Columnist.
Donald Trump once called the Rev. Al Sharpton "a con man," meaning that Sharpton plays the race card less out of sincerity and more as a method to make demands and extract concessions. But has there ever been a bigger legislative con man than the soon-to-be-retired Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., currently the second-longest serving member of the House?
Hard to believe, but Hillary Clinton's campaign team thinks they lost because Donald Trump ignited America's inner bigot, which caused the KKK and Aryan Brotherhood members and sympathizers to show up in droves and vote Trump.
Every sane person expects Green Party candidate Jill Stein's attempt to overturn the election with her vote recount effort to crash and burn. Given this, why would the Hillary Clinton campaign file a motion in support of a Stein-initiated request for a hand vote recount in Wisconsin?
Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the odds-on favorite to become the Democratic National Committee's chairman, had a long association with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. He compared then-President George W. Bush and 9/11 to Adolf Hitler and the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament building: "9/11 is the juggernaut in American history and it allows ... it's almost like, you know, the Reichstag fire," Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country (Hitler) in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."
Just because "our guy" won, Economics 101 hasn't been repealed. Donald Trump is still a populist, not a fiscal conservative or a states' rights federalist.
The day after one of the greatest political upsets in world history, I dug out my July 2016 exchange with "David," an Ohio left-wing retired law professor whom I once considered my best friend.
Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, just announced his decision. For his presidential vote on a mail-in ballot, he wrote in the failed 2008 Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Apparently, Kasich found Wendell Willkie too difficult to spell. For the umpteenth time, Donald Trump, out of 2016's 17 Republican candidates, placed 20th on my list. He is a populist — not a fiscal conservative — with an assortment of views, some conservative, many centrist and even liberal. Has there ever been such a blatantly protectionist modern Republican candidate?
With a Republican candidate, the media can be counted upon to seize upon any deficiencies — big or small, real or imagined — while giving the Democrat a pass. So Trump's "failure to ever apologize" outweighs an examination of Clinton's flat-out lie during the third debate when she insisted that the Supreme Court Heller case was about "toddlers," as opposed to the fundamental issue of whether the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms.
What will it take for Democrats to lose the 95 percent black vote? Hacked email to and from staffers at the Democratic National Committee and to and from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, shows she cares far more about the black vote than black voters. Concern for lack of diversity: One email, three months before she announced her presidential candidacy, shows Clinton's future campaign staff mocking the criticism that it lacks racial diversity. Her then-spokesperson and future traveling press secretary Nick Merrill dismissively joked that former Bill Clinton chief of staff and future Hillary Clinton campaign director Robby Mook "claims he's 1/16th Apache, so we should be all set."
The crass tape of Donald Trump speaking in vulgar terms about women and what he has supposedly done to them worked, ironically, in Trump's favor during the second debate. It meant that more people tuned in for this debate than otherwise would have and saw Trump's vastly superior performance compared with that of the first debate. Trump promptly apologized and admitted to being embarrassed by the things he said, but he attributed his filthy remarks to "locker room" banter. When asked, he pointedly denied doing the things he bragged he did, including groping women as he'd boasted on the tape. Assuming no woman comes forward to dispute his denial — and, so far, no one has — the air pretty much escaped from this "bombshell" within the first few minutes of the debate.
Let's describe the relationship of the media and their Democratic cohorts to taxes and those who "don't pay them" as, well, complicated. In 2012, ABC News' Jonathan Karl claimed on television that an auto mechanic making $75,000 a year paid a higher federal income tax rate than that paid by then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But, as I later told Karl in a radio interview, that would only be true if Mr. Auto Mechanic had no children, owned no home and therefore did not take the same deductions as those taken by Romney. In an apples-to-apples comparison, I informed him, Romney, at a 14 percent rate, pays twice the rate paid by Mr. Mechanic.
Monday night's debate moderator, NBC's Lester Holt, asked Donald Trump why he "perpetuated a false claim that the nation's first black president was not a natural-born citizen." Hillary Clinton added that Trump "has a long record of engaging in racist behavior, and the birther lie was a very hurtful one." Trump defended himself by saying: "Sidney Blumenthal works for the campaign and (is a) close — very close — friend of Sec. Clinton. And her campaign manager, Patti Doyle ... during ... her campaign against President Obama, fought very hard. ... And if you look at CNN this past week, Patti Solis Doyle was on Wolf Blitzer saying that this happened. Blumenthal sent McClatchy, (a) highly respected reporter at McClatchy, to Kenya to find out about it. They were pressing it very hard. She failed to get the birth certificate. When I got involved, I didn't fail. I got him to give the birth certificate."
A "never Trump" friend I've known since law school writes: "My former partner is old enough to have voted for Barry Goldwater. And like me, he is pro-choice, pro-gay rights and libertarian, so there are some Neanderthal Republicans out there who are just too distasteful to vote for. So, like me, he often votes Libertarian. He does not see much about Donald Trump that resembles a traditional Republican." For the millionth time, Trump is *not* a fiscal conservative. He is a populist. And his near-embrace by many evangelicals notwithstanding, New Yorker Trump with "New York values" is likely pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. The man doesn't even go to church. And speaking of "traditional Republicans": GOP voters backed Mitt "Romneycare" Romney and John "McCain-Feingold" McCain, but they draw the line at insufficiently conservative Trump?
This political season means full employment for pundits, opinion givers, strategists and soothsayers, on cable television and via social media. It's interesting to watch the catch phrases, verbal crutches and tics speakers and writers use, which often, when examined, make little or no sense. We all do it. Donald Trump is fond of saying, "*That* I can tell you." Does that mean he's sitting on the real bombshells? Hillary Clinton, in her broadside against "half" of Trump supporters whom she said were a "basket of deplorables," actually invented what appears to be a new word — "generalistic."
Here's what Donald Trump, at the black church in Detroit, *should* have said: "In the words of Malcolm X, blacks have been 'political chumps.' At the time, he said that 80 percent of blacks voted Democratic in hopes of a civil rights bill, but President John Kennedy, in the opinion of a lot of black leaders, dragged his feet so as not to lose the South come re-election time. In the last presidential election, 95 percent of blacks voted Democratic. "I *indict* the Democratic Party for creating family-destroying dependency; deepening unemployment with minimum-wage laws; burdening job creators with excessive taxes and regulations; increasing crime by falsely maligning the police — the overwhelming majority of whom are hardworking, honest public servants of all colors; and for stoking anger by playing the race card for votes.
Recent polls find a majority of Americans believe that "race relations," since the election of the first black president, have gotten worse, not better. Colin Kaepernick, a National Football League quarterback, is Exhibit A for why so many people feel this way. Kaepernick signed a $114 million six-year contract in 2014, with $61 million guaranteed. Like President Barack Obama, he is biracial, with a black biological father and white biological mother. Obama's father left his wife and toddler son, and from the age of 10, Obama was raised by his white paternal grandparents. Kaepernick's biological father abandoned his pregnant mother, who put him up for adoption. Kaepernick was adopted by a white couple. A standout athlete in basketball, baseball and football, Kaepernick chose to pursue football, making it all the way to the NFL as a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, one of the most storied franchises.
"Do you ever get tired of defending Donald Trump?" a critic asked. It isn't that Donald Trump does not say things that are cringe-worthy. It's that his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, says and does things even more cringe-worthy. So forgive those who feel that Trump's supposedly "outrageous" statements are nothing more than selective outrage, double standards, and the typical "Republicans are racist" meme. Democrats routinely say vulgar, bigoted, divisive, outrageous things while getting a toll-free pass. It wasn't Donald Trump, but Donna Brazile, then Al Gore's campaign manager, who said Republicans have a "white-boy attitude." It wasn't Donald Trump, but Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who said, after Hurricane Katrina, "George (W.) Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black."
After the death of a young black man by a Milwaukee police officer, riots, looting and fires followed. In one instance, as a gas station burned, people watching chanted, "Black power!" Local news reported that the 23-year-old suspect was not only armed but that he also defied orders to drop his gun. The Milwaukee police chief refused to identify the officer involved, but did say that he was "black." At one time, such a fact would suggest that racism and police brutality were not at play. But as the death of Freddie Gray — a black man who died after being transported in a Baltimore police van — shows us, not necessarily. Of the six officers involved in Gray's arrest and van transportation and who were prosecuted, three were black. In fact, just weeks before the death of Freddie Gray, a White House task force praised the Baltimore Police Department, as well as its black chief, for "implementing national best practices for policies and training" and "use of force" reforms.
It's an article of faith that President Barack Obama needs Hillary Clinton to win to "preserve his legacy." On the contrary, a Clinton election, essentially a third term for Barack Obama, would produce results no better — and likely worse — than that of her two-term predecessor. Obama's legacy is already here — the worst economic recovery since 1949. The last quarter clocked in at 1.2 percent gross domestic product growth. That's pathetic. Obama is the first president ever to preside over an economic recovery without a single year coming in at 3 percent GDP. And time has run out.
The same clueless nitwits who, with no evidence, cried "Bush lied, people died!" are now ignoring overwhelming evidence of Hillary Clinton's violation of the Espionage Act and how that behavior imperiled national security. In George W. Bush's case, there is zero evidence of a "lie." In Clinton's case, as to a violation of the Espionage Act, her violation is clear-cut.
