Winter is Coming
The end is near
I voted this afternoon, one day early. With my life expectancy, why take the chance I won’t be available tomorrow?
Oh, I expect to be here for awhile yet.[1] I fully expect to heave a big sigh of relief tomorrow at about 11 PM local time when the polls close on the West Coast and Hillary Rodham Clinton is projected to be the winner of the ugliest Presidential campaign in our country’s history. She, I’m almost certain, will win comfortably.
Surely. Right?
Yes, the troll from Gotham will be vanquished tomorrow and we can all relax.
But as any Game of Thrones fan knows, winter is coming.
He won’t go quietly (and neither will the Deplorables)
I won’t waste time and bandwidth here citing even a tiny fraction of the ample evidence available that Donald J Trump is the most spectacularly unqualified major party candidate ever nominated for President in the history of our country. (I’m not sure why I need qualify that with “major party,” whoever or whatever “Deez Nuts” may be.[2])
Let me just say without offering any evidence (Google exists) that Trump is an ignorant buffoon, a con man and a fraud, a cheat, a thief, and a prodigious liar. He is racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic, misogynistic, and delusional. A scary clown. He is a sociopath with tiny, tiny hands.
Yet more than 50 million people will cast votes for him. They can’t all—like the gentleman at right in the spiffy teeshirt (“Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.”)—belong to the “basket of deplorables” can they?
Like these fine supporters of the Party of Lincoln’s nominee:
Surely Trump voters can’t all be lumped together with this crowd? Surely. Yet this crowd exists. In the tens of millions at least. Their anger and fear won’t dissipate anytime soon. They aren’t going away and neither is their basket-stirring loser candidate.
It will get a lot darker before this is over. Winter is coming.
The most hated woman in America
Our next President.
Hillary Clinton isn’t perfect. Just as the 45 men preceding her, she has faults. More than some, fewer than others. Over the course of 30-plus years in the public eye she has made some mistakes. It might be said that she has been her own worst enemy. And this might be true if it weren’t for the well-organized and well-funded anti-Clinton and anti-Hillary groups hell-bent on destroying her.[3]
She is paranoid and secretive. Chicken or egg? She is hated for the misdeeds of her husband and for her aggressive defense of him.
Rough-and-tumble (dirty?) politics. Has she sometimes crossed the line? Yes, she doesn’t leave this to the men. There is a double standard that applies to women in politics—a sort of glass wall that she has smashed through. She once said (paraphrasing Otto von Bismark), “Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it has always been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be.”[4]
Hillary Clinton is as ambitious as any man (gasp!). In 1969 she graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in political science and she earned a law degree from Yale in 1973. Years later as First Lady she was impolitic enough to suggest that she hadn’t intended, after earning her degrees, to spend the rest her life in a kitchen baking cookies. She’s been hated for it ever since.
Such a nasty woman!
She consistently has been a strong advocate for children, women, civil rights, and the middle class. She earned praise from both parties during her time in the Senate, and worked across the aisle to co-author legislation consistent with her longtime positions. Her approval ratings were high and she easily won reelection.
But Trump stood behind her on stage and “let [him] tell ya, [he] wasn’t impressed [with her ass].”
Clinton is so hated by many of the religious right that they have convinced themselves that God wears a bad comb-over and a red “Make America Great Again” hat. God is concerned that Hillary wants to pass common sense gun control regulations in defiance of the divinely-inspired Second Amendment (the one about the right of “well-regulated militias” to keep and bear single-shot muskets) and to kill unborn babies.[5]
Deplorables or just hypocrites?
My regrettable loss of restraint
I kept relatively quiet about the election here and on Facebook until quite recently. Sure, I made a couple of snarky comments meant to be humorous. After Trump appeared to be on track to secure the GOP nomination, I wrote a satirical piece here on Trump and Sarah Palin. I didn’t find time to poke fun at Clinton, of course.
No one can have been in doubt about my sentiments, but I kept mostly to myself. I ignored all of the most vitriolic posts from both sides.
Then I fell off of the wagon.
A few days ago I changed my profile picture to the “I’m with Her” graphic. Innocuous, but a gateway drug.
Next I posted a video juxtaposition of Trump’s bizarre claim that President Obama treated a protester disgracefully with what actually occurred. This prompted a question from a high school classmate of mine, “What about Benghazi?” This pushed my double-standard button and I just had to respond:
No one, including HRC herself, denies mistakes were made in Benghazi. Attacks on our embassies are nothing new. Wikipedia lists at least 40 and I’d guess that most are susceptible to after-the-fact coulda/shoulda/woulda criticism.[6]
The worst embassy attack in terms of American lives (10) occurred in Beirut during April of 1983 (53 non-American lives were lost). This happened during President Reagan’s first term. Six months later, 241 US Marines were killed—again in Beirut—by a truck bomb. The base was protected by a thin wire perimeter fence the truck drove through, and its few sentries were under standing orders “to keep a loaded magazine inserted in their weapon, bolt closed, weapon on safe and no round in the chamber.” Only one managed to chamber a round before the explosion.[7] Less than a year later—September 1984—our new Beirut embassy was bombed and 23 were killed (only two Americans, so this is barely remembered here).
Who did Congress and Americans blame for these three attacks? Terrorists. How many partisan witch hunts were generated? None.
Two months after the last of these three attacks, Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide.
Again according to Wikipedia (I’m trying to stick to unaffiliated sources), at least ten separate government investigations into Benghazi have been or are being conducted. Estimates of their costs seem to be all over the map ($8-22 million). It would be hard to maintain with a straight face that even a small part of these investigations has anything to do with learning from mistakes or preventing future attacks.
In September of 2015, Kevin McCarthy (front-runner at the time to be the next House Speaker) bragged on live TV, “everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”[8]
That’s what Benghazi is about.
I’m voting for the best qualified candidate in the race. Not for her husband, not for the caricature of Hillary Clinton that Republicans have been trying for 20+ years without success to destroy. It’s an easy choice for me.
Now I’m out of control. Tomorrow, this will all be over. Sanity will cover the land like a warm fuzzy blanket. Right?
I’m afraid not. The hateful bile stirred up and exposed during this spectacle of an election threatens our country in a big way. A pyrrhic victory for our democracy and at least four years of ugly hate is what I expect.
Winter is Coming.
—
Notes
- I have Timberwolves 2016/17 season tickets. Gotta stick around for that. [^]
- Deez Nuts. Yep, better qualified than Drumpf. [^]
- See the Atlantic’s Among the Hillary Haters. [^]
- From the Washington Post. [^]
- All over wacko-Christian media is the report that a retired firefighter received a prophetic message from God in 2011 that Donald Trump is the man God has chosen to lead America. So maybe I’m wrong about tomorrow. [^]
- See Wikipedia’s Attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities. [^]
- See Wikipedia’s 1983 Beirut barracks bombings. [^]
- See Kevin McCarthy Admits Benghazi Committee Formed to Beat Hillary Clinton. [^]
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