The Damned "R-Word"

Recently the Informed Comment website ran an article titled “Star-Struck & Party Fanatic: the Moral Paradox of Trump Support,” in which that site’s proprietor and those who wrote comments to that article put fingers on the forces that they considered to be most responsible for the Donald Trump candidacy nightmare, which now, to the tremendous joy of billions around the world, is finally closing in on its last moments, one way or the other.

Professor Cole pinned the blame on Trump’s celebrity status and on party loyalty in spite of all.   The commenters offered alternative explanations, which included the sharp decline of industries in the U.S., support of carpet bombing as a legitimate U.S. tool of war, the absence of attention that Americans pay to things political, right wing media outlets as sole sources of info on everything, phony perceptions of the U.S. being in general decline, and undying hatred of Hillary Clinton.  Noticeably, no one mentioned misogyny in general. 

But then, if not always of themselves, everyone at least always wants to think the best of their family members.

All these designations were interesting and possibly even convincing, but I thought that the ground under them was not nearly as firm as what underlay the candidate that I could name, even though I knew that my opinion would have no chance of being taken seriously, by the writers on that site or by the great majority of its readers.   I knew that what I had to drag forward would be seen as unforgivable old hat to members of the most dominant segment of the American population, who are sick of hearing the R-word offered up yet again as an explanation for anything at all.

Still, having been born with the “wrong” skin color in 1931 and by having come of age during the Civil Rights Era, I felt secure in pointing out that, unlike the great majority of those folks, I have been obliged to endure and also to observe all the various manifestations of racism against so-called “black” people for quite a long while, even if I could be easily dismissed because I would be seen as being naturally disposed to offer pure racism up as the best explanation for the power of the Trump pandemic.

I don’t see how it can be denied that racism and the insistence upon “white” superiority has been the chief bane of American existence since long before the U.S. was founded, and that continues even to the present day.   Just stringing together expressions like “slavery, ”KKK,”  “lynch law,” “Jim Crow,” and “roll-backs” is enough to show that.

Take a look at the numerous Trump rallies that this year witnessed.   They seem to me to operate in a spirit of entertainment that could only appeal to the most callous, unthinking, and hateful of people,  and those events created an air that was and is strongly akin to what I can easily imagine had prevailed at the lynching bees of yesteryear.  And continuing in that vein, I would ask why, today, has Trump spent time trying to dictate what  “black” communities should do, when he is speaking in places that are more than 90 percent “white,” and so is sounding a chord that hasn’t been heard since nooses were thrown over so many tree branches, and now he is using dreams of sending in squads of his supporters on Election Day, to discourage voting in those communities.

Without openly acknowledging it, Trump is using the same “Southern Strategy” that the Republican Party started setting into place successfully in the 1960’s, after they had happily welcomed into their ranks the Dixiecrats who had started leaving the Democratic Party.  The “Willy Horton” effect and the Ronald Reagan dog whistles that sought to make bigotry respectable were other instances, later in the day.   And nowadays why is the “Black Lives Matter” movement resented so bitterly, when it is the Latino increase as a percentage of the American populace that figures to be the biggest factor in the decrease of “white” power?  I guess the Repubs figure that the Latinos can be dealt with later.

In embracing poorly concealed racism against the people that he rudely calls “the blacks” and their role in taking part in what he already condemns as certain to be rigged elections, Trump has reached for the biggest and longest-lasting spear in the grab-bag of the group whose status as “the Party of Lincoln” did not last much past the onset of the 20th century.

Racism is only rivaled by overpopulation when one wants to name the root causes of almost all the ills plaguing the world.  And that is not at all limited just to the descendants of Europeans.  It has been true of humans in general from the very beginning, and I think that would go far in explaining why, of all the different varieties of bipedals who milled around the savannahs of Africa for a very long time before, one after the other, they finally decided to get their knees wet, to see what, if anything, lay beyond the Red Sea, only one of those groups, the Homo Sapiens, are left, and, now divided into only a few colors, there are serious efforts afoot to see if even those several hues can at length be reduced to just one.  

Yard Sign Considerations

Ours wasn’t the only Clinton-Kaine yard sign that was stolen the other day.   In addition to our neighbors directly across the road, two others were taken just on this short stretch of our road, making for a total of eight pilfered of the signs that G. had posted in this part of the county.  The Republican Trump-Pence signs, of course, hadn’t been touched.

Since then, my wife, who works in the Democratic office in the county seat, has gotten two replacement signs, one for us and one for our neighbors.  But I am being slow to display ours, because I’m still considering strategies. It would damage my faith in my fellow citizens in this usually quite civil county even more if another sign was snatched just as quickly, which I believe would be sure to happen, so unusually fierce is the Republican antagonism this time around, all because this time they have a candidate who is tripping bigtime, and the numerous sniffs that he emitted during the debates were only one of the factors that testified to his condition and possibly also to the sources of his feverish and disjointed states of mind.

One strategy that I considered was to show my sign only in the daytime, as I was certain that the thefts had occurred at night.   But then G.K. told me that all his signs were taken in the middle of the day!

Still I decided that the new sign wasn’t doing any good lying in my disabled pickup truck, and at around noon yesterday I set it up in a big oak half-barrel that normally holds only part of our impatiens flower collection and that sits just off the road up at the head of our somewhat steep driveway.   There I could still check on it from way down at the bottom of the driveway, across from my workshop, which I did throughout the rest of the day, until, near sunset, I went up and brought the sign back down to the truck, for the night.  Today I plan to again set it in the impatiens tub first thing in the morning, and leave it there all day.

G.K. said that he had installed what is called a “game camera” to keep an eye on his sign, and after 4 or 5 days, when both his sign and the camera could have been taken, they hadn’t been touched.   But I had only now even heard of game cameras, which apparently are mostly used so that people can watch the wild animal life on their property from their homes or even from their offices at work, and I don’t have such a nicety of modern tech.

Though I’m not supposed to be getting on a ladder of any kind and going up any height, I have nevertheless been giving strong consideration to bringing a ladder up there and hanging my sign from one of the tree branches that reach almost over the edge of the road.  Yard sign vandals have been known to rip the plastic off the wire frames in that case, but this would at least force them to haul their vastly over-sized behinds out of their cars and find some way to reach that high.

In any case, in this silent discussion that I’ve been having with the thugs, if my sign in the oak tub is also ripped off by some Trump supporter with severe anger issues for which he should seek help,  I’ll just get one more replacement and start displaying it only on Nov 4, four days before the voting. 

Meanwhile I am highly aggrieved that I feel it necessary to go through all this, when I, on the other hand, have never even thought of tampering with anyone’s yard sign.   Nor have I contemplated or done anything else of that kind during a very long lifetime, except state my opinions in no uncertain terms on this blog, which no one but me ever sees, though Blogger does say that it gets a few page views every day.  But no comments are ever left here, which I guess is just as well.

The Trumpistas would be highly gratified if they knew of how easily their criminal acts aggrieve me, so I am only left with never wishing them well.   

Actually people would be surprised if they knew how often that really works for me, and in a number of ways!

The Least Patriotic Man in America is . . .

By now, a mere fortnight before the outcome of the 2016 election is known for sure, the identity of The Least Patriotic Man in the U.S.A.  should be obvious even to those fresh from  near total lobotomies.  The Republican candidate for U.S. president, Donald J for “Jackass” Trump, has earned that title beyond all doubt, and one of the main ways he has shown that is in the utter contempt that he has shown for the American electoral process every step of the way.  That process has been one of the mainstays of American pride in itself, yet from the day he entered the race he has ridiculed it in every way that comes to his diseased mind.   Yet there are still millions who are too blinded by a host of afflictions to be able to see that and instead are ready to bust a gut to force his victory down American throats, at the points of guns as much as by any other means.

Unbelievable!  What hath the Republican Party wrought, through its decades of romancing the country’s most criminal political elements, from their embrace of the Dixiecrats of the 1960’s straight through the “Tea Party” and on down to the ultimate fruits of their labors, today’s Trumpistas?

I’ve already tried to remind everyone, maybe more than once, of something that I remember vividly,  though I have the impression that few others do.  Still, it doesn’t hurt anything to point it out once again.

Within days of his announcing his candidacy, this man with all his emulation of a deranged orang-utang and the hair color of such said that there was no point in having an election at all, and that instead he should simply be installed as the President without further ado.

And now, having forgotten that he had already extracted as much mileage as he could have expected from using that line, which wasn’t much, that son of a KKK sympathizer trotted it out again, just a few days ago and almost word for word, without regard for all the absurdity and profanity that time itself has heaped upon that notion, and which was no sort of a joke but was instead a gigantic insult, even – I would think – to his most faithful if not also badly misguided supporters.  I mean why, then, had they spent so much money on gas and risking their lives on madhouse interstates driving to his numerous rallies all these months, during which so far they had not seen a single one of those of the undesirable skin tints being strung up?   It was all well and good for his ego to be satisfied, but they had their blood lust to propitiate.  What otherwise had been the purpose of those gatherings of the like-minded?

       Alright.  So, in what other ways has Donald J. shown such contempt for the American electoral process that he expects to reward him so much?

       He was expected to debate Hillary Clinton three times, during which he, like she, would discuss the issues in depth.   Yet, as expected, he came prepared only to deliver any conservative throwaway lines that happened to pop into his mind, interlaced by numerous personal attacks against Ms Clinton.   And I suppose his supporters thought that was smart, since even they must have sensed that he has little to no knowledge of the complexities of today’s burning issues, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and therefore his deeply discourteous behavior toward her was the best way to hide his extreme ignorance, in addition to being his idea of being entertaining.

        So far, unlike most other if not all presidential candidates to date, he has utterly refused to release his tax returns.

        He has indicated that he will recognize the results of the voting only if he wins.  Otherwise , , , 

        He has tried to intensify the many earlier Republican initiatives to keep certain groups from voting at all, and so deny them a right that is supposed to be guaranteed in the Constitution.

       Also, so far he has made no attempt to present his case to all the  large ethnic groups that make up the American population.   Instead he has acted as if only one group really matters, and that is the one whose members look like him, snarl like him, and share his gender.  In fact he has been so dismissive in so many ways of women in general, that I don’t think he is really aware that they comprise at least half the electorate, besides being definitely the better half of the American population in general.  The much lower incidence of crime among them is more than enough to testify to that, along with many other ways.

       Meanwhile Dumbf or Trumpf or whatever his real name is seems unaware that this is 2016, not 1795, when only his guys could vote.   Is that what is meant by the dog whistle in his motto that one reads emblazoned on his baseball caps and that he intones constantly?  “Make America great again?”  

       But I would ask, how would limiting the vote and in fact asking to be chosen President in much the same way that an Austrian named A. Schickelgruber grabbed power through force and turning truth on its head in the early 1930’s in a country that he wasn’t even from make America great again?  Maybe it would for his minimum of people, but not for the great majority of Americans.

        I wonder how, a few days from now, how many voters will see that?      

 

The Invisible Russians and the Hermitage

In addition to their other failings, which are numerous and grievous  beyond all understanding and are only equaled in number and in the amount of lasting damage inflicted on the body public by the American criminal justice system, the American news media adds greatly to the general American ignorance by seldom if ever passing on information about anyone in Russia except for its bumptious leader, Vladimir Putin, and for an occasional hacker.

I thought that Russia contains tens of millions of tough women and hard-drinking men with evil intentions and with every last one of them needing never to get behind the wheel of a car.

Inform us.   Are Putin and those hackers the only people still alive and kicking in today’s Russia?

If so, why doesn’t someone outfit an expedition with good flashlights to go in there to take a look?

I know of a museum strewn throughout an old palace in one of its towns that has acres of paintings set in frames so monstrous that at times they almost dwarf the images set within that were brushed onto canvas not in Russia but elsewhere, a while ago.   Those at least could be salvaged and brought back to their countries of origin, though actually the 18th century wasn’t the best time for collecting the “post-modern” art of that era, except for the work that was done slightly earlier by the Dutch, and there that museum in Leningrad, St. Petersburg, or whatever it is called these days is sorely lacking, if the haunting and remarkable film “Russian Ark” is a good indicator.

SOMEBODY STOLE OUR CLINTON SIGN!!

Somebody disposed of our Clinton sign!

What?   Has this guy been reading this here blog of mine, and doesn’t like my conclusions at all?

Okay.   You can start laughing now.

Seriously, the identical sign of our neighbors directly across the road is also missing, and this makes me wonder if some good ol’ boy drove by in the dead of night, scooped up all the Clinton signs he could find on our road, threw them in the back of his pickup truck, and went on his merry way, grinning in anticipation at the kicks he would get the next time he throws back a few beers with his buddies and brags about this great thing he has done.

As those signs are out of sight from our house and involve a walk up a slope that is becoming more and more of a hard slog for an old guy with wobbly feet and legs, I didn’t know about this outrage till the neighbor who put those signs up for us called earlier this evening to tell us about the thefts, with a promise to replace them.

During every national election every four years, we put a sign up at the head of our driveway, and, yes, reprehensible as it might be to certain denizens around here, the signs always recommend only the Democrat in the race.   We regard it as almost a civic duty to join others in pointing out the names of those whom we see as being the representatives of good in an election campaign, as compared to the neo-Fascists on the opposite side.

We have been living here and doing so for 40 years, and this is the first time  that  this sort of thing has happened.   This is obviously as good a sign as any of how severely the candidacy of Donald J for “Jackass” Trump has poisoned the  American discourse.

I know of no neighbor that I can suspect,  mostly because I no longer get  around at  all.  Ordinarily one of my closest friends here would come to mind, though not seriously.   I believe that he always votes Republican, because there is only one issue that really concerns him, and that is, which party is more likely to take away his beloved guns.

Still, I don’t think that even at the worst of times he would take my sign, though he hates all such signs and it’s been muttered that he does go around picking them up, regardless of party, though only after the elections.  Or maybe at some point he just said that he did, just to get a rise.  He likes to provoke people that way.  But right now he is far too involved with fighting off several quite serious physical ailments and mysteries thereof to even think about small roadside political admonitions.

Otherwise, oddly and for reasons (other than my presence), that I’ve already gone into in this blog in previous eras, this sparsely populated rural county in the western half of Virginia (as distinguished from woebegone West Virginia), is usually a lone spot of blue in a sea of red after every election,  though a professional wrestling show held here years ago revealed to me in startling fashion how this county is riddled with unenlightened people living tucked away in every hollow and cove, that one usually doesn’t see, except for such important occasions, which, incidentally, don’t include elections.

I have been wondering what I should do now.   I guess it’s best to wait till G. replaces those signs and see if those will be snatched up, too.   As a very close reader on the Internet of all the various aspects of this election, I will not be surprised, just as I wasn’t by this original misdeed.  I still have 2008 and 2012 Obama signs that I saved as collector’s items, and I briefly – only briefly --  considered putting one of those up, too, next to the Clinton signs, to emphasize how strongly I feel about this present election.   But it doesn’t take a genius to know what would have instantly happened to that sign, too, and I quickly dropped that idea.

If a second sign is grabbed, then I suppose it would be best to wait till just three or four more days before the voting takes place and only then put up a third sign, just to show our would-be tormentors that we haven’t forgotten or relented.  It’s not our fault that our taking the best American ideals so seriously contrasts so strongly to how they honor those same ideals only in the breach, provided that they are aware of the those principles at all, which this Trump nightmare causes me to definitely doubt.

Wo Sind Frau Palin?

Where is Sarah Palin?

For a while after Donald J for Jackass Trump threw his hat into the ring, Sarah Palin, the Woman with the Inextinguishable Smile, was much in evidence as one of his biggest and earliest supporters, and there was talk that she was angling for a post in his cabinet, should he pull off this shot at the Presidency.   But here in the very last stages of the campaign, she hasn’t been heard from for a long time, and no one has said anything about her.   At least not to my noticing.

She is still alive and burbling, isn’t she?

Since she stood for absolutely nothing that I would respect, one would think that I should be rejoicing over her absence, and that I should knock on wood, lest my mention of her should result in her sudden reappearance, in a more idiotic guise than ever, sort of like one of the crazier precepts of quantum physics, which posits that a change in something or another in the whirling of an electron in an atom will bring about an identical change in the orbiting of its companion electron, even if the latter is a trillion miles away.

I will admit that I’ve been interested in Palin ever since, in 2008, John McCain brought her onto the national political stage from the frigid climes of Alaska, a state that must be packed with geniuses, since they saw enough in her to have had her as their governor at that time. McCain must have shared their keen powers of perception, when he installed her as his surprise secret weapon running mate in the campaign of that year, though that sharpness of vision must not have been available to many others, since that choice turned out to be a move that probably had more to do with his ensuing defeat than anything else, after she opened her mouth and thereby instantly revealed that there was absolutely nothing to go with that big smile and the rest of her physical appearance.

I have an uncredited picture that I found on the Internet a while ago and that shows a woman who has Sarah Palin’s easily recognizable face and smile.  If it is her it was obviously very heavily photoshopped by someone.   Nevertheless, in my expert opinion the sexual dynamic of that image is not easily surpassed by any photo of that kind.  Mainly it is a matter of how well the enhancements just south of her neck complement her eyeware.  That image beautifully backs up my longtime contention that, contrary to all popular opinion, wearing glasses definitely adds to a woman’s sexiness.  I intend to use the outline of that figure as superimposed on two other such female outlines for a stained glass piece that I have hopes of making, as soon as I can finish my current painting projects.   It will be a sure winner.   Meanwhile doing that might help me to better understand how it was possible to build up Palin's likeness to such an amazing and unforgettable extent.

But it wasn’t Palin’s physical appearance, doctored or not, that held my attention, though I did think that in real life she had done a good job of hanging on to so much of her natural pulchritude while she began to enter her fifth decade and after she had borne five children, the guiding of whom to the safe haven of sensible adulthood did not promise to be easy.   Instead I was drawn by the answers she gave to questions of any kind, outside of the bread and butter that were her deeply repugnant, conservative political beliefs.  I always found her babbling in any situation to be highly entertaining.

I’ve often wondered why this should’ve been so, and I think it must be that much earlier in my life I must’ve gotten a lot of laughs out of  people like her, who are determined that no matter what they’re asked, they are never going to be seen as being at a loss for an answer.  Instead they’re always going to respond with the first things that pop into their heads, and never mind if it doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.   Such people don’t see that as being a problem.  They see the  nonsense as being their listeners’ problem, and if they can’t untangle it, then it’s all their fault.   Meanwhile these Palinesques are perfectly happy to keep going on lolloping through life and, when caught in tight situations brought on by their own ignorance, throwing word-plaster or offal on the wall, with complete confidence that some part of it will stick. 

Otherwise, to a large number of people, Palin comes off only as being a total idiot, and I think that early in his campaign, as I believe I’ve said before in this blog, Palin and Trump hit it off so well because Trump, whose education, to my observation, is never mentioned even by his enemies and is shrouded in mystery, is well-practiced in using the same approach.

       So, what, then, has happened?

       Can it be that Palin, even hardcore regressive Sarah Palin, decided that she had had enough of sharing with Trump the Republican Jonestown Kool-Aid, as made even more lethal when he decided to lace that toxic concoction with admissions of his misogynistic attitudes, and all the revelations about his consequent sexual misbehavior came to light?   Has Palin remembered that before she was a Mama Grizzly, she was very much a woman, and she has slunk out on her own accord rather than having been pushed out of his hellish inner circle and all of his other circles as well?

       I like to think that the former was the case.

       I find it much easier to give women, any woman, the benefit of the doubt than it is for men.

Inquiries from Beyond, on the Election

 I would surely vote for Donald J., though not for President.   No intelligent man or woman would vote for Trump as President, much less revealing him- or herself by having a Trump-Pence sign on their lawns, the heads of their driveways, or anywhere else on their property, for, by doing so these people would seem to suggest that they are not only sorely lacking in their reasoning powers but also that they have no regard for the well-being of their fellow citizens, in the U.S. or anywhere else.

But if in less than three weeks we would be choosing instead who should be seen as being by far the most disgusting, deplorable, and degraded man on Earth, I would be rushing to darken the parens next to the name of Donald J for "Jackass" Trump.  There would be no need to write in his name.  It would be already there, right at the top of the list.

By having been born in D.C. during the Great  Depression and raised and educated there, I was not allowed to vote until I was somewhere in my 20’s.  Till then, thanks to the chronically criminal group called the U.S. Congress, not even the white people in D.C. could vote, for the President, a member of Congress, or even a mayor.   Finally Congress eased up a little and permitted us to vote for a mayor and a President but still not for a voting member of Congress, because the Repubs from all over the rest of the country know that that city is always going to vote Democrat, and Republicans see the American Way as meaning doing all that they can to prevent anyone from exercising their right to vote on anything whatsoever, if there is any likelihood that that vote will not be in the right wingers’ favor.

When I first voted, I thought I would be clever by keeping all my options open, and so I registered as an Independent.   But it didn’t take long to see that my views and all the best people were always Democratic, with the result that I have never voted Republican, and I am now 85.  I can’t foresee anything happening that would ever change that, and I am extremely proud to be able to say that.  It makes me feel, in this instance, intellectually and morally pure, and no one can know how sorry I am for all those legions who can’t say the same thing.   Yet now we have people who are more than ready to keep their heads plunged even deeper in the cesspool by their badly mistaken intentions to vote for Donald J. Trump and consequently further defiling themselves by in the process also voting Republican.

So what is that sound I hear?  I believe it is the groan and crackle of distinguished Republican figures of days long gone by, turning over in their graves as they see how the party that they used to love so much has allowed itself to be steam-rollered into presenting to the American people as their choice for the 45th President of the United States a man who was not to the liking of the few cooler heads that still remain in that tattered party.

“Not him!” they try to shout from their netherworlds, figures like Barry Goldwater, Edward Brooke, Jacob Javits, Howard Taft, William F. Buckley, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.   “What’s the matter with you?  Are you completely out of your minds in these latter days?   Have you paid no attention to all the garbage that this man with the card game name has spewed since the day he declared?  Have you gained no idea of the kind of a man he is. besides being merely a self-admitted and dedicated snatch-grabber and ogler of naked, teenage girls?  Have you not noticed his almost non-existent grasp of language, and so he can truly connect only with those who, like him, much prefer to express themselves only with four-letter words, and with the tiniest grasp of complex ideas to go with it?   Were you not listening when he asked why isn’t conducting nuclear warfare an option?   Could you not foresee how easily, then, this unconscious creature would be totally overmatched by Hillary Clinton in the debates, no matter how hard he tried to provoke her into losing her temper?  Did you not see how the rallies that gave him so much inspiration and confidence were like nothing so much as meetings of people who desired hearing from him only a call to bring back the lynching bees of old, now that there are so many more people in the land to hate and to murder and to herd into cattle cars than just the descendants of the slaves?  Were your ears filled with cat dung when he ranted that if elected he would prevent a very large chunk of people from traveling to this country purely because of their religion?   Have you, like him, forgotten that one of the main pillars on which this country was founded was freedom of religion?  Did you just think it was funny when he said that he would accept the results of the election only if he won?   . . .  We heard that, too.   . . . Tell us when to laugh.”

If by some catastrophe comparable to an asteroid as big as the Queens borough being suddenly inspired to veer off its normal path and to crash instead into the Earth, so-called “white” evangelicals will be the only group left in the U.S. who will still profess to believe that there is anything like a just and merciful God.   Everyone else in the country will be wracked with doubts that will be far more intense and widespread than ever before.

Whatever the outcome, I expect that hereafter Donald J. and the Republican party and its voters will never be forgiven by the many decent people in this country and in the world at large for the absolutely needless and enormous scare to which they have been subjected for well over a year now, and, in Trump’s case, for no purpose other than to inflate far more the 267-pound sack of liquified bluster that his person already presents.

Abiding Shame -- the Inception

At this moment when I have started writing what I hope will be a series of blog posts on the current elections, after such a long but characteristic period when I didn’t post anything here, today, on the 21st of October, 2016, I am included in all the other 230,000,000 Americans who are going through by far the most shameful period in American history, BAR NONE!  (That is, short of the day long ago in 1620 when the first slaves were brought onto the soil of the place that eventually became the “Commonwealth of Virginia.”)

Though of course he had collaborators, and lots of them, this shame is principally the work of just one man – an individual named Donald J for “Jackass” Trump.  And the occasion is the current election cycle for state and national government offices.

Fourteen months ago, this person jumped into view by offering himself to the Republican party as a candidate for the post of nothing less than the top job of U.S. President.

Though he was not exactly welcomed, Donald J for Jackass was nevertheless permitted to enter the fray under the auspices of that hapless and unprincipled party whose constant deceit is embodied in its very name – the so-called “Grand Old Party,”  the Republicans, when actually that group is neither grand nor old, and they shouldn’t be called “Republicans” either.

When a party called the “Republicans” first came onto the American political scene, back in 1860 or so, they campaigned against the long-enduring atrocity of slavery, while the already existing Democratic Party was the party of the slave-owners and their supporters, and despite certain anomalies, that distinction in philosophies generally held through the next 100 years.

But then, in the 1960’s, a complete turnaround occurred.  Suddenly the Republicans, buoyed by taking into their ranks the Dixiecrats, became the party of would-be slave-owners, while the Democrats who were left behind happily found themselves in a party with a much more liberal and therefore more reasonable and charitable bent, and they became the party of Lincoln, despite the fervor with which the Repubs try hard to this day to hang on to that appellation for themselves, laughable  as that claim might be, as if Lincoln, were he still alive, would want to have anything to do with that bunch as it is presently constituted.

These days “The Nasties” is the far more appropriate name for the Republicans, and the reigning irony is that they have gone so far in earning that handle that they inadvertently set themselves up for having to admit into their tent this walking, talking disaster named “Trump,” though even they had misgivings about him from the start.  That includes the latest group of thugs that had followed the ex-Dixiecrats in taking over Republican thought, the Tea Party, because, like everyone else, they already had a fairly accurate picture of what Donald J for Jackass had been all through the most recent decades. and it was clear that he had shown up entirely to take advantage of what he saw as a golden opportunity to embark on yet another ego trip.

I myself had paid not the slightest attention to this bounder, and I am glad to see that that was with good reason, for, according to what has been revealed about him since he made his announcement, he was known for tall buildings and other real estate ventures, some of them financial disasters, casinos, golf courses, beauty pageants, multiple marriages to women who have all the appearance of not having been acquired solely because of his charm, and a reality show called “The Apprentices” about which I do not recall ever hearing anything.

None of those strike me as having been activities that were in any way contributory to the general good, and they certainly did not qualify him to be President.  Yet, against what he saw as a weak field in the primaries and in the final stage, I am certain that he viewed this election as promising to be his biggest romp of all  –- except that it has been somewhat different from that, as shown by comparing remarks he made at the beginning of his candidacy with an outburst that he was unable to hold in near the end of the third and final debate that took place two days ago between himself and Hillary Clinton.

He was so inspired by the response of the malcontents that he quickly picked up soon after he declared, that he immediately questioned the necessity of holding any election at all, and he said that instead he should be inaugurated as the new U.S. President then and there, and he seemed to be nothing if not quite serious about that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if very few people remember that he said that at the very beginning, but they couldn’t have missed how in the just concluded final debate with Ms. Clinton, and overcome with frustration at having been obviously and easily bested by her in all three of the debates – as was only to be expected -- he was unable to avoid blurting from out of the blue the very ungentlemanly and incredibly nasty remark, “You are a nasty woman!”

That latest attempt of his to drive up the nation's temperature was just the latest instance of how every damn second of his efforts has been to the detriment of everyone in the country, and that includes Donald J. himself, though, like his rabid followers, he is being a trifle slow to see that.   But that, too, was only to be expected – again, I’m sure, by all his Republican contemporaries as well, no matter how much they might wriggle like snakes caught in a rat trap, to keep from showing it.