Tag Archives: elections

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Scott Adams, Trump Card

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English: This photo depicts Donald Trump's sta...
Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I agree with Scott Adams, who’s probably perpetually peeved that most people know him only as the creator of Dilbert — his accomplishments range far beyond that — on one thing: Donald Trump will win the 2016 presidential election in a landslide.

Adams predicted that outcome more than a year ago, at a time when I was still having a good laugh over the silly idea of Trump getting within a thousand miles of the Republican nomination. My friend Thane Eichenauer kept urging me to pay more attention to what Adams had to say, but I kept ignoring both of them until, oh, right about now.

Scott Adams’s General Theory of the Inevitability of Trump differs substantially from my own simplistic hypothesis, so much so that the former deserves a grandiose title and the latter doesn’t. Adams believes that  Trump has masterfully scripted himself into the lead role in a presidential campaign produced as a three-act movie. I just think that Americans despise Hillary Clinton even more than they loathe Donald Trump.

But hey, why can’t it be both?

Here’s what pulls me, kicking and screaming, toward Adams’s way of thinking about the race:

In 1997, according to Wikipedia (which references a San Jose, California Mercury News piece accessible only via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and consisting of video files that either aren’t there or that my computer doesn’t like), Adams conducted an unusual and telling experiment at the invitation of Logitech CEO Pierluigi Zappacosta.

Disguised as rock star management consultant “Ray Mebert,” Adams expertly guided an eager group of Logitech managers through the process of revising their group’s mission statement into something “so impossibly complicated that it has no real content whatsoever.”

That sounds remarkably like what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party over the course of the last year or so, doesn’t it? I mean, c’mon … building a wall and making Mexico pay for it? Someone’s obviously been tapping directly into the mind of Dilbert‘s megalomaniac companion, Dogbert.

I have to wonder if, somewhere deep down in the Trump campaign’s FEC reports, an inquiring mind might find multiple records of disbursements to one Ray Mebert for campaign consulting? OK, no, I don’t really wonder about that. I checked. Adams must have picked a different pseudonym for this particular escapade. I bet he still has the wig and fake mustache from his Logitech outing, though.

Well played, Mr. Adams, well played.

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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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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Holiday Greetings From Planet Elizabeth Warren

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) addresses the 2016 Democratic National Convention [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]
It is an election year and I am a political junkie. Therefore my inbox runneth over with political emails. Recently I’ve received numerous such emails (from avowedly “progressive” organizations) alerting me to US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s latest hobbyhorse. “Election Day should be a holiday,” says the Massachusetts Democrat, “so no one has to choose between a paycheck and a vote.”

How exciting! A new “birther” controversy motoring over the horizon in our direction! Senator Warren passed on a presidential run this year but enjoyed considerable buzz and may well reconsider in 2020 or 2024. So I’d like to see her birth certificate — long form, please — with a view toward contesting her eligibility. She’s obviously not from this country, and probably not even from this planet.

The federal government recognizes ten holidays:  New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, Inauguration Day (in years following presidential elections), Washington’s birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

How many of those do you get off work?

Unless you’re a government employee (or work for a bank), the answer is almost certainly  “not all of them.” And the further down the income and prestige scales your job is, the more likely the answer is “only a few of them, and usually without pay.”

Senator Warren would presumably know this if she was from, or lived in, or even spent much time visiting, the United States.

Surely she would have, at one point or another, shopped at Wal-Mart, or eaten at McDonald’s, or taken in a film (most theaters are open EVERY day, Christmas being the busiest day of the year in the movie business), or traveled by air, or hailed a taxi, on a holiday.

And when she did any of those things, how could she conceivably have avoided noticing the people who make it possible for her to do those things? You know, the workers whose job title isn’t “US Senator?”

Warren’s proposal wouldn’t it make it any easier to vote for anyone who has a hard time voting now. The people who have a hard time voting are the people who don’t get new government holidays off work with pay just because  a light bulb comes on in Elizabeth Warren’s head.

Early voting makes voting easier. Relaxed rules for absentee voting make voting easier. Voting by mail makes voting easier. Turning “Election Day” into two full days, 48 hours from midnight Friday night to midnight Sunday night, would make voting easier.

Calling for Election Day to be made a federal holiday, on the other hand, just gives people good reason to wonder if perhaps US Senator Elizabeth Warren is proof of extra-terrestrial life. And disproof of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

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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