Places to round up and humanely keep the 400,000 undocumented immigrants from Dallas alone. Or the 400,000 more from Houston. Or the 500,000 more from New York City—more New Yorkers than live on Staten Island.
You know, in camps, with concentration.
Some of them big enough to fit all the residents of Atlanta in them. Or Kansas City. Or Cleveland. Or New Orleans.
Now, you might not need to house all eleven million, because some of the people would kill themselves rather than go back, or would resist the roundup and would be killed—humanely, I’m sure.
Still, you’d better make the camps, with concentration just a little better, because, well, sorry, it’d be necessary—to make the process go more smoothly and more humanely—to make it illegal to, you know, help or hide anybody accused of being an undocumented American. Maybe Trump would make it illegal to not turn in . . . any undocumented Americans, and anybody guilty of one of these crimes would go into the camps, too.
You know, the camps, with concentration.
But don’t worry. Trump intends to do it “humanely.”
These would be humane camps. With concentration.
And what could possibly go wrong . . . in them?
It’ll be done humanely!
MELTDOWN
Post date • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13
At the start, I’d just like to reiterate Donald Trump’s laudable interruption of his now four-day-long temper-filibuster to offer his now famous public service announcement at Panama City, Florida, about the importance of voting: “So go and register, make sure you get out and vote November 28.”
In fact, I’ll go further. If you’re voting on November 28, I say: vote for Donald Trump.
What the hell is wrong with this guy?
November 28 is Cyber Monday, the online Christmas-shopping apex.
November 28!
*
Quick! A diversion!
Maybe Trump could attack a prominent Republican—like Mike Pence!
Maybe Trump could say Bill Clinton had an affair with Nancy O’Dell!
Maybe Trump could claim that he is appalled by that tape on which Hillary Clinton is heard using coarse sexual language about women in a conversation with Billy Bush.
Because that’s about all we are missing from the Trump meltdown that began early Monday afternoon.
There have been Trump tweetstorms before, and Trump rages before, and even Trump attacks on other Republicans before, but this one has taken on a kind of “Mr. Smith’s Evil Twin Goes to Washington” quality.
It has gone deeper and deeper into a kind of campaign psychosis, and yet it is being treated as if it were some kind of campaign strategy . . .
“Donald Trump’s New Attack Strategy: Curb Clinton Vote,” wrote The Wall Street Journal late Tuesday.
Trump “plans to renew the nationalist themes that built his base and amplify his no-holds-barred attacks against Hillary Clinton to try to depress Democratic voter turnout, his advisers said.”
So it’s full-on, no-holds-barred, absolute war against Hillary Clinton. Throw anything at her, use any means, by hook or by crook, just keep pounding away that she’s the worst person in history, and all efforts must begin with the understanding that she is the source of every evil in the world, and not only is nothing and no one more deadly than her, but that nothing and no one could be, ever, under any circumstances.
“Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win—I will teach them!”
So how does that work?
If you read that and you’re a—you know—Trump voter, you think: “Trump says Hillary’s bad but Paul Ryan is worse.”
But if you read that and you’re a—you know—Hillary voter, you think: “Trump says Hillary’s bad but Paul Ryan is worse.”
Only one kind of voter could read that and not think, “Trump says Hillary’s bad but Paul Ryan is worse”—that would be the voters who actually are Donald Trump.
Quick! A diversion!
“The very foul mouthed Sen. John McCain begged for my support during his primary (I gave, he won), then dropped me over locker room remarks!”
Once again—locker room remarks, because everybody talks that way in their locker room, and everybody’s locker room is a bus on a Hollywood film lot in which all the men are wearing microphones and know they are being videotaped for a television show.
So that didn’t work against McCain.
Quick! A diversion!
He torched McCain again, then said, “I wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with a lot of these people, that I can tell you.”
That deft bit of strategy reminded anybody still listening that there was no way he ever would have been in a foxhole with John McCain, because while McCain was a pilot who was tortured inside a North Vietnamese POW camp, at exactly the same time, Trump was getting draft deferments for a hangnail or whatever it was.
Quick! A diversion!
That crazy wandering stuff during the debate? Tuesday night, “she came into my territory . . . I never walked near her. She stands right in front of me.”
Yesterday, NBC reported that, as all this is happening, two big-money Trump donors—responsible for tens of thousands of dollars—have asked for their contributions back. And the bundler who gathered about a million says he’s done raising money for Trump.
Quick! A diversion!
So back to the greatest hits, and late Tuesday he stands up in front of a rally and blows that dog whistle. Again.
“Hillary Clinton wants to really dismantle our Second Amendment, so maybe she should start with her security people not carrying weapons.”
Mr. Trump.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t like you. I think you’re the most dangerous political figure in our country’s history—although on sunny days, I begin to think you’re only the most dangerous political figure since the 1864 Democratic presidential nominee who ran on a platform of giving up on the Civil War and repudiating the Emancipation Proclamation.
So, politically, I don’t care if you melt in the hot sun.
But personally, all human life matters to me. So let me say this, just on a basic “ask not for whom the bell tolls” level:
Get some help.
See a doctor, do some meditation, take a brief leave of absence, read a book on ten quick steps to a healthier mind . . . Do something.
This is not innovative brilliance. This is not campaigning. This is not self-advocacy. And there is no brand-new political strategy by which one wins . . . by getting fewer votes.
Get. Some. Help.
I will even, on the premise of “It tolls for theeeee,” offer you a little cover. When you said:
“Make sure you get out and vote November 28”?
You were . . . referring to the campaigns for mayor, city alderman, township supervisor, and township assessor of Bloomington, Illinois—because November 28 is the deadline there for filing petitions to run for those offices.
That’s what you meant.
It tolls for theeeee . . .
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
Post date • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13
Donald Trump is—at best—being played by the Russians like the proverbial two-dollar banjo.
Donald Trump is—at worst—the spokesmodel of the Russians in this country, fronting for their dictator, Vladimir Putin.
There is now hard evidence of this. Not just Trump’s advocacy of Putin’s dubious poll approval numbers, nor his admiration for his leadership style, nor his excuses for the opponents and reporters jailed or hurt or worse on his watch.
There is now hard evidence of this, and it does not even require invoking the name of the shadowy investor Carter Page, nor the Russian bureaucrat believed to be in charge of his gov
ernment’s efforts to intervene in our presidential election.
This is much simpler, and much stupider, and it reinforces my oldest theory—that democracy survives not as much because of the efforts and sacrifice of the noble to preserve it as it does because of the sloppiness and imbecility of those who seek to destroy it.
On October 21, 2015, Newsweek printed a story called “Benghazi Biopsy,” by a very good reporter named Kurt Eichenwald.
Benghazi—the lone obsession fully shared by the Republicans and the right wing and the alt-right and Donald Trump.
Eichenwald wrote:
“One important point has been universally acknowledged by the nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable. Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate.”
On Monday of this week, the tenth, Sputnik, an online news and radio service created by Russia’s government-controlled news agency, posted what it called “a major revelation” from the emails stolen by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Sputnik claimed that in one Podesta email, Sidney Blumenthal—the other shared obsession of the whole spectrum of right-wingers—had secretly written that Benghazi was preventable.
Sputnik claimed that Sidney Blumenthal had written this:
One important point that has been universally acknowledged by nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable . . .
Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate.
It’s exactly what Kurt Eichenwald wrote in Newsweek a year ago . . . minus one instance of the article “the.”
Otherwise, it’s word for word. What Kurt Eichenwald wrote, WikiLeaks stole out of John Podesta’s emails and published as something Sidney Blumenthal said.
Well, that’s a helluva coincidence.
Of course, it isn’t a coincidence.
A Blumenthal email included those words because Blumenthal was emailing Eichenwald’s story.
He didn’t say them, he didn’t write them, yet they go from Podesta’s hacked email account to a Russian propaganda site and are then presented to the world as a blockbuster confession by Sidney Blumenthal.
A fake blockbuster designed to alter the outcome of our presidential election, brought to you by WikiLeaks and the propaganda arm of the Russian government.
But it gets worse, and it gets scarier.
And here is where Donald Trump is either knowingly serving as an agent for the Russians, spreading disinformation . . .
Or he’s just a moron reading stuff he doesn’t understand that somebody found on the internet.
Trump, addressing a crowd at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, hours after the Sputnik forgery went online, on Monday of this week:
So Blumenthal writes a quote—this just came out a little while ago, I have to tell you this. “One important point has been universally acknowledged by the nine previous reports about Benghazi.”
This is Sidney Blumenthal, the only one she was talking to. She wasn’t talking to Ambassador Stevens, even the six hundred calls, probably desperation.
“The attack was almost certainly preventable.” Benghazi.
“Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect the United States personnel at an American consulate in Libya.” He meant Benghazi.
“If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate.”
In other words, he’s now admitting that they could have done something about Benghazi. This just came out a little while ago.
Trump was reading the paragraph from the Kurt Eichenwald article in Newsweek, falsely and obviously turned by the Russians into a fake Sidney Blumenthal quote, and shoved under this idiot Trump’s nose.
He read it aloud.
And the crowd started chanting, “Lock her up.”
Donald Trump—speeches written by the Russian government.
But why should you think that, and not that it could be a coincidence or just the typical sloppy thinking of a slob like Trump?
Because of a very strange man named Roger Stone. He is a longtime Trump confidant and had been a formal adviser to his campaign.
Stone tweets on Sunday, October 2: “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.”
The next day?
“I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”
But neither of those is a smoking gun.
In fact, Assange canceled a much-touted news conference for Wednesday. Besides which, it’s not as though Stone actually specifically referenced John Podesta or anything.
Oh, right. He did.
On August 21, Stone had tweeted:
“Trust me, it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
Eichenwald writes it, WikiLeaks hacks Podesta’s email, Stone threatens Podesta, Stone promises Clinton is done thanks to WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks produces an email, Eichenwald’s article is misidentified as something Sidney Blumenthal said, and Trump reads it to the red-meat crowd hours later—like a good puppet.
And it sure looks like Stone knew it was going to happen.
Six weeks ago.
Only he was too stupid to keep his mouth shut, and the Russians were too stupid to realize that the guy who really wrote the quote would recognize his own words when he read them.
And on top of everything else, Trump then complained because it wasn’t the October surprise he’d been promised.
Wednesday, 9:46 a.m.: “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”
True—only the system in question is Vladimir Putin’s.
*
Democracy survives not as much because of the efforts and sacrifice of the noble to preserve it as it does because of the sloppiness and imbecility of those who seek to destroy it.
Kindly pray that this continues to be true.
TO TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS: YOU KNOW THIS MAN
Post date • MONDAY, OCTOBER 17
Three weeks from today, we will stage the most important presidential election since the Civil War.
Three weeks until that election and one candidate has spent the past forty-eight hours insisting there is already voter fraud happening at polling places that don’t exist yet.
Three weeks until that election, which that candidate says is rigged—unless he wins—because of voter fraud, which has happened thirty-one times out of the past one billion votes cast in this country.
Three weeks until that election and the leaders of one party are still chained, of their own volition, to the captain of the Titanic.
Three weeks until that election and their candidate has proved himself, more and more, hour by hour, day by day, to be manifestly unstable, sexually criminal, deranged, bigoted, and despotic.
Yet—to paraphrase Winston Churchill—these so-called leaders have been given the choice between shame and loss of office. They have chosen shame. They will get loss of office . . . later.
But it is not to them I want to speak at this three-week mark before the election. It is to those who will vote for Trump.
More important, it is to those who may vote for Trump.
To those who, bluntly, can still hear me.
If you’re thinking of voting for Donald Trump, I’m sorry this country and your life in it are not what you thought they would be, nor what you thought was promised to you.
I’m sorry that you think you have been denied something by Am
ericans who don’t look like you or pray like you. I would remind you that when your grandfather or great-grandfather or whoever came here—and whenever they came here—they were blamed, identically, because they were Catholic or Italian or Irish or just foreign.
I don’t doubt you have grievances, or that our system of government has been so overcome by the political industry that you see no chance that you will get what you really want. I have felt that way, too, nearly every day of my adult life.
But I’m not here to agree or disagree with your grievances. I’m here to urge you to recognize that what you see as your solution will, in fact, end with your slavery.
Because . . . you know this man.
You have always known this man.
Voting for Donald Trump is like not getting the car you want, so you instead take the car you have—and you drive it into a wall. While you are in it. While your family is in it. While your country is in it.
This election is not a question of policy or political correctness or rebellion against the machine. This is sanity versus insanity, and freedom versus a police state.
This man is crazy.
He is violent against women, he has been violent since he was a child, he hates and disparages people based on how they look or where their parents are from. And anyone and anything who goes against him is not treated the way you would treat them, or it. He does not move on. He does not work harder. He does not find another way. He says it’s fixed, it’s a plot, it’s a lie, it’s the fault of Mexicans, it means war.
He has uncontrollable anger.
And you want to give him nuclear weapons?
*
You know this man.
You have always known this man.
He is the lying used car salesman across town. He is the contractor who puts a hole in your wall and then vanishes. He is the fast-talking huckster on the late-night television commercial. He is the husband or the wife or the girlfriend or the boyfriend who promised you forever and ran off with your heart and your money—and your life.
You may not like Hillary Clinton or her policies or anything about her, but if she’s elected, you will have four years to find a presidential candidate of your own whose true goal is not to rob you blind, and four years from now you will still have a presidential election and a vote—and a country.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 7