Actually saw some of the debate last night – embarrassing – two awful candidates – Trump rambles to the point of sounding incoherent – can’t go into details about anything I’m assuming because his understanding of what he’s talking about is superficial – Hillary opens the door repeatedly for attack and he fumbles again I think because he has no deep understanding of anything which is why he always sounds like he’s winging it. I missed the email discussion but have heard others say he nailed her there – maybe – he did get off a few good ‘zingers’ that will no doubt thrill his followers – his line about Hillary blaming her lies on Lincoln was pretty good – but his clear inability to go into depth about anything it seems is disturbing. Will his performance help him? It seems impossible his poll numbers go up – unless Hillary is such a hated politician that people give him points for taking it to her even if it was done incompetently. Still, the video will so damage his already bad standing with women that there just simply isn’t enough angry white men out there to compensate for it – and so the only way he can win is if Putin really is sitting on a very nasty surprise for Hillary which will hurt turnout for her.

As for Clinton – she may know more about ‘stuff’ than Trump, but her ideas are all bad – and she’s horrible talking about those ideas – boring, really struggles getting to the key point she wants to make – always sounds insincere – no charm whatsoever – and really is weak trying to skirt her and Obama’s many flaws and mistakes – the canned answers are just painful to listen to – on Syria she was awful but because Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about there he couldn’t take advantage of it. Did Obamacare come up? Hillary and the Obama years are such target rich environments for anybody wanting to paint a picture of the awful consequences of liberal policy there’s no way she should be walking out of that place last night with anyone thinking she won. Yet I bet a lot of people did. It should have been like the first Romney/Obama debate where even Dear Leader’s most devout fans understood that he’d lost – but then Romney can do smart so, ya know, that helps.

It’s just embarrassing that our choice is between these two thoroughly uninspiring people. I guess the only thing left to hope for is that Republicans keep control of House and by some miracle the Senate too.

Does the GOP have any option but to dump Trump? Trump is caught on tape essentially admitting to liking the fact that his celebrity allows him to commit sexual assault with impunity – unless there’s a tape out there of Hillary saying she liked holding down the victim[s] of her husband’s rape[s], there’s no way he wins the election [although we still don’t know just how bad the stuff Putin has is] - so the real objective for the GOP leadership now becomes saving the down ballot races – and how do you do that without dumping Trump? Especially if Trump is going to spend the rest of the election creating a scapegoat for his failure by shitting on the GOP – which is what Trump has already starting doing since for him it’s now all about saving the brand and how can you save the brand by admitting it sucks?

Or how about this – concede the presidential election. You concede the election, it drives down liberal turnout while driving up conservative turnout since the election now becomes all about making sure Hillary doesn’t have carte blanche. This election is such an unmitigated disaster that that absurd suggestion doesn’t sound really that absurd.

From what I’ve read replacing Trump as the candidate is difficult but doable – that’s what the electoral college was designed for, to deal with emergencies – having a candidate being caught admitting to enjoying committing sexual assault with impunity because of his celebrity sounds like an emergency to me. I mean, think about it – how else are you gonna shut the guy up, remove him as an issue? He’s not gonna run as an independent – so send him off to his redoubt at Breitbart and that will be that.

Make this election all about the down ballot races – otherwise the GOP is fucked and the country is fucked.

Of all the scenarios for this awful election one tried to imagine that might lead to something good [ie Pence in charge], the one of Trump being so stained by controversy that he couldn’t continue sort of fell by the wayside – but now of course returns – oddly enough, not unexpectedly even though I like many had moved past expecting it.

Problem is, I don’t see Trump stepping aside. He doesn’t care about country or ideas or the future of the GOP etc etc – he cares about the Trump brand and ‘giving up’ would hurt that brand so I don’t see him stepping aside. Instead what I see happening, with the election now one would assume unwinnable, is him going full Trump and just mercilessly tearing Hillary apart – and there’s a lot there to be torn apart. Which will be fun to watch, but nothing short of a disaster for the country – but then we were heading for a disaster anyway so small difference.

The thing to look for I think is if Pence stays – I don’t see how staying on the ticket does anything but put an end to his political career – to me he has to give Trump an ultimatum: you go or I do. Trump will say no because it’s all about saving his brand now – and Pence lives to fight another day.

What does Ryan do? As always he’s between rock and hard place – my guess is he won’t withdraw endorsement but will have nothing more to do with the man – but could easily see it going the other way – again, Ryan has no good options here.

[to all those complaining of a double standard since Slick Willy is easily as much of a woman abusing scumbag as Trump and possibly worse – Trump unlike Clinton has not as yet been accused of rape – media bias is part of the equation if you’re a conservative – every move you make has to reflect that reality and therefore your tactics and strategy must reflect that reality – in other words, no use complaining – rather, figure out a way to deal with it. Step one, do not nominate highly vulnerable and flawed candidates like Trump.

Although the hypocrisy vis a vis Clinton could throw media bias into such stark relief that it could push Trump’s base into a frenzy of anger – and that too could be fun to watch – unfortunately it would also be like watching Rome burn]

Was reading essay in I think The American Interest about the left coast roots of Trumpism’s intellectual conceits – the argument that there’s any intellectual angle to Trump at face value seems absurd, but it isn’t. The essay made clearer to me something I’ve touched on before – namely, that a certain segment of Trump supporters embrace the ‘movement’ because they see American democracy as a broken thing that cannot be fixed and therefore Trump for them becomes the first manifestation of things to come – they don’t so much believe in Trump as they do in seeing him as the beginning of an end they’ve been predicting – again, America is broken and democracy as it’s currently dysfunctionally practiced in the West is not up to the task of fixing it.

What the essay fascinatingly points out is that it makes complete sense that this ‘ethos’ flowered in a place like California, a mess of a polity that used to have a strong conservative animus but has relentlessly been turned into a single party leftist tyranny by the very things that are turning America as a whole into a single party leftist tyranny – public institutions that serve a leftist agenda, a liberal elite in charge of a media/entertainment complex that serves a leftist agenda, and mass immigration of poor, poorly educated and low skill Latinos who have dramatically changed the demographics of California and whose left wing sympathies mean the statehouse will never again be open to conservative ideas – which effectively means California is now a one party leftist oligarchy - and consequently a dysfunctional high tax, high debt bureaucratic mess. You take away Silicon Valley and Hollywood and California is essentially a third world country at this point.

You see why these ‘intellectuals’ would not so much embrace Trump as welcome him as the advent of a ‘truth’ that will rattle the very foundations of the republic. Trump is no Caesar come to wrest control of the country from the corrupt hands of the elite – and I’m sure these intellectuals understand that – Trump is much more clown than he his anything even remotely Caesarian – but they no doubt welcome him as the first instantiation of an inevitable battle between an increasingly autocratic progressive elite and a now increasingly autocratic populist/nationalist/vaguely conservative reactionary reply.

Not saying I agree with these reactionaries point of view – am sympathetic to it though. I believe I recently read a poll that registered Obama’s approval rating at 55%. This guy is the worst president the country has ever had, an unmitigated disaster – foreign policy is a mess, domestic policy a mess, economy is comatose, racial animosity at levels not seen since the 60s, violent crime spiking, America’s standing in the world in decline – and then there’s all the scandals, lying, unconstitutional executive abuse - absolutely awful president – and yet if given the chance apparently would be reelected. How can one look at that and not think: something is horribly wrong.

Interesting audio has surfaced of Hillary talking at a private fundraiser and describing Bernie Sanders’ fans as delusional idealists looking for big govt hand outs of progressivey treats like free university etc etc – not her words exactly of course but that was gist of her remarks – false promises I think she called the Sanders rhetoric.

Interesting for two reasons. One, she’s of course right – but aside from that it’s reassuring to hear her talk in a somewhat reasonable and moderate way, encouraging one to imagine or legitimately hope that just maybe she won’t simply be a female version of Obama, flouting our constitutional order by leveraging a biased media to push forward an extremist agenda. Unfortunately, the other reason it’s interesting is because that hope is probably doomed since Hillary, fearful that a lack of enthusiasm from the far left is going to doom her, has adopted many of Sanders’ false promises.

In short, even if one manages to convince themselves that Hillary is apt to govern as a moderate, it won’t matter – the far left wields too much influence on the Democratic Party – moderation will not be tolerated. Add to this disturbing zealotry and how increasingly the media is morphing into the propaganda arm of that beast the frightening fact that Obama will soon be free of having to fake moderation as President and therefore will soon be stepping into his post White House role of being the chief spokesman for the progressive agenda – I believe Obama will be the most politically active ex-president ever and will exert a lot of influence accordingly. And so, even if Hillary is a more palatable choice than she currently seems and wants to for instance do something like scrap the awful Iran nuke deal, forget about it – Obama will summon his acolytes and the zealots will tear her apart. I mean, just look at what happened to Jimmy Fallon, the guy who used to slow dance the news with Obama – torn apart by the left just for having Trump on his show – and Trump isn’t even a conservative! That’s how out of control the left is and so even if one imagines there’s a moderate hiding away somewhere in the great pant-suited one, that person will never see the light of day.

The country’s in a bad place and desperately in need of a highly skilled leader capable, like Reagan, of doing the horse trading required of our republican system – that person’s nowhere to be found. I’d say the one who comes closest to it is probably Ryan but when you combine how out of control the left is and how media bias feeds that disease with what Trump has done to the GOP it’s hard to see a path to the presidency for someone like him. The system is designed to force compromise and bipartisanship on the elected – its goal is moderation - the country is moving in the exact opposite direction. It won’t end well.

I remember in 2008 being convinced, in opposition to almost everyone I knew or had a daily contact with, that Obama would be an awful president if he won – the opposition to my viewpoint was so monolithic and in many cases vituperative – can’t tally how many times it was insinuated I was racist - that I came to the point of hoping Obama would win so that I could be proven right. Bush’s egregious mistakes aside, mission accomplished there I think. Profoundly awful president. The reasons why I thought he’d prove awful varied, but the chief reason I think was the way the media was so in the tank for him – and not just in the tank, but in the tank for the most simplistic, most vacuous, most naïve of reasons – he was black – but not just black since Condelezza Rice would not have enjoyed such sycophancy – he was a black guy who spoke the left’s idealist nonsense with a perfect cadence – he didn’t sound black. He was the embodiment of the perfect world the left dreams of, a world that can only be created by their inclusive sentimentality. And that’s what you learned – the left has little to do with ideas, with objective analysis, with rationality applied to empirical evidence – it’s ultimately about sentiment, about emotion, about feelings – about a desire that the world be made to look like what they desperately need it to look like if their beliefs are to remain relevant. That is essentially the definition of idealism and essentially why Kant could never beat Hume in a debate – unless of course the debate was moderated by CNN.

What the media being in the tank for Obama told me was that he would be allowed to do whatever he wanted and this indulgence would enable bad thinking, bad ideas, bad policy and bad behavior – all evidenced by the Obama administration. Worse, mistakes would be overlooked, explained away in order to serve the ideological imperative, and therefore all the missteps that led to the mistakes would not be corrected, compounding the malaise. Again, that pretty much defines the Obama administration – its mistakes, which are many, are rationalized into a nebulous cloud that the average voter cannot penetrate.

In practical terms, compare to Bush – he had no choice but to address the mistakes of his Iraq invasion – I don’t wanna debate the invasion itself since, forgetting twenty twenty hind sight, legitimate arguments for and against can be mounted there – but the post invasion thinking was quite clearly flawed. Bush was forced to face the mistakes he made because the media attention thereof was relentless – thus the surge. Where has the same standard been applied to Obama? It hasn’t – his egregious mistakes involving Libya, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Russia, China, Israel just vanish into the media induced cloud and therefore the mistakes never have to be corrected – and therefore the thinking that engendered the mistakes can be reproduced – and it is. Obama still talks about his approach to Syria as if it was beautifully nuanced, foreign policy at its best – frightening thing is, I don’t think per his usual that he’s lying when he says that – I think the idiot actually believes it.

And that essentially defines the awfulness of Obama. And probably defines Trump – a president who is so awful yet so beloved by the media is bound to produce outrage I think amongst a great many people – the establishment is clearly unable to stop this awfulness therefore an establishment candidate is not going to have a lot of appeal – thus Trump. Which is why it doesn’t seem to matter that Trump is not fit to be president – people who support him feel the system is entirely fucked [they’re probably right] and therefore don’t care about such niceties – I think a media corrupted by bias is a very bad thing when it comes to democracy – the founding fathers clearly felt that way – I think what we’re seeing is a consequence of that corruption.