2016 Mach 13^th

There once was a bit about going to a hockey game to watch the fights; this year a Trump rally replaces the hockey game. TV covers these Trump performances quite well but then television gets blamed for the toxic nature of the rallies. If only TV weren’t there people say everyone would make nice. No they wouldn’t. Trump knows that the more outrageous his claims, the more he irritates his detractors and the tighter he binds his fans to himself. He refuses to back away from a claim even if it is demonstrated to his face that it is a clear-cut lie. On Chuck Todd’s program this morning Trump was asked if he was at all responsible for the physical abuse of hecklers at his events. Then he was shown a replay of himself talking about wanting to “hit protesters in the face.” This was then followed by a video of one of his supporters wading through a crowd to an aisle so he could hit an unsuspecting protester in the face. Todd asked Trump to respond to that sequence. Trump’s comment was that the protester “was a really bad dude and that he was swinging wildly at everybody” so no, he said that he had no responsibility for the violence.

Trump has a scapegoat; it is Bernie Sanders the “Commie.” Because some protestors were wearing Bernie Sanders t-shirts they must have been sent by Bernie Sanders. (And If I wear a Harvard sweatshirt I must have gone to Harvard!) Trump knows better but his followers don’t. Trump doesn’t know a Bolshevik from a Menshevik and he doesn’t need to know because his supporters don’t know the difference between socialists and communists. Now Trump has threatened Sanders with sending Trump supporters into Sanders’ rallies to disrupt them. This is just what Trump supporters want to hear and Trump always tells them what they want to hear.

Kasich the hope of many republicans is having a town hall. This is a time when many questions (planted?) can be directed to the candidate. One of the first was about raising the minimum wage to ten dollars an hour. That’s still below the poverty level for a family of four so the government will have to pitch in to help support those folks. That wage is too high for Kasich who wants to keep it down to just over eight dollars an hour. (I wonder how Kasich would like to live on that for a month.)

Then Kasich was asked about control of Isis and this produced a rant about how, among other things, we removed Khadafy and as a result Libya went to Isis. Khadafy has admitted that he arranged for the bomb to put on board Pan Am Flight 103 that blew up over Scotland killing about 240 people but, like conservatives everywhere, once the Obama administration eliminated him he was suddenly a good guy. Go figure!