March 9, 2018--My 3,333rd Blog Posting: Suicide Is Painless

The one thing thus far missing from the Trump Show is a murder or suicide. 

In regard to that he's not keeping up with the Clintons who, according to the conspiracy-minded, as early as their first year in the White House, already had a few.

Vince Foster comes to mind.

He was a colleague of Hillary's in the Rose law firm in Little Rock and her suspected lover. He followed the Clintons to Washington and during the first six months of Bill's presidency served in the administration as deputy White House counsel.

One day, after not showing up for work, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, shot in the head. 

Many on the lunatic fringe claimed that the Clintons murdered him, though five separate investigations found that Foster, unhappy in Washington, had grown despondent and killed himself. 

For years afterward, Clinton haters did not accept that verdict, including Jerry Falwell, who, through the Arkansas Project, alleged that there were two witnesses who had incontrovertible evidence that Foster was murdered by Bill and Hillary. However, before they could testify, Falwell claimed they were killed in two separate plane crashes.

On late-night talk radio, along with a continuing drumbeat of accusation about Hillary's role in the death of our embassy workers in Benghazi, one can still hear ranting about the murder of Vince Foster.

Thus far with Trump, we hear about Playboy centerfolds and porn stars, but nothing yet about suicides or murders. 

Give them time. He's been in office only 14 months.

As things close in tighter and tighter on Trump and his inner circles, I anticipate there will be a few. 

Would one be surprised if Trump's so-called "outside" lawyer, Michael Cohen, who has created a fiasco out of attempting to obscure and silence talk about Trump's longterm extra-marital affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, took a handful of pills? 

He is clearly one of those Trump enablers who has been with him for years, cleaning up his messes, who feels as if he would take a bullet for Trump. Barring that, killing himself would serve. 

And, of course, this would have the additional benefit of Sean Hannity blaming it on Hillary. 

Then there is the strange case of Sam Nunberg, another Trump hanger-on, who until recently was also available to take a bullet for the big guy and who became a household name earlier this week among cable news devotees as he made the rounds of talk shows, muttering semi-coherently about being subpoenaed by one of Robert Mueller's grand juries. On the Ari Melber show, for example, he was so agitated that Melber and his panelists suspended normal interviewing and tried to talk him down from the ledge. 

As of this morning Nunberg says he will cooperate with Mueller, his is not off the wagon, and though he's still alive, he's on my watch list. 

And, of course, if he does do himself in, Rush Limbaugh can always blame it on Obama.

Would anyone be surprised if Paul Manafort was found dead soon after imbibing some exotic Russian potion? Either administered by the same operative who poisoned the Russian defector and his daughter earlier this week in London (he could have had an open-jaw plane ticket from Moscow to London to Washington to Moscow) or the polonium-210 could have been self-administered by Manafort who at age 68 is looking at 80 years in federal prison. That would make him even older than my 107-year-old mother if he managed to serve his entire sentence.

What with his literal million-dollar custom wardrobe, which he paid for with Ukrainian money, living the rest of his life in a 50 square foot jail in an orange jumpsuit with no belt or shoelaces is not that GQ. 

But again, if Manafort is no more, his demise can be blamed on Huma Abedin or Susan Rice or Eric Holder. 

And, finally, there is Trump himself. From the current look of him it appears as if he is eating himself to death. A few more supersized Big Macs, with his clogged arteries, who knows. 

On the other hand he'll have no one to blame but himself.

November 1, 2016--Ode to J. Edgar

With the current flap about FBI director James Comey making an even bigger mess of the already-messiest presidential election in history, reading recently about the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, during this politically perverse year I've been asking where is J. Edgar when we need him?

Hoover was all the terrible things you know about him and then some. And I'm not talking about his penchant for black sheath dresses and extra-high heels. By today's standards that makes him more interesting and even amusing.

What I am missing in Hoover is his ability to get things done and to keep certain kinds of high-level matters where they belong--under control and out of the public eye.

For example, he had the goods on John F. Kennedy both before and after he assumed the presidency. He told brother Bobby, who was JFK's Attorney General, that he, Hoover, would keep the lid on Kennedy's womanizing (now there's a word for you), philandering that makes Bill Clinton seem celibate, as long as Kennedy let him remain FBI director and cooled his fooling around with Mafia mistresses. In other words, Hoover was devoted to his own prerogatives and to keeping things running on a version of even keel.

Comey, in contrast, whatever the email denouement, is nothing if not totally disruptive.

When in July he issued his report on the first swatch of Hillary emails, finding that she had been "extremely careless" but not indictable, Democrats raced to praise him while Republicans saw a pro-Hillary conspiracy involving Comey, attorney general Roberta Lynch, and Bill Clinton who, now famously, had a tarmac tete-a-tete with Lynch during which he allegedly promised her that she could continue as AG after Hillary is elected if she squelched the FBI probe.

And now, when on Friday Comey sent his incoherent letter to the congressional committee investigating Clinton's emails, just 10 days before Election Day, Democrats are excoriating him (Harry Reid says he may have committed a crime) for supposedly sandbagging Hillary.

And though Comey is a registered Republican and was an appointee of George W. Bush's, the same Republicans (i.e. Donald Trump) who lambasted him for his initial findings, this time around are praising him for going rogue with the now renewed investigation.

About this resumed scrutiny, here is one paranoid scenario about what is unfolding.

(Note--during this literally psychotic election season nothing one might imagine happening is paranoid since the craziest behaviors have become the norm--at least once of day in Trump's case.)

Though he is a Republican, Comey is of the old school of Republicans--a rare moderate--and thus he despises Donald Trump and wants to see him soundly defeated.

So he issues this seemingly inappropriate letter even before anyone in his office has looked at any of the emails recently found on Anthony Weiner's laptop (talk about psychotic) and then, after being massacred in the mainstream media, appears to backpedal, saying that FBI agents will fast track an analysis of these emails and report to the public perhaps even before Election Day if there are (or aren't) any emails that haven't been seen before that might convince him that Clinton is indictable.

The fact that nothing remotely like this has ever happened in all of American history aside, we are where are and, for sanity's sake, here's what might really be going on--

• Agents using metadata search methods will quickly review the Weiner emails and Comey will report by the end of this week, three days before the election, that there is nothing new and Hillary is finally and fully in the clear.
• The voting public goes crazy. 
• The Trump people cry foul and claim this shows once again that the election is rigged.
• The Hillary people are ecstatic and rush to the polls in record numbers.
• She wins in both a popular vote and Electoral vote landslide--52-45% in the vote count and 450-90 in Electoral votes.
• Comey sees the results he wants and goes down as a footnote to history.
• Two years from now, when his FBI job ends, Comey secures a $5.0 million advance to write his memoirs. He makes the rounds of all the talkshows. This is the last time he is ever heard from.
• Hillary doesn't take Huma Abedin with her to the White House. She hires a replacement "body woman." So Huma, after finally dumping Weiner, joins CNN as a political commentator. On the side, she resumes her no-show job at the Clinton Foundation.
• Anthony Weiner is convicted of sexting a minor and gets 3-5 in the slammer.
• And, yes, the Trump disaffiliates do not march on Washington with pitchforks and torches. They retreat to their finished basements more devoted than ever to six-packs of Bud.

August 15, 2016--No Daylight

With Donald Trump searching desperately to remain in the media spotlight and as a result of that and his proclivities descending deeper and deeper into political trouble; with the drip, drip, drip of Republican defections (Maine Senator Susan Collins is the most recent GOP leader to announce that she will not vote for Trump); with his candidacy in free fall and Hillary Clinton opening up an unprecedented 10-or-more-point lead, it is time to call for expanded press scrutiny of Clinton to learn more (if that's possible) about her character and fitness to be president, since it seems virtually certain now that she will in November be elected to serve as the United States' 45th chief executive--for these reasons it is imperative that media resources such as the New York Times pause in their daily assault on everything Trump and turn the same investigative energy to things Clinton.

Case in point the blasé way in which the Times has been dealing with the dump of thousands of new Hillary Clinton emails which this time move beyond exposing the "extremely careless," at best quasi-legal way in which she used her personal email account and server to conduct top secret State Department business, to now peeling back the veil that has obscured the ways in which she abandoned her pledge to President Obama in 2009 to sever all ties to the work (read, raising up to $3.0 billion) of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and Global Initiative while serving as his Secretary of State.

The Clinton Times story, "New Questions About Overlap Between Clinton State Dept. and Charity" gets buried on page A10 while stories about Trump "topping out" among registered Republican voters or how his "camp is falling to tame his tongue" becomes the lead story on the front page.

His, political process stories; hers, about fitness to assume the presidency. Not by any measure of equal consequence.

The Clinton story is not new. It has rattled around for years.

Here's how it appears things worked while she was Secretary of State--major donors to the Clinton "charity" were given expedited access to State Department officials when they had matters of personal advantage to bring to the attention of the right people or received favorable fast-tracked decisions and exemptions if one of Clinton's deputies winked in the right direction.

These deputies included Cheryl Mills and the ubiquitous Huma Abedin, both of whom somehow managed to be on both the Clinton Foundation and State Department payrolls. Or perhaps as Mills claims, in one assignment or another, they did Clinton bidding as "volunteers." At least, so they say.

The conservative but credible advocacy group, Judicial Watch, through the Freedom of Information Act, secured this latter cache of emails which, they demonstrated by quoting, reveal that between the State Department and the foundation, "there was no daylight."

As texts of the emails attest, JW got that right. And now it is passed time for the New York Times to also get things right.

July 31, 2013--The Weiners and the Clintons

In her Sunday New York Times column, Maureen Dowd was half right--Anthony Weiner is a "punk"; and she was also right to say that the Clintons want him out of the way since there is a connection between Weiner and them that is reminding voters about Bill's hanky-panky from 1995-97 with Monica Lewinski.

But she goes way too far when making an invidious comparison between Weiner's and Clinton's transgressions.

Somehow, Dowd feels that since Weiner is essentially a nobody (while in Congress for 12 years he managed to get just one piece of insignificant legislation passed) and Bill, to quote one of her sources, was and is "the greatest political and policy mind of a generation"; and thus what they did in private (and then was exposed publicly), to Dowd should be judged differently. "Bill," she writes, "was a roguish genus and Weiner's a creepy loser," and for these reasons we should not hold them to the same standard.

This is as if Dowd is saying that ubermensch Bill Clinton should be allowed to live and thrive in a Nietzschean world beyond good and evil, while Weiner should be required to crawl back into his hole and see if he can find a job selling life insurance.

But before we accept this analysis, let's take a moment to see what the two bad boys were up to--

On the Internet Wiener send out some creepy pictures of his appropriately-described "junk" and drew a few unsuspecting women into sex talk; whereas Bill Clinton, President William Jefferson Clinton got a 22 year-old intern to give him frequent BJs in the Oval Office and then lied about it to his family, the American public, and under oath to federal prosecutors.

There's not much equivalency there--Weiner by comparison is a small-time perv--and thus it is no wonder that the Clintons want Weiner to simply disappear and his wife, Huma Abedin, Hillary's former devoted assistant and body person, to dump Anthony so they can return to enhancing their brand and Hillary can focus on making millions while getting ready to run for president without everyone thinking about Bill and Monica and why the "feminist" Hillary stood by her man.