“Ha, ha. That’s not a knife… that’s a knife!”

Crocodile Dundee                        link here

 

 
In a moment reminiscent of Paul Hogan’s iconic line in Crocodile Dundee, James Comey’s revelation of the ongoing FBI investigations into the Clinton Foundation and the never ending email scandal made pale by comparison the preceding typically political “revelations” concerning Trump. One could have cast Hillary and her partners in crime as the punks with a switchblade trying to mug the American people, with Crocodile Comey smugly chuckling saying, “That’s not an October surprise… this is an October surprise!”

Just as no circus is complete without clowns, I suppose it is somehow poetic that this circus of an election be punctuated with an appearance by Anthony Weiner. The revelation was seismic, and the geniuses who proclaimed that the election was over a couple of weeks ago, who were beginning to talk “down ballot” and GOP losses of the Senate and possibly the House, are now scrambling to modify their premature predictions. Combined with the continuance of the Obamacare train wreck, and the WikiLeaks water torture, Hillary is praising whatever god she worships for the existence of early voting, possibly the only reason she could still pull this off.

Have you ever been driving home and not been able to remember completing part of the trip? You may have been lost in thought and before you knew it you were almost home. No, you weren’t sleeping, nor were you necessarily inattentive to to the drive; that’s just how short term memory works. Our brain can’t be cluttered with every bit of meaningless input we encounter in the course of our lives, so if some minimal level of significance is not attached to a memory, within a few seconds it passes out of our minds. Unfortunately, for the politically passive, short term is often the only political memory they employ. The FBI investigation is more significant to those of us whose memory includes the years of scandal after scandal when it comes to the Clintons. Though the evidence is thus far not conclusive, forgive us if we jump to conclusions on the well worn path of Clinton corruption. If they somehow manage to slip this scandal, trust me, there will be another on its heels… it’s what they do.

And so we have Donald Trump the celebrity trying to be a politician. And Hillary Clinton the politician trying to be a celebrity. Unable to draw crowds to her rallies because of her flawed political persona, she is trying a new gig as variety show host, dragging out not only her regular political star surrogates (the Obamas), but staging a concert with shiny objects Beyonce and Jay Z as the draw, and Hillary as the emcee. Katy Perry is next, and who knows after that. (Unsolicited advice: Hillary might want to present her political plea in the middle of the concert instead of the end so people don’t just walk out when the music stops!). And so we have all the beautiful people scolding us. Obama treating rally crowds like unruly school children, television stars and pop-icons treating Trump and his followers as sub-humans, journalists en-masse abandoning their journalistic ethics in favor of their elitist social conscience. Maybe we’re tired of scolding. Maybe we are unimpressed with celebrity. Maybe we are sick of the so-called elite imagining that their opinions surpass our own.

IMHO: It would be enough I suppose to vote against a candidate as fundamentally dishonest as Hillary Clinton. I can abide a lot of faults in a human being, but dishonesty, particularly practiced dishonesty, makes for an impossible foundation in any relationship. That being said, it is better to have reasons to vote for somebody. Despite my problems with Trump, there is a lengthy list of reasons I am persuaded to cast my vote and support for him. The Supreme Court nominations are paramount on that list, the proximity that Mike Pence will have to a future presidency, the dismantling of Obamacare, Pro-life sympathies, border control, attention to regulatory overload, attention to our inner city issues including school choice, ethics reforms in Washington, refugee common sense…     And my list for Hillary? …no, I got nothing, nothing at all.

Trump is as close to a viable third party candidate as we will see in the near term with the stranglehold the parties have on the election process. He is the nemesis of the establishment elites in both parties, the elites in the media and in the entertainment industry. There are “Women for Trump”, “Blacks for Trump”, “Hispanics for Trump”; but there are no elites for Trump. The “elites” who have dictated our choices for decades are out of the loop here for the first time in forever. I would have preferred a more polished choice, a less tarnished one, a better spoken one; but when you are being strangled (and we are), you reach for whatever blunt instrument you can reach. Trump is our blunt instrument.