Subsequent Notes of a Political Nature

Bumptious Trump won the most votes in the mysteriously named “Electoral College” and so became the President.   Hillary Clinton won the most votes in the Popular Election, which means that overall she got more votes than did the Republican, yet she is not the President.

That whole Electoral College thing is a big can of worms that is debated with every 4-year election cycle, and then is quietly set aside till the next election.

As her reward for having fought the good fight with good methods and for a good cause, Ms Clinton gets to go back home and rest and enjoy never having to deal with D.J. Trump again or to endure having him glaring down the back of her neck.  That is my idea of quite a fine reward, and a far better deal than Trump’s latest better half, the former Melanija Knavs, is getting, and she strikes me as seeming to know that.

But Ms Trump, an immigrant from Slovenia, can do nothing about her plight, and thus she is a very real prisoner of her hubby and of circumstances, and it’s impossible to imagine anything she could even remotely have done to deserve such a terrible fate as having to be constantly photographed standing a foot of so behind his left jaw and trying to look – though not too hard – as if she gives the slightest damn.

Surely after she got off the plane and bumped into Trump, she must have had quite different expectations and thereby presented a quite different presence, but now we have her current frozen and ever disgruntled appearance, so that in every shot she looks resolutely stern and stately.  That and no more could be exactly what is required of her by her spouse and his staff.   However, all that rigidity and suggestions of resentment cause her to resemble nothing so much as a wooden Indian chief and not a particularly well-carved one at that, standing dust-covered in a cigar store.

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Though I did not agree with several of Obama’s stands and ways of doing things, I always wondered whether the country would have been better off if he and any other Democratic President had not presented any good ideas for legislation and instead held on to them for a better day, though I knew that of course that wouldn't be such a good idea at all.  Still, no matter what he and B. Clinton proposed, and regardless of the obvious virtues of their proposals, their ideas were always instantly shot down and shoved out of sight by the ever-aggressive and ever-unprincipled Republicans, especially if the House or the Senate, or both, were in the hands of the Republicans, which they usually were.   This situation got so bad that good ideas eventually became almost unrecognizable in this country.

A textbook case of this happened shortly after Obama helped NATO to stop Gaddafi in his tracks in Libya before that madman could end up killing his countrymen en masse, a deed for which today Obama catches a lot of flak from the poorly informed.   But a little later in Syria, when Assad Jr. was following in Gaddafi’s footsteps by seeing to the deaths of thousands of his fellow Syrians, Obama was dissuaded from using some sort of surprise strike to bring Assad up short as well.   This was before ISIS came into the picture, and I feel that that catastrophe could very well have been averted if Obama had struck early.  I repeat what Bobby Fischer, the late, great, Brooklyn chess grandmaster and world champion, said.  “Timing is everything.”

This must be why Republicans are always trying to terrorize and to repudiate college professors and to make college faculties as conservative as possible.   They couldn’t care less about the education of the students.   Instead they mainly don’t want any of their misapprehensions and misdeeds to be recorded for posterity.   But isn’t that what universities are for?   Passing the past through the present and into the future?  Maybe the events of this past election, deftly summarized, should be chiseled onto granite tablets and buried in undisclosed locations.  Posterity always has a perfect right to know the truth.  Otherwise how can the past be gotten past?

Republicanism and its know-nothing remember-nothing nature must be a disease that dates back to the beginning of human history, when lessened rainfall in eastern Africa drove the humanoids out of the trees, while their former neighbors, the chimpanzees, stayed up there, scratching their brows and their behinds and hurling down their feces while endlessly screeching, “Wtf!” in the best Guiliani style, while giving no thought to why they were remaining stunted.  And that, in turn, suggests that chimpanzees have never evolved into anything else precisely because they have remained being such good, constantly snarling, squabbling, and teeth-baring Republicans, up in the swaying boughs. 

 

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In these days of the new President gingerly examining the gigantic and prize coconut that he and his confederates never expected to succeed in knocking out of the treetops, one wonders how that will go.   I mean in assembling his staff and the cabinet members, for he has little to nothing to choose from.

This is due to the massive purges that have been conducted in the Republican Party by the series of thugs that the party admitted into its ranks and that turned around and made that party into today’s organization that knows only how to reject the good and to thrust forward the bad.   The result is that one cannot detect a high mind or even just a mere intellectual in the bunch, which is why this President-elect managed to push aside so easily well over a dozen competitors in the primaries.   And now, to help him preside over such a large and complex country, he has only a pool of clowns who have only big lines of chatter and nothing else to recommend them.

Well, he can continue to work in the model of the 1930’s when the Austrian gangster with the haircomb mustache, after he had driven out most of the best minds in Germany, found that he had at his disposal only a bunch of low intellect beetle-brows to help him, who knew a lot about terrorizing large groups of people and to manufacture cannons and other weapons of war aplenty, but nothing about running a country that could contribute worthwhile things to the world, and instead they wound up with only bald aggression and countless atrocities to offer.   And so now are we not seeing an American version of that same scenario beginning to unfold? 

Way back in 1935 (surely the year when my father took the picture of me that is up on the sidebar of this blog), a well-known writer of that era named Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical book titled “It Can’t Happen Here,” and that work is now being lauded as having foretold the coming of the current President-elect.   Lewis’ point was that yes, it could easily happen here, and that must be why so many presumed Americans cast votes for the Death Jockey while not troubling themselves to think things through and never mind the garbage provided by CNN and Fox News, maybe because despite the appearances these Trum pissers presented, they had nothing to think with.

I mean there must be a good explanation somewhere, for what happened the other day!  I think this one is at least as good as any other that I’ve read.