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Gepubliceerd: 27 juni 2016

#Trexit

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

It was the hashtag of a tweet that read: ‘Dear Scots, you can keep Donald Trump, thanks, USA.’ The last couple of weeks all of Donald Trump’s deficiencies as a candidate and as a human being have been on display.  His pathological narcissism spilled over after the massacre in Orlando and the Brexit vote.  For him, everything is always about Trump, so after the shooting he tweeted about the many congrats he had received for forecasting a terrorist attack, and after the Brexit vote the first thing he could talk about was the revenue from American tourists his golf courses in Scotland would generate with the lower pound sterling. 
      In the latter case Trump not only exhibited his mental disorder but also his limited business acumen.  He claims to own hotels and golf courses around the world, all of which have become far more expensive for British tourists, who therefore won’t show up anymore, and seems to think that a few courses in Scotland and Ireland can make up for that.  It is of course possible that he knows something we don’t know, namely that he only receives fixed licensing fees from those ‘properties’ and won’t take a loss.
      The Donald’s trip to Scotland also accentuated something that was already clear in his attacks on judge Curiel for the latter’s Mexican heritage.  He exploits his candidacy to advance his business interests, and there is no chance that he’ll ever put the USA before Trump Enterprises.  Trump used the attention he’s getting from the political press to promote two golf courses, and by God, they all fell for his scam, hoping that maybe he would say something politically relevant.  Trump made two more or less political statements, first explaining why he had not brought any foreign policy advisors, ‘because there was nothing going on,’ and then congratulating his Scottish audience for having voted to leave the European Union, apparently not knowing that a large majority of Scots voted ‘remain.’  The latter gaffe earned him a lot of nicknames, such as ‘utter twonk,’ ‘cockwomble of the highest order,’ ‘bankrupt traffic cone,’ ‘soggy expired dog food coupon,’ ‘bumbling inglorious punchinello wag,’ and the statement ‘that he could not be more out of touch with reality if Nessie bit him in the arse.’  Hillary Clinton’s campaign can work with that.
      But another potential Trexit that has nothing to do with the EU has the Democrats probably more concerned than Reince Priebus.  Trump’s general election campaign has no money, in spite of his braggadocious statements about self-financing, no data operation to speak of, and no staff on the ground in swing states or any other states for that matter.   There are still various attempts under way to prevent Trump from becoming the GOP nominee, and one of them might succeed.
      Those attempts are fertilized by the massive desertion of the Republican old guard, the Bushes, the Romneys, and most recently also Hank Paulson and George Will, who even changed his voter registration to ‘independent.’  Pledged delegates bound to vote for Trump are trying to evade their fate by making a ‘conscience claim,’ and one of them is suing the GOP for it.
      There is no better nominee to run against for Hillary than Trump, who has higher negatives and whose Trump University scam overshadows her email scandal.  Of course Trump would sue the GOP if he was discarded, and in that case the party might end up without a nominee at all.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 20 juni 2016

The Second Amendment

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

The opening item in the local news was a police-involved shooting in the Bronx.  One man was killed, and according to an NYPD spokesperson officers fired thirty-one shots, “of which several hit the suspect.”  Several out of thirty-one doesn’t sound like an impressive performance, and it puts statements by the likes of Donald Trump that ‘if only more people in the Orlando nightclub (or in the Paris concert hall for that matter) had been carrying guns, there would have been less carnage’ in perspective.  If highly trained police officers misfire between 80% and 90% of the time, one can only imagine the damage random gun-carrying civilians would do.  Moreover, Trump ‘forgets’ to mention that there was an armed guard at the Pulse, who couldn’t take down the terrorist.  The news continued with an interview with a Republican US Senator, who declared that “this is not about guns but about terrorism.”  It sounded like a refurbished version of an old NRA slogan, which now says: Guns don’t kill, terrorists do.  The notion that terrorists with guns kill easier than terrorists without guns escapes these geniuses.
      The real problem is the 2^nd Amendment, or rather its interpretation by the American right. It was added to the Constitution in 1789, and says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For two centuries legal scholars and politicians have debated what the founders and framers intended when they wrote these somewhat mysterious words.  Clearly it was not to protect the rights of the squirrel-hunters in Bernie Sanders’s Vermont, and therefore the arguments focused on whether only citizens who are part of an organized militia have the right to bear arms, or if it is an individual right of every citizen.  The matter was settled by the Supreme Court in 2008 with the Heller-decision in favor of an individual right, the crowning event of a process that started during the Reagan administration.  In this case the Court was probably right.  Both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were very concerned about the potential power of a ‘standing army,’ and believed that an armed population would be a counterweight to that threat.

      Although most of the debate is still about militia versus individual right, it seems that there is a much stronger argument against the 2^nd Amendment.  As the Bundys c.s. have amply demonstrated, individual citizens banding together, even when armed with AR-15s, have no chance against the local police, the FBI and the National Guard, let alone the US Army. So the original intention of the amendment has become obsolete, and it should be removed from the US Constitution.
      That is not about to happen, but as long as there is a 2^nd Amendment, even interpreted as an individual right, there is no reason why gun ownership cannot be regulated without infringing on that right, as many cities and a number of states have shown.  The unwillingness of politicians in DC to regulate is not of a legal nature, but only shows that they are in the pockets of the NRA.
      Next week, in the wake of the Orlando massacre, the US Senate will vote on four window-dressing measures that would limit the ability of suspected potential terrorists to buy guns.  Two are proposed by Democrats and two by Republicans, so it is to be expected that none will pass.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 12 juni 2016

Hard Choices

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

It is the title of Hillary Clinton’s recent memoir, but it applies more to Donald Trump than to her at this point in the campaign.  Trump has to decide who he wants to be, his know-nothing racist, misogynistic, bragging and insulting self, with no policy ideas to speak of, other than cutting his own taxes, building ‘The Wall,’ deporting 11 million people and keeping all foreign Muslims out of the US, or what the Republican establishment wants him to be: a controlled and civilized spokesperson for Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand-inspired policy agenda, who always stays on script, using the teleprompter to make sure that his vocal cords don’t go where his wacky brain wants to take them.  Trump tried the latter disguise twice now, first last Tuesday night, when he gave an uninspired victory speech in which he forgot to claim victory and to thank his voters, but incoherently rambled about his future greatness as president while his daughter Ivanka, who apparently co-wrote the speech, stood next to him looking like she couldn’t wait to get to the ladies’ room, which was caused by fear that he would go off the mental reservation she had confined him to.
      Yesterday Trump appeared similarly cloaked a second time, at a faith-based event in DC, and the result was even worse.  He stumbled through his sentences, occasionally looking slightly panicked from one part of the teleprompter to the other while skipping a line and thus mutilating a sentence because his eyes had lost contact with the text.  In the evening, at an event in Richmond, VA, he had decided to ditch the teleprompter and try to be himself again, by calling Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’ in response to her blistering attack on him the night before, and subsequently apologizing to ‘the real Pocahontas’ for comparing her to Elizabeth Warren, undoubtedly securing a large chunk of the native-American vote.  But it was not easy for Trump to get back into his former belligerent shape, and you could almost see him think about all the things he now knew he should not be saying anymore, pretty much like a golfer who constantly tells himself not to shank his shots and therefore screws up every time.  We’ll know better what shape Trump is shifting towards during his ‘major speech’ about the Clintons on Monday night.
      The whole thing creates two dilemmas for Trump.  If he concurs with the demands of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell he looks like a neutered bull that’s trying to leave the china store without causing any more damage, and that will disappoint the under-educated white male rednecks who are the core of his constituency, possibly to the point where they stay home rather than voting for a spineless wuzz.  And if he doesn’t Ryan and McConnell might distance themselves from him.
      The second dilemma is that Trump cannot change who he is, as personality theory teaches us and as 70 years of his life, a milestone he’ll reach next Tuesday, have shown.  So although the first dilemma leaves him with only bad choices it’s inevitable that in the end he won’t capitulate to the GOP and will be a thin-skinned loudmouth bully until the bitter end of the campaign.
      The Democrats in the meantime won’t give poor Donald a chance to change, as they’ll make his head spin with simultaneous attacks from Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Bill and Hillary Clinton.  It will be hard for Trump, Sarah Palin and Chris Christie to respond.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 04 juni 2016

ALI

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Today the death of Muhammad Ali appears to have stopped the parallel political campaigns for the Democratic nomination and the presidency.  On a normal Saturday morning CNN, Fox News and MSNBC would have had all their usual pundits rehashing the violence at Donald Trump’s rally in San José, Hillary Clinton’s first successful attack on Trump, and Bernie Sanders’s latest argument why the Democratic Party’s nomination process is rigged if he doesn’t become the nominee, even if ‘the Secretary’ has won more pledged delegates once the primaries are over.  Instead, all the cable networks are going back and forth between documentary stories and images of Ali’s career and life, studio guests with their own memories of ‘the Greatest,’ like William Rhoden of the New York Times, who appears on more than one channel, and reporters at the Phoenix hospital where Ali died and in Louisville where he was born, who cannot tell us anything more than that the family is in mourning in Phoenix and that preparations for the funeral are under way in Louisville, ‘news’ that of course you don’t really need to hear the whole day.
      In spite of the repetitions, however, one of the perks of spending a day memorizing Ali’s life, his courage and his wit, is that we are treated to the many hilarious statements he made, most of which were both heartfelt and true, albeit on occasion slightly exaggerated.  The way he intimidated Sonny Liston before his first title fight: “I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, the hands cannot hit what the eyes can’t see,” followed after his victory by the little poem “The fans didn’t know when they came to the fight, that they’d see the launching of the first black satellite.”  Or his confidence booster for the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ with George Foreman, a boxer he was genuinely afraid of who initially hit him so hard that it may very well have been the first cause of his Parkinson’s Syndrome: “Last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”  And finally the prediction of his victory over Joe Frazier: “It’s gonna be a thrilla when I beat the gorilla in Manila.”  But his most famous quote was not about boxing: “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong, no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.”
      The way Ali explained his refusal to go to Vietnam that cost him his title and the heart of his career deserves more quotations: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam when so called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” In his view the war simply served to continue the domination of darker people by white slave masters.
      His statement went on as follows: “But I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here.  I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.” In conclusion, Ali said: “This is the day when such evils must come to an end.” It was his own Gettysburg Address.
      Although Ali’s passing put the campaign on a back burner there was some interaction.  Trump tweeted an homage to the champion but didn’t seem to remember that Ali had fiercely criticized his attitude towards Muslims.  That and Hillary’s speech is only the beginning of his downfall.

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