A cantankerous political climax (at last).

A midweek political posting, as I get ready for our flight home from Vegas.  Re this awful election, I think we've mostly said what there is to say.  

Heck, Clinton and Obama seem at last to get what I (separately and unbeknownst, alack) have been calling for. Going after the troglodytic Roger Ailes puppets in Congress. Nothing would be better for human civilization, for the nation, and for the possible resurrection of a sane-grownup version of US conservatism, than the banishment from power of the Ryan-McConnell cabal that's continued the "rule" of Ailes and Dennis Hastert, two sexual predators who dominated the Republican Party for decades.

Republicans, this is your chance to clean house! Dump them all, down-ticket, including state assemblymen! You can come back in just 2 years with adults. Grownups willing to break with Hastert and Ailes and actually negotiate the way mature citizens (and yes, conservatives) are supposed to do. Come on. The GOP dominated Congress for 20 of the last 22 years. Can you name an accomplishment? Are you happy with those bozos?  Send us mature men and women, in 2018... not scary clowns.

== Cleaning up political snippets ==

Okay, okay... this posting will convey to you some of the snips and rants I had shoved aside for the last couple of months, in favor or more timely, or pertinent... or lucid... political commentaries.  Still, even if some of them are... well... stale, they may still carry some bite!

Such as:

The New York Times editorial board threw its support behind Hillary Clinton “rooted in respect for her intellect, experience, toughness and courage” and making only parenthetical references to her rival, Donald Trump.

While commenting on her mistakes, the Times board adds: “Over eight years in the Senate and four as secretary of state, she built a reputation for grit and bipartisan collaboration. She displayed a command of policy and diplomatic nuance and an ability to listen to constituents and colleagues that are all too exceptional in Washington,” the board wrote. “She is one of the most tenacious politicians of her generation, whose willingness to study and correct course is rare in an age of unyielding partisanship.”  

The board made a single brief but pointed mention of the GOP candidate as the “worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history” before declaring that “the best case for Hillary Clinton cannot be, and is not, that she isn’t Donald Trump.”

== After the first debate ==

So much to comment on.... So many things she could have done so much better. For example... One fascinating thing from this debate... Donald Trump essentially backed my claim that the Mexican middle class is rising spectacularly and largely due to NAFTA. And to be clear, the Mexican middle class is rising vastly, vastly more than the American middle class has suffered, and most of the US suffering was not due to NAFTA but allowing our oligarchs to seize passive wealth, hand over fist. Via Supply Side (Voodoo) "Economics" or SSVE.

It is the stunning U.S. accomplishment no one will talk about, but which should have been - and is - among our highest national priorities, because a middle class, prosperous Mexico -- another Canada -- is more in our interest than almost anything else. A fantastic accomplishment of the American Pax... and never mentioned by anyone.

Um, some logic here? Isn't it better and easier to defend Mexico's narrow border with Guatemala than the huge US-Mexico one? (BTW that is happening right now, as the US assists Mexico beefing up its southern "wall." And Mexico is eager, since their rising middle class is now complaining about illegal immigrants from the south, stealing jobs.)

Those in the U.S. who screech "those should be OUR jobs!" are just dumb. These are mostly jobs that would have otherwise gone to China. And where one was lost in the U.S., it was with a multiplier of dozens in Mexico.

Seriously, you think a rising Mexican middle class is a ZERO SUM situation? Idiots. They are already buying more US products, by far than when they were poor. And that will only skyrocket. Moreover it helps to explain why net immigration from Mexico - especially illegal - has plummeted across the last 8 years and gone into reverse!

And not mentioning that... and similar stats... showed that Hillary badly needs to get different debate coaches.

 == Try a sense of proportion ==

Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. ... Like Hillary Clinton and her predecessor Colin Powell, the Bush White House used a private email server. Only the Bush administration failed to store vastly more of its emails, as required by law...

...and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of them. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?” 

“Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney's office were in the administration's system but he couldn’t get them.” 

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC. 

All of which adds up to one word describing those who now screech at Hillary Clinton for mistakes that were literally… and I mean “literally” in the most literal sense – minuscule by comparison. What is that one word? Hypocrites.

== The opposite of dirty is...? ==

Why has President Obama’s White House been so scandal-free? Like Sherlock Holmes's "dog that failed to bark in the night," that lack of scandal is important, not least because it offers some clues to how the next White House can do the same.  See: Five policies and practices seem to have led the way, by Norman Eisen.

The author makes powerful points. But he leaves out a bigger picture.  In fact, GW Bush assigned scores of FBI agents to dig for "smoking guns" to send to jail "the most corrupt" Clintonite politicians.  What did the most extensive witch hunt in U.S. history accomplish?

 . . (1) agents distracted from counter-terror before 9/11... in other words outright treason, and

 . . (2) ZERO clintonian officials even indicted for malfeasance of office, a first ever for a two term administration. The first time. Ever.

Especially since a real witch hunt, extending across 24 years, costing upwards toward a billion dollars, diverting public resources and involving Vesuvius-spews of bile from talk-radio hosts across the land, never resulted in a single Clinton era official ever being imprisoned or even indicted for actual crimes having to do with malfeasance in the performance of their official duties. Not one, ever. 

To a scientist, this would come as close to disproof by failure to find supporting evidence as one could get.. (Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, when the search for evidence was so relentless and thorough.) Indeed, the implication -- galling to all of my Republican friends -- is that the Clintonites were the most honest governing clade in U.S. history.

Now we have a second U.S. administration to go eight years without a single demonstrably culpable malfeasance of office. (The current House GOP is desperately trying to deny the dems that double record, by attempting to impeach the IRS head for things he never did, ever, even remotely-at-all.) Only in the case of the Obama Administration, it’s not just the second to have no malfeasance indictments, but the first to have gone essentially *scandal free.*

Oh… you ravers who raise “scandals” of an utterly picayune nature? How about you first put up money that I can’t respond with things done by the Bushes that were literally orders of magnitude worse? Two orders? Three?  Four?

== Never Mind Trump ==

And now we have the main campaign slogan being pushed by John McCain and the Koch Network of PACs is “Never mind Trump! Vote Republican down-ticket for Congress and state legislature, so a GOP Congress can hold Hillary’s feet to the fire and block anything she tries!” 

Again, it’s the “Hastert Rule” concocted by Dennis “friend to boys” Hastert, and enforced fiercely by the head of Fox News, Roger "friend to women" Ailes, that turned the world’s greatest deliberative body – and its oldest political party – into wretched opium dens of glowering, indolent-slothful cronyism and turpitude. 

And treason, for the harm they have done to a nation where science and innovation and moving ahead have been key to our leadership of the world. Remember, Trump is not the disease, but a symptom. Burn out Rupert Murdoch's mob of nasty confederates. It is the only chance to restore and revive a conservatism of adults.

== Miscellany ==

A cute moment as Barack Obama cheerfully chides Bill Clinton to get up the stairs and into Air Force One to take him home (from the Israel funeral of Shimon Peres.) One president, highly disciplined and self-controlled, urging one who – well – was an LBJ style glad-hander and certainly a bit self-indulgent.

But both of them the most popular and most accomplished presidents in a long time.  The only 8 year presidents in U.S. history to see not a single one of their appointees topple or be indicted for malfeasance of office.  With almost every large metric of US national health rising instead of falling (as happened under both Bushes.)  

Oh, but what will she do with Bill?  A cabinet post to keep him busy? Picking drapes and hosting teas? Ambassador to France, to keep him both busy and happy and out of her hair?  Ambassador to Libya, to make a point? Both revenge and rewards can be served cold. I guess we'll see.