Tag Archives: Election 2016

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Clinton: Unhinged?

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Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire
Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Following multiple damning email leaks and disclosures, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign decided, in the weirdest attempt at damage control I’ve ever seen, to  invoke the late Allen Ginsberg’s “America”:

“America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.”

Forget the content of the leaks. Just focus on their alleged (not proven, alleged) source. IT’S THEM RUSSIANS!

Never mind that one of the leaks uncovered the Democratic National Committee’s secret program to deliver its party’s presidential nomination to Clinton at all costs. Did I mention that Donald Trump MIGHT BE WORKING WITH THEM RUSSIANS?

Never mind that another disclosure gave the public a glimpse of Clinton’s corrupt “pay to play” scheme,  in which high-dollar donors to the Clinton Foundation got special goodies from the Clinton State Department. Who cares? The Ukrainian government (installed in a 2014 coup funded by the US and orchestrated by Clinton’s protege,  Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland) just happened to conveniently “discover” “evidence” linking Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to THEM RUSSIANS!

Servergate? Never mind FBI director James Comey’s announcement and testimony revealing that she’s at least recklessly negligent  and almost certainly a felon who only avoided prosecution because her name is Hillary Clinton. LOOOOOOOK! THEM RUSSIANS!

It’s all so maladroit and ham-handed that it would be laughable if not for the stakes:

Clinton’s strategy for distracting attention from her corruption and incompetence, so that she can win the White House, is an all-out attempt to re-start the Cold War (at the risk of one or more very hot wars) and resurrect Joe McCarthy between now and November. And it just might work.

No, I can’t bring myself to support Donald Trump. But it’s getting harder and harder to peg him as the distinctively harebrained, irresponsible, unhinged one in the race. Clinton is still a game down to Trump in the World Series of Crazy, but it looks like the series will go all the way to seven.

It’s been noted over and over, by pretty much everyone, that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most roundly despised presidential candidates since polling became a thing. How either one of them got within spitting distance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a mystery for the ages. And one of them almost certainly moving in come January sounds like an establishing shot for next summer’s top-grossing horror film.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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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Election 2016: Time for Libertarians to Dump Bill Weld

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Libertarian Party Logo
Libertarian Party Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I didn’t pay much attention in 1972 when vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton was removed from  the Democratic ticket and replaced by Sargent Shriver after it came to light that Eagleton had a record of psychiatric hospitalizations. I have a pretty good excuse  for being distracted — I was five years old — and I’ve never looked into the mechanics of how that happened. But I’d like to see it happen again, this time in my own party.

The bylaws of the Libertarian Party’s national committee require that committee to “provide full support for the Party’s nominee for President and nominee for Vice-President as long as their campaigns are conducted in accordance with the Platform of the Party.” But they allow the LNC, on a 3/4 vote, to suspend either candidate. The suspension becomes permanent removal unless the candidate successfully appeals it to the party’s judicial committee.

Why on earth would Libertarians want to dump vice-presidential nominee William Weld? To let American voters, especially gun owners, know that the Libertarian Party still supports their rights as it always has.

Weld won the party’s nomination by a nose on the second ballot at the party’s national convention, after presidential nominee Gary Johnson pleaded for him to be chosen. One reason he was a hard sell to Libertarians was his anti-gun record as governor of Massachusetts (he supported and signed an “assault weapons” ban).

During the nomination campaign he went back and forth, telling Libertarians he had changed his views on guns one day, telling CNN he hadn’t changed his views on guns the next day.

Since the nomination, Weld has campaigned vigorously against the party’s platform — not just on gun issues but on due process rights — often spouting nonsense that makes him sound as ignorant and as nutty as Donald Trump at his worst.

Here’s Weld talking to REVOLT 2 VOTE correspondent Amrit Singh during the Democratic National Convention:

“You know the five-shot rifle, that’s a standard military rifle. The problem is if you attach a clip to it so it can fire more shells, and if you remove the pin so that it becomes an automatic weapon. And those are independent criminal offenses. That’s when they become essentially a weapon of mass destruction. The problem with handguns is probably even worse than the problem of the AR-15. You shouldn’t have anybody who’s on a terrorist watch list be able to buy any gun at all.”

None of the factual claims he makes there are true, nor is his stated position even remotely libertarian.

Libertarians support gun rights. Libertarians support due process, not presumed forfeiture of rights due to inclusion on secret enemies lists. These items are in our platform, and they’re not negotiable.

Some of my fellow Libertarians believe that removing Weld would damage Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign and possibly even irreparably harm the party itself. I disagree.

In this year of all years, doing the right thing — and being SEEN doing the right thing — is pure political gold. It’s time for Bill Weld to go.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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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Donald Trump: Unprincipled Populist

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English: 1896 Judge cartoon shows William Jenn...
English: 1896 Judge cartoon shows William Jennings Bryan/Populism as a snake swallowing up the mule representing the Democratic party. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rhetoric is, by most accounts, “populist, ” but that’s a broad description. Trump takes his “populism” from a particular historical tradition — one with a baleful history in American politics.

What is populism, and what’s the problem with Trump’s version of it?

Simplified, populism is the notion that society consists of two classes — the righteous but oppressed masses, and the greedy and oppressive power elites. That notion is timeless, but in modern political theory we can trace it to two French libertarians, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, who correctly identified the righteous masses as “the productive class” (those who make their living through honest labor and exchange) and the greedy power elites as “the political class” (those who make their living, and accrue their power, by working for or buying the favor of the state).

Karl Marx repurposed Comte’s and Dunoyer’s theory and put it in harness to his nutty economic theories. Marx’s righteous masses were “the workers;” his greedy power elites were “the capitalists.” His proposed solutions militated in a non-libertarian direction, but he was at least clear on the relationship between the power elites and the state.  The state, he said, is “the executive committee of the ruling class.”

The final disposition of the ruling class is the rub with most “populist” agitators: They aim to topple the existing ruling class and replace it with another.  They don’t want to get rid of the power elites; they just want to BECOME the power elites. And they promise that their constituents (the righteous masses) will ascend to power with them.

Principled populism aims to end the existing class division altogether. By either limiting or liquidating government, it proposes to make the formation or existence of a “political class” impossible. In a genuine populist society,  a libertarian society, honest labor and free exchange are the sole sources of wealth and power.

Trump’s populism descends from an odd twist in American populism which treats the most marginalized and oppressed groups as the oppressive power elites, the middle class as the oppressed righteous masses, and a demagogue as the savior of those masses. We saw this kind of populism in the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, in George Wallace’s independent presidential campaigns, in Nixon’s “southern strategy” and in Pat Buchanan’s upstart Republican and Reform Party efforts.

Trump tells Pennsylvania steel workers and Louisiana carpenters and Kansas farmers that the oppressive power elites aren’t the political class (American government’s taxers, regulators and subsidy eaters), but rather foreign workers crossing the border and foreign governments American politicians get “a bad deal” from.

He tells the white middle class that the power elites aren’t the political class (government police terrorizing our communities), but their fellow productive class Americans (often  African-Americans) who object to assault and even slaughter by those police.

He tells Americans that putting him in power will put them in power.

Don’t fall for it. It’s a lie. Trump’s a fake populist and a run-of-the-mill (except for the really bad hair) power seeker.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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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