* * *
Is it 1968 all over again?
* FOLKS... THE 1968 AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHIC DOESN'T EXIST
ANYMORE...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN I KEEP ON TRYING TO
GET THROUGH TO PEOPLE: THE AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHIC HAS SHIFTED; WE'RE NO LONGER
"AMERICA" IN THE SENSE WERE IN EVEN 2004 - LET ALONE 1968. EVEN
PAGLIA DOESN'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THIS.
Violent clashes between antiwar protestors and Chicago
police during the 1968 Democratic Convention boomeranged against the New Left
and sabotaged the presidential hopes of the Democratic nominee, Hubert
Humphrey, a genial, compassionate populist. The American electorate, repelled
by street chaos, veered to the Right and made Richard M. Nixon president. The
new crossover Nixon Democrats laid the groundwork for the two conservative
presidencies of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
* FOLKS... D*E*M*O*G*R*A*P*I*C*S...
* FOLKS... THE ADULTS OF 1968 ARE EITHER OLD... OR DEAD.
SOMEONE WHO WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD IN 1968 WAS BORN IN 1950. IT'S 2016. DO THE MATH.
In our current campaign, the obvious strategy by
Democratic operatives to disrupt Donald Trump’s rallies and link him to brewing
fascism (via lurid media images of wild-eyed brawlers) has backfired with a
bang. The seething demonstrators who blocked Trump’s motorcade at last week’s
state GOP convention in Burlingame, California, forcing him and his retinue to
ditch their vehicles and sprint to a rear entrance on foot, managed to alienate
mainstream voters, boost Trump’s national momentum, and guarantee his sweeping
victory in this week’s Indiana primary. With the withdrawal of Ted Cruz, Trump
is now the presumptive GOP nominee. Great job, Dem wizards!
* FOLKS... SHE'S TALKING ABOUT A REPUBLICAN PRIMARY IN
INDIANA.
(*SIGH*)
* FOLKS... LOOK AT WHO MAKES UP THE RIOTERS TODAY.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* FOLKS... DEMOGRAPHIC REALITY IS... REALITY. THIS IS WHY
I SAY NOVEMBER IS OUR LAST CHANCE. IF WE CAN'T WIN IN NOVEMBER... WE'LL NEVER
WIN... NEVER WIN BACK THE PRESIDENCY... AND THUS NEVER WIN BACK THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH... AND IN TURN NEVER WIN BACK
THE JUDICIARY. OUR CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC WILL BE LOST... CAPTURED... NEVER TO BE REVIVED.
The helicopter TV footage of Trump and his Secret Service
detail on the move was certainly surreal. All those beefy men in shiny, dark
suits rapidly filing through narrow concrete barriers (like cattle chutes at a
rodeo) and then scrambling up a grassy knoll! It reminded me of the flight
through the woods by scores of elegantly dressed Mafiosi after police raided
the 1957 gangland convention in Apalachin, New York. (True, I have a special
interest in that colorful event: Bartolo Guccia, who told the cops he was just
delivering fish, ran his store out of the ground floor of my paternal
grandparents’ house next to the Sons of Italy in nearby Endicott, my home
town.) The optics of the aerial photos made Trump look like a late Roman
emperor being hustled to safety by the Praetorian Guard, which over time had
become a kingmaker, supplanting the authority of the Senate and the old
patrician class.
* GEEZUS... SHE'S JUST NOT GETTING IT. WE'RE NOT TALKING THE
1968 AMERICAN POPULATION.
Trump has knocked the stilts out from the GOP Establishment
and crushed the pretensions of a battalion of political commentators on both
the Left and Right. Portraying him as a vile racist, illiterate boob, or the
end of civilization as we know it hasn’t worked because his growing supporters
are genuinely motivated by rational concerns about border security and bad trade
deals. Whether Trump, with his erratic impulses and gratuitous crudities, can
morph toward statesmanship remains to be seen. We don’t need another bumbling
rube like George W. Bush, who bizarrely ambushed German chancellor Angela
Merkel by grabbing and massaging her shoulders from behind as she was seated at
a G8 Summit meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006.
The aerial view of Trump at Burlingame gave me a moment
of gender vertigo. His odd, brassy blonde hairdo, which I normally think of as
a retro Bobby Rydell quiff, looked from behind like a smoothly backcombed
1960’s era woman’s bouffant. Shelley Winters flashed into my mind, and then it
hit me: “It’s all about his mother!” I had never seen photos of Mary MacLeod
Trump (who died at 88 in 2000) and immediately looked for them. Of course,
there it was — the puffy blonde bouffant to which Trump pays daily homage in
his impudent straw thatch.
In their focus on Trump’s real-estate tycoon father, the
media seem to have missed that the teetotaling Trump’s deepest connection was
probably to his strong-willed, religious mother.
(*NOD*)
Born in the stark, wind-swept Hebrides Islands off the
western coast of Scotland (the next North Atlantic stop is Iceland), she was
one tough cookie. She and her parents were Gaelic speakers, products of a
history extending back to the medieval Viking raids. I suddenly realized that
that is Trump’s style. He’s not a tribal Highlander, celebrated in Scotland’s
long battle for independence from England, but a Viking, slashing, burning, and
laughing at the carnage in his wake. (Think Kirk Douglas flashing his steely
smile in the 1958 Hollywood epic "The Vikings".) Trump takes savage
pleasure in winning for its own sake — an attribute that speaks directly to the
moment, when a large part of the electorate feels that the U.S. has become
timid and uncertain and made far too many humiliating concessions to
authoritarian foreign powers like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Despite their show of bravado, most savvy Democratic
strategists have surely known for months that Trump was by far the most
formidable of Hillary Clinton’s potential opponents — which is why they’ve been
playing the race and riot cards against him to the max. Hillary has skimmed
along in her bouncing gender bubble, virtually untouched by her too chivalrous
Democratic rivals. Far from Hillary (in this election cycle or the last) having
a harder time as a woman candidate, she has been habitually shielded by her
gender. At the early debates, for example, Martin O’Malley was paralyzed by his
deference to her sacred womanhood and hardly dared raise his voice to contest
her brazen untruths from three feet away. Meanwhile, in debate after debate,
unconstrained by the sycophantic media moderators, Hillary rudely interrupted,
talked over both O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, and hogged airtime like it was
going out of style. Not until CNN’s April 14 debate in Brooklyn on the eve of
the New York primary did moderators forcibly put a lid on Hillary’s obnoxious
filibustering.
The most pernicious aspect of this Democratic campaign is
the way the field was cleared long in advance for Hillary, a flawed candidate
from the get-go, while an entire generation of able Democratic politicians in
their 40s was muscled aside, on pain of implied severance from future party support.
It is glaringly obvious, given how well Bernie Sanders (my candidate) has done
despite a near total media blackout for the past year, that Hillary would never
have survived to the nomination had she had younger, more well-known, and
centrist challengers. Hillary’s front-runner status has been achieved by DNC
machinations and an army of undemocratic super-delegate insiders, whose pet
projects will be blessed by the Clinton golden hoard.
Hillary has also profited from Sanders’ too-gentlemanly
early tactics, when he civilly refrained from pushing back at key moments, such
as the questionable Iowa and Nevada caucuses, which he probably would have won
had there not been last-minute monkey business by party operatives.
As for the tired excuse of evil sexism in American
presidential politics, it wasn’t sexism that stopped two far more qualified,
accomplished, and skillful Democratic politicians, Senator Dianne Feinstein and
former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, from running for president. No, it
was the sheer, stupid, life-cannibalizing drudgery of our excruciatingly
prolonged and geographically vast campaign process that daunted and discouraged
them. Feinstein and Pelosi, to all reports, enjoy a rewarding private life that
they do not want violated and blown to hell. But Hillary, consumed by her own
restless bitterness, has no such tranquility. The wheels must grind! The future
must be conquered! Past slights must be avenged! So it’s all planning and
scheming and piling up loot, the material emblem of existential worth. It’s all
talk and more talk about ideals and values without actually achieving anything
concrete – except, of course, for Hillary’s one notable legacy, the
destabilization of North Africa.
And is there anything creepier than that current Hillary
meme, the campaign slogan “I’m with her”? The blurred borderlines of those
pronouns (“I” numbly dissolving into “her”) and that ambiguous preposition
(“with” her like a child, a lover, or a nurse’s aide with a geriatric patient?)
are close to pathological.
The Hillary acolytes are joined at the hip to “her”, the
Great Leader Who Needs No Name, the Maternal Tit daubed in wormwood, the bitter
toxin left by men – those spoilers of the universe who created the master
structures of modern civilization that provide us put-upon gals with jobs,
transportation, abundant food, clean water, housing, electricity, and a magical
disease-spurning municipal sewage system that only men seem required to clean
and repair.
Hillary’s anti-male subtext, to which so many women voters
are plainly drawn, flared into view last week when she crowed to CNN’s Jake
Tapper about her proven skills in sex war: “I have a lot of experience dealing
with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how
they speak….I’m not going to deal with their temper tantrums or their bullying
or their efforts to try to provoke me.” The prestige media tried to suppress
Hillary’s gaffes here (which breezily insulted both men and Native Americans)
by simply not reporting them. Her campaign deflected initial criticism, but she
made no personal response until the issue kept escalating. Five days later, she
sat down with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell and incredibly claimed that she had been
referring to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Rick Lazio and Vladimir Putin—none of
whom have had perceptible “temper tantrums” about her.
(*SMIRK*)
Conservative radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, analyzing
Hillary’s remarks as most mainstream journalists refused to do...
* SEE, FOLKS! EVEN CAMILLE PAGLIA GIVES RUSH CREDIT WHERE
CREDIT IS DUE! FOLKS... I URGE YOU ALL... IF YOU CAN'T LISTEN TO RUSH EACH DAY,
AT LEAST VISIT HIS WEBSITE EACH MORNING TO VIEW THE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE PREVIOUS
DAY'S BROADCAST!
...interpreted them as a cloaked reference to her
embattled life with her philandering husband. However, I assumed from the start
that “temper tantrums” (a term applied to small children) was another of
Hillary’s odd childhood flashbacks and that it described her ranting father’s
abusive behavior toward his wife and family (detailed in Carl Bernstein’s 2007
biography, A Woman in Charge). It was her stoical mother who trained Hillary in
the art of contemptuous endurance of men’s squalling infantilism. Women are
noble, superior creatures; men are yapping dogs.
(*SIGH*)
And as for “off the reservation,” wow — I guess Hillary
should take a gander at John Ford’s classic Western, Fort Apache (1948), where
John Wayne tangles with Henry Fonda as a U.S. Cavalry martinet vengefully
pursuing the Native American “savages,” led by the famous Chiricahua Apache
chief Cochise, who refuse to stay on the reservation decreed for them by the
government during Westward expansion. The bloody Apache wars in Arizona were
one of the darkest chapters in American history. But there you have Hillary’s
gender theory in a nutshell: men are bums and bullies who belong in internment
camps under female lock and key.
A side note in the Andrea Mitchell interview was the
inadvertent revelation about Hillary’s health.
(*PAUSE*)
Clinton was wearing a conveniently high mandarin collar,
but check out the moment when she mentions Vladimir Putin: one can clearly see
an unmistakable lump bulging from the left side of her neck. Whether it is a
goiter or some other growth should surely be of legitimate public concern in a
presidential candidate. But as a friend tartly wrote to me this week, “Of
course not one reporter out of the thousand working reporters in America will
dare to ask.”
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