And then it happened.
And it didn’t change me much.
I only got one more dog. And got two other dogs for my girlfriend’s parents. And started working with a rescue shelter for injured and sick dogs. And started giving out dog books for Christmas. And saw that most of human behavior can be explained by watching dogs. And called all my dog-world friends from before I was blessed and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And realized that dogs explain enough of the meaning of life that you don’t need to know any of the other possible meanings of life.
No biggie.
I was just born again.
*
And Donald Trump . . . no dog.
As Anatole France said, part of his soul, unawakened.
Even so, this was still just philosophy.
And then the Trump campaign put out, and almost as quickly pulled back, a proposal to eliminate what it called the “FDA Food Police.”
Citing as one of its supposed government overreaches that the agency “even dictates the nutritional content of dog food.”
Well, it does dictate the nutritional content of dog food.
It dictates the nutritional content of dog food so the dog food doesn’t kill the dogs.
As The Daily Beast reported, in the past year, eleven of the twenty-three FDA pet-food recalls were to remove poisoned pet food from shelves.
To save dogs’ lives.
*
And Donald Trump, who tweets “fired like a dog,” “cheated on like a dog,” “begged for money like a dog,” and all the other put-downs as his go-to insult, as if a dog were somehow a bad thing . . .
Donald Trump has given a hint that, if elected, he would protect a businessman’s right to poison dogs.
Maybe your dogs.
Maybe mine.
Maybe any of the other 78 million.
Because . . . you know . . . profits.
*
Hey, Don.
Fuck you.
THE ELECTION IS INVIOLABLE, TRUMP
Post date • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4
The first question to Mike Pence in tonight’s vice presidential debate should not be about Donald Trump’s tax avoidance.
It should be: Does Donald Trump believe in democratic elections? In this country?
*
It was, perhaps, the first sane moment of his campaign.
It appears it was his last.
Within ninety-six hours he had repudiated that moment. And that repudiation was the most craven and cowardly act not just of this election, not just of this campaign, but by any presidential candidate since the Civil War.
And it was lost in the shuffle.
Something un-American, something unbelievable, something unconscionable—and it barely registered . . .
Buried amid the emotional debris of an unstable megalomaniac raining down upon the nation: the “genius” who claimed that poor people weren’t paying enough taxes when he might have paid none for eighteen years; a debate over nonexistent sex tapes; controversy over who will tweet at three a.m. invocations of marital infidelity, cheating at charity, cheating at illegal trade with foreign nations . . .
Lost in the avalanche of stupidity and self-obsession and hypocrisy from this idiot Trump . . .
Missed—in large part—because there are a dozen things a day, any one of which should disqualify him from residency, let alone presidency.
And yet—he said it, as glibly as if he were unhappy about a zoning board decision.
“One of you will not win this election,” debate moderator Lester Holt had said. “Are you willing to accept the outcome as the will of the voters?”
And Trump could not simply answer it. He first had to wade through the involuntary egotism and spasmodic salesmanship with which he thinks he cloaks the most insecure man of our times from public view. But finally he said it. “If she wins, I will absolutely support her.”
The first thing he has yet said that indicated that for a moment, just for a moment, he could put America ahead of his own ego, his own naked lust for power and control. Control not just of a company or a television show, where what he says is the rule, but of a nation in what he says is the law.
And it was just for a moment.
For then the impact of his failures at the debate hit him, and the pattern of whatever is wrong with him stopped waning and started waxing, and Trump . . . took it back.
Late last Friday, Trump told The New York Times that he was rethinking his statement. Rethinking whether or not to recognize the outcome of the presidential election next month. “We’re going to have to see. We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to have to see.”
No presidential candidate, no political party, no leading government figure, no member of the military, no prominent commentator nor leader of any kind is permitted to raise such doubt. The sanctity of the election is the bedrock of this country—not the Constitution, not the Bill of Rights, not the military, not the Founding Fathers.
There is only one permissible response to a question about the outcome of the election: acceptance. Merely to hesitate, in the most trying of circumstances, in the midst of legal actions by both sides, in the immediate aftermath of as close a vote as could be imagined, is to change one’s reputation forever—as it did that of Al Gore. To hesitate and be judged in the legal right still eternally alters a man’s place in history—as it did that of George W. Bush.
Richard Nixon, who craved the presidency more—and more ominously—than any other man who attained it . . . even he did not move to formally contest the razor-thin margin of 1960, and he certainly did not imply that he would not—nor others should not—recognize it.
Samuel J. Tilden, denied the presidency in 1877 in a fateful bargain between the Democrats and Republicans that sanctified Jim Crow for eighty years, still walked away. Even with the sitting president quietly strengthening the military presence in Washington over rumors of armed revolt no matter who won—even as members of the U.S. military supposedly offered Tilden support to overturn the election by force—he obeyed.
Abraham Lincoln, when he thought, as late as September 1, 1864, that he would lose reelection to General George McClellan and the Democrats, was ready to leave office—in the middle of the Civil War.
And Nixon and Gore and Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 and Andrew Jackson in 1824 and all the other losers in all the other impossibly tight elections in our history not only never raised a serious doubt about the legitimacy of their own defeat after it happened—even when, as in Tilden’s case, the flaming torch of Civil War had been one side’s recourse just four elections previously—but none of them ever would have dreamed, in a dozen lifetimes, to threaten not to recognize it before it happened.
Trump: You are a child throwing matches at a gasoline can.
You are pulling on the loose thread that every winner, every loser, every saint, every devil, and everyone else who has ever sought the presidency has known better than to touch.
You are denying the fundament of democracy; betraying the history of your party, your people, your nation.
Trump: You are fomenting revolution.
There is no margin for error here.
Because, no, Trump, we are not “going to have to see.”
What we are going to do, we Americans—after this remark, I don’t know what you are—what we are going to do is honor the fifty-seven elections that have gone before. Even if they’re hacked by the Russians, whom you like far too much to make thinking men and women do anything but cringe. And if we don’t like the outcome, we will act to remedy it, within the Constitution. Opposition, protest, impeachment, even formal contestation—all of it legal, ethical, often necessary to the life of the nation.
But nobody, Trump, who believes in democracy—Republican or Democrat, conserv
ative or liberal—first says he will “absolutely support” the free elections that have kept us free for 240 years and then, within the week, because he doesn’t like the polls, because he doesn’t like the commentators, because he doesn’t get his way, suddenly switches to “We’re going to have to see.”
Trump, you are—by yourself and as a representative of a brutal minority in this country—a threat to the very democracy that permits a savage like you to rise this far and get so close to the life-and-death power of the presidency. In the kind of nightmare country you invoke just by using the very phrase “We’re going to have to see,” your presidential aspirations would have ended long ago, and not by legal means.
But this is America, and this is democracy, and even when nearly two and a half centuries’ worth of process and law and good fortune comes to a sudden end and the system spits up someone wholly unqualified for office, nowhere is it written that the rest of us can simply say “we’re going to have to see” if we will support the outcome of this election, even if it led to the cataclysmic nightmare of your administration, Trump.
We would stay and fight you.
Through the law.
Through the Constitution.
Through the Constitution, and for those things, the Founding Fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor; for those things, every soldier who ever wore this nation’s colors fought; for those things, every patriot willingly offered up all they knew and loved.
And the first of those things, Trump, is the sanctity of the election.
If you cannot now hold to a pledge to honor and accept its outcome for more than ninety-six hours, you are not a president, you are not a man of freedom, you are not an American. Get out—out of this race—now, before you damage this democracy still further. Get out—out of this country—now, before the cowards and fascists and bigots who have rallied around you for a year begin to believe that their subversion of democracy will be permitted here.
You’d fit in perfectly in the new government of the Philippines.
You like Russia? I’m sure they can find people for you to dictate to and oppress there.
Get out, Trump.
For once in your life, recognize that something is not about you.
Nor is it about your opponent, nor the Democrats, nor the Republicans.
It is about the essence of the United States of America.
And you do not have the option of saying, “We’re going to have to see.”
*
Two hundred forty years of patriots’ blood and respect for law will not be sacrificed at the gold-plated altar of your sick and demented—and treasonous—ego.
DONALD TRUMP’S TOP FIFTY EXCUSES
Post date • WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5
We have excuses from Donald Trump about apparently not paying taxes—“That makes me smart” and the amazing “I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them.”
Nevertheless.
We begin day five of our wait for Donald Trump to come up with an excuse for why he accused a woman who is not in a sex tape of being in a sex tape . . .
When he himself was in a sex tape . . .
Please note how remarkable it is that Trump has not blamed his agent, or a celebrity look-alike service, or claimed he didn’t know Playboy even made sex tapes, or simply insisted that the Second Amendment protects his right to bear arms and legs and the rest.
Because Trump . . . has an excuse . . . for everything.
*
The top fifty of them?
I mean . . . recently?
His excuse for not releasing his taxes? “I’m being audited, so I can’t.”
But he will “when she releases her 33,000 emails.”
But “I don’t think anybody cares.”
But “there’s nothing to learn from them.”
Plus, his tax rate is “none of your business.”
*
His excuse for his bad poll numbers? The “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.”
Without the “disgusting and corrupt media,” he’d be leading by 20 percent.
And he’s not losing: “I certainly don’t think it is appropriate to start changing all of a sudden when you have been winning.”
*
Trump’s excuses about Russia:
Hacking into Democratic National Committee computers? “It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”
Shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17: “They say it wasn’t them.”
Going on a Larry King TV show carried by Russian-owned television and saying Vladimir Putin was a great leader: he thought it was for a Larry King podcast.
*
His excuses for supporting the invasion of Iraq in September 2002:
A 2004 interview proves he didn’t.
He told Sean Hannity he didn’t.
When Howard Stern asked him, he said, “I don’t know,” even though the tape shows he actually said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“By the time the war started, I was against it.
“And shortly thereafter, I was really against it.”
Regardless, when he said it, he “was not a politician.”
*
His excuse for his performance in the first debate:
“They also gave me a defective mic,” but he wasn’t sniffing, because also, “the mic was very bad, but maybe it was good enough to hear breathing.”
His excuse for not attacking the Clintons’ marriage: “I really eased up because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” Then he attacked anyway. Then he questioned whether Hillary had been loyal to Bill.
Also: Moderator Lester Holt? “Lester is a Democrat. It’s a phony system. They are all Democrats.”
No, he’s a registered Republican, and “he did a great job.”
No, he deserved a “C, C minus,” but “I’m not complaining.”
No, Lester Holt rigged it. “What a rigged deal. I tell you, we’re in such a rigged system.”
Trump’s excuse if he loses the election: “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged.”
Before then? “The polls are rigged.”
His opponent cleared by investigators? It’s a “rigged system.”
But “it’s not just the political system that’s rigged. It’s the whole economy.”
*
But not everything is rigged.
Trump’s excuse when he asked Russia to hack Clinton’s email? “Of course I’m being sarcastic.”
Trump’s excuse when he called President Obama the founder of ISIS? Quote: “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?”
*
Small crowd size in Colorado Springs? The fire marshal was a Democrat.
Small crowd size in Washington? Six hundred thousand would’ve been there, but “they wouldn’t let them in.”
*
How his wife, Melania, got into the country despite apparent immigration irregularities? She’ll hold a news conference.
Why Melania hasn’t held a news conference? They released a letter from her lawyer.
*
His excuse for claiming that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese? “I did not say it.”
He tweeted it.
His excuse? “I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. . . . But this is done for the benefit of China.”
Trump’s excuse for his connection to alt-right white supremacists? The term “was just made up” by Hillary Clinton.
The excuse for violence at his rallies? It adds “excitement.”
His excuse
for not disavowing white supremacist David Duke during a TV interview? “A very bad earpiece.”
His excuse for proposing a Muslim ban: “It was just a suggestion.”
His excuse for saying he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue in New York City and not lose any support: “Obviously it was a joke.”
His excuse for calling Ted Cruz a pussy: “We were all just having fun.”
His excuse for disparaging Heidi Cruz’s appearance: “I didn’t start it.”
His GOP debate excuse for disparaging remarks toward women: “Oftentimes, it’s fun; it’s kidding; we have a good time.”
His excuse for commenting that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter, he might be dating her: “Cute. It was cute.”
His excuse for abusive remarks about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado: “She had gained a massive amount of weight.”
His excuse for disparaging Machado after she endorsed Hillary Clinton: “Check out sex tape.”
His excuse for the three-to-five-a.m. overnight tweetstorm that included the phrase “check out sex tape”: “At least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call.”
And lastly, his excuse for making all of his harsh remarks:
“I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.”
That was August 19.
Before the Washington Hotel Birther News Conference; before he talked about disarming Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service detail; before he physically mocked Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia collapse; before the “Raise your hand if you’re not a Christian conservative” thing; before he said he might not recognize the outcome of the election; before he slammed the entire African American community, Mika Brzezinski, Maureen Dowd, ex–CIA director Robert Gates, Colin Kaepernick, Obama’s poll numbers compared with Putin’s, Alicia Machado, the Federal Reserve System, Jeff Zucker, Elizabeth Warren . . . and Rosie O’Donnell. Again.
“BECAUSE YOU’D BE IN JAIL”
Post date • MONDAY, OCTOBER 10
On the thirtieth of September 2007, the Russian chess master Garry Kasparov declared that he would run against Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor in the presidential election in Russia.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 5