sadly, all are flawed human beings and we are saddled with the miserable job of picking the best (or least worst) of the lot. The only alternative is despotism. The divine right of kings. Dictators. Want that?

If not, get over Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome. She’s an imperfect human being and an imperfect candidate. On the other hand, she won’t start World War III.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Trump Debate Bingo


Reading time – 87 seconds; Viewing time – 2:42  .  .  .

In a snappy article in the New York Times cleverly entitled, A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump, authors Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns list a single week’s “.  .  .  blizzard of [Trump’s] falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies  .  .  .” and then debunk them.

After reading the piece it occurred to me that watching the September 26 debate would be more fun if I were to keep track of the false innuendo and bovine fecal matter that dribbles from Trump’s lips  .  .  .  just to record his prevarication score in Bingo-like fashion  .  .  .  to identify which lies he told the most times in just one 90-minute period.

Given that he was to be just one of the two debate participants, he would be limited to about 45 minutes of blatant deceit possibility, minus the time moderator Lester Holt might use for posing questions and suppressing audience reaction. Surely, not even Donald the Deceiver could rack up a high score in so little time, right?

Wrong.

In a debate where I found Donald Trump to be especially incoherent and non-specific, here are the top scoring Trump untruthables according to our crack CYA News staff:

  1. I was against going into the war in Iraq. He said something like that 4 times. Hard to tell because of his meandering, incoherent rhetoric. He said it other ways, too, which if added to the blatant denials of the truth brings the total to about 8 whoppers.
  2. Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. He said some form of that approximately two times – sort of. Again, it’s hard to nail this down due to the Trump verbal blizzard of non-sequiturs.
  3. Lots of whoppers vying for third place, like:
    1. ISIS is in more and more places.
    2. I’m all for NATO.
    3. The Iran agreement is one of the great giveaways of all time.
    4. We lose on everything.
    5. “Stop and frisk” wasn’t found to be unconstitutional.

Perhaps things seem hopeless and you feel your sense of dignity and even your sanity assaulted by the Trump blasts of political dishonesty. Well, take heart – there is hope!

Have a look at the newest offering from the Represent.us folks. After watching their highly encouraging video, click through to their website. Then maybe even do something to make things better. I mean, really, that shouldn’t be too hard, since the bar is set so low.

DIRTY STINKING LIES BONUS SECTION:

David Leonhardt heads the New York Times Daily Opinion report and published the following summary of Deceitful Donald’s excursions from reality. There is no link to this in the newspaper, as this material was only offered as the lead article in the email to subscribers immediately following the September 26, 2016 debate.

Dear Times Reader,
He lied about the loan his father once gave him.
He lied about his company’s bankruptcies.
He lied about his federal financial-disclosure forms.
He lied about his endorsements.
He lied about “stop and frisk.”
He lied about “birtherism.”
He lied about New York.
He lied about Michigan and Ohio.
He lied about Palm Beach, Fla.
He lied about Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve.
He lied about the trade deficit.
He lied about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan.
He lied about her child-care plan.
He lied about China devaluing its currency.
He lied about Mexico having the world’s largest factories.
He lied about the United States’s nuclear arsenal.
He lied about NATO’s budget.
He lied about NATO’s terrorism policy.
He lied about ISIS.
He lied about his past position on the Iraq War.
He lied about his past position on the national debt.
He lied about his past position on climate change.
He lied about calling pregnancy an “inconvenience” for employers.
He lied about calling women “pigs.”
He lied about calling women “dogs.”
He lied about calling women “slobs.”
So… who won the debate?
You can sign up for this daily newsletter, containing commentary and links to The Times’s full daily Opinion report, here.
David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

About Those Deplorables


false

Click the meter to get the fact-checked story on who started the birther insanity.

Reading time – 1:37 seconds; Viewing time – 2:56  .  .  .

I instantly cringed when I heard Hillary say,

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?”

There is a difference between the act (saying something deplorable) and the person (they are deplorable) and my belief is that to condemn the person is to vilify, and that is a deplorable thing to do. So, I’m forcing myself to read between the lines and make a differentiation.

The polls have shown that a very large percentage of Trump supporters are motivated by some form of hate. The white supremacists are the extreme example, of course, but ordinary Americans with strong biases about race, gender identity, religion and national origin practice”othering” and they say and do, well, deplorable things. Like beating up protesters. My blood boils at the hatred of Trump and his cadre of brownshirts and brownshirt wannabees and I struggle to keep my “reject the action, not the person” mindset. In fact, there, I just failed again with the brownshirt comment.

Separating out these people who expressly promote hate, like David Duke, former Grand Peabrain of the Ku Klux Klan, and Alex Jones, Right Wing Village Idiot (and no, I won’t provide links to these two haters), I think a lot of Trump supporters are in his Kampf for far more benign reasons. They are frustrated at being lied to over and over by elected officials. They are suffering because so many good American jobs have disappeared (Fact: a large percentage of jobs are gone because of automation – off-shoring and bad trade deals aren’t the only boogie men). And they have been fed a steady diet of lies and hate from politicians, telling them that others are the cause of whatever their woes might be, all this in the absence of any facts that might be at least tangentially connected to reality.

All that doesn’t make these people innocent. At the very least they are guilty of allowing themselves to be ignorant. In their black and white world, they refuse to allow for the complexities of the world and foolishly insist on simple answers. And they allow themselves to be led by nothing more substantive than bumper sticker slogans.

And they are getting all of that from Donald Trump.

Stretch yourself, though, to allow that in their heart-of-hearts they love America just as much as you do and that they believe in right over wrong and good over bad. If you can do that, then Stephen King can explain our national obsession with delusion in this way:

the-trust-of-the-innocent

Think about that as you watch the debates.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

It Isn’t About Your Message


Housefly.Reading time – 1:54; Viewing time – 3:17  .  .  .

The 2012 general election generated a lot of forward looking comments from pundits and political operatives, like:

The Republicans will have to change their messaging if they are going to appeal to Latinos.

“Severely conservative” Mitt Romney will have to pivot to the center in order to attract independents.

Republican candidates have to stop saying things like, “A woman’s body has a way of shutting that down [in cases of rape],” and “[Pregnancy from rape] is God’s plan.”

This year those statements are being modified only slightly by saying that Trump will have to change his messaging if he is going to appeal to Latinos and African-Americans. Like Romney, he’ll have to pivot to the center in order to attract independents. He’ll have to stop demeaning women and he’ll  have to refuse to align with hate groups if he is going to attract anyone but the hair-on-fire pissy people (my description, not a quote).

The important point, though, is that all that “how to win elections” word torturing is completely misguided, wrong-headed and even dishonest.  It seems to say that all that matters is the manipulation of the message and of voters.

To which I say, “Nuh-uh.” What is important is not the crafted messaging of an appeal to African-Americans or a pivot to the center or avoiding saying stupid stuff. What is important is what candidates would actually do. And however you dress up Trump’s piggy statements, it’s clear that even with lipstick, he will continue to be a pig and he will do what pigs do.

Charles Blow recently wrote, “Trump is an unfiltered primal scream of the fragility and fear consuming white male America.” Surely, there’s much we can learn from that. More critically, though, Trump’s frivolous comments about the use of nuclear weapons abandons common sense and even survival. In a real crisis, what would he do?

This election is about many things including what’s already been mentioned, as well as voter disenfranchisement, big money poisoning of our politics and the millions of good paying jobs that Congress continues to say “It’s all about” but consistently refuses to take action to improve. It is about these substantive issues and is not about focused-grouped, misleading messages.

TO OUR POLITICAL CANDIDATES (not just Trump) – News flash: It isn’t about your message.You need to understand that Latinos don’t care what you say about immigration reform; they care about what you would do about it. Americans don’t care how you flap your lips about Medicare, Social Security, jobs, climate warming and terrorism; they care about what you would do.

If you’re all about the hot air of your finely honed, misleading messaging, then all you are is a manipulator and we will sniff you out. You may have had your way with us for a while, but if you’ve been dishonest with us, we will swat you like we would an annoying housefly and flick you away.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

America Through the Looking Glass


Antique Looking GlassReading time – 37 seconds; Viewing time – 55 seconds  .  .  .

You’ve heard comments about the multiple Trump bankruptcies and failures, but to really understand you need to read the meaty account of them in Newsweek, Donald Trump’s Many Business Failures, Explained by Kurt Eichenwald. As you read it, keep in mind that Trump has told us repeatedly that he’ll be the greatest president ever because he’s such a great businessman and a winner. Eichenwald’s essay puts the lie to that nonsense.

Trump wants you to believe that he knows things that you don’t know, and he’s right. You don’t understand, for example, that failure is success. You just don’t get that a lie is better than the truth and that innuendo, insult and slander are hallmarks of personal greatness. All of us but Trump missed the fundamental life lesson that fraud is the calling card of great virtue. To any sane person, it’s craziness.

But the true craziness of our time is not Trump and his dishonesty; it is that 30 percent of the American electorate is so enraged that they support him and cheer anything he says that feels like a “f**k you” aimed at others. They are so enraged by all the lies and sellouts over so many years by those in power that they mindlessly latch onto Trump’s permanently raised middle finger.

What have we done?

For a fuller understanding of the Trump alternate universe, take a look at Katy Tur’s piece on the Marie Claire website and you’ll see that life around Trump is life through the looking glass. Can that possibly be good for you or even for Trump’s 30 percent? Could America as we know it survive that?

Thanks go to ABS for the pointer to the Newsweek piece.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Green is the New Black


Green is the New BlackReading time – 1:52; Viewing time – 3:37  .  .  .

Many Democrats are angry and some even hate Hillary Clinton. The negatives tend to cluster around two things: trustworthiness (actually, the lack of it) and her disastrous position on ____________ (fill in the blank with your key issue). That has led many Democrats to proclaim with a righteous fury that they will not vote for her and they certainly won’t vote for Trump, so instead they will either abstain from voting or will vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. To explain why that’s self-defeating, let’s look at the math.

Votes for Trump will be from “the base”, plus those Republicans who put clothespins on their noses (thanks for the visual, D.W.) and vote for him only because his name is not Hillary Clinton. Clearly, all of those will be votes against Clinton.

Next point: Jill Stein doesn’t have even a remote chance of becoming president, so a vote for her won’t get her elected. In that sense, votes for her are wasted.

Finally, making the assumption that Democrats who abstain from voting or who vote for Stein would have voted for the Democratic candidate had that been someone other than Clinton, then those abstentions and votes for Stein will be votes against Clinton, which is exactly the same as a vote for Trump.

So, the math says that if you are a disaffected Democrat and either abstain from voting or vote for Stein, you will assure that America is endangered by a sociopathic President Trump. There, I said it: President Trump. How did that feel in your gut to read those words? Really scary and black?

If you fail to vote for Clinton and instead abstain or vote for Stein, Green will be the new black.

Yes, the DNC played unfairly with the nomination process. Absolutely, there are things about Clinton that don’t comport with your ideas about how things should be and assault your sense of right and wrong. I get it. Overriding all of that is this simple imperative:

There must never be a President Trump.

On August 7, 2016 Bill Maher put into perspective the issues you have with Clinton, saying, “There’s no room for boutique issues in an Armageddon election.” Armageddon election! That’s exactly what we have when a presidential candidate speaks glibly about using nuclear weapons.

Want to feel a bit better about holding your nose and voting for Clinton? Here’s some help.

Ezra Klein has an ordinary size human head, but tucked inside is a brain the size of Delaware; he is monstrously smart. His recent Vox article is about Hillary Clinton and her “gap” – the difference between how people who know her feel about her, versus the feelings of those who don’t have first-hand experience. This piece is enlightening and is a must-read, unless you’re dedicated to being frustrated and angry about Clinton. I double-dog dare you to read it.

Libertarian is the New BlackBTW: Everything said here also goes for disaffected Republicans who are thinking of abstaining or voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate. Each of those voting options is a vote for Trump. Good Republican friends don’t let their friends do that.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Yooge


http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yooge

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yooge

Reading time -122 seconds; Viewing time – 4:04  .  .  .

Now that we’re in the midst of the political conventions and immediately following the Trump narcissist extravaganza, it’s time to do something unusual, to separate from cable blather and give our full attention to reality.

Trump’s 1987 book “The Art of the Deal” was presented as an autobiography by the then-38-year-old Trump. In truth, Tony Schwartz is the ghostwriter who penned every word of it and he has an irreparably guilty conscience now for having done so. His Faustian bargain with Trump and the truth about Trump’s dishonesty are detailed in the July 25, 2016 issue of The New Yorker magazine in a critically important piece by Jane Mayer, author of “Dark Money.” Schwartz tells us that in writing the book, “I put lipstick on a pig.”

You need to read this piece to fully understand:

    1. That Trump really is a sociopath.
    2. That Trump is impulsive and has no attention span.
    3. That, “Lying is second nature to him.” “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.”
    4. That Trump has no regard whatsoever for the people he falsely claims to champion.
    5. That the only thing Trump wants to make great is his public attention. For Trump, it is not and never has been about America.

On that second point Schwartz says, ” .  .  .  that it’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes  .  .  . ” His experience with Trump left him with the clarity that Trump has, ” .  .  .  a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” Those are really bad personality flaws for someone who is Commander in Chief of the world’s most powerful military. The job of president requires the ability to learn and understand deep and complex issues and all the implications surrounding them. Says Schwartz, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

Regarding Trump’s claim to care about the poor and working people, “In the past seven years, Trump has promised to give millions of dollars to charity, but reporters for the Washington Post found that they could document only ten thousand dollars in donations – and uncovered no direct evidence that Trump made [the promised] charitable contributions from money earned by “The Art of the Deal.”

To illustrate the impact of the last point about public attention, George W. Bush wanted to be seen as a war president. He proceeded to lie us into invading Iraq, which led to ISIS, the Syrian civil war, an unrestrained Iran, terrorist murders around the world and our never-ending Middle-East wars, all because Dubya wanted the public attention and image of war president. And Schwartz tells us, ” .  .  . that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention.” What do you suppose that sort of personality disorder might mean for our children and grandchildren?

It’s crucial that the American people know and understand the frightening truth about this P.T. Barnum-like charlatan before it’s too late. So send this blog to everyone you know, lefty, centrist or righty, informed or not and tell them to click on the link to Mayer’s article on Schwartz, just as you will. Tell them to read the piece – it’s startling – and then to pass this along to everyone they know. Because this is about reality – actual facts – from the guy who studied Trump like no other and knows the truth about him. We can handle the truth; what we can’t handle is a yooge sociopath in the White House.

So go ahead – do it now before the next hyperbolic news cycle breaks your concentration. And remember – and I mean this literally – we’re all counting on you.

You can watch Tony Schwartz on Bill Maher’s Real Time – RNC Convention Edition here starting at 22:20.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe.  Thanks!  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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