Tuesday, July 26, 2016



Why Donald Trump will win: Michael Moore lists five reasons

WHETHER you like it or not, Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. At least, according to filmmaker Michael Moore, who has warned the world to be prepared for a Donald Trump victory.

In a new blog entry on his web page, Moore writes he hates to be the bearer of bad news but the reality was Trump will become president in November. Moore, who already predicted the property tycoon would be the Republican nominee for president, writes there are five reasons Trump will win.

He stressed that he has never wanted to be proven wrong so badly in all his life, but the reality was we all needed to get used to hearing the words President Trump.

Moore already caused a stir with similar comments made last week. In a Wednesday night appearance on an online edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Moore said he thought the verbal attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention played to “a lot of people” Trump has to win over to become president.

“I think Trump is going to win. I’m sorry,” he said.
“People are in denial of this, but the chance of winning is really, really good.”

Moore said Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which have turned pro-Republican in recent years.

He warns what will happen in the UK will happen in the US with people felt abandoned by (Democrat) policies which helped lead to job losses and created a protectionist-type outlook. These people feel “screwed over” and while working classes might not agree with him they will end up voting for him because they are simply angry.

Trump’s argument fearmongering about the “Feminazi” is winning and the endangered white male will not put up with “a woman bossing us around” after having eight years of being told what to do by a black man, he warns.

But that’s not the only problem. Moore writes Clinton’s biggest problem is the fact she remains so unpopular, with 70 per cent of voters finding her untrustworthy. He adds another problem is she represents the old way of politics “not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected”.

Moore also reveals how a lack of voter care will mean the average Bernie backer will only be voting for her reluctantly and not convincing five of their mates to do the same thing.

He also reveals how Clinton’s killing the youth vote and few are excited or willing to volunteer to support her campaign.

Finally Moore warns of the Jesse Ventura effect where people will vote for Trump as a joke just to see what happens. He predicts millions will vote for Trump not because they like him but simply because they can and they feel disenfranchised and will wonder what a world with Trump will look like.

He warned this could happen after the “smart state of Minnesota” voted for ex-wrestler and governor Jesse Ventura in 1999. “They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual,” Moore writes. “They did so just because they could.”

SOURCE

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Jeff Jacoby: A hater's guide to Hillary

IF IT WAS said once during the Republican National Convention, it was said a thousand times: The only thing that unites the GOP is its hatred for Hillary Clinton.

A chasm separates the party's pro- and anti-Trump camps, the outward-looking Reaganites from the build-a-wall isolationists, the "Lyin' Ted" Cruz attackers from the "Lion Ted" Cruz admirers. But they all agree that they loathe Clinton. And that leaves liberals dumbfounded.

MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews, broadcasting from the convention on Tuesday, was aghast at what he called "this festival of hating Hillary"; when Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey roused the crowd with an indictment laying out Clinton's record of malfeasance, Matthews sputtered that the "bloodthirsty" delegates were just waiting for Christie to say: 'Kill her now.'" A day later, Time magazine's story out of Cleveland was headlined: "Hillary Clinton Hatred Remains Unifying Theme of Third GOP Convention Night." That was the word from The Atlantic as well: "'Lock Her Up': How Hillary Hatred Is Unifying Republicans."

Something tells me that at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the cup of Trump hatred will overflow. Something also tells me that Matthews & Co. will not grow nearly as perturbed when speaker after speaker gives voice to the party's hostility toward the GOP nominee, or when delegates liken Donald Trump to Nazis and Klansmen. After all, it's hard to see anything wrong with hating a candidate when you hate him too.

I am firmly in the #NeverTrump camp, and will not be surprised if the DNC becomes a "festival of hating Trump." There are compelling reasons to loathe Trump, and in the hothouse atmosphere of partisan politics, loathing frequently evolves into hatred.

But there are compelling reasons to loathe Clinton, too, even if an awful lot of liberals cannot or will not acknowledge them.

The former first lady and secretary of state is at least as unprincipled as Trump, willing to say or do virtually anything in the pursuit of power and wealth. Like other politicians, Clinton's stands on controversial public issues have flipped and flopped, invariably putting her on whichever side has grown more popular: She's been for expanding free trade and against it, for same-sex marriage and against it, for the Iraq war and against it, for more gun control and against it, for a crackdown on illegal immigrants and against it, for the trade embargo on Cuba and against it, for the ethanol mandate and against it — the list goes on and on.

Trump and Clinton both hunger for money, but only Clinton appears to have exploited the levers of US foreign policy for the enrichment of her family. By now the evidence is overwhelming that the Clinton Foundation has been used to extract millions of dollars from foreign governments, corporations, or financiers. The whiff of quid pro quo — financial deals with Bill and Hillary Clinton in exchange for diplomatic access or government approvals — has at times been overpowering. In his 2015 book "Clinton Cash," the Hoover Institution's Peter Schweitzer describes numerous cases that fail the smell test. The scope and extent of the payments made by foreign entities to the Clintons, whether as donations to the family foundation or paid in speaking fees, he writes, "are without precedent in American politics."

The late New York Times columnist William Safire long ago called Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar." Examples have proliferated throughout her career, with the congeries of lies about her private e-mail server only the most recent. Two devastating reports on Clinton's e-mail practices — one by the State Department's inspector general, the other by FBI Director James Comey — methodically shredded every claim she had made in defense of her behavior. Clinton has no more reverence for the truth than Trump.

NBC's Brian Williams lost his job for concocting a self-aggrandizing falsehood about coming under fire in an Iraqi war zone. Clinton concocted a similar falsehood about "landing under sniper fire" in Bosnia and having to run "with our heads down" to safety. It was a tale invented out of whole cloth, as news footage of the event confirms. It may not trouble Clinton acolytes, but it is one more data point in a long dossier of deceit that has convinced so many Americans she cannot be trusted.

Clinton, like Trump, attacks even honest critics without compunction. When she (or her husband) is caught doing something wrong, her instinctive response is to accuse her accusers of hating her. (Sound familiar?) In 1998, amid reports of Bill Clinton's Oval Office trysts with a young intern, Hillary told a TV interviewer that it was all a smear by the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that had always opposed the Clintons. That is still her go-to excuse.

Both Trump and Clinton can be cruel. But whereas his cruelty is that of schoolyard bully mocking a weaker or less popular kid, hers stems from a determination to bulldoze anyone or anything that stands between her and power.

What I still find most jaw-dropping about Clinton's Benghazi performance is not the calamitous failure of security at the compound in Libya, but the shameless and repeated claim that an obscure YouTube video was the proximate cause of the violence. Within hours of the attack, we now know, Clinton had e-mailed her daughter and called Libya's president to say that the attack in Benghazi was a planned Islamist terror operation, for which "an al-Qaeda-like group" had claimed responsibility. Yet days later she brazenly told the father of slain Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods that the YouTube video was to blame. "We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible," she said to Charles Woods. Even Trump might flinch from such cold and ruthless duplicity.

To be clear, I don't hate Hillary Clinton. I don't hate Donald Trump. But I do find them both to be indecent and unworthy, graspers of low character whose rise to political eminence is a terrible reflection on the Republican and Democratic parties.

SOURCE

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Melania Trump Strikes a Blow to Outdated Seventies Feminism

BY ROGER L SIMON

This is supposed to be the year of breaking the glass ceiling on the presidency itself  but -- call me cis-gendered -- I'm far more interested in potential first lady Melania Trump, who was a one-woman smash of poise and glamour speaking at the Republican National Convention opening night Monday. (The writing of the speech was banal, as it almost always is on all sides of the political spectrum.)

As most realize, that presidential glass ceiling could have been broken years ago -- it happened in Pakistan, of all places, in 1988 -- if the right person presented herself and Hillary Clinton (yawn) is (finally, after paying more dues than any of us can imagine) supposed to be that person.

She's about twenty years too late, make that thirty. These days women are outstripping men at virtually every academic level straight up to graduate and professional school and soon enough male presidents will be scarce. The UK is now on its second female PM.  For all we know, Trump may be the last male American president, should he win.  We should treasure him.

But that brings me to Melania.  Why shouldn't that (possibly last) cis-gendered American president have a wife who looks like that?  Give the man a break! (Sexist of me to comment on a woman's looks?   Well, I'm cis-gendered too.  Sorry, as the lady said, I was born that way).

But beyond the looks, Melania is no dummy. She speaks five languages -- that's four and a half more than the average American.  But she doesn't parade her knowledge, as opposed to, say, former Harvard prof turned politico Elizabeth Warren, who apparently speaks one and a half languages. (“My Spanish may not be great, but it’s coming from the heart,” Warren said at an immigration rally.) In deference to Warren, Serbian and Slovenian aren't particularly easy.

Elizabeth Warren, and for that matter Hillary Clinton, are products of the seventies feminist movement that Melania Trump decidedly is not.  That movement dealt with inequalities between the sexes that are largely gone, but as happens with so many movements, the cause lingers on... and on... long after it has outworn its usefulness, often to the point of being counter-productive.  Young women tend not to take Hillary's shrill and dated feminism seriously, as well they shouldn't.  Most people know self-interest when they see it.

So back to Slovenian-born Melania Trump.  What does she and their marriage tell us about the kind of president Donald Trump might make?  Is he a sexist because he likes beautiful women, albeit intelligent ones? Is he sexist because he makes nasty cracks at Megyn Kelly and Rosie O'Donnell (and plenty of men as well)?  Is he a sexist at all, as the Democrats would insist?

I seriously doubt it.  Between his daughter Ivanka and his wife Melania -- who seems destined, after Monday night, to emerge as a new Jackie Kennedy, if Donald is elected -- I would hazard a guess that Trump trusts women, in all probability, more than men  The attack on Trump  as a sexist, like the attack on him as a racist, is a lie based on the exploitation of his sloppy use of language.  Unfortunately, for that reason, Donald gives his opponents far more opportunities than he should to hang these labels on him. (Paradoxically, Trump is at once a terrific and a lousy communicator, riveting and fumbling.  I've never seen anyone quite like that.)

Seventies feminism -- I know from, alas, firsthand experience -- did not make for good and lasting marriages.  Whatever view you may have of its ideology,  it often turned what should have been a union of mates into a perpetual dialectical debate and (sometimes) sexual competition.  The Clintons are an example of a couple who had to deal with this and made compromises to survive that are more than slightly eerie -- almost, to be cruel, a form of Macbeth Family Values.  Everything is held together by ambition -- and then just barely.

This does not compare well with what we have seen of the Trump family, a close-knit group that could almost be the subject of a 1950s sitcom were they not billionaires.  What we saw from Melania on Monday night is something I have never seen from Hillary -- that she really loves her husband.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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