Tag Archives: 2016 election

national news

How does Bernie keep raking in all that cash?

I want to stipulate a political truism, which is that lots of money doesn’t always translate to lots of votes.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had tons of cash when he launched his 2016 bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination. He, um, didn’t make the grade.

Four years later, we have Sen. Bernie Sanders out there raking in huge sums of money. They’re from small donors, he keeps telling us. Sanders, who’s actually an independent senator from Vermont, is running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

I am baffled how so many voters keep “feeling the Bern.” They keep pumping all that cash into his coffers. He finished 2019 with a huge haul of $34.5 million in the final quarter of the year. He’s loaded, man!

You may color me amazed, along with baffled. The man sings off a single song sheet page. Wealthy people are bad for the country, he keeps saying. Every single answer to every question seems to turn on “wealth inequality.” He wants to redistribute the wealth, you know … take from the rich and give to the not-so-rich. I guess it has its appeal, but I am not sure why.

I hate to bring age into this argument, but he is 77 years old. He would be the oldest man ever inaugurated president were he to win. I mention this with some trepidation as I just turned 70 myself this past month.

Sanders has yet to demonstrate a broad swath of knowledge on matters far from the income inequality theme he keeps preaching.

The war on terror? Climate change? U.S.-Russia relations? Middle East policy? We know what he believes about taxation.

Plenty of my friends are supporters of Bernie Sanders. I just won’t sign on until I get a sense of a more well-rounded, comprehensive platform on which he intends to run. So far, I am not seeing it.

But … he still is awash in campaign cash.

Go figure.

national news, political news

Welcome to the ‘most consequential election’ year; really … it is!

Welcome to 2020. We’re going to elect a president near the end of the year.

I know what you might be thinking. We go through this every four years and every single time some pundit or politician calls it the “most consequential election” in, take your pick: our lifetime, U.S. history, all of human history.

You know what? The 2020 presidential election might fall into all of those categories. This is the real thing, ladies and gentlemen.

America exhibited some amazingly bad form — and this is just my humble view — in 2016 when it elected Donald John Trump as our 45th president. He won a majority in the Electoral College, while losing the “actual” vote by nearly 3 million ballots.

He snookered just enough people in the appropriate states to edge out an infinitely more qualified opponent to win the presidency.

In my mind, Trump has made an absolute mess of the high office he occupies. The task awaiting voters in 2020 is to make amends for the mistake they made four years earlier.

Donald Trump promised to make history as president. He’s done it! He is the third president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He is likely to be the first president to run for re-election as an impeached president.

Yes, the economy is going strong. The labor force has added millions of jobs during Trump’s tenure as president; joblessness is at historic lows. The president is taking all the credit for it. Fine! Let him take whatever credit he wants to scarf up.

However, a lot of other matters need our attention.

Trump has trashed our alliances; he has cozied up to strongmen abroad; he has thrown bouquets at the feet of North Korean killer/despot Kim Jong Un and Russian spymaster/strongman Vladimir Putin; he has denigrated our intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia attacked our electoral system; he has disparaged an American war hero.

Trump promised to stay off the golf course, only to spend more time on the links than any president in history; he runs an executive government branch that only is about two-thirds full, with key offices lacking anyone in charge; he relies on his unqualified son-in-law to look for Middle East peace.

Trump conducts public policy via Twitter; he fired the FBI director because he was doing his job; he fired an attorney general because the AG determined he could expose himself to conflict of interest.

Trump solicited a foreign government for personal political favors and blocked all key aides from testifying before Congress … two actions that led to his impeachment.

The president likely will survive a Senate trial. Then he’ll run for re-election. The task awaiting voters is to determine whether the president — who has set an unofficial record for lying — deserves another four years as our head of state and commander in chief.

We need to elect a president who understands the limitations of his office, who recognizes tradition and decorum, who can rebuild the alliances that have been tattered and torn, who puts the public interest ahead of his or her personal interest.

By golly, this upcoming election looks to me to be the most consequential in my lifetime. We might even be able to expand the superlative before it’s over.

national news

FBI director might be headed for the exits … yes?

When the person who appoints you to an important job refers to you as the “current” individual doing that job, then you might want to consider your next career move.

So it might be with FBI Director Christopher Wray, to whom Donald Trump referred as the “current director.” Why the qualifier? Well, Wray has backed up the findings of the Justice Department inspector general who said that the FBI did not launch its probe into the Russia election interference with any political bias.

Here is what Trump said via Twitter about Wray: I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me. With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!

Trump has alleged that former FBI Director James Comey was biased against him when he began examining allegations that Russia attacked our electoral system in 2016. He fired Comey in 2017. The IG was brought in to determine whether the probe began because of bias against Trump.

The IG, Michael Horowitz, said the FBI did not act with political prejudice, although he did scold the FBI for committing serious mistakes in seeking warrants involving one of Trump’s campaign aides. Political bias? Prejudice? Not there, said Horowitz.

And so now we are left to wonder whether Christopher Wray, whom Trump selected to succeed Comey, is headed for the proverbial political guillotine.

I have lived long enough to remember a lot of internal political battles. I’ve watched them from some distance. Even during Watergate, when the FBI got caught up in that hideous scandal, I don’t ever recall an embattled President Nixon refer to the FBI boss in terms that the current embattled president is using against Wray.

What does this do to morale among the troops in the trenches? How does it affect their performance? How do they concentrate on the myriad investigative duties required of them while the director is being singled out by the president?

The chaos persists. The bad news is that it is quite likely to worsen.

national news

Meanwhile, the IG makes some big news

While members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee today were making spectacles of themselves with their posturing about this and that regarding Donald Trump hideous behavior, the Justice Department’s inspector general managed to make some real news.

Michael Horowitz, who is known to be a non-partisan straight shooter, released a report today that debunks Trump’s assertion that the FBI acted properly in instigating its investigation into Russia’s attack on our electoral system in 2016.

Boom! Bingo! There you go!

The president has been yammering seemingly forever that the FBI was prompted by partisan political concerns to launch a probe into the Russians’ attack on our system. The IG said today the FBI report was done properly and with justification.

To be fair, the IG did scold the FBI on some procedural matters involving some aspects of the information gathering it completed. The IG said the FBI committed “errors” while wiretapping a member of Trump’s campaign staff. The big stuff? The conspiracy that Trump and others have sought to perpetuate? No deal, man! Ain’t nothing there, according to the Horowitz.

Of course, Attorney General William Barr has criticized the report. He is holding onto the notion that the FBI conspired to ensnare the president with an investigation based on specious allegations that President Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of the Trump campaign offices.

The inspector general has cleared the FBI of the idiotic allegations that Trump and others have leveled at the world’s premier investigative agency. This is a big deal that, to my mind, eclipses the posturing many Americans today witnessed by members of a key congressional committee.

The inspector general’s report likely won’t silence Donald Trump. He’ll keep hammering away with his Twitter account that the FBI was inspired by partisan concerns to undermine his election as president. The IG says otherwise.

I am going to stand with the inspector general.

International news

The Russians did it … dammit!

Republicans who have circled the wagons around Donald J. Trump keep repeating yet another lie about Russia and the goons who attacked our election in 2016.

I am about to scream at the top of the lungs!

They keep trying to implicate Ukraine as at minimum a co-conspirator in the attack on our electoral system that aimed to help elect Donald Trump.

Wait a second!

The CIA has said the Russians, all by themselves, did it. The Director of National Intelligence said the same thing. So has the FBI. And the National Security Agency. Same for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Russians did it! The Russians are fomenting the Ukraine lie and the GOP — led by Donald Trump — is parroting the rhetoric being spit out by the Russian propaganda machine.

I cannot stand listening to this lie. When will the leadership of the once-Grand Old Party listen to the truth?

national news

POTUS becomes Russian disinformation mouthpiece … unbelievable!

It wasn’t enough that Donald Trump stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and said he believed Putin’s denial of Russian interference in our 2016 electoral system.

Oh, no. Nor was it enough that he denigrated our intelligence network’s assertion that the Russians did what was alleged.

Now he has adopted the Russian lyric that Ukraine played a major role in the 2016 election hack. He is helping the Russia propaganda machine spread the lie that the U.S. intelligence experts have debunked.

The director of national intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Treasury Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff … they all say the same thing. The Russians did it!

And yet the president of the United States continues to double down on the lie being pushed by the Russians and endorsed by congressional Republicans who are dissing Ukraine as part of their strategy to defend the president against the impeachment wave that is swelling in the House of Representatives.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing an astonishing act of political malfeasance by the president.

He is defending the Russian strongman/president yet again critics here at home who view the Russians as an existential threat to the integrity of our electoral system. The Russians have embarked on a campaign to do to the 2020 election what they did in 2016.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller III told us this past summer that the Russians are mobilizing their election interference machine at this moment. He endorsed fully the intelligence community’s assessment that the Russians pose the threat to our democratic electoral system.

Donald Trump took an oath to protect our system against such an outright attack. He has forsaken that oath for personal political gain.

Shameful.

national news

Talkers are now suggesting Trump won’t run in 2020 … huh?

Neil Katyal is a serious guy, a former acting U.S. solicitor general who’s argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and, yes, I’ll stipulate that he was appointed to the solicitor general’s post by President Barack Obama.

So, when Katyal says that Donald Trump is unlikely to be the 2020 Republican presidential nominee, one ought to consider this a serious prediction.

I’ll declare here that I disagree with Katyal. I believe Trump will run for re-election next year and that the Republican National Convention will nominate him for another term as president.

Katyal believes the probable impeachment by the House of Representatives will drive Trump to the sidelines. I also need to note that Katyal has wanted Trump to be impeached. He believes the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors and should be kicked out of office.

If Donald Trump has taught any of us any lesson at all it ought to be to never underestimate this guy’s staying power. He should never have been elected president in the first place; but he was elected. He shouldn’t have been nominated by the GOP in the summer of 2016, given all the candidacy-destroying instances that would have taken out “normal” candidates for public office; but he was nominated.

Trump has managed somehow to survive countless deal-breaking mistakes. He denigrated a Vietnam War hero, the late Sen. John McCain; he mocked a physically handicapped reporter for the New York Times; he admitted to grabbing women by their “pu***”; he disparaged a Gold Star family at the Democratic National Convention. You want more? Well, you get the idea.

He survived all of it.

Is the president inclined to bow out of the 2020 presidential campaign because the House has impeached him? I find that hard to believe.

I wish it were plausible. I am shuddering at the notion that Trump somehow is going to parlay this impeachment into a winning political strategy. How? I suppose by energizing that base of support that holds firm at around 40 percent, based on the RealClearPolitics polling average. Yeah, he needs more than that to win, but won the presidency in 2016 despite polling nearly 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent.

This clown is maddening in the extreme. He doesn’t deserve to be re-elected. I hope Neil Katyal is right. However, I fear the worst, that Trump will run for re-election … and that he just might win!

2016 election, national news

Voters are facing a ‘fool me twice’ challenge in 2020

I have been proud to proclaim for the past three years that I was among a plurality of Americans who did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

I proclaim yet again. There. I said it.

However, the 2020 election is going to present Americans with another challenge. It deals with that saying you’ve likely heard: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

A minority of Americans got fooled in 2016 by the huckster posing as a presidential candidate. A quirk in the U.S. election system enabled Donald Trump to win the presidency on the strength of the Electoral College system; he won enough electoral votes to win.

So, what might this mean for the 2020 election? It well might mean that Trump is in a position to stage the same kind of victory he scored four years earlier.

Which compels me to invoke what I believe was arguably the nation’s most profound political mistake with Donald Trump’s fluke election in 2016.

A man with no public service experience, or the lack of any shred of public involvement in his entire adult life managed to win the only public office he ever sought. He tapped into some dark national mood to win enough votes in just the right states.

What’s more, he has governed the same way he campaigned. He has appealed to Americans’ anger at, let’s see, the media, something called “The Deep State,” socialists, political correctness, immigrants (legal and illegal).

Granted, the economy has continued to do well under Donald Trump’s time as president. However, he inherited an economy in good shape, so I’ll give him credit for not shredding it.

It’s all the other stuff that has me hoping that he gets the boot in 2020 that he avoided getting in 2016. He treats allies like enemies; he disparages our institutions; he trashes presidential tradition.

And of course he abuses the power of his office. The House of Representatives is likely to impeach the president. He’ll stand trial and is likely to avoid conviction on a constitutional “technicality.” Then he will get to campaign for re-election.

Is this nation really and truly ready to return this man — who is replete with his myriad idiotic pronouncements — to the Oval Office?

My goodness. Let us not get fooled again.

national news

Trump to California: Don’t count on me to help you out

Donald J. Trump appears to be laying down a clearly defined marker to residents of states that voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 or are governed by politicians of the party other than Trump’s Republican Party.

It is this: Don’t count on the president of the United States to offer words of empathy or support in the event of monumental natural disasters, let alone statements of unqualified federal assistance to help you fight those disasters.

You see, Trump is in a war of Twitter words with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The president is excoriating Newsom over the state’s forest management policy, which Trump says is the reason that wildfires have exploded across the state.

Trump and Newsom are political foes. They might even be called “enemies.” Newsom’s state happened, I should say, to vote for Clinton by a huge margin in her losing bid to Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The rhetoric Trump is leveling at California’s elected leadership is not the kind of thing he says to those in, say, Texas or Louisiana or Mississippi, Alabama or Florida. Hurricanes have savaged those states since Trump took office. They all voted for Trump in 2016.

Trump, though, seems to get a bur under his saddle when tragedy strikes California.

I guess I should point out that Donald Trump has emerged as the Climate Change Denier in Chief, calling the issue a “hoax,” despite scientific evidence that suggests that climate change is responsible for the huge fires that are erupting with more frequency and ferocity than ever.

Yes, Trump did say in one of his weekend tweets that the firefighters are doing a “great” job. Then he tees it up against Newsom, saying he should insist on clearing forest floors more frequently and should make sure the state has plenty of water to pour on the fires.

I just find this back-and-forth between the president and the governor of one our states — whose residents are fleeing for their lives ahead of devastating fire — to be unbecoming in the extreme.

There once was a time when the federal government stepped up to lend a much-needed hand to American citizens in distress. Please tell me those days are not gone forever.

legal news

DOJ embarks on, dare I say it, a ‘witch hunt’?

The Department of Justice is now launching what has been called a criminal inquiry into — get ready for it — the investigation into whether Russia interfered in our 2016 presidential election.

What DOJ expects to find is not clear. Attorney General William Barr has appointed a seasoned prosecutor, John Durham, to lead the probe. This one puzzles and concerns me greatly.

Don’t politicize DOJ

Every leading intelligence official within the Donald Trump administration has said the same thing: Russia interfered in our election and sought to elect Donald Trump as president in 2016. Trump, of course, has debunked that notion; he also has denigrated our intelligence agencies’ ability to reach the conclusion they all reached.

When former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe, his deputy AG, Rod Rosenstein, appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to be special counsel and lead the investigation into the Russia matter.

Trump has hurled some harsh language at Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in May with a partial exoneration of Trump of “colluding” with Russians; he left open the question of whether Trump obstructed justice in the pursuit of truth behind that interference.

Now we have DOJ entering the scene.

To what end will this probe conclude?

I just hope that John Durham, the experienced federal prosecutor who has drawn praise from partisans on both sides of the aisle, will be able to withstand political pressure that might emanate from the top of the Justice Department.

Still, I fear how this probe will proceed. I smell a “witch hunt” in the making.