Kaboom Ka-ching

     Yesterday, September 11, 2016, marked the fifteenth anniversary of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States of America.  It's called Patriot Day.  Patriot Missile, Patriot Day, New England Patriots.  It's a favorite word in this country, second only, perhaps, to pussy.
     Donald Trump, during the primaries, agreed with a woman at a rally who shouted that Senator Ted Cruz is a "pussy" for not embracing torture wholeheartedly.  Are we patriots or pussies?  Should we celebrate the American war machine's actions these past fifteen years, or be critical of the havoc wrought?
     Last August I saw Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, interviewed via satellite on Fox and Friends, speaking about American militarism, about war profiteering, support of illegal military aggression by Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all three nations receivers of billions of dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied weaponry used to slaughter Arabs.  She may as well have been talking to mentally handicapped second graders (including Tucker Carlson).  They wanted her to talk about Cuba's human rights record, but Stein countered by saying that getting upset about Cuba while not getting bent out of shape about Israel's relation with the American ideologically driven war machine, is a false comparison.
     In vulgar parlance, who's the pussy?  Jill Stein, who's logical and humane, or Tucker Carlson, who went from CNN to Fox, an organization run by, only until recently, by a sexual predator, Roger Ailes, who forced his will on numerous women employees, getting sued by Gretchen Carlson (who once occupied the same couch sat upon by Tucker) who gained millions of dollars in the settlement against her former horrible boss, Ailes, friend of Donald Trump, political consultant of Nixon, Reagan, the first Bush, and Rudy Giuliani?
     Is Roger Ailes a patriot?  Giuliani?  Is patriotism such an easy thing that it merely involves having an American flag nearby, and saying cliches about the fallen of 9/11, about the necessity of sacrifice, such words coming usually from those who have never been shot at in combat, have never lost a son or daughter in a foreign land invaded for profit at the behest of oil corporations?
     There was a memorial service yesterday in New York for the 9/11 dead.  Trump was there; so was Hillary Clinton, the latter wearing a long-sleeved dark jacket, temperature in the high seventies Fahrenheit.  She left early.  The reading of names of the nearly 3,000 dead takes about four hours.  I wonder if this names ceremony will be done in fifty years?  Will the people running America then, the current generation of Millennials and their children, those who weren't even yet born when George W. Bush was handed his excuse to unleash chaos on the planet, bother to engage in such a formal activity surrounding a hallowed date?  Does America stop in its tracks on the December 7 Pearl Harbor anniversary?  No.
     Hillary Clinton, according to her people, felt "overheated," and had to leave the ceremony after about ninety minutes.  Imagine a presidential candidate, Trump or Clinton, standing in rising heat for four hours while names are read.  What's going through their minds?  What would they rather be doing?  Clinton's body was definitely telling her to be prone.  As she got into her black security armored van, she lost the ability to walk on her own, and sank in the grip of Secret Service agents, before being put into the vehicle, which then drove not to the hospital, but to Chelsea Clinton's New York apartment.
     As Martha Raddatz on ABC News astutely put it this morning, "the hospital comes to her."
     It's absurd to think Hillary Clinton didn't receive a medical checkup after this event.  In Chelsea Clinton's building for about two hours, the former First Lady then emerged onto the sidewalk, waving and smiling.  Staged or not, a beautiful young girl ran up to her and exchanged words with the nation's matriarch (the mother-in-law no one ever wants to be visited by).
     Her apparent "I'm feeling great!" condition was written off by her aides as "dehydration," "overheating."  However, a little while later, in the traditional Clintonian drip-drip style of information, they finally admitted that the Democratic Candidate and chief bulwark against a Trump presidency--with accompanying apocalypse--was diagnosed last Friday, September 9, with "pneumonia."
     Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton campaigned, didn't rest, worsened her conditioned, committed herself, for appearance's sake probably, to standing by in high seventies heat for four hours during the name reading at the 9/11 Memorial.  Even today, only three days after her doctor's diagnosis, her campaign chairman said, brightly, "She's back to work!" clarifying that she's doing stuff involving sitting down or up in bed.  Even so, she has pneumonia!  Chill out for a week, for God's sake!
     She's old, Trump is old, I'm middle-aged and getting old.  Her physical health gets scrutinized not nearly as much as Trump's mental health.  Unfortunately, she provided him with ammunition a few days ago, saying to a group of donors that "half of Trump's supporters" are a "basket of deplorables."
They're homophobic, Islamophobic, "you name it."
     Basket of Deplorables, while it sounds like the name of an upcoming Pixar film, prompted the intrepid Mike Pence to say, "they're not a basket of anything," which when analyzed grammatically, comes out as "they're a basket of nothing."  I'll buy that, at least as far as their collective braincase is concerned.
     Trump has seized on his opponent's contemptuous remark, comparing it to Mitt Romney's infamous and self-damaging "forty-seven percent" remark in 2012.  Trump insists Clinton's statement is worse.  Comparing the two, Romney was referring to "forty-seven percent" of the electorate whose votes Republicans couldn't count on, including African-American and Latino American votes; thus, "we" can write off those forty-seven percent and concentrate on persuading the remainder.  Romney's logic, though cold, was at least honest as he demonstrated his, and the Republican Party's, lack of interest in the fortunes and lives of nearly half the population.  This logic persists in the GOP, as well as in the mind of Donald Trump, who doesn't give a flying fuck about Black people, Latinos, the poor, or the human race generally.  He's worse than Romney, because Mitt, at least, would've maintained, had he been elected president, a class-separation status quo, unjust though it is, similar to what we now have.  In his out of touch, plodding way, Romney nonetheless wouldn't have behaved like an adolescent with impulse control issues.
     Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark failed, logically and sensitively, because of its generalization.  "Half" of Trump's supporters are total fucking useless idiots capable only of fearing and hating?  How does she know this?  I've been willing to write in this blog, many times, that Trump supporters are stupid.  I stand by this opinion, based on the woefully ignorant shit that always comes out of their mouths whenever reporters put microphones before them, and also especially hearing the nastiness and violence of their shouted words at rallies.  "Deserving strong condemnation," "Shockingly bad in quality."  That's what deplorable means.  Clinton "pivoted" when she made this statement, from Trump himself to his followers.  I think it was pre-planned to see if it would work.  The news media in general hasn't supported it, because it's imprecise, although they've been tolerant of Trump's chronic imprecision.  He declared last year that Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, a remark pertaining to over a billion people, far greater a number of offended persons than the millions of yahoos who think Donald Trump actually gives a shit about them.
     "Shockingly bad in quality."  Yes.  The two main candidates for president in Shitstorm 2016.
     Clinton's health and dumb remark about "deplorables," (not a real word by the way), occupied the news cycle, instead of the meaning of an anniversary redolent with warfare, state terrorism, blowback, injustice, power concentrated in ever-smaller units, mass surveillance, and the deadliness of dark patriotism rising higher and higher in both major parties as they seek to wall off nearly everyone from their masters' wealth.

                                                                              Vic Neptune