"Our Democracy" -- What is it Really?

“We need you to take this seriously. Our democracy is at stake. Elections matter. Voting matters.”  Barack Obama, November, 2017

From community organizer to President of the United States – now, back to community organizer. Obama cast these pearls of wisdom (above) before an adoring crowd in Richmond during a Virginia Governor election campaign stop. The ex-President continues to be a walking compendium of clichés of which he seems determined to flaunt as profundities. Vacuous they may be – nevertheless, they have served him well – to wit, the culmination of Obama deep thought –“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Unlike other ex-Presidents, he has eschewed dignified retirement, and so, given his relative youth, many years lie ahead for him to inflict on us the weight of his massive ego and the steady stream of flagrant banalities delivered with all the condescension of an obnoxious adolescent lecturing his captive elders about how to fix that awful mess they have made of the world.

But there is more to Obama’s public interventions than just the usual dispersal of vapid nostrums for consumption by the useful idiots. They still cannot seem to figure out why, after eight wonderful years of Hope and Change, a former real estate mogul and reality show host is now resting his jackbooted feet on the White House coffee tables. Not to mention that poor old Bill Clinton had to disappoint that bevy of future White House interns he had recruited from his flights with Jeffery Epstein on the “Lolita Express.” 

So, Obama is hitting the trail with the scary “Our democracy is at stake.” The former Golfer-in-Chief who defiled the White House with regular guests such as Al Sharpton and criminal rapper, Rick Ross, is the now the basso profundo in the chorus of Chicken Littles intoning the demise of our system of government. You see, “our democracy,” the one that elected him twice, has been mysteriously swept away with the tides of Trumpian Fascism. When you win, it’s democracy in action; when you lose, the sky is falling.

Members of this distinguished chorus are out and about. Recently, Our Revered Lady of Chappaqua waddled into a Toronto bookstore peddling “What Happened” and told the Canucks, now having to stomach the best Canadian Democracy has to offer – Justin Trudeau – that: “Democracy is under attack everywhere. It's not only my country….  But I also want a concerned world to recognize that democracy is under assault.”  Well, no doubt, when Hillary speaks, the “concerned world” wakes up and listens. She can keep her finger on the pulse of the concerned world or whatever other nebulous abstraction that pops into her head, but an ambassador and embassy staff under siege on her watch? What difference does it make, now?

Moving along then toward the immanent collapse of America, there is Former Attorney General under Obama, Eric “My People” Holder who recently told Rachael Maddow that “Our democracy is under attack.” For those with a short memory, Holder was a highly useful Clinton errand boy who helped secure Bill’s notorious pardon of Marc Rich when he was Assistant Attorney General around the time the Clintons were looting the White House on their way out. The quid pro quo? Bill Clinton got a half a million dollars for his Presidential Library from Rich’s ex-wife and Holder would be the new AG in an Al Gore administration. If there were a perfect fit for “deplorable” and “irredeemable” would it be the man who bought the pardon or the man who sold it? Perhaps Hillary could help us out with this dilemma.  From Slate:   

“Rich was a pioneering commodities trader who made billions dealing in oil and other goods. He had a habit of dealing with nations with which trade was embargoed, like Iran, Libya, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa. Rich also had a habit of not paying his taxes, to the point where one observer said that ‘Marc Rich is to asset concealment what Babe Ruth was to baseball.’ The United States indicted Rich in 1983, hitting him with charges—tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, trading with the enemy—that could’ve brought life in prison. Rich fled the country.” 

These are the Clintons et al … making “our democracy” work for them. What greater opportunity for the most extravagant cynicism when people like this try to put us into a state of fecal incontinence by prattling about “the assault on our democracy.” This is post-modern politics at its best: every serious activity becomes (wink, wink) a parody of itself. Language is disconnected from reality, its meaning always temporized by the speaker’s relation to power.

The initial temptation is to say that if what we as citizens get out of “our democracy” are the likes of Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Al Franken, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, then perhaps “democracy” really means “kleptocracy,” and “our democracy” is just a euphemistic bouquet intended to cover the stench wafting up from the capitol city cesspool of corruption and decadence, a special place run by poseurs and hypocrites who devote their energies to self-enrichment by selling political influence to the highest bidder. Added to the injury of their shameless corruption is the insult of their arrogance and condescension, their pretense to wisdom, moral superiority, selflessness and compassion for the oppressed.  

  

Whatever a serious observer might wish to call what the average citizen gets out of participating in the American political process, a “democracy” is not what would first jump to his mind. Democracies, supposedly, “are states in which all sane adults participate in making political decisions.” (Minogue, Kenneth. The Liberal Mind, 2580-2581. Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.)  By a rough count, there are approximately 200 million registered voters, official participants, so to speak, in U.S. political decision-making. How many of them are sane (or stoned or literate or dead), of course, is anybody’s guess. So then, for each and every one of you, my fellow citizens, your participatory share of American democracy is about 1/200,000,000^th. Imagine being informed that you were named a distant heir to an estate worth $200,000,000, then your reaction to learn that you were in the will for a whole dollar. Well, that is how excited you should be about how much power you wield in American politics, or, how worried you should be the next time Obama (taking time out from proof-reading the ghost-writing of his $40 million memoir or Hillary now worth a hundred-plus million from her selfless devotion to women) tells you that “our democracy” is in great peril. 

A more accurate, prosaic description of American politics is that it is a client-patron system. The politicians compete to be patrons (elected officials who sell access to power) for clients (officially designated victim groups). The quid pro quo is obvious: the votes of the victims put the patrons in power; the victims get to be favored by the patrons over non-victims. “Favored” means rent-seeking privileges and political and legal support to leverage your official victim-status for social-professional-economic positioning. The patron also helps his clients with the stigmatization of the non-victims as bigots, those responsible for making the victims into the victims (best to ignore the irony at this juncture). Much of what now passes for political campaigning is simply a language game that separates the victims from the non-victims with code-words (“racist”, “sexist”, etc.) used by the patrons to secure and align their client coalitions and morally isolate the assigned bigots bearing their particular stigmata.

A client-patron approach to politics leads to an escalating state of “victim-inflation” because being a victim (a client) means you get to go to the front of the line. With no patron to advance your claims to victimhood, you to back of the line, if you are lucky to make it to the line at all. Client-patron systems, however, would seem to be highly entropic, moving toward completely disordered and chaotic end states like Venezuela and Detroit.

When Hillary tells her campaign audience that Trump supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” she is not simply intending to insult a particular voting block. She is signaling prospective clients that she will be their devoted (vote-purchased) patron who will use her power to assure their protection and favor and to punish the “irredeemables” because punishment is what racists and other designated bigots most deserve. “You name it” is not, I repeat, not a throw away phrase. It is an open invitation for the not-yet-initiated to get in the game, to help themselves and help her to expand her client base – more victims, more favors, more votes, more power … then, more Marc Riches and Eric Holders – fewer deplorables. Welcome to “our democracy”, politics in 21^st century America.  If it is under attack, bring it on. Better late than never.

From Ted Kennedy to Harvey Weinstein, or, How the Lecher became the Lion

 

Let us cut to the chase. Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was one miserable, contemptible excuse for a human being. But dead he has been for eight years, so why bother now sifting through the sordid details, the mountainous offal strewn in the wake of his long and epically degenerate life? Two words: Harvey Weinstein. The recent outing of this bloated, debauched full-time Hollywood kingpin and moneybags man for Democrat politicians like Hillary and Obama and part time rapist raises the obvious question: how do they get away with it? The libertine, John Kennedy, splashing in the White House pool with prostitutes and shagging mob molls, still occupies his station in Camelot; yes, and Bill Clinton, a serial womanizer, sexual predator and suspected rapist who liked to fly on the“Lolita Express” with his “good buddy,” convicted, child rapist, Jeffrey Epstein.  Bill’s wife, who covered for him and attacked his victims (“slut”  and “looney tunes”), then gets rewarded with a carpet bag Senate seat, the 2016 Democrat Presidential nomination, and 66 million votes. 

So, while the left now is on a cultural rampage with our public spaces – the statuary, monuments, the names of buildings, schools, streets, etc.  – purged of any historical references, symbols or imagery that might offend the delicate sensibilities of social justice warriors, the assault and abuse of women by big shot men of the left, both living and dead, get written off as “weakness”and “addiction.”They are  quick to be forgiven because, as principal players in the ruling cult-Marx decadence of American culture, what they actually do is secondary to what they pretend to be – everything is the opposite of what it is said to be. The reality of Hollywood’s pretend superior virtue is the rampaging sodomizer of actresses, Harvey Weinstein; the reality of the Democrat’s pretend abhorrence of hatred and violence is Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, trying to gun down Republican congressmen.
   
How then does the defunct Teddy, “the Lion of the Senate” Kennedy fit into this scene of ruinous hypocrisy where real victims get displaced by abstract ones? Ted Kennedy was the national standard bearer over a generation for left-wing profligates, a man who managed to set the bar lower than anyone could imagine. But this answer leads to a more complicated and fundamental question. How did he pull it off? How was this arch hypocrite, a man so intellectually mediocre, so personally dissolute and debauched able to rise to this pinnacle of political power, eulogized at his death as a champion of the disadvantaged and downtrodden, officially “lionized” as a great Senate statesman?  

Chappaquiddick was for Edward Kennedy his defining moment both as a man and as a politician. The decades that followed were merely exposition and commentary on this shameful episode of moral immolation. As a man? A coward, a libertine, a liar, a fraud, complicit in manslaughter from one of his countless alcohol fueled, philandering escapades. He abandoned a young woman in his submerged Oldsmobile he had driven off of a bridge, then fled the scene and sobered up. She could have been rescued, but the Senator was busy huddling with his handlers and the more important task of concocting a story to evade the law and to salvage his political career, letting his girlfriend of the moment slowly drowned. As a politician? He used the wealth and influence of his family and the power of his office to suborn the local authorities, buy off the Kopechne family and ultimately to evade responsibility for actions that would have sent any other man to prison.

He was never completely able to escape the shadows and shame of Chappaquiddick, but the voters of Massachusetts had to have a Kennedy in Washington, perhaps to keep the women in the Bay State safe, and with the passage of time and the crafting of a fashionable leftish championing-the-underdog image, his abandonment of Mary Jo to die became a mere peccadillo, collateral damage of the sort happily overlooked so as to keep a playboy with a magic name in a high place. Here then is the beginning of the answer to the question posed above: how did the lecher become the lion?
 
With gusto Kennedy positioned himself firmly on the left embracing its antinomian trends and leading the charge of American identity politics. Rewarded with the unconditional support of its pandered-to beneficiaries, he was thus in large part able to immunize himself from the sharper edges of the contempt he deserved. Teddy never came to endure what should have been an outpouring of disgust and repudiation for a man with the moral fiber of a bunko artist and the life-style of Caligula.

The easy life of a protected, rich wastrel and reprobate was, however, not enough for Teddy. He was, after all, a Kennedy, committed to what he liked to call “public service” a laughable, crude piece of unintended irony for someone wholly self-indulgent in his gross personal conduct and self-serving in his public role. A life devoted to beakers of Johnny Walker and whoring was not going to, as they say, “make a difference.” Kennedy needed to inflict himself on the nation. And so he did … make quite a difference. Two of his signature pieces of mischief, that pushed the country toward its current state of misery, deserve mention here.  First, his support and active selling of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which produced the opposite of what he promised.

From the Center for Immigration Studies
 Although the 1965 bill was intended only to end discrimination, some people feared a major increase in immigration and a change in the source countries of immigrants. Supporters of the measure assured doubters that this would not happen. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:
“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.” [emphasis added]

In the “final analysis,” we are talking about the word of Teddy Kennedy. Most apropos is a single phase – Kennedy “reassured his colleagues and the nation,” the same sort of reassurance, perhaps, he gave Ms. Kopechne in watery bowels of his Oldsmobile – “don’t worry, honey, I’ll get you out of here.” He lied with the verve of a true Bolshevik – “everything is the opposite of what I say it is.” The country was “flooded with millions of immigrants” who dramatically changed “the ethnic mix of this country.” America, thanks in large part to his man, has been transformed, ethnically, culturally, economically by this law. California, once a competitive and healthy two-party state is now because of the immigration influx unleashed after 1965 entirely controlled by a single party. Hillary Clinton’s margin of nearly three million votes over Donald Trump in the 2016 election came out of California, Democrat clients of Kennedy’s creation. Her plan, upon election, was to turn the rest of the country, politically, into California.
Catering to a burgeoning, resentment-laden set of victim classes and importing lots of needy people into the country along with the extraction and redistribution of resources from its largely middle-class citizens to support them creates a cultural and political backlash that threatens the power structure and its overseers. Thus, the second piece of the Teddy Kennedy’s nefarious legacy: “hate” legislation.  From a peroration in the Senate in 2007, “Standing Against Hate.” 

I'd like to speak … regarding the Hate Crimes Amendment -- at a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to violence here at home. Now more than ever, we need to act against hate crimes and send a strong message here at home and around the world that we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate…..  Since the September 11th attacks, we've seen a shameful increase in the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims, Sikhs, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent…..  Hate crimes are a form of domestic terrorism…. Like other acts of terrorism, hate crimes have an impact far greater than the impact on the individual victims. They are crimes against entire communities, against the whole nation, and against the fundamental ideals on which America was founded. [emphasis added]

What a vapid collection of useless abstractions and non-sequiturs from a man who ceaselessly preached but never practiced. “At a time when our ideals are under attack from by terrorists in other lands”? Terrorists do not attack “ideals”: they attack and kill defenseless people, which is what makes them so terrible. Not clear as well is why terrorists would be attacking our ideals in other lands, but this is Ted Kennedy talking, oblivious to minimal standards of evidence and coherence. Why, a rational person might ask, do we need to send this “message” to the world that “we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate”?  Since there was absolutely no evidence that we did tolerate such crimes, why was he talking like this? To distract people from the obvious fact that so much of the terrorism going on around the world was being done by people of “Middle Eastern descent,” and to hope people might not wonder why politicians like Kennedy were so eager to put more of them in their neighborhoods. No one in the political establishment from President Bush after 9-11 on down was speaking of Islam as anything other than the “religion of peace.”

One has also to ponder: how America had managed to stave off collapse until 2007 by ignoring these crimes, now morphed into “domestic terrorism” against, first, “entire communities,” then, “the whole nation” and then, yikes! America’s foundational “fundamental ideals.” Once again, we are supposed be traumatized by terrorists attacking those wonderful “ideals” – what specific ideals he doesn’t bother to say, but the more nebulous and vague the abstractions, the easier it was to keep his multicultural scam going. And the scam?  Import millions of third world people, many of whom are resistant to assimilation, some of whom are hostile to American norms. Then, stigmatize the resentment of the American hosts who bear the cultural, financial burden as “bigotry and prejudice.” Gotcha! Welcome to twenty-first century America where lechers are lions and where the politicians have christened half of the citizens as “irredeemable” racists, xenophobes and bigots because many of them believe that it is not a good idea to let anyone and everyone into the U.S. who simply wants to come.

The mumbo-jumbo of “Standing Against Hate,” late in a career of pretending to be a statesman was one of Teddy’s many signature incoherent episodes of Senate oratory. Since his death in 2009 it can be said in fairness to him that he did leave his mark; he did make a difference: to the American people he did figuratively what he did literally to Mary Jo Kopechne fifty years earlier.
 
Teddy was also a pioneer in the field of career advancement for left-wing politicians and “socially conscious” Hollywood celebrities who now so eagerly excoriate Trump and his bigoted supporters. The winning formula: affect a self-righteous persona that exudes compassion, pander to the right victim groups for support and adulation while smearing the opposition as racist, sexist, or, as Hillary Clinton whined, “you name it.” Lots of choices. Then … enjoy your escapades. No restraints should apply to those voices of the voiceless, and no one will give much thought or sympathy to the casualties of their making. They are merely collateral damage, just not the right sort of victims.  

Nicholas Kristof -- Away with the Hitler Metaphors

You have to give the devil his due, and the devil I speak of is Nicholas Kristof, a preening, self-righteous ideologue who pretends to be a journalist. He belongs to a very exclusive troupe of professional pontificators known as New York Times columnists.  These haughty sycophants serve the Democrat party in a Pravda sort of way, predictably parroting its officially sanctioned propaganda talking points and relentlessly hectoring and smearing any and all outliers who might resist the iron fisted orthodoxy peddled by the “progressives”.  For the shills who man the loud speakers of progressive politics the only obstacle to the complete institutionalization of the progress they envision for all of the lesser lights under their tutelage is the moral malignancy of the political opposition, immersed as it always is in the evil of racism and its progeny, sexism, homophobia, and on we go to infinity. There can be no good faith opposition to progressive policies which embody everything that is good, just mean, selfish people who discriminate and hate. Boiled down to its essence progressive politics is about really good people who should be in charge (them), and very bad ones who should not (us). 

By my count there are nine of these regular pulpiteers, the best known likely being the globe-trotting, blow hard, Thomas Friedman, a prolific but mediocre wordsmith unsurpassed in being able to say so much about things of which he knows so little.  A close second might be the supremely arrogant and condescending Paul Krugman, a master of vitriol who at some point forsook economics to become a party scribbler, a hack ideologue who preaches only to his own little choir.  Oh yes, and there is the NYT-designated resident “conservative” in the claque, David Brooks, who in 2008 swooned over the “crease” in Obama’s slacks, an intellectual pretender who seems to be taken seriously only by himself.

But my favorite, as suggested above, is Nicholas Kristof who is the complete New York Times columnist package, political correctness incarnate. He is more akin to the “good cop” of the NYT enforcers and goes busily about, hither and yon, proclaiming himself as the “voice” of the oppressed, specifically, those “victims” chosen by the Democrats and most recently by Hillary Clinton.  These are the various mythically persecuted legions who needed protection from the rampant bigotry of the millions of “deplorable” voters who for some inexplicable reason could not stomach the prospect of a professional grifter and her sexual predator consort once again polluting the rooms of the White House.  

More in contact with reality than Friedman, more condescending but less openly arrogant and vitriolic than Krugman, less ponderous and intellectually pretentious than Brooks, Kristof is the perfect progressive -- earnest, oozing with compassion, his sensitive moral antennas ever alert to pick up the faintest signals of any of the “isms” or “obias” (racism, sexism, xenophobia, “you name it”, as Hillary croaked to her LGBT groupies in New York) wafting up from and infesting those vast regions of the country outside of the DC Beltway, Manhattan, Boston, Hollywood, and our staunch bastions of free-speech and moral courage, the universities.    

You have to experience Kristof in person – his irritating, prissy sounding voice and goody-two-shoes demeanor -- to really appreciate what a smarmy, self-promoting, snake oil salesman he is. Some years ago I sat through a slide show he gave at a university in Ohio, the content, as I vaguely remember, the tear-jerking details of one of his many sojourns through a third world hell hole.  All in all, however, the talk was all about Kristof.  He is a master of what now is called “virtue signaling” – following the proper grievance mongering protocols, publically voicing your deep concern for the oppressed, the point being that everyone needs to know that goodness beats in your heart -- and a university audience was the perfect venue for him to hit all of the right notes to demonstrate his compassion for the right kinds of people, who are, of course, victimized by the worst sorts of people, and, we all know who those people are.

Kristof’s columns as well are tributes to his virtue.  The best of his most recent efforts came shortly after his world came a tumbling down with the election of Donald Trump.  Thus: “A Twelve Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/a-12-step-program-for-responding-to-president-elect-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fnicholas-kristof&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection&_r=0

This piece is vintage Kristof, just the title alone with Kristof playing the therapist for the traumatized millions who, unfortunately, believed the the New York Times pundits as they confidently proclaimed that Hillary would follow Obama into the White House.  Things didn’t quiet work out the way the wise men thought they were supposed to, and the surprise election of the “racist”, “sexist”, “xenophobic”, “you name it” Trump was not simply an electoral defeat for the progressives. It is now, you see, January 30, 1933 once again, and Adolf Benito Grand Kleagle Trump will soon be resting his jack booted feet on the White House coffee tables. When you make every possible effort to paint your opponent as Hitler, Mussolini, the voice of the Klan, too vicious, stupid and incompetent to win – and he wins, yikes! – well, “it’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” But reality must at some point intrude even for Saint Nicholas. The Reichstag is not on fire. Time for the grief counselors to go home.  Kristof must rally the cry babies.

 “A Twelve Step Program” does not read well on a queasy stomach, but it does capture the essence of the ideology that defines Kristof’s New York Times hermetic world. Here we go.

“I will accept that my side lost, but I won’t acquiesce in injustice and I will gird for battle on issues I care about.”  Yeah, “gird for battle” -- wouldn't you like to see Nicky in a You Tube video girding himself up. As noted above, the opposition does not operate in good faith and its victory in the election means the subversion of justice. The “battle” will continue which means the racism-sexism propaganda barrage will be ramped up.  Much of what Kristof writes turns into verbal smog:  what exactly would he be doing if he “acquiesced in injustice”?  As if anyone would suggest that he would – more virtue signaling.

“I will avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else.” Well, this sounds nice and civil of him, but don’t get your hopes up, because … “I’ll call a local mosque to offer support, or join an interfaith event. I will sign up for an “accompany my neighbor” list if one exists for my area, to be an escort for anyone who is now in fear.”  The horror, the fear, yes, indeed.  Kristallnacht is next on the agenda.  You see, those Trump supporters he instructed you not to demonize are now out on the streets hoping to be able to beat up your Muslim neighbors on their way to prayer.  As I recall, the last ethnic people in the U.S. to be rounded up and placed in detention camps were Japanese Americans, done under the administration of … wait a minute …. Democrat Patron Saint, Franklin D. Roosevelt, opposed by Democrat arch villain, J. Edgar Hoover.

“I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade.”  This one is really worth parsing.  The Nazi name-calling tactic didn’t work so well for the election. “Nazi” and “Republican” have been interchangeable for long time, so maybe a different approach is needed. Kristof counsels his readers to eschew Hitler metaphors not because he believes they are wrong, but because those rubes who voted for the Klansman aren’t buying it. 

“I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks for his willingness to hire and promote refugees. Likewise, I will give blood and register for organ donation — for at least they’ll make me feel better. As will a tub of Chobani.”  This might be the best one of all.  You eat the politically correct food, feel good about yourself, (feeling good about yourself is really what this is all about) and …. “support the society [you’d] like to see”. Clearly, he doesn’t like the society he sees now. And, what kind of society might that be?  One without racists. Kristof is a one trick pony and yet once more, the de rigueur “racist” smear.  Of what race are refugees?

“I may not be able to prevent a sexual predator from reaching the White House, but at events I attend, I may be able to prevent a sexual predator from assaulting a drunken partygoer.” Whoa, where did this come from? Maybe Kristof is laying awake nights in anguish, worrying that President Trump will be lounging in the Oval Office commandeering blow jobs from the twenty-something interns he keeps in tow and ejaculating on their dresses. With Hillary and Bill back in the White House, this, of course, would never have been a concern. But we will look forward in the times ahead for reports from Kristof’s heroic efforts at stopping sexual predators from assaulting drunks at parties. Perhaps there are a lot of them in the parties he goes to.  Maybe Bill Clinton will be at some of them with his travel pal from the “Lolita Express,” convicted sex-offender, Jeffrey Epstein.    

“I will not lose hope. I will keep reminding myself that politics zigs and zags, and that I can do more than shout in the wind. I can fight for my values even between elections, and even at the micro level I can mitigate the damage to my neighbors and attempt to heal a social fabric that has been rent.”  This is step 12, the last chirp in this particular installment of “fight the good fight” from the ideological cocoon Kristof lives in.  What is he hoping for? What is the “social fabric that has been rent”, and how does one "heal a social fabric"? This is some sort of therapeutic-sounding babble. What is “damage” that has been done his neighbors? The person they voted for lost the election.  In an election someone has to lose. “What is the “mitigation” involved?  None of these questions Kristof could answer in language that connects with anything other than the abstract, anodyne pieties that he constantly employs to bolster his delusions of moral heroism and perfection. His agony is now that the wrong people are now in charge, and he will continue toiling away with his non-stop accusations of hatred and bigotry.

The Question Hillary Cannot Answer: Thanks Donald

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declined on Monday to say if she has been in communication with any of the women involved in the sex scandals during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Asked if she has had any interactions with them, or feels empathy for any of them, Clinton told The Des Moines Register: “No, I have nothing to say and I will leave it to voters to determine whether any of that is at all relevant to their decision.   

From the January 12^th interview with Hillary Clinton and The Des Moines Register

There you have it.  She is quite a talker. She gets three hundred grand a pop for boiler plate, completely forgettable, uninspiring speeches, and currently on the campaign trail she’s rarely at a loss for words.  But the walking-talking spin machine who has a whole lot to say about a lot of things, particularly about what a “fighter” she is, particularly what a champion she is for women suddenly opts to take the “take the fifth” when someone asks her about those women who had aroused the interest of Bill and had the misfortune to find themselves alone with him.

You really cannot blame her for the dodge.  I mean, talk about a “gottcha” question.  No where to go with this one, but hey, she’ll have to hope those “voters” are as stupid as she must think they are. You’d almost feel sorry for her.  Not really.  She was deluded enough last December to make, what was that tweet?   “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” https://t.co/mkD69RHeBL  Ah yes, those survivors of sexual assault – assaulted like, perhaps, getting raped (Juanita Broadderick) or trapped in a room with a certain Arkansas Governor exposed and not so politely insisting on a blow job (Paula Jones) or … well, it can go on a bit more but that’s all so 1990’s and as George Soros would say, lets “Move on”.  Not so fast though:  perhaps in a few years some of those underage girls who were on those flights to “Orgy Island” with Bill Clinton and one of his buddies, convicted pedophile, Jeffery Epstein, in Epstein’s plane, may want to be “heard, believed and supported.” 
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/details-on-bill-clintons-ride-on-pedophiles-lolita-express-sought/article/256685
I’m sure Hillary Clinton, wherever she is will be completely supportive. You never know. 

Unfortunately for Hillary, those younger female voters who were too young to experience the reign of Clintons in the 1990s and the management of the President’s “Bimbo eruptions” as his own people so kindly put it, I suspect, will soon get very well acquainted with at least some of the names of Bill’s casualties and Hillary’s somewhat less than sympathetic response to their plight.  One of course can never predict but one does wonder if the younger female generation will be so indulgent with Bill as was Nina Burleigh, the White House correspondent for Time Magazine who covered the Clinton White House during the Lewinsky scandal.  She said, she “would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” Read more at http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/121283/nina-burleigh-back-kathryn-jean-lopez

Perhaps Hillary’s campaign should introduce a feminist “kneepad” theme in keeping with this inspiring encomium so if and when theocrat slayer Bill takes his rightful place in the White House beside Hillary, the ceremonies of “gratitude” can get underway.  I’m sure the lines will be very long with much lip service to be paid.

This touchy matter of Bill’s rough business with women used to be off-limits for reporters covering Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns but those women Bill abused are still around, and, they have the temerity to think they “deserve to be heard, believed and supported.” Imagine! Worse for Hillary, given her life long aversion to the truth and relentless self-promotion, a lot of people now are beginning to realize that she is a shameless opportunist and a terrible liar. Maybe those women were not the “sluts” and “looney tunes” Hillary said they were. Who would you believe? The more these women Bill abused and Hillary smeared talk, the more people will listen and wonder. The more reporters ask her what the Des Moines Register reporter recently asked her, the less she will look even remotely Presidential and more like, well, someone who should just go away, leave us alone and be content to have looted the White House just once.

Times do seem to have changed.  Clinton infatuation isn’t quite what it once was.  Hillary has gotten older not wiser, more insulated and, hard as it is to believe, even more entitled and arrogant.  Hence the tweet which you have to think makes even the most die hard Clintonistas cringe and say to themselves, “Are you crazy?”  Then, as if that is not walking into the middle of the ring and sticking your chin out, she decides to work the usual “sexist” angle on …. Donald Trump.  Oooo, that will put him in his place.  Well, whatever you think of Trump, this was not a real smart move.  He’s not your typical Republican punching bag, like Mitt Romney.  For whatever reasons, the Republicans have for a long time let those Lefties in their glass houses throw their stones without pitching a few back and let the mainstream media reporters run all over them, shilling for Democrats while pretending to be journalists (Candy Crowley leaps to mind).  Trump hasn’t gotten the memo, backhands the sneering reporters and suddenly Hillary has to try to change the subject.  Trump is no one’s floor mat and he seems willing to go where no Republican has gone before and should have – which is why his popularity is growing and why unlike the last two Republican candidates for President he may actually win.

“Ready for Hillary” is Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan with its barely sublimated entitlement message, but with the Clintons there is never a shortage of perverse irony. “Ready for Hillary?” formed as a question raises a lot of questions, many of them nightmarish and  unseemly, most of them relating to a lot of stuff she and Bill did that other less connected folks would have gone to jail for.  Come to think of it, a lot of their associates did end up in jail. No one was better at pitching their helpers under the bus than the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of Little Rock.

Trump, whatever else he does, has helped to change “Ready for Hillary” from a rally cry into an ugly question, maybe several of them.  He has played the wonderful role of the child pointing at the naked emperor and asking the obvious question, the question that for some of us has been in play for long time, but may soon be out there for a broader and more complete national rumination.  Why would any decent person in this country want to put a man with such a long and sordid history of abusing women anywhere near the White House next to a Madam President wife who smeared the women he injured?