2016 Oct 12^th

There are some columnists worthy of mention today but they’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

First, consider Trump’s recent advice to his playmates in Florida at a rally on Tuesday: He told them to be sure to vote on November 28^th. Oh dear! By that time Hillary Clinton will be selecting her cabinet because the election, which is occurring in some states right now, will have happened back on November 8^th.

It’s easy to see what probably happened here: Understand that the aging brain is inclined to conflate things because it takes focused attention to keep separate those thing that should be separated. On the Tuesday when Trump gave this interesting instruction, there were exactly 28 days until the election. He conflated the number of days until the election with the date of the election…oh well!

Moving right along, we find that stalwart Christian conservative, founder and head of the “Family Research Council,” Gary Bauer, being interviewed on the CNBC talk show, “With all due Respect.” The show wanted to get Bauer on the record about Donald Trump’s very un-Christian self-described, “locker room” talk. Bauer immediately went into the Christian forgiveness mode. Of course what Trump said was just awful but as Christians we must forgive him…besides Hillary Clinton has done far worse. And then came the zinger, “If you forgive Donald Trump why don’t you forgive Hillary Clinton?” Poor Gary Bauer; he came up with some tortured logic that explained nothing. The poor man had been nicely hung out to dry. He kept talking over the other guest until one of the moderators told him he had to stop doing that because the audience couldn’t hear what anyone said. He complied.

Trump lives in a bubble and he brings his fans in with him. He claims that all of the polls show him winning the last debate but he doesn’t tell us what polls those are. Then 538, a political forecasting site, has maps showing which states would be won by each candidate if only men voted and if only women voted. If only men voted many states go to Trump; if only women voted almost every state goes to Clinton. So now we have Trump waving the “if only men voted” “map at his rally as if this map represented the current status. When Trump loses, as he surely will, he has prepared his followers, by such chicanery, to believe the election was stolen.

Hillary Clinton has to contend with WikiLeaks, the Kremlin’s entry in the election. About the only cudgel WikiLeaks has is some old Clinton emails. These are made available to counter Trump’s crotch grabbing remarks. Who do you suppose wins that battle?  A couple of problems are obvious with this strategy: The first is that there is no way to verify the accuracy of these emails; the second is that Trump can be pegged as the Kremlin’s candidate for the presidency. That isn’t a helpful label for any candidate, much less one who is already sinking in the polls.