Tag Archives: Kevin Drum

You Get a Check! And You Get a Check! And You Get a Check!

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Given the fact that the federal government’s complete and absolute fck-up of preparations for this pandemic — including wasting three months calling it a “hoax” — is largely responsible for the near total meltdown of the economy, (everything has stopped because we don’t even know who or how many are infected), I guess it’s only right that the feds are talking about cutting us all checks.

Me, I’m not alone in seeing $1000 per adult as a kind of cheesy reelection bribe from Team Trump. “Here’s a grand. Sorry about bullshitting you about that hoax stuff and you then losing your job, blowing through your pitiful savings in a month and having to call off your daughter’s wedding and sell your truck and fishin’ boat. But hey! Buy yourself a beer. Let’s Keep America Great!”

But $1000 is something. Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has been making the case that Jared and Pence and the Hollywood foreclosure king Steve Mnuchin better be prepared to cut a lot more checks if they’re serious about saving the majority of us from economic perdition. Of course, whether they care that much about anything other than the next election and their place in the annals of history’s greatest scoundrels and fools remains to be seen.

It’s encouraging that DC Democrats, sensing blood in the water for Trump and his enablers, have zeroed in on language to prevent the usual suspects, executives and stockholders, from their customary skim job whenever the gummint is handing out panic money.

Yesterday Andrew Ross Sorkin of “Too Big to Fail” fame started talking up what at first glance seems like a good idea, essentially a very … very … fat zero-intersst loan-cum-grant package to every affected employer to maintain payroll and lease/rent costs until some adults can ride in and turn this thing around.

Not being a Nobel laureate I can’t say if that is the best option out there right now. But anything that compensates airline executives, to take just one example, for stuffing their faces with stock buybacks and the resulting bonuses from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s trillion dollar 2017 tax givaway instead of contingency planning for, you know, rainier days will be a scandal atop a catastrophe. The money — loans like Obama gave the auto industry, not grants — has to go, must go, to sustaining employees almost exclusively. (Here’s another good airline screed.)

Trump, ever the clueless idiot, has talked about bailing out the cruise industry. As if Norwegian Cruise Lines and others, nearly all of which are registered off shore and pay next to nothing in U.S. taxes are some kind of vital industry. FFS! Far better we zero in on the guys that run the corner beer and pizza joint and their minimum wage workers.

And what of non-profits, many of which provide vital public services the pernicious “small government” crowd loves to mock if not ignore? Are they going to be rolled into the check-writing frenzy?

Very ironically, the whole thing is almost exactly what Andrew Yang was talking about for past year. (I also thought the best way to provide everyone $1000 a month in Universal Basic Income was by forcing Google, Facebook, Experian, VISA and every other corporate monolith to compensate individual Americans for the constant trading and profiteering off our personal information. But that’s just me.)

This whole episode is — no big revelation here — an astonishing shit show. One that wouldn’t be nearly as bad had the U.S. government been under the control of competent, experienced, functioning adults and not a clown car of frauds and grifters. But that Hillary … and those e-mails … .

The question I leave you with as we hunker in our caves, when we’re not day-drinking and over-walking the dog, is pretty basic: Does any fck up by any other American administration — and the Iraq war wasn’t even 20 years ago — come close to comparing with this?

Quick answer: No.

Fear the Bern

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Bernie Sanders is fond of saying, “People want real change”, just as in pretty much every election one candidate or another hypes his or her power to bring just that. Big time, transformational change. The problem is the data on that “real change” thing is pretty spotty-to-discouraging. In reality, mostly voters are afraid of “real change”. Mainly they want things to stay kind of the same, just with a different face at the helm of the ship.

Last night in South Carolina, Bernie took more than his usual share of hits. This wasn’t surprising given his solid-looking front runner-status. The Democratic establishment and a remarkable slice of the punditocracy have mobilized to prevent his nomination.

The primary argument being that once we leave the bubble of the primary season and Bernie is exposed to the full brunt of the hysteria and nefariousness of Donald Trump and Team Trump media, Bernie will play like a 78-ton millstone around the neck of every Democrat in every district and race where large numbers of voters — independents and moderate Republicans — mainly want things to stop being stupid and embarrassing and just go back to the way they were four years ago, no revolution required.

Sanders points to polling showing him regularly beating Trump. Skeptics point to other data showing how viscerally/emotionally voters respond to just the label of “socialist.” Hell, “atheist” polls better. And “gay” is no real issue at all. But “socialist”, even soft-core “Democratic socialist”, remains an American boogey man with very deep roots. It may be meaningless to people of the post-Soviet era, but it remains as toxic to (many) Boomers and ultra geezers as “pedophile.”

(From the article linked above: “Most Americans don’t like the idea of moving toward socialism, regardless of how you qualify it. In a Suffolk poll taken last spring, a slight plurality of Democrats said they’d be “satisfied with a presidential candidate who thinks the United States should be more socialist.” But steep majorities of independents (72 percent to 18 percent) and voters in the aggregate (67 percent to 22 percent) said they wouldn’t. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for the Democratic nominee regardless. But these grim numbers go much further.”)

It’s of course another low-information problem. Beyond the primary season bubble of “activists” and “zealots” and “revolutionaries” — amounting to a fraction of a faction of the total electorate — are far more people, (likely voters), who have never processed how much “socialism” is already baked in to American life. Nor have sussed out how what Bernie is constantly yelling about would really work. Wish all you want that that wasn’t the case, but it’s a harsh reality.

And it’s hard to see how this improves in a long head-to-head with the disinformation/distortion Trump machine.

Through the primaries thus far Bernie has managed to play coy with his math on Medicare for All and with his health records. But there’s a gruesome gauntlet awaiting him on those two matters alone, post nomination. And then we’ll start adding on every “socialist”-sounding thing he’s said for 40 years on Vermont Public Access TV.

My feelings about Bernie remain pretty much what they’ve been for the last five years. Were it to happen, his vision for the mechanisms of the world would be better than what we have in almost every way … but I can not for the life of me imagine how he, or anyone, can possibly deliver them. His “revolution” of “real change” requires leading a wave election so large and definitive that it not only sweeps Mitch McConnell and a dozen or more Republican senators out of DC, but is also so sweeping and commanding it intimidates the truly titanic forces of American finance. To the point they concede resistance is futile and melt away from the fight … for their very existence.

The numbers aren’t there. (Here’s Kevin Drum at Mother Jones breaking down how much better Bernie will have to do with young voters than any Democrat has ever done.)

My pet response to anyone giddy over the thought of Medicare for All and a four-year timeline to put the private health insurance industry out of business is, “Ok, great. They’re carnivorous bastards. But just walk me through exactly how you unwind UnitedHealth, for one example. Never mind the employees out of work. Where does the shareholder value — held by pension funds for teachers unions and others besides the usual plutocrats — go? Are we just wiping it out? If so, I see some resistance there.”

As my blogging colleague Joe has said several times, the poison pill factor in Bernie’s support is the obsessive and (justifiably) angry faction that will not accept anyone but him. Should he lose they’ll likely repeat what they’ve done in recent memory and shift to some/any third party candidate making the same “principled” noises, ignoring what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore, or Jill Stein to Hillary Clinton. (Somewhere within Bernie’s support remains the “blow it all up” crowd who were down to a coin flip between him and Donald Trump in 2016.)

In both “Platoon” and “Saving Private Ryan” a character on the battlefield appeals to his commanding officer, “I got a bad feeling about this one.” That’s me today with Bernie.

Of course in “Saving Private Ryan” Tom Hanks responds by asking, “When was the last time you felt good about anything?”

A Basket of Quotes, Just a Hint of Which I’d Like to Hear from Tina Smith

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From life-long Republican Steve Schmidt, better known as the man who advised John McCain to select Sarah Palin as his running mate:

The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we’re in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you’re able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.

That’s not to mention the baby internment camps, the indecency, the cruelty, the meanness, the lying, the complicit nature of this Republican majority with an attack on the country that’s launched by the Russian Federation. So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist . It has been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel. For there to be any redemption of a right of center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.

It’s like a fire. Fires are a part of the ecosystem, part of the natural progress. And when the forest burns, it’s purified. There can be new growth. For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.”

From conservative columnist Michael Gerson in The Washington Post:

“In November, many Republican leaners and independents will face a difficult decision. The national Democratic Party under Nancy Pelosi and Charles E. Schumer doesn’t share their views or values. But President Trump is a rolling disaster of mendacity, corruption and prejudice. What should they do?

They should vote Democratic in their House race, no matter who the Democrats put forward. And they should vote Republican in Senate races with mainstream candidates (unlike, say, Corey Stewart in Virginia).

Why vote strategically in this case? Because American politics is in the midst of an emergency.

If Democrats gain control of the House but not the Senate, they will be a check on the president without becoming a threat to his best policies (from a Republican perspective) or able to enact their worst policies. The tax cut will stand. The Senate will still approve conservative judges. But the House will conduct real oversight hearings and expose both Russian influence and administration corruption. Under Republican control, important committees — such as Chairman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee — have become scraping, sniveling, panting and pathetic tools of the executive branch. Only Democratic control can drain this particular swamp.

Alternatively: If Republicans retain control of the House in November, Trump will (correctly) claim victory and vindication. He will have beaten the political performances of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms. He will have proved the electoral value of racial and ethnic stereotyping. He will have demonstrated the effectiveness of circuslike distraction. He will have shown the political power of bold, constant, uncorrected lies. And he will gain many more enablers and imitators.

Perhaps worst of all, a victorious Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (which is already far along). Even murmured dissent will be silenced. The GOP will be fully committed to a 2020 presidential campaign conducted in the spirit of George C. Wallace — a campaign of racial division, of rural/urban division, of religious division, of party division that metastasizes into mutual contempt.

But this does not change the political and ethical reality. The only way to save the GOP is to defeat it in the House. In this case, a Republican vote for a Democratic representative will be an act of conscience.”

From conservative icon George Will, also in The Washington Post:

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Noting that [Joe] Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praised him as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor. …

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.”

 

And finally (for now) from liberal blogger Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

“Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons. Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.

… I’d like to make clear just how long this has been brewing. I know this is hardly news to anyone who reads this blog, but as I approach my 60th birthday I can say that half my life has now been marked by Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, Newt Gingrich, the Vince Foster suicide, Whitewater, the Rose law firm, Filegate, the Christmas card list scandal, Fox News, Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, the Florida recount, Swift boating, the GOP’s partywide effort to suppress black votes via photo ID laws, birtherism, the unanimous Republican rejection of the 2009 stimulus, Benghazi, Emailgate, Merrick Garland, and now the endless haze of racism, bigotry, and corruption surrounding Donald Trump.

This is very much a non-exhaustive list. But every one of these things is either a baseless ‘scandal’, an example of ethical rot, or part of a deliberate media effort to lie and mislead. These are the highlights of the Republican Party over the past three decades. No political party with a rap sheet like this deserves to be walking around free.”

 

Before the Jeronimo Yanez Verdict

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Not being what you’d call a gambling man, (there was that slot machine in Beatty, Nevada years back) I’ve never put the chances of Jeronimo Yanez’ conviction in his killing of Philando Castile any higher than 15%. I hope I’m proven wrong, but history is on my side as we await the verdict. And this is an actual jury, not one of those sealed off police review boards where the chances of the finger of guilt would drop into the low single digits.

Before the jury returns I just want to return to a couple facets of this more or less routine run of traumatic incidents of police playing judge jury and executioner with black motorists and guys selling CDs on the street corner..

1: Jeronimo Yanez should never have been a cop. No one operating at the level of fear and panic he demonstrated should be wearing a badge, much less toting around a loaded gun with a license to kill. I’m told he’s a sweet guy. But that isn’t the point. He clearly didn’t have the emotional stability to be in the job he was in. Maybe at a desk for a non-profit. But not a cop. And for that I blame his employers as much as him.

Just because someone wants to be a cop is no reason to hire him. In fact, given the militaristic-to-racist attitudes of too many of these guys (and the woman in Oklahoma), wanting (badly) to be a cop should be a red flag for anyone sorting through applications. Moreover, are city police forces so desperate for bodies to fill uniforms that they can’t adequately vet someone like Yanez for aptitude and judgment? Put another way, if they took Yanez, who did they turn down? This guy?

After that we move on to training, where as we’ve learned, there is plenty of focus on gunplay and combat-style tactics — they call it “Bulletproof Warrior” for chrissakes — and not so much on how you go about dialing down the temperature of a situation.

Finally, on this facet, there’s the demand put on “emotionally vulnerable” young cops like Yanez to produce revenue for cash-strapped municipalities, largely by repeatedly ticketing low income minorities for nuisance violations. You don’t want to know how beyond-crazy ballistic I would have been after the second ticket from some twitchy cop, and Castile was stopped something like 44 times.

But as we all know the Jeronimo Yanez law enforcers of the world aren’t going to be hassling middle-aged and older white folks in clean new cars, even if they have a broken tail light.

2: And apparently I’m the only person on the planet who is obsessed with this, but why, considering all the pain and suffering to victims, families, police department reputations, city budgets and on and on hasn’t anyone (else) suggested issuing police a kind of dial-barreled service revolver, with a default setting firing rubber bullets or chemical darts? (When city cops get into the exceedingly rare raging, Hollywood-style gun battle, they could simply re-set the thing to fire its load of live ammo.)

Had Yanez freaked at the word “gun”, whipped out his and starting pumping rubber bullets into Castile’s chest, (being careful as he says not to scare the toddler in the back seat), Castile would have been pretty damn sore for a week or so, but he’d be alive, Yanez wouldn’t be on trial, the cops wouldn’t be fending of the now standard and very hard to dispute accusations of racism, the cities involved would be several thousands of dollars less in the red and Castile would be alive to pay another few hundred dollars a year in expired tab fines, or whatever the next cop could get him for. (I’m not sure what St. Anthony Park’s basic fine is for “Driving While Black”.)

This is good: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines/

As far as I can tell my dual-barrel revolver idea has garnered exactly zero interest anywhere in the country, probably because no politician could stand up to Second Amendment fanatics shrieking about, “Disarming the cops!”.

One other facet worth giving some thought to are statistics dug up by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the disproportionate number of these cop v. minority killings that involve peace officers who are either young or very new to the job.

 

 

Jim Comey’s Pre-Existing Conditions

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2Sure it’s berserk, (for them, typically berserk), but I’m hoping U.S. House Reoublicans pass their Obamacare-gutting bill today. Why? Because holding the national conversation hostage over whacking adequate, reasonably-priced health insurance for 20-30 million Americans will re-inflame The Resistance and keep the inmates away from tax “reform” and everything else on Steve Bannon’s to-do” list, at least for a while.

The numbers on the so-called bill up for vote today are gob-smacking as usual. They make no sense. But this is what we’ve come to expect from a collection of critters, (today’s “principled conservatives”), far better suited to opposition than, you know, actually running things.

Here are a couple of the top howlers in this bill as it is. The $8 billion (over five years) tossed in yesterday to win support from four “moderate” Congressthings to cover constituents with pre-existing conditions? Well, to paraphrase baseball play-by-play legend Bob Uecker, that comes up “Juuuuust a little short.” Like by roughly, oh, $190 billion. In other words, it’s meaningless.

The other, in terms of who gets screwed most, is this: The top ten states with the most people 40 or younger with pre-existing conditions are all … damn you, you beat me to it … deep red, hootin’ and hollerin’ Trump states. Preggers in West Virginny? That’ll be an extra $17,000 in annual insurance premiums. Really, WTF?

But if this “moral monstrosity” as Nancy Pelosi put it yesterday, does pass, it’ll go over to the Senate for weeks if not months, eating up massive chunks of pundit air supply not to mention the attention of our ADD-afflicted Orange Leader. And by the time the Senate lays eyes on this thing, due diligence conservatives along with you and me, will actually know silly science-y stuff like for example, what’s actually in the bill, how it works and … how much it’ll cost. And at that point wiley old Mitch McConnell, who is all about political survival, (and I do mean all), will have to decide how big an appetite he has for political suicide.

My guess? None at all.

That said, there’s a connection within this all-too familiar madness to FBI Director Jim Comey. Allow me to make it as succinctly as I can.

Comey seemed unusually animated yesterday talking about his options regarding his unprecedented Oct. 28 disclosure about Hillary Clinton’s-mails. There were only two, he said: “Really bad” and “catastrophic.”

So, he broke with the FBI’s rules and went with “really bad” because of the predicament “we” (meaning the FBI) would have been in had Clinton won (which everyone assumed she would) and word leaked out post-Clinton victory that she had … had … well, frankly I don’t know what, unless somewhere in her e-mails was a note to Vladimir Putin proving she was involved in something truly treacherous and treasonous, like colluding with agents of a homicidal international gangster to trash her opponent.

Want to read the best “Why Comey Turned the Election to Trump” piece I’ve read? Here you go.

But what is far, far more likely, and isn’t discussed nearly as much is who Comey feared most and why. I can’t claim originality on this. But when The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky argued that Comey had every valid reason to fear what Congressional Republicans would do to him personally and the FBI it landed with the weight and scent of high plausibility.

The established Republican game plan, going back to the Clintons and Whitewater, is to launch an endless series of investigation and hearings, amplified by their media mouthpieces, until something … anything … gets churned up that damages the intended target, normally a Clinton or a Democrat.  (Notable irony: They never found anything with which to attack Obama.) For example: Failed Arkansas land deal begets Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. And more recently “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” begets Hillary’s e-mail server.

Democrats either haven’t learned how to play this game or find it too repugnant to seriously consider. And Comey knew that. He already had an insurrection within his New York FBI office. His agents were convinced, probably from listening to Rush Limbaugh on stakeouts in Chappaqua, that the Clintons were dirtier than Carlo Gambino and Comey wasn’t being tough enough. He also had good reason to suspect those agents — retired or otherwise —  were leaking inside information to Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. (Now Comey says he’s investigating that angle too, along with the Russians, etc., etc.) With all those fuses burning Comey made the fateful promise he had no legally valid reason to make, namely that he would keep “Congress” i.e. Republican committee heads, updated on anything new regarding their Enemy Number One, Hillary the Terrible.

In effect it’s not all that different from the kid cowering from a pack of bullies pleading, “Please don’t yell at me. I hate it when you yell at me!.”

To do less, which is to say play by normal FBI/Justice Department rules, Comey would have faced the extreme probability of guerrilla war within his New York office (at least) and a full-fledged Congressional Republican/conservative media attack on both him and the Bureau at large for being a Clinton stooge. Conversely, he had nothing of the sort to fear from Democrats by not mentioning last Oct. 28, “Oh, by the way, we have a criminal investigation going into the Trump crowd for jacking around with the Russians to pervert the election.”

Point being:  The contemporary Republican strategy of reckless, relentless total war, on individuals no matter their status in the DC pecking order and on the most basic logic of legislative cause and effect has a chokehold, (maybe a stranglehold), on all points of critical government function.

But, if you’re paying attention, you already knew that.

 

 

Hillary Survives Another Nothingburger “Scandal”

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It’s a tough day to be Republican. But then most of them are this year, aren’t they? This thing with the FBI letting “crooked Hillary” off on that colossal e-mail scam … well, until someone starts shouting for a special prosecutor to investigate the FBI, that notorious den of lefties, men and women of conscience (and with nothing better to do with their time and our money) are going to have find another dead horse to flog.

Not that “e-mailgate” didn’t succeed almost as well as other ginned-up Clinton scandals. I mean it began with Benghazi and after throwing years and taxpayer millions at that mirage it begat e-mail servers. It was just like how Whitewater begat Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and impeachment, which as you remember was such a winning strategy for Republicans Bill Clinton left office more popular than St. Ronald the Daft.

The fact is that like Whitewater and Travelgate and Benghazi before it, the Republican attack machine never had a coherent theory of the crime with e-mailgate. Which is why it bored people and never caught on like, well, like hanky panky in the Oval Office. (Now if among Hillary’s e-mails had been some hot mash notes to Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger we might have had some fun.)

I mean, she used her own servers … to do what, exactly? Send military secrets to Al Qaeda? Sell off Texas to the North Koreans? What? Please tell me. Because I was never grasping the Constitution-tearing gravity of the situation.

“Well,” came the usual response, “we’ll never know. Because she won’t disclose everything. That’s the way the Clintons are. Clearly corrupt. Every time we accuse them of something they refuse to turn over all the evidence we need to make our case! Bastards! It’s like they don’t trust us! We have to Make America Great Again!”

This perpetual cycle of molehill non-scandals that … we the people have paid to prosecute … only to watch “the case” evaporate under the harsh light of actual evidence is of course central to the widespread perception that Hillary and Bill “can’t be trusted”. Never mind that if you ask “why can’t they be trusted?” the most frequent response is something along the lines of, “Well, because I hear they’re always in trouble over something.”

Somehow, maybe by adding a little video to this argument, from Kevin Drum Team Hillary has to turn the guns back on the firing squad.

For the record: Whitewater was a nothingburger. Travelgate was a nothingburger. Troopergate was a nothingburger. Filegate was a nothingburger. The Vince Foster murder conspiracy theories were a nothingburger. Monica Lewinsky was Bill’s problem, not Hillary’s. Benghazi was a tragedy, but entirely nonscandalous. The Goldman Sachs speeches were probably a bad idea, but otherwise a nothingburger. Emailgate revealed some poor judgment, but we’ve now seen all the emails and it’s pretty obviously a nothingburger. Humagate is a nothingburger. Foundationgate is a nothingburger.

Bottom line: Don’t let Donald Trump or the press or anyone else convince you that Hillary Clinton is “dogged by scandal” or “works under a constant cloud of controversy” or whatever the nonsense of the day is. That constant cloud is the very deliberate invention of lowlifes in Arkansas; well-heeled conservative cranks; the Republican Party; and far too often a gullible and compliant press. Like anybody who’s been in politics for 40 years, Hillary has some things she should have handled better, but that’s about it. The plain fact is that there’s no serious scandal on her record. There’s no evidence that she’s ever sold out to Wall Street. There’s no corruption, intrigue, or deceit. And if anything, she’s too honest on a policy level. She could stand to promise people a bit of free stuff now and then.”

I make no apologies. I have no great problem with Hillary. She’s pulling the gears on a huge, sophisticated, well-heeled and well-oiled political machine. Live with it. That’s the game in 2016 USA. It’s how you get elected. You want to change it? Me too. But it ain’t happening this year.

Moreover though, I tell anyone who cares to listen that I believe she’ll be a better president than Bill, who if you remember anything other than the stained blue dress, did a pretty good job of keeping the economy on the rails and US troops out of unwinnable foreign wars.

She arrives in the Oval Office with more experience on every imaginable level than anyone since maybe LBJ (problematic comparison), plus the full support of officers and staff from two successful Democratic presidencies and a whole lot less of Bill’s, shall we say, “impulse control” issues. She has also demonstrated masterful control over the Republican wing nut fringe, an enormous time, energy and money suck in D.C. these days, that must be persistently neutralized.

So there are plenty of rational reasons to trust her to competently manage matters here and abroad.

Not that the usual suspects will be screaming “scandal” and “special prosecutor” before she takes the oath of office.