It’s Over! Hooray!
Piñata Time or Is Vlad Smiling?
WINNERS AND LOSERS: My deadline was Monday, the day before the election. So at this writing, I don’t know who won. If The Donald lost, give your Trump piñatas a last whack or save them for four (no, no, not again!) years.
If Hillary Clinton won, she made Russian czar Vladimir Putin, Trump’s pal, the next biggest loser of the year. No nights in the Lincoln Bedroom for him. (They say it’s haunted.)
If Trump won, the biggest winners (losers?) will be all those non-college-educated white men who helped elect him. How did that Pink Floyd song go: “We don’t need no education.”
In honor of all those who didn’t bother to vote, I point out that the Day of the Dead film Macario will be shown at the Granada Theatre on Sunday at 3 p.m. It’s a classic 1960 supernatural film about a poor man who makes a deal with La Muerte (death).
The Washington Post says President Barack Obama made D.C. “look cool.” Asked the Post: Will Clinton or Trump “make it boring again?”
I still say a tour of the capital is the best vacation you’ll ever have. After touring the White House and Capitol building, Lincoln Memorial, and the rest of the Mall stars, have dinner at the in-spot Capital Grille restaurant and a drink at the Round Robin bar in the swank Willard Hotel. Listen to the talk.
Now that the election’s over, we can get back to real life and not have to consult numbers guru Nate Silver every hour on the hour or hear more from loudmouth nutcase Rudy Giuliani. (They elected this guy mayor of New York City?)
Not that we’ve heard the last of Trump if he lost. He’ll still be fulminating nightly on his personal TV campaign station, Fox News.
It was a presidential campaign like no other — the school braggart against the smart girl sitting quietly in study hall.
The Supreme Court is still deadlocked with one justice short at eight and the Republicans on strike, blocking a new appointment. The ninth, Antonin Scalia, died earlier this year at age 79. With three justices getting up there in years — Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 83, Anthony Kennedy at 80, and Stephen Breyer at 78 — we could theoretically get down to five if the Grim Reaper acts fast. To be confirmed, a new justice must be approved by a simple majority of the Senate — at least 51 votes. Good luck with that.
“In late August, Hillary Clinton announced that she would soon give a speech in Reno, Nevada, linking Donald Trump to what has become known as the alt-right,” the New Yorker reported last week. The alt-right, the magazine said, is “a loose online affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists and social-media trolls.”
With that kind of backing, how could he lose? Sociopaths need representation, too, don’t they?
Even if Trump is flushed down the drain like dirty toilet water, we still won’t have heard the last of him. He’ll just keep opening casino hotels and bankrupting them.
One good thing about this presidential campaign: It dramatically pointed out the urgent need to reform our democracy. Millions of middle-class Americans feel poor in a land of plenty, left out of the American dream, forgotten in a celebrity-ridden society where a relative few relish unbelievable wealth while masses of hardworking people struggle.
How could Trump, for all his thunderous craziness and forked-lightning danger, attract millions of voters? What will happen when a smoother operator, a real demagogue, arrives on the scene avoiding Trump’s mistakes but harboring the power to warp our precious democracy beyond belief?
The Greeks invented democracy. In 507 bce the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced reforms he called demokratia or “rule by the people.” Alas, Athenian democracy would only survive for about two centuries.
We can beat that, can’t we?
