Everyone and anyone, and I do mean that literally, is welcome to stop by and join the debate.  It’s the way Rutherford would have wanted it.

Trish (Mrs R)

First, the number of fence sitters was statistically insignificant. Hillary Clinton was one of the most polarizing candidates in American history. Folks loved her or hated her. Very few were ambivalent. 

Second, the Electoral College proved valuable in disproving Hillary’s claim. If Comey and the Russians were such poison, how then did Clinton win the popular vote by 3 million? The brilliance of the Electoral College was that it pin pointed the source of Hillary’s problem. She didn’t give a damn about rust belt working class Americans and they knew it. Post nomination, not a single trip to Wisconsin, not a single one. And like Glenn Close, in Fatal Attraction, Americans don’t like being ignored.

To his political credit, good old red neck Bill Clinton reportedly told his wife that she wasn’t paying sufficient attention to rust belt whites. His warnings were drowned out by the elites surrounding Hillary. 

Kudos to Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen for co-authoring a book, “Shattered” that actually suggests the fault in Hillary’s campaign was not in the stars but in her campaign. The same campaign dysfunction that lost her the 2008 nomination killed her again. 

Hillary needs to go away and shut up. 

P.S. One of the classiest things George W. Bush did when he exited the White House was to go away and STFU. Barack, now it’s your turn. If America was that interested in your perspective, they would have selected your “inevitable successor”. They didn’t. Time for you to learn how to paint. 

What do y’all think? The bar is open. 

School choice: major fail. 

Battle Creek has school choice and it is not going well. Students who can afford to, flock to the better schools in the area leaving the other schools to kids with fewer … ahem … choices. So I gave a typical conservative argument to my wife. “Take a capitalist approach. If a school wants to keep its students, it needs to up its game. The market decides which schools succeed.” Only one problem. Gov funding is based on attendance. Schools with more students get more funding. Those with less get less and fall further behind. A vicious cycle. 

Cereal ain’t selling. 

Kellogg will probably be laying off folks in the near future. The cereal industry is not what it was decades ago when this town was thriving. A local businesswoman said the city’s major mall is full of closed stores. The city now survives on conventions and events – which is why I’m here, a gymnastics event with my wife and daughter. 

So, Donald Trump. Looks like Battle Creek is among the many cities who need your business savvy to revitalize. They’re waiting. What ya gonna do? 

What do you think? The bar is open. 

So what’s a president to do to score big in the first 100 days? Start dropping bombs of course. Syria’s Assad gave Trump a wet kiss in the form of “your predecessor was a weak punk, how bout you?” Never one to shrink from provocation, Trump lobbed 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airstrip. And he did so while enjoying a delicious slice of cake with China’s Xi Jinping.  I think there’s little doubt he was showing Xi by example that no one screws with him. 

A few days later he drops a MOAB (colloquially called the Mother of all Bombs) on an Afghanistan tunnel complex killing a few dozen ISIL members in the process. 

But this is child’s play compared to the real big bully on the block. Yes we’re talking about that nut job Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea. This dude is so crazy he kills his relatives if they piss him off. And he’s got nukes. And his missiles that can carry the nukes get better everyday. So much so, various experts are suggesting we strengthen our defenses. You know what that means, Washington and California, it’s duck and cover time!! 

I think it’s a damn shame that a punk (only in his 30’s) can have the strongest nation on Earth shaking in our boots. And make no mistake, we are scared shitless. While we were sweating Iran getting a nuke and those dangerous Muslims using them in their jihad, old Kimmy was having a grand time bulking up. Maybe if he had threatened Israel, we might have given a damn? 

So now he holds South Korea hostage and he can kill a few Chinese and Japanese while he’s at it. This greatly reduces our options. Can we say to Seoul, “hey, we can greatly damage his nuclear arsenal if you guys don’t mind losing a few thousand citizens.”  Somehow I don’t think South Korea will sign up for that. My history is pretty weak but I don’t think Harry Truman envisioned this outcome of the Korean War, a nation so badass it has the USA pissing in its pants. 

I’m torn on the whole thing. A part of me wants Trump to, in his words, bomb the shit out of them. But I have trouble accepting the massive bloodshed that will ensue. However is the bloodshed not a matter of if but when? 

What do you think? The bar is open. 

Update: As this goes “to press” (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase), Kimmy just launched another missile which was a dud. Don’t let that calm you. Public humiliation will likely only make him madder. 

In March of 2015, Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to run for President. He was soon followed by Rand Paul of Kentucky. These were the first two Republicans to jump in the race. Both men were known for distinct philosophies about government. You might not like them but you can’t deny they stood for something. They were serious candidates. On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was the first to announce. Sadly, in that instance, we had someone with no convincing ideology and a party ready on day 1 to coronate her. Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chaffee and finally Jim Webb would step up to challenge her but in the end only Sanders posed any real threat and that threat was never really taken seriously by the Democratic party or the main stream media.

On June 15, after a prolonged tease, Jeb Bush jumped into the GOP race and was immediately assumed to be the front-runner. Despite the rocky presidency of his brother hanging over him, Jeb was still believed to be the “smart” Bush. Many were already predicting another Bush/Clinton face-off, the first being in 1992 when Hillary’s husband, Bill, defeated Jeb’s father, George HW Bush.

Just one day later, everything changed. A moderately successful real estate mogul, branding genius and star of a popular American TV reality series, descended the escalator in the building bearing his name, to the tune of Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World”. He announced not only that he was running for President but that his core raison d’être was to keep illegal immigrants out of the country. His indelicate assessment that Mexico was not “sending us their best” but was instead sending us “rapists” threw the left into a collective conniption and made some on the right uneasy. Thus was born the presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump.

And at this time the dishonesty in the media also went into high gear. Trump’s attack, no matter how rude, was limited to people entering the country illegally. The media and the left in general immediately conflated this to anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant. You repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. Trump was an anti-Latino bigot.

But of course, Trump didn’t stop there. It seemed almost every week was taken up with some new whopper thrown down by Trump either deliberately (McCain is not a war hero – “I prefer people who don’t get captured”) or via leak (“I can grab them by the pussy”). And it seemed almost every week, the media counted him down and out. In the meantime, the 16 men and one woman who opposed him, one by one dropped out of the race. Perhaps the most devastating admission of defeat came from Jeb Bush on February 20, 2016. The establishment candidate who many believed would carry on the Bush dynasty, was called “low energy” by a loud-mouth, know-nothing carnival barker and the label stuck. Other labels would define other candidates – Little Marco (Rubio), Lyin’ Ted (Cruz). In fact, even Cruz’s father was not immune from attack with Trump implicitly implicating him in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It seemed, the more outrageous Trump got, the more his base loved him and the more his party (it was never really his party) feared him and reconciled themselves to his eventual nomination.

On the Dem side, the contest came down to an idealist with pie in the sky plans for America that promised way more than a chicken in every pot and a front-runner who had been careless at best and criminal at worst in her handling of classified materials while Secretary of State. Supporters of the idealist, Sanders, could not convince the identity-politics driven elite of the Democratic party to abandon their first potential “woman President”. As a result, Hillary Clinton, one of the least trusted politicians in the country won the Democratic nomination – odds of winning be damned. The arrogant position that beating Trump was a slam-dunk set in almost immediately.

Then Wikileaks, the “truth telling” organization run by Julian Assange, started releasing little bird droppings all over the Clinton campaign, portraying the campaign as targeting Sanders’ lack of religious conviction and other unflattering revelations. The revelations were culled from stolen emails from the DNC and John Podesta (whose email password was “password”).  It is currently assessed (using proof we the people are not allowed to see) that Russian hackers at the explicit behest of Vladimir Putin were employed by Assange in an attempt to weaken Clinton’s eventual presidency (reports are that even Putin did not expect Trump to win).

In November of 2016 the woman who did not deserve to be President was defeated by the man who had no business running in the first place.

Fast forward to today. We have a President totally ignorant of how government works, with zero incentive to learn. His Twitter account which was amusing during the campaign has not been shut down and is now the source of accusations serious enough to either raise the question of criminality of the previous administration OR raise the question of the current President’s mental health.

Where is the hero, the white knight, who will rescue us from this fiasco? Nowhere to be found. The Democratic party unable to admit they chose the worst candidate in a century, has morphed Russian propaganda and influence on American opinion (to be expected) into “election hacking”. Let’s be crystal clear. Trump won this election fair and square. He exceeded the number of electoral votes needed to win – popular vote be damned. The Russians didn’t tamper with the voting machines. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to the Democratic party.

The media won’t help us either. Their lies throughout the Trump campaign were called out by the nominee and now President. Their reaction has not been introspection. They are defensive and doubling down. We have a mainstream media whose feelings are hurt and they are more interested now in bringing down Trump than getting at the truth. So, we really cannot depend on them to defend us from a serial liar who is very possibly mentally disturbed in a way that disqualifies him from the Presidency. The credibility of the media, upon whom we rely to get at the truth, is seriously compromised.

Last week, we witnessed the symbolic cherry on the shit cupcake.Ted Cruz once called Donald Trump a “sniveling coward” for humiliating Cruz’s wife and insulting his father. Last week he went to the White House for dinner with Trump. He took his wife and his kids with him. Truly puke-worthy.

And thus ends this chapter in the story with no heroes. The country is at an all time low with no relief in sight. The story is not over but it does not look like we are in for a happy ending.

What do you think? The bar is open.

So that begs the question where were all these protesters from 2009 – 2016?  These folks in the street crying for justice for illegal aliens sat on their hands while Obama kicked out Mexican after Mexican after Mexican. 

It’s no wonder our country has lost its stature. We are currently led by a joke and we have a citizenry of hypocrites. 

And another thing … if I hear one more time that Trump is anti-immigrant I’m gonna shoot the TV. He’s anti ILLEGAL immigrant. Do we protest the prosecution of rapists saying “the state is against men who just want to have intercourse”? Have we lost the ability to discern legal from illegal? One of the very few things the reality TV president has right is that we either have borders or we don’t. If we have a border, then there’s a legal way to cross it and an illegal way. The two should not be conflated. The day Trump says he wants to end all immigration, I’ll write another post apologizing for this one. Until then folks need to just shut up. 

What do you think? The bar is open. 

Applicant must be at least 35 years old and a natural born citizen of the United States having resided here at least 14 years. 

That’s it. Nothing else. 

Now look at the following job qualification:

Applicant must be at least 8 feet tall and be able to understand what the “top” of something is. He must also be familiar with Christmas trees and ornaments. Applicant must be able to take instruction. 

The second reasonably detailed qualification applies to the Abominable Snow Monster from the holiday special, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. 

The first job qualification is for the leader of the free world, able to launch enough nuclear missiles to destroy the planet. 

I have to think the founders had such profound faith in the American people that they wanted the presidency open to just about everyone. Of course, in the 1780’s “everyone” was white men but I digress. 

The notion of a President “of the people” is quite seductive. Andrew Jackson sold himself on this premise. However Old Hickory had been a Senator and Governor. 

It is simply amazing that despite this skimpy job qualification statement from Article II of the constitution, all we have gotten so far for Presidents have been folks with a military or government service record, without exception. Folks like Herman Cain or H. Ross Perot tried to break the pattern but failed. The pattern has remained undisturbed … until now. 

I think it’s time Article II was amended. I can’t say that military or government service, per se, should be a requirement but some evidence of past civic duty should be in there somewhere. Donald Trump, unique among the 44 men who have held this office (remember Grover served two non-consecutive terms) has no history of civic duty. This does not make him a bad man but it does raise the question of whether he really understands how to serve others in a selfless fashion. 

The daunting truth is that Donald Trump is no more qualified to be President than you or I. He is a successful businessman with no real interest in government except when it serves as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. His ride to the White House was fueled on the catharsis he provided to millions of disaffected Americans. But catharsis must be backed up by minimal qualification. I absolutely love driving my car but I have no business running a car company. 

Donald Trump is a mixture of Cliff Clavin from the sitcom Cheers (the pub know-it-all) and Archie Bunker, a man possibly very decent but severely limited by a world view shaped by stereotypes and checkout counter tabloids. I didn’t consider Bunker a racist. I considered him profoundly ignorant with a fear of the unfamiliar born of ignorance. I feel the same way about Trump. 

Someone with civic experience would never have leaped into the travel ban that Trump implemented. Cliff and Archie would. 

Age and citizenship are no longer sufficient qualifications for the Presidency. Not when the very existence of a nation (and even the world) is at stake. Until now, the common sense of the American people has relatively protected us. That barrier to calamity has disappeared. 

We have a man in the Oval Office no better prepared for the presidency than the Abominable Snow Monster. Article II is partly to blame and needs fixing in no short order. 

What do you think? The bar is open. 

So I go back to the drawing board and think about what was truly historic about the Obama presidency. Wars, economic downturns, shifting cultural norms – none of it historic. All of it encountered in previous administrations. What was truly historic, what cannot be debated by any sane individual, was this:

The First Black President.

Much has been written about the stereotypical conservative bigoted reaction to Barack Obama. I seem to recall writing a piece a few years ago comparing Obama’s predicament to that of the average black employee in a white dominated workplace. But the reason why I call the Obama years a failed social experiment is not about the fully predictable reaction of racists. It is about the tacit, soft bigotry of low expectations evidenced by liberals. Let’s start with the opening premise.

The Experiment was Founded on a Lie

Being black in America is NOT being Barack Obama in America. The American black experience is tied inextricably to slavery. Barack Obama’s roots don’t go back to American slavery. His father was Kenyan. His mother was a white American. Barack Obama does not, cannot, feel in his bones the sense of disenfranchisement of the American black. He can empathize. He can also be stopped by a cop “driving while black”, but that is due to the accident of skin

color and his reaction to such an incident cannot be the same as the reaction of someone whose great grandfather was owned by a white man. To put it simply, Barack Obama is not black in the psychological sense. I further maintain that “traditional”  blacks like Jim Clyburn or John Lewis could no more get elected President in 2009 than they could in 1864. Obama was the exotic man bigots could rationalize and liberals could easily embrace. Joe Biden said he was “clean and articulate”. That’s code for when you talk to him on the phone, he sounds white, not like fictional junk man Fred Sanford.

The Obama presidency was book-ended by two examples of the liberal bigotry that demonstrate how far this country needs to go before the social experiment of a black president can succeed.

2009 – The Negro Ambassador

On July 22, 2009 Barack Obama gave a press conference devoted to health care. In the days preceding the conference, black Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates had been arrested trying to gain access to his own home. He was mistaken for a burglar by a well-meaning neighbor and when confronted by police, Gates exacerbated the situation by not controlling his understandable resentment. It should be noted Gates was an acquaintance of the president. At the end of the health care press conference, Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet asked Obama to comment on the Gates incident. Clearly the question had nothing to do with health care and I submit would NEVER have been asked of a white president. In my political fantasy world. Obama would have responded, “I don’t comment on ongoing local law enforcement incidents” or even better, “Lynn would you be asking me this if I were white?” Instead, he took the bait and called the Cambridge, MA police stupid. In so doing, he further polarized an already racially tense incident and the liberal media, led by Lynn Sweet began their role as racial shit stirrers.

What was galling, and went under the radar of all those who see liberals as politically pure, was the implicit racism in Lynn Sweet’s question. She treated the leader of the free world as our ambassador to negro America. This conduct passes for outreach and empathy in our society. Good decent liberal whites want to “understand” the troubles of the black man. But NO black man is an authority on American racism. He is an authority on his own experience. To treat him as a spokesperson for all blacks is actually condescending.

It could be argued that the Obama presidency never transcended race because LIBERALS never let it go. They spent eight years raving about the first black president and scolding every Obama opponent as a racist. Only the most crude conservatives explicitly brought up Obama’s race. Yet the fact that liberals constantly brought it up was somehow supposed to make them seem “enlightened”.

2016 – The Condescension Continues

David Axelrod was Chief Strategist to Obama’s presidential campaigns. He was also a senior advisor in the first term of the Obama White House. He now, among other things, hosts a podcast called “The Axe Files” and late last year, Barack Obama was his guest. The dynamic between the two men during the podcast was telling. Obama tried to strike a balance between being Axelrod’s friend and being his former boss. Axelrod on the other hand seemed to pay little deference to the fact that he has mostly been this man’s subordinate. Don’t get me wrong. I think Axelrod loves Obama like a brother. They have been through a lot together. However, the tone of the interview didn’t seem to respect the office of the presidency. This dynamic hit its nadir when Axelrod proclaimed to Obama “I’m proud of you”. Excuse me? He is the leader of the free world. With all due respect, who is David Axelrod to be “proud” of him, like he is a child who has performed well?

I understand that campaign staff view their candidate as an object to be controlled to ensure a positive outcome. To that extent, every candidate is viewed by the campaign staff as a poll-tested rat running through a maze toward election. But it seems to me, eight years down the road, Axelrod should have abandoned that perspective. Axelrod’s interview made me envision an entire liberal contingent who sees Obama not as a dignified, intelligent, self-made man but as their creation. He is their hammer to pound against the nail of bigotry. He is their kindergarten show-and-tell example of the “articulate black man”. He is their prop to demonstrate how fair-minded they are.

Obama’s presidency convinced me that America was still not ready for a black president. Partly, because he wasn’t really black in the first place. But to my surprise, America wasn’t ready in large part because of liberals. Obama’s two terms were, to a great extent, an attempt to cleanse away white liberal guilt. The incessant racial advocacy did not foster further empathy and understanding. It resulted in a country more racially polarized than it has been since the 1960’s. I submit that because Obama’s feet were not firmly planted in the black American experience, he did not know how to react to being a prop. He tried not to piss off blacks.

Sadly, we will never know how blacks would have reacted to a black president who said, “race is foolishness. I’m not discussing it. I’m not weighing in on it. People are people.” Blacks might have found that refreshing. I certainly would have.

It is impossible to overestimate the damage done to this country by our original sin. To this day, it has us split into three factions: honest to goodness bigots, guilt ridden folks who overcompensate with 24/7 racial advocacy and the majority of people just trying to get through the day and treating most people on an individual basis. We may never get straight racially but until we do, we will not be ready for a black president. Despite two elections, the social experiment of a black president was essentially a failure. And the take away is that liberals are as much, if not more, to blame for this failure as conservatives.

What do you think? The bar is open.

While not getting deep into the methods used in the report, it is worth noting up front that all the public is permitted to see is the de-classified version.  The very first bit of writing in the report tells us that they cannot tell us everything because a lot of it is classified and part of national security secrets.  Of course, what is being kept secret is how they actually reached the conclusions in the report.

The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.

Thus, while the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods.

Were this an academic paper submitted by an undergraduate student, it would receive a failing grade and scathing comments in the margins about the lack of methodological data.

What we do know is that the so-called evidence of direct Russian involvement in the actual hacking of DNC computers did not stem from FBI or CIA analyses of those computers.  In fact, neither the FBI nor the CIA ever looked at those computers at all.  Instead, the computers were looked at by a private 3rd party group who gave its investigative conclusions to the IC.  Why didn’t anyone from the government look at those computers, and what methods did the 3rd party investigative team use?  Good questions.  The FBI alleges the DNC refused to let them look and the DNC alleges the FBI never asked to look.  What’s the truth?–who knows.  Again, were this a student research paper it would be returned rife with red ink.

The IC report offers a variety of “Key Judgments”, the first of which is that Russia has increased its “longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order”.  Yet, while admitting this is a “longstanding” Russian policy, the report conveniently fails to mention just how far back that policy goes.  And we know that it goes back to at least the 2012 US Presidential elections, when Russia was asserting the elections were rigged.  Back then, the pro-government Russian group, Izvestia, claimed:

The procedure for the election of US President November 6, 2012 (prior to the day of voting) does not comply with the international principles of the organization of the electoral process. The principles of universal and equal suffrage, the authenticity and validity of the election, transparency and openness of elections provided by the US authorities is not satisfactory. (Translated using Google Translate)

In other words–your election doesn’t pass our smell test.  If that isn’t an attempt to “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order” then what is?

Part of the circumstantial evidence of Russian meddling is that it displayed clear favoritism in the outcome.

Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin publicly contrasted the President-elect’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric.”

The United States is inarguably the most powerful and influential nation on the planet with a long history of challenging Russian and Soviet hegemony.  Is there a time in recent history when Russia did not display a clear favorite in a US Presidential election?  It sure wasn’t in 2012, when Russian Prime Minister, Dmitri Medvedev, exclaimed, “I am glad that the man who considers Russia the number one enemy will not be president. That’s ridiculous, some kind of paranoia. Obama is a known, predictable partner.”  To juxtapose just how different were the positions of 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney and sitting-President Barack Obama, the former went on record calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe, while the latter was caught on a hot mic promising greater flexibility in pro-Russian policies after the election.

The most important portion of the 2017 IC report is also the least covered–while the computers of private election entities were infiltrated, official electronic election machines were not.  There is absolutely no proof, or claim, of Russian involvement in the voting or vote tallying process.  In fact, the report concludes, “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”  In the 25-page report, the word “tallying” appears a mere two times, both times in a single sentence twice repeated.  That’s it.

To be clear, there is little doubt that Russia did everything the IC report claims it did.  But what exactly did Russia do that it hasn’t done in the past?  The answer seems to be “very little”.  The IC report concludes that Russia will take what it learned in 2016 and apply it to future US elections.  But it has already done that, applying what it learned in 2012 to 2016.  Russia has displayed a history of questioning the legitimacy of US elections, yet this is the first time it’s being called subversive.  Russia has displayed a history of declaring its preferences in the outcome of US elections, yet this is the first time it’s being called subversive.  The only difference between 2012 and 2016 is the alleged cyber intrusion–a difference that is so minuscule that it is neither substantiated by actual IC investigation, nor is it said to have affected the actual electoral process.  In fact, the exact opposite is claimed.

If the proof of Russian meddling is in the pudding, it’s a sparse portion of a stale dessert that is several years old.  Donald Trump may well have benefitted from Russian influence in our 2016 election, but if this report is proof of that, then it must also be concluded that Barack Obama benefitted from it in 2012.

And there sure aren’t any Intelligence Community reports alleging that, are there?