The blah blahs

I guess that I can't win.

I talked to a friend last night who says he can't stand the blog these days because I am sounding so liberal of late. Excuse me? I did a quick survey of the past month or so of writing after our phone call and failed to see any evidence of my perceived bias towards the dark side. Mostly I put up pictures, figuring that scenery rarely enrages anybody.

Have been getting a lot of similar emails about the dangers regarding that living minion of satan, Hillary Clinton.

Truth is I have done my best to stay off politics whenever I can, it just pisses people off. I have friends and readers that are both liberal and conservative and I would rather talk about policy than party affiliation.

I regularly excoriate Obama on a host of issues, wrote about Benghazi when nobody wrote about Benghazi but how does the Cure song go, it's never enough?

I prefer to think of myself as an honest umpire who calls balls and strikes as he sees them. If I have a bias, it is towards any person in a position of authority who happens to be in power, irrespective of party. Stan says that I don't play well with others.

Dain recently told me at dinner that he used to think I was really off on the left side, now he thinks I lilt too far to the right. Jeez.

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Having said all this in my preamble, we have the clearest national choice in this country in memory and are headed for a landslide not seen since long ago when a little girl was picking daisies apart and throwing them at Goldwater.

When your only hope is the demographic of ignorant and uneducated poor white voters, you are in serious trouble.

The Republican Party is in its own little civil war, between the establishment and the Freedom Caucus. The internecine shakeout might take years. Their party's views, right or wrong, no longer resonate with a majority of the country, especially the young.

Hillary or Shrillary gets a lot of guff for being a supposed liar. I don't know where this comes from, all politicians prevaricate and shade the truth from time to time. I don't see her as any more or less dishonest than the next guy or gal. Maybe it looks worse on a woman, I don't know. I just don't buy it. I like what she said when she started the campaign, that she was not perfect, merely a human being, encompassing all that entails.

I don't blame her for her husband being a no good philandering slut either. Not my business. He happened to be a good president, nonetheless.

She is a serious policy wonk and fairly humorless but she knows the job as well as anybody and I trust that she will do a good job once installed in office. She will still be hated by a sizable portion of the electorate but that is the country we live in today, two balkanized states that rarely talk to each other and mainly throw up roadblocks to keep government in a paralyzed state.

I have followed her opponent since I lived in New York, where he has always been regarded as a buffoon. Trump changes positions like the wind, I can't believe that he really believes in anything except power. If you want an accounting of the man, you only need to follow the companies that he associated with, see how he treats not only the help or the golf course neighbors but anybody stupid enough to get involved with one of his concerns.

Follow the saga of Trump University or the casino bankruptcies. You talk about a guy who has received a free pass. The teflon don. This guy has the evasion skills of Barry Sanders.

I care about a lot of things deeply, especially reproductive and sexual choice. I don't want a leader who may be already on the hook to Moscow. I don't trust Iran. I still believe that the world is a sphere and that as far as we know, Jesus never really had a pet dinosaur. I think that we deserve strong borders and that people that don't respect those borders and commit crimes forsake their rights to citizenship.

I have not yet heard a rational reason to cast a vote for Donald Trump or even a reason to believe a single word that comes out of his mouth.

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Susan Estrich, now a mouthpiece for Roger Ailes, whatever the hell happened to you?

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Snopes. John Kerry turtles on terrorism.

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Porkstakes. Coal country thinks it has a whole mess of handouts coming. First they had to stop growing that poisonous tobacco and now they're after coal and durnit, somebody is going to have to pay for it. They vote Republican and hate communism unless it means more money coming their way, like the cattle men who think they have a right to graze for next to nothing on federal land.

“I’m a lawyer. I rarely get offended by an offering of money to redress a wrong,” said State Senator Ben Chafin, a Republican, who watched the decline of his father’s tobacco farm. “But $3 billion a year won’t even be enough to buy everyone a custard cone.”

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Marco Rubio has the unenviable job of telling Floridians on the front lines of the Zika scare why he believes that they should be forced to give birth to and spend a lifetime raising, microcephalic babies. This is what happens when we put the self righteous moralizers in charge.

Take a look at the current leadership in Texas, Abbot, Patrick and the whatshisname AG who was indicted on felony fraud charges. Look at their anti-woman policies, at the machinations of the Texas Education Board, the Railroad Commission, the environment.  Does anyone in their right mind think that this is how we want to live in the rest of America? If you do, you know who to vote for.

Vote for anybody the hell you want. Maybe we'll get what we deserve.