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Election 2016: Hillary Clinton is a Bad Hand in the World Series of Political Poker

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Hillary Clinton in Hampton, NH
Hillary Clinton in Hampton, NH (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I see a firefighter or EMT in uniform out and about in town, I think little of it. Maybe she’s on her way to or from work. Maybe he’s doing a routine fire safety inspection for a local business. Whatever, no biggie. On the other hand, when I pull to the side of the road to let eight or ten emergency vehicles pass me with their sirens wailing, and hear other sirens in the distance converging on a specific point, I assume there’s some kind of calamity in the offing.

The Washington Post reports that “[o]ne hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads” in the matter of Hillary Clinton’s homebrew email server. The aide who maintained that server, Bryan Pagliano, receive immunity in return for his cooperation in the probe. According to the Los Angeles Times, the FBI plans to interview other Clinton aides — and Clinton herself — in the near future.

That’s quite a few sirens and klaxons. It’s getting harder and harder to make out Clinton’s “this is nothing” and “this is just a routine security review” and “this is just a Republican fishing expedition”  and “bad judgment but no crime” explanations over the din.

I hold no brief for the Democratic Party in general, or for Hillary Clinton in particular, or for the Republicans. I’m a partisan Libertarian and a pox on both their houses. But I tremble at the prospect of one party exercising absolute control over both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government — especially with Donald Trump or Ted Cruz at its head.

Those are the stakes in this year’s game of presidential poker. Do Democrats really want to go all in on Hillary Clinton’s narcissistic sense of self-entitlement, especially when it’s looking more and more likely that the next card the dealer turns up will be grand jury indictments?

Apparently they do, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s politically just completely nuts. Even if Clinton herself escapes prosecution, it’s worth remembering that Richard Nixon was never indicted either, but was forced to resign after several of his closest aides were.

After such a gloomy forecast, I suppose the next step is following up with some brilliant advice. But I have none to offer. Absent an unexpected surge in the Libertarian vote, the forecast changes to four years of stormy  and capricious weather.

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: The X-Files/Napoleon Dynamite Factor

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

As we come around what may be the final curve of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton look positioned to be the two horses who break free of the pack and make a neck-and-neck run down the final straightaway toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That pairing and the likely outcome tell us some interesting things about America’s voters and their chosen candidates.

Specifically, it tells us that many voters are the political equivalents of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from Fox’s long-time fan favorite show The X-Files: They want to believe.

Believe in what? Well, that varies.

Trump’s supporters want to believe that, working with him, they can “make America great again.” Nobody seems to really know how that might come about, except that it will involve getting Mexico to pay for a wall. But not to worry: It will be yuuuuge. It will be very nice. They’ll like it a lot, winning so much that they get bored with winning. They want so intensely to believe this that, as Trump himself says, he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” They don’t care whether or not he’s a “conservative” or about his actual policy positions. They don’t even demand that he make any sense from day to day.

Clinton’s supporters want to believe not only that she can win, but that she’s the only Democrat who can. They want so intensely to believe this that they’re willing to ignore her mediocre past electoral record, her dismal performances in elected and appointed office, her yuuuuge (like Trump’s) public disapproval numbers, the significant chance that she’ll be indicted over her mishandling of classified information, and the fact that she’s only been a “progressive” for about a minute, because it came to her attention that that’s what people like about Bernie Sanders.

If the voters resemble Mulder and Scully, the candidates remind me of the candidates in Napoleon Dynamite: Summer Wheatley, the “popular” student the regular kids actually love to hate but apathetically assume will win the student body presidency in a walk, and Pedro Sanchez, the upstart new guy who promises that if his fellow students vote for him “all of your wildest dreams will come true.”

I love The X-Files. I enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite.  But I’m not sure I can take eight more months of watching e-run marathons. Can you?

Maybe it’s time for a crisis of political faith. Maybe it’s time to crank up Netflix and find a new show to follow or a new movie to watch. So, two recommendations:

First, pull up Doug Stanhope’s comedy special Beer Hall Putsch on Netflix.

Second, if you must vote, vote Libertarian.

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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Mean-Spirited, Low-Lived Fellows Are Nothing New in American Politics

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The Mount Rushmore Monument as seen from the v...
The Mount Rushmore Monument as seen from the viewing plaza. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Does Donald Trump have small hands? Is Ted Cruz a wimp (this is a family-oriented column, so I’m using that term instead of the word Trump used)? Are progressives who don’t support Hillary Clinton misogynists if they’re men and traitors to their sex if they’re women? The 2016 presidential race is a bumper crop of insults, with the usual accompanying cries for a “return to civility.”

Reality check: There’s no era of civility for American politics to return to. It’s always been a rough and tumble sport. Election campaigns have never consisted of  the candidates holding hands and singing “Kum Ba Ya” with an occasional break for  sober issues discussions.

In 1800, presidential challenger Thomas Jefferson’s supporters described sitting president John Adams as possessed of a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman. Adams’s supporters retorted that Jefferson was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was the target of personal insults intended to politically damage him from well before his presidency. Jackson killed one critic, Charles Dickinson, in a duel after Dickinson insulted her and accused him of cheating in a horse race.

In 1836, Martin van Buren’s opponents spread a rumor that he was the illegitimate son of former vice-president Aaron Burr, who had also famously killed someone (Alexander Hamilton) in a duel and had been tried for treason.

In 1884, supporters of Grover Cleveland chanted “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, The Continental Liar from the State of Maine!” Blaine supporters responded with “Ma, Ma, where’s my Paw? Gone to the White House, Haw, Haw, Haw!” referring to the (true) rumor that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock.

If you’ve been around long, you may have heard that George W. Bush was a cocaine fiend with a suppressed arrest record, that John McCain’s adopted kids are actually the children of his affairs, that Al Gore got preferential treatment in Vietnam because he was a Senator’s son, and that Barack Obama is from Kenya.

It’s ALWAYS been dirty, folks. Like Finley Peter Dunne said, “politics ain’t beanbag.” Why? Because politicians want to win. There’s an apocryphal tale of Lyndon Baines Johnson, in a pre-presidential campaign, suggesting that a press release be put out accusing his opponent of having sex with pigs. When a staffer objected that it wasn’t true, LBJ supposedly replied “I know … but let’s make him DENY it.”

I’ll be the last person to suggest that there are no real scandals  to be considered when evaluating candidates for public office. There certainly are. So pay attention. You may learn something important.

But when you’ve cleared the deck of the rumors and insults, what’s left is what matters. Do you agree with the candidate’s positions? Do you trust the candidate to tell the truth about the issues and to have the backbone to do the right thing? Choose carefully and vote accordingly.

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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