As Time Slowly Stretches Into Election Day

The craziest election year of our long recollection got even crazier over the weekend, as Friday’s announcement by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that their interest in Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s scandal-plagued e-mail is once again piqued by some newly-discovered evidence spilled over into the ensuing two days of otherwise slow news cycle.

All the polls were already showing that Clinton’s once formidable lead had tightened enough to clearly worry the more partisan Democratic press, so the FBI’s announcement set off something of a panic among the more polite publications. The news was impossible to ignore, or even keep off the very front page, and quite difficult to spin. There was no avoiding the words “e-mail” or “FBI investigation” in the early paragraphs, and of course the words “Anthony Weiner” were also bound to come up at some point in the story, and by now anyone who’s been following the improbable plot twists of this crazy election years knows that all of that amounts to bad news for the Democrats that can only remind voters of all the rest of the past 30 years of bad news. The Democratic nominee and her more stalwart defenders in the press could raise legitimate questions about the vagueness of that FBI director’s announcement, and why it comes at such a crucial point in such a crazy election year, but none of those questions would have ever come up if Clinton had only followed the sensible laws regarding a Secretary of State’s e-mail communications, and there’s no getting around the questions of judgment that raises, nor avoiding the questions of character that might explain her motives, so even those stalwart defenders of the Democratic nominee among the more polite press sounded slightly panicked.

As recently as the day before last Friday in this crazy election year they all seemed pretty cocky, with the previous news cycles being mostly about Republican nominee Donald Trump and all his accumulated scandals and hard-to-spin awfulness, and all the polls showing that aforementioned comfortable lead for Clinton. The words “grab ’em by the p***y” are also hard to keep out out of the news when uttered by a major party nominee, and the more impolite pro-Trump sort of press had their work cut out for them in trying to defend his attacks on the inevitable numerous women who came forward to say that he’d done pretty much what he bragged about, and when you throw in the rest of his attacks on prisoners of war and Gold Star families and his evictions of widows and three marriages and the four casino-and-strip-club bankruptcies and frequent heresies from both Christianity and Republicanism and geo-political and economic common sense along with the hard-to-miss buffoonery and boorishness and ignorance and almost daily weirdness that had made him the most unfavorably-regarded major nominee ever, so it was hard to dispute the left’s cockiness of just the day before last Friday.

But that was a long time ago, as we measure time in such a crazy election year as this, before the latest reminder that Democrat is arguably criminal and undeniably corrupt, and with eight seemingly eternal days left before the last votes are counted we remain as uncertain as ever as to how this will all turn out. Clinton still looks fairly safe on that stubbornly resistant-to-the-latest-nws electoral map, Trump clearly has the come-from-behind national momentum to provoke all that panic in the press, both candidates still have the most unfavorable ratings in the history of American political polling, and with eight excruciatingly long days left in this crazy election year there’s something bound to come out that would make such average voters as ourselves loathe them both even more. Clinton and her defenders might yet spin this into a favorable story, the same FBI director who until last Friday had been regaled by Trump’s defenders as a conspirator in a rigged system might prove it with yet another improbable plot twist, and the possibility of Trump providing yet another unfavorable news cycle does not seem at all remote.

At this point we’ll just wait and see which of these two awful people the rest of the country considers the less awful, and in any case we’ll wonder what the hell about this crazy election year in rueful retrospect.

— Bud Norman

The Premature Fix

The Republican primary race is pretty much over, even if the Washington state party pledged 40 of its 41 delegates to the presumptive nominee’s last vanquished rival in the most recent contest just to express their understandable dismay about it, and the presumptive nominee has lately refrained from the outrageous comments and obnoxious behavior that somehow won him the nomination, so all the attention is now on the still-slightly-in-doubt Democratic race. No wonder the presumptive Republican nominee has lately taken a slight edge in the polls, because the Democrats are arguably in even worse shape yet.

Although a professional wrestling-style fix has been in for years to coronate former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she somehow still hasn’t finished off a self-described socialist who literally honeymooned in the Soviet Union and rants about he plethora of underarm deodorants available to American consumers and goes by the until-recently unfamiliar name of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. This is partly because Sanders’ brand of Old Left anti-choice kookiness has a strong appeal to a significant portion of the party’s equally kooky base, but mostly because the party’s presumptive nominee is simply awful. Her tenure as First Lady mostly involved smearing anyone who noted her perv husband’s serial sexual depredations, her otherwise forgettable few years in the Senate are best remembered by the still sore base for her vote for the Iraq War, and with the possible exception of her successor we’d be hard-pressed to name a more disastrous Secretary of State. There are also all those old financial and political scandals that should have disqualified her from public life decades ago, as well as the ones recent enough they are still being diligently investigated by everyone from Congress to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the unavoidable questions about her health, and the undeniable fact that she’s an utterly unappealing candidate.

From an old-fashioned Republican perspective it’s almost enough to make think of voting for Donald J. Trump, and even from the kookiest Democratic perspective people are still moved to cast their votes in dismay for the last vanquished foe. That First Lady tenure of smearing the victims of her presidential perv husband’s sexual depredations was happily excused by all the aging feminists back when they had to worry about abortion rights, but by now they’re more concerned about the “culture of rape” and Clinton’s hectoring that any woman who alleges rape must be believed regardless of the evidence suddenly sounds ridiculous, and the sensible and effective welfare reform and crime bills and trade deals that he was forced to sign on to by a Republican Congress are now denounced by the presumptive Democratic nominee and the rest of her party. That Senate vote for the Iraq war is still a sore point with her party, and no one on either side of the aisle who can think of anything to brag about from her four years as Secretary of State. There’s an understandable “anti-establishment” mood afoot in the Democratic Party similar to the understandable one on the Republican side, too, which makes any former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State automatically suspect.

In retrospect, whoever the hell it was who put the fix in clearly should have picked someone else. At the time the deal went down the First Black President and his “Hope and Change” mantra had some reason to expect that the First Woman President would easily continue his fundamental transformation of America, which by then would surely be almost universally popular, but it just goes to show the futility of making political predictions more than 30 seconds or so ahead of schedule. Even way back then we could foresee that the fundamental “Hope and Change” transformation of America would not be universally popular at any point in 2016, but even our mighty powers of prognostication could have predicted that the coronated queen would be facing this particular presumptive “Make America Great Again” Republican nominee.

This is a candidate willing to make a perfectly valid issue of the Clinton’s many unsavory sexual scandals, even if he’s got more than a few of his much boasted-about own, and will even bring up that alleged rape, even if rape has also been alleged against him. Certainly no one could have predicted that the presumptive Republican nominee would be running to the left of that hated-by-the-left Iraq War vote, and even parroting the Code Pink “Bush lied, people died” line that not even Obama or Sanders will dare. The presumptive Republican nominee is even claiming to have opposed the disastrous and dishonest Libyan policy that Clinton is responsible for, and although he’s lying about that and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t have been just as dishonest about denying culpability for opinions of the moment he’s still arguably got the better end of the argument. The presumptive Republican nominee also has a better pitch with his tough-on-the-bankers pitch, having bested his creditors many times in his sleazy private sector career, and he’ll surely be willing to after Clinton’s sleazy influence-peddling “family foundation” even though he was six-figure contributor. One can hardly blame the Democratic powers that be for not foreseeing this admittedly strange turn of events.

By now even those far-seeing powers-that-be can surely see what they’ve wrought, however, and we wouldn’t be much surprised by some readjustments. If the polls between now and convention time show the presumptive Republican nominee moving farther ahead, they can easily put another fix in. Those ongoing Congressional and Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries could easily be allowed to end her candidacy, or the threat of that could allow those obvious health problems to provide a more gracious exit, and someone other than a kooky self-described socialist could be chosen, and it might be that fake Indian professor that all the Old Left types wanted as the First Woman President all along, or they might even figure that the self-described socialist still leads the presumptive Republican nominee in all the polls and go with him. This has been an unpredictable year, though, so we offer no predictions.

— Bud Norman