On Private Parts, Public Discourse, and Cultural Decline

Go right ahead and call us old-fashioned, and we’ll freely admit we have no idea what sort of focus groups and poll-testing might have signed off on it, yet we can’t help thinking that “grab ’em by the p***y” is probably the worst presidential campaign slogan ever.

Please accept our apologies for using even such politely expurgated language in these previously pristine pages, but that’s where we find ourselves at this late moment in America’s long cultural decline. This year’s presidential election has dragged the entire country right down in the mud, where Republican nominee Donald J. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters had always promised it would be won, and at this point we can’t see how anyone emerges un-muddied. Trump has ambiguously apologized for that “grab ’em by …” slogan that was revealed on an 11-year-old videotape of him bragging about how his celebrity allows him to take such liberties with women, and he has defiantly and plausibly asserted that Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s husband’s behavior over the years has been even worse, but the mud still sticks almost all around.

We were called old-fashioned at the time, but when Bill Clinton was first running for the presidency way back in our relative youth we objected that his well-documented tawdry private life had disqualified him from public office. The tawdriness of his private life was publicly documented during his second term by revelations of an affair that involved cigars and Altoids and a much-younger White House intern, and it dominated all the early morning headlines and late night comedy monologues, but even the current Republican nominee was then a Democrat contributing his family causes and scoffing at such prudes as ourselves, so his reputation somehow survived to such a point that his oft-wronged but still defiantly defensive wife is now the betting favorite to be the next president.

Way back when we were proud of the Republican Party’s willingness to go ahead and impeach Bill Clinton for the lies he told under oath about that tawdry affair with a much younger and quite obviously stupider young woman, even if they didn’t succeed in removing him from office because of a strict a party-line vote, despite the reputation as an old-fashioned bunch of blues-noses they acquired as a result. When Clinton’s complicit wife emerged as the Democratic front-runner this year we were hopeful for a Republican who would be willing to confront her about it, but as it turned out the only one who threatened to do so was Trump. From the outset we worried that the twice-divorced and married-for-a-third-time-to-an-illegal-immigrant-nudie model and six-times-bankrupt casino-and-strip-joint mogul was hardly the one to make the case, and that was just based on his own autobiographies and countless appearances on Howard Stern’s shock-jock radio show, and even before that footage of him bragging about grabbing women’s private parts because he was a reality show star we could see the race winding up in the worst sort of mud.

At this point all those Democrats who called us old-fashioned back in the day are suddenly appalled that the Republican nominee is such an undeniably sexist pig, all those Republicans who objected to Bill Clinton’s sexual piggery and his wife’s complicity are suddenly defending Trump’s behavior as mere “locker room talk” are similarly hypocritical, and even such prudes as ourselves are reduced to using asterisks to expurgate the current political discourse. We can congratulate ourselves on being so consistent as to being appalled by the last few decades of cultural decline and right up to the current moment, we suppose, but we still feel slightly muddy. Much of the rest of the Republican Party is also distancing itself from the party’s candidate, and a disappointingly smaller share of the Democratic party is distancing itself from their party’s candidate, but the muddiness seems likely to prevail.

— Bud Norman

No Sex, but Lies and Videotape

By Wednesday morning it was the conventional wisdom that Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence got the better of Democratic rival Tim Kaine in Tuesday’s night debate, for whatever that’s worth, but by Wednesday evening Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump seemed to be losing the post-debate news cycle against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Even the more respectable pundits on the most polite press acknowledge that Pence made a damning case against Clinton’s damnable record, but even the most die-hard Trump supporters should acknowledge that he had a harder time defending some of Trump’s most outrageous statements.

In several cases Pence simply denied that Trump had ever said any such thing, which seemed to work well enough for the duration of the 90-minute debate, but in the age of ubiquitous audio tape and quick internet access the ploy didn’t last a day. By the time the evening newscasts came along there was footage of Pence shaking his head and insisting that Trump had never praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, followed by footage of Trump saying “Putin’s been a very strong leader for Russia,” Pence dismissing as “nonsense” the claim that Trump was unaware that Putin had invaded Ukraine, followed by footage of Trump assuring an interviewer that Putin “is not going into Ukraine, you can mark it down you, can put it down, you can take it any way you want,” Pence shaking his had and saying “nonsense” again at the claim Trump had advocated a deportation force for illegal immigrants, followed by footage of Trump saying “You’re going to have a deportation force.” Similar denials of videotaped statements regarding punishing women for abortions, allowing nuclear proliferation in Asia and the Middle East, renegotiating the national debt, and a ban on Muslims entering the country also made the list, and both the Clinton campaign and its media allies were having great fun with it.

We suppose Pence could have quibbled that he and Trump had called Putin “strong,” which doesn’t necessarily imply “good,” and he might have explained how Trump meant to say something other than that you could mark it down and write it down that Putin would never invade Ukraine, perhaps that he wouldn’t do again, and he surely wouldn’t have lost any supporters if he’d gone right ahead and doubled down on that deportation force idea. Pence has been a stalwart of the anti-abortion cause long enough to know it doesn’t advocate punishing women who seek abortions, so he could hardly be expected to defend the zealotry of a newfound convert to the cause, and he seems a reasonable enough fellow, so he could hardly be expected to defend that crazy talk about Japan and Saudi Arabia acquiring nuclear weapons, so perhaps a brief-lived denial was the best he could come up with.

Which is a shame, really, because Pence did make a darned damning case against the damnable career of Clinton. The more objective sorts of fact-checkers were begrudgingly obliged to point out of some of Kaine’s own whoppers, too, but for the most part he didn’t try to deny any of it and thus wasn’t caught in some easily disproved denials. Kaine was an obnoxious jerk who frequently interrupted his more presidential-looking opponent throughout the debate, and at times seemed almost unhinged, but it’s hard to imagine that any still-undecided voters will think that a reason to vote for Trump.

Trump can take some solace in though that we’re in a post-factual era of politics when no one pays much attention to all that ubiquitous and easily-accessible audio-tape. Last time around Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a damning case during a presidential debate that President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had outright lied that the four deaths at an American consulate in Libya were the result of a spontaneous protest against an obscure YouTube video rather than a pre-planned terror attack, and had repeated the lie on numerous news shows and in front of the United Nations, but Obama denied it and the moderator cited a vague allusion to “terrorism” during one speech to back it up, and it wound up working well enough. Trump shouldn’t expect such favors from the moderators of any of his debates, though, and the reality show veteran should keep in mind that videotape is pesky stuff.

— Bud Norman

Another Grand Jury, Another Controversy

Yet another grand jury has declined to indict a white a police officer involved in the death of a black man, this time in the Staten Island borough of New York City, and the latest round of racial tensions seems likely to continue for a while.

The death of an unarmed black teenager by the gun of a white police in Ferguson, Missouri, brought devastating rioting and looting and arson to that unfortunate town, and then another round of the same after a grand jury heard testimony and evidence that clearly indicated the officer was acting in self-defense. Reaction to the grand jury decision in New York City has thus far been less destructive, despite the efforts of a mob to disrupt the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, but it will suffice to keep the controversy about policing in black neighborhoods in the news for weeks to come. The latest case might yet prove even more volatile than the Ferguson incident, as the facts are less clear-cut.

The incident in New York City was caught on videotape, and what it reveals is at best ambiguous. Several policemen approach an extremely obese man, reportedly because he had been selling single cigarettes to passersby without paying the city’s notoriously high taxes on the product, and he is argumentative but not physically aggressive. When the officers attempt to handcuff the man he resists, but not in a way that can be construed as life-threatening given the lack of a weapon and the number of policemen involved. Several officers then bring the man down to the ground, one of them employing what the New York press has routinely called a “choke-hold” but might better be described as a “headlock,” and the officers pile on to handcuff the man as he is heard shouting that he cannot breath. As the tape ends, the officers are still piled on, the man’s head is still wrapped in a policeman’s arm, and the shouts by the man that he cannot breath continue.

The videotape leaves no doubt the decedent would still be alive had he acted more sensibly, but one can reasonably wonder if he might also have survived different procedures that could still have resulted in an arrest. There’s obviously more to the story than than what is seen on the videotape, and we assume the grand jury heard the rest of it, but there’s enough there to exacerbate the resentments of those who presume that police routinely act with disregard for the lives of black suspects. It’s at least a more compelling example for that view than what happened in Ferguson, where several black eyewitness corroborated ample physical evidence that the officer’s life was in danger and deadly force was warranted in response, but the initial reports in that case suggested a case of cold-blooded murder and weren’t effectively rebutted until the aftermath of the grand jury’s verdict.

The politicians and activists who prosper from racial strife will likely switch their attention to the New York story now that Ferguson’s rage has diminished in the cold weather and the even colder facts of that case, but they’ll have to settle for a story that is at best ambiguous. The videotape makes it harder to claim that putting cameras on America’s police will prevent such situations, but there’s still a case to be made that it could have prevented the premature judgment rendered against the Ferguson officer. What happened in New York might lead to better policies regarding arrests, but it should also continue to serve as a warning to those who would resist arrest in even the most ineffectual ways. It will also continue to distract attention from inordinate amount of criminality in black America, which kills far more black Americans than even the most reckless police departments, and we can only hope that the current controversies will soon fade enough for the country to consider that sad fact.

— Bud Norman