All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Election 2016: The Incredible Evitable Hillary Clinton

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Frontrunner Hillary Clinton got into a heated ...
Hillary Clinton circa 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes, I’m a concern troll. I’m no Democrat, nor am I a Republican. But I would really, really, really like to see the Democratic Party nominate a viable candidate for President of the United States this year.

Why? In a word, gridlock — or at least what passes for it in this age of unrestrained “unitary executives.” Checks and balances ain’t  what they used to be, but it gets worse when one party controls both houses of Congress and the White House at the same time. The last time that happened, we got ObamaCare. The time before that, the war in Iraq.

Since it’s unlikely that the Republican Party will lose control of either the Senate or House of Representatives, it’s important to me that the presidency go to a candidate of another party. In a perfect world, that would mean a Libertarian moving in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, the least bad LIKELY outcome is Democratic victory.

But Democrats don’t seem interested in winning. In fact, they seem to be going out of their way to throw the fight.

The “inevitable” Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was “inevitable” in 2008, too. Remember how that came out? She placed second in the Iowa caucus and would have placed third if John Edwards had flamed out a little earlier. Barack Obama pretty much ran the table. “Inevitable.” Yeah, right.

This time last year, an NBC News/Marist poll had Clinton at 68% and Bernie Sanders at 7% in Iowa.  By Monday, that lead had evaporated. Clinton eked out a “victory” in the caucus on the basis of six coin tosses for tiebreaker delegates. Some “victory.”

When Bernie Sanders — an “independent social democrat” whose picture appears in the dictionary next to the word “gadfly” — comes back from a 61-point deficit to hand you your head in Iowa and outpolls you nationally versus likely GOP candidates, you are not a strong contender for the presidency and  you SHOULDN’T be treated as a strong contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Two decades of “inevitable” talk aside, Hillary Clinton is a lemon, a  jinx, a Jonah. Everything she touches falls apart. Even if she manages to make it to the convention with a majority while avoiding a criminal indictment, we will almost certainly end up with Republican monopoly government for at least two, and more likely four, years. That won’t be on Hillary Clinton. It will be on Democratic caucus and primary voters.

Tip to Democrats: Stay fractured until convention time, then draft Joe Biden. I’m not just saying that because I have ten bucks riding on him in a prediction market. He’s really your only shot.

Tip to voters: Vote Libertarian. Train wreck and clown car are not your only options.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Hands Up Don’t Shoot, Oregon Edition

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English: A Picture of FBI SWAT officers. Origi...
A Picture of FBI SWAT officers. Originally from http://buffalo.fbi.gov/specialty_programs.htm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

“They shot him right there, he was just walking — I saw it,” says Victoria Sharp . “I swear to God, he was just walking with his hands in the air.” She’s describing the January 26 killing of LaVoy Finicum by FBI agents and an Oregon State Police SWAT team.

Sharp’s account doesn’t go uncontested. Mark McConnell, described as a “witness” even though he was a mile away at the time of the shooting and was just “told” what happened, describes Finicum as “charging” the police. And unidentified “law enforcement sources” tell CNN that Finicum “reached down toward his waistband where he had a gun.” Grainy overhead video of the shooting, subsequently released by the FBI, does more to stir the pot than to resolve the conflicts of account.

 

Sound familiar? It should. There’s another pair of competing legends in the making, both of which will incorporate preferred truths and discard inconvenient facts to reach the desired conclusions.

Most of those who decried police actions to evict the Occupy demonstrators and  wanted Ferguson, Missouri police officer Daren Wilson’s head on a platter for the killing of Michael Brown have already written the Oregon occupiers off as “terrorists” and pigeonholed Finicum’s death as “suicide by cop.”

Most of those who wanted the smelly hippies of Occupy swept from the streets and would cheerfully vote for Wilson for president if he was old enough to run, on the other hand, probably consider the Oregon occupiers heroes and Finicum a martyr.

I find myself in a strange position here. For once, I’m the moderate.

I don’t know exactly what happened on Canfield Drive in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, or along US 395 in rural Oregon on January 26, 2016. Neither, in all likelihood, do you. We weren’t there. All we can do is choose which glass to see those events through. Darkly.

I take that back. There’s another thing we can do. We can reaffirm the basic American principle that law enforcement personnel and other government employees aren’t special.

When a cop shoots someone under circumstances brought into question by credible evidence and/or testimony, that cop should be charged and tried just like you or I would be.

Culpability in Finicum’s death should be sorted out by a jury on the basis of reasonable doubt or proof of guilt beyond such doubt. The fact that his killer or killers wear badges and collect government paychecks is irrelevant to the matter.

Update: This column was revised the day after initial publication to reflect the release of FBI video of  Finicum’s death.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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So Much for Peak Trump

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English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy, quite a few people, including me, thought “never in a million years will he be the Republican nominee, let alone president.”

As his poll numbers rose, we thought “he’s got a hard ceiling; not a chance he’ll carry the race.” And “not even GOP primary voters could be THAT stupid.”

But it looks like I was wrong, and all those other people were too. With the Iowa caucus and then New Hampshire  just around the corner, Trump’s running as hot as ever. Not even his cowering, sputtering fear of Megyn Kelly, so disabling that he announced his intention to skip this week’s Fox News debate rather than face her, seems likely to dent his position as the Republican front-runner.

Heck, he might even win in November, proving once and for all that Mencken was right (“democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”).

Are there any consolations to be found in the possibility of a Trump presidency? Yes, I think there are.

When you get right down to it, he’s not any more especially authoritarian, xenophobic or narcissistic than the other “major party” presidential candidates. He’s just less filtered in how he presents himself.

The idea of his finger on the nuclear button bothers me, but not any more than the idea of Ted Cruz’s, Chris Christie’s or Hillary Clinton’s.

It might not be as bad as it sounds. Especially since the alternatives aren’t exactly attractive on their own merits.

Maybe a Donald Trump presidency would be right up in our faces enough, more so than the reigns of those other prospects, to get it through Americans’ heads: “Let’s never do THAT again.” I doubt it, but hey, it could happen.

More likely, it would just mark the final death knell of the Republican Party. Which, I admit, would make putting up with four years of Trump more than worth it, especially if it produced a whole new political alignment — Democrats alone on the right instead of splitting that side of the political spectrum with the Republicans, the Libertarians finally giving America a “major party” on the left (no, that was not a typo).

Scoff if you like, but don’t step on my dreams. As long as we’re considering the surrealistic nightmare of a prospective Trump presidency, I’m entitled to them.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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