Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Encounter …

I was preparing to make chicken broth, when the doorbell rang. As I walked toward the door, I began rehearsing lines to engineer my swift return to broth. It was someone canvassing on behalf of Hillary. He seemed a nice fellow. He asked if my wife was home, she being the registered Democrat in the house. I told him she was not. He asked me if I planned to vote, and I told him I had not made up my mind. Then he asked if I was leaning toward a particular candidate, and I told him I had not made up my mind about that yet either. Then he asked me to, in effect, summarize my view of the current election campaign. I told him I thought it was the most grotesque in our history. He stepped back, the look on his face bearing a resemblance to shock, thanked me for my time and left.

23 comments:

  1. A woman at lunch today asked me about my voting plans. I told her that I had problems with both major candidates. She countered with the incredulous question, "I can understand your reaction to Trump, But you really have a problem with a strong woman as President? Oh, my, that's a shame." Yes, I guess it is. When did strength become an absolution for sins?

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  2. I would have gladly voted for Condoleeza Rice. She's smart, competent, and she plays a mean Brahms.

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  3. My luncheon companion really does not care about strong women, and she certainly would not be interested in a strong woman who was not a Democrat; as a die-hard Democrat, my luncheon companion would vote for anyone breathing and above ground with a "D" following the candidate's name. I've not been a one-party voter, and my enthusiastic support for Kennedy, Jimmy Carter (God forgive me), and Reagan confuse people who would like to pigeon-hole my political ideology.

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  4. She is what used to be called a yellow-dog Democrat. She'd vote for a yellow dog, if it was a Democrat.

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  5. I took Mary to an early voting place in Cambridge tonight. One of the benefits of early voting is that, for the voter, the election is over once the vote is cast. It's been a grotesque challenge, with so much energy and time wasted of time for the country. The #1 and #2 issues facing this country became how bad the candidates would be as presidents ~~ with no escape.

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  6. I voted early here in Maryland. I got to weigh in on some minor county ballot questions, and I happily left the president line blank.

    I don't begrudge anyone their vote as long as they hold their nose at the ballot box, but I'm troubled by the people who show genuine and unrestrained enthusiasm for either of the two horrid major-party candidates.

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  7. For me, it's not about voting for a yellow dog. It's about voting against a narcissist and a con man.

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  8. One could make a case for that description fitting both, Lee.

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  9. Frank et al: The Founding Fathers, so hostile to the idea of political parties, would be horrified about the freak show in 2016. Well, I am too.

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  10. Jeff Mauvais11:35 PM

    At this point, I'm reduced to divining whose election will have the least deleterious effect on my retirement account. Like most people who have spent their careers in the private sector, I have no pension awaiting me.

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  11. Frank, obviously many are making that case but I see a difference--a vast difference--in kind, possibly because I'm a woman, possibly because I've some experience with genuine narcissism and its effects. I am seriously troubled that so many voters, openly or tacitly, approve of mysogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, and all sorts of hatred. And anyone who believes that Trump can fulfill his promises, based on his past record, his exaggerations, miscontructions (a polite word), and general ignorance, is seriously fooling themselves.

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  12. But, Lee, given the shambles thst is Middle East at present, a condition directly resulting from policies put in place by Hillary Clinton whike she was Secretary of State, why would trust her with even greater power and responsibility? And is the recent American vitizen from India who said to me that all immigrants "should have to go through the same crap l did" xenophobic. There are laws governing immigration. Why should they not be enforced? The portrayal of Trump supporters as xenophobic, homophobic, midogynist bigots does not square with my experience of those people. Peter Thiel, who spoke at the Repuboican convention, is gay.

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    1. Jeff Mauvais11:20 PM

      Frank, the Middle East has been a shambles since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Please specify the policies put in place by Hillary Clinton which made the situation worse.

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  13. Of course not all Trump supporters are 'haters' -- nor did I say or suggest anything like that. (Though being gay does not automatically preclude other sorts of bias and hatred - and please note here that I'm not accusing Thiel, since I've no idea.) However, the nature of this campaign surely reveals deeply abhorrent views, and seem to give people permission to express them, and even act upon them. This trend is accelerating, as far as I can judge.

    As to laws governing immigration, perhaps Melania Trump ought to have respected them too. Here is a story just breaking in The Guardian:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/05/melania-trump-was-paid-modeling-before-work-visa-records-show

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  14. To address Jeff's question briefly: the Middle East is a mess, but it's a mess more accurately laid at Bush's and especially Obama's door than Clinton's (In the end, the buck stops where we all know it stops.): Obama's so-called 'red line', Iran, the re-emergence of Russia as a world, or near-world, power. Here in Germany, Clinton is in fact generally considered far more hawkish than Obama (not always with approval). I can't vouch for the accuracy of the following USA Today fact check, but it's certainly worth reading and checking out further:

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/07/27/fact-check-clintons-record-state-department-during-middle-east-chaos/87582276/

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  15. I've done a bit more reading since this morning. In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote the following:

    'Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women [emphasis mine] — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.'

    So giving the women the vote helped undermine capitalist democracy? This goes some way towards explaining his support of Trump. Now, where's my apron and scrubbing brush?

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  16. Link for the above Thiel quote:

    https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian

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  17. Well, that is an interesting quote, to be sure. My factory-worker mother (an early single-mother home-owner) and grandmother would surely be perplexed.

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  18. There are shambles, Jeff, and there are shambles. Gadaffi may have been an SOB, but he had become our SOB. His overthrow took place on Clinton's watch and has not shown good results. The business in Syria took place on her watch. The tide of refugees began on her watch. You should be held responsible for what happens when you are in charge.

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    1. Jeff Mauvais12:08 AM

      It's worth remembering that one of Gaddafi's minions was the mastermind of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 innocent people, including 188 Americans (one of whom was my former colleague Irving Sigal). People are willing to throw the Bill of Rights under the bus because 64 Americans have been killed by ISIS, but you would have us forget the much larger number killed by Gaddafi's regime. Moreover, Libya at this point is relatively stable, with areas under Islamist control steadily shrinking.

      The "business in Syria", by which I assume you mean the conflict between the Assad (father and son) regime and Islamic rebels, began in 1979 and never ended. The Assads have been murdering civilians for over 35 years, with their victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands (see for example the Hama Massacre in 1982). Nothing new there. The refugee crisis is just as old, with only the destination changing. In the past, most Syrian refugees were absorbed by Iraq. But that option became much less attractive as Iraq was plunged into war by the U.S invasion. With the advent of open borders in the EU, getting to Greece or Italy was the new best choice.

      Holding the U.S. government responsible for events in a country like Syria, where it has never had much influence, makes no sense to me.

      For what it's worth, my preferred electoral outcome is the election of Hillary Clinton, followed by her quick impeachment. The nation could spend the next couple of years catching its breath under the leadership of the congenial, uncontroversial, Jesuit-educated Tim Kaine.

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    2. While I doubt that an impreachment would be quick (nor conducive to mending the bitter divides in the country unless something really incontrovertible turns up), I agree that Kaine appeals to me far more.

      Jeff's points about the Middle East are very sensible.

      There are some people, Frank, who believe one of Thiel's motives in supporting Trump is the chaos and backlash which might result should he take office, thereby facilitating a drastic implosion of the entire two-party system and the American form of democracy. Of course, this is basically just guesswork.

      And a little measured commentary seems a good thing these days!

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  19. I am, by the way, amazed that my (I thought) droll account of an election canvasser should spark so much earnest commentary. Perhaps I did not make my point clear enough. Had my reference to the grotesque been aimed at Trump , I am sure the canvasser would not have been taken aback. That I regarded the whole damn thing as grotesque is what I think shocked him. I am old enough to remember when a presidential candidate preached to us that American boys should not be fighting a war that Asian boys should be fighting. Which did not stop him, once he was elected, from sending a few million American boys to fight said war anyway. Of course, the person he was running against, we were assured, was planning a nuclear Armageddon. Sound familiar?

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  20. No one is going to persuade me that Hillary Clinton's tenure at State was anything other than an unmitigated disaster. Remember the reset with Russia? Even Kerry's running in place is better than Clinton's maneuverings. It is hardly outrageous to expect the nation's chief diplomat to display some skill in managing the nation's foreign affairs.

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