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Got a question for Millennials: does it bug you someone gave you a name that sounds like a Star Trek villlain? There, got that off my chest.

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) July 27, 2016

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He looked older. He sounded older. He isn’t the guy he was twenty years ago. And, yes, my mind strayed once or twice to that terrible time when he hurt his wife and daughter.

But it was a master speech by a master story teller – and all about her, not him. Her achievements, not his. Brilliantly, he zeroed in on her main weakness – her persona, her occasional inability to connect – and painted a wonderful, compelling picture of a good person.

At the end, he also laid out the ballot question. As I told Charles Adler on Sirius XM last night, the ballot question is now just one thing: Donald Trump. And Bill Clinton framed the ballot question in this way:

See what he did there? The choice is between a familiar, proven, positive, effective reality – or an unknown, untested, unpleasant, unimpressive cartoon.

That’s the choice.

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I was at Star Trek Beyond with Sons Two and Four, last night, so I missed much of the antics by the Bernie Brigade.  With their booing, or with their mouths taped shut, they actually reminded me of some Canadian sore losers, the ones who wore black arm bands way back.

Son Two is a big Bernie Sanders fan, still, and we debated all of this stuff before and after Star Trek.  He thinks the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie.  I disagreed, and gave him this rationale about why I (an ex-pat Democrat) could never support Sanders, and he shouldn’t, either:

• Bernie Sanders has always been an Independent, and not so much a Democrat.  He isn’t even registered as a Democrat in his home state of Vermont.  That matters.
• Bernie Sanders’ supporters aren’t really Democrats, either.  They, like their candidate, saw the primaries as a means to an end – a flag of convenience.  That matters, too.
• Bernie Sanders hurt the Democratic cause with the way he ran his campaign, well past the point that he could not win.  The beneficiary was Donald Trump, and Sanders’ supporters were so crazed, they were even prepared to echo Trump’s vilest attacks.  That also matters.
• Bernie Sanders, in pure policy terms, is not a Democrat.  He is Occupy’s candidate, arriving eight years too late.  He does not believe in the things Democrats do.  That matters.
• Bernie Sanders needs to get his lunatic fringe under control.  Because if he doesn’t, the only beneficiary will be Donald Trump. And that matters, most of all.

Don’t believe me? Ask Paul Martin, who never got his Bernie-style supporters to respect a democratic outcome, either – and who consigned the Liberal Party to a decade in the wilderness as a result.

And that matters, or should.

 

 

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They kill an 84-year-old priest, celebrating Mass in Rouen.

These pigs need to be hunted down, like the animals they are, and killed.  They are not human beings, if they ever were.

 

 

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Your perspective on the Republican National Convention depends on your politics, of course. 

If you are in any way progressive, it was a five-alarm dumpster fire, a bonfire of insanities, a crazy conflagration of fear and loathing. It made Fight Club and Dr. Strangelove seem like newsreel footage. 

If you are a Trump-style conservative, however, none of that matters in the slightest. To you, and those like you, the liberal media establishment are slime, and they lie all the time. 

What the reviled MSM (mainstream media) say doesn’t matter a whit to you, the Trump Troopers. To you, the only relevant truth is the one that validates your world view. 

Take, for example, the now-infamous plagiarized speech. Melania Trump stole Michelle Obama’s words and thought several million people wouldn’t notice. When some did, she and her husband blamed a secretary no one had ever heard of before, and whom many believed did not even exist. Dishonesty used to excuse dishonesty. Lie upon lie. 

Plaigiasm-gate stomped all over the GOP’s narratives (pro-unity, pro-security, anti-Hillary) on Days Two and Three of their convention. It was a clown show, with CNN giddily dissecting every minute. 

But the Trump Troopers? They didn’t care. 

To them, anything emanating from the MSM is a lie. To them, anything that upsets the pointy-headed intelligentsia is actually welcome. To them, the only media that matters is found at the furthest reaches of the Right, recycling dark conspiracy theories about Benghazi, Whitewater and email servers, over and over. 

What they wanted to hear were Donald Trump’s lies, and he had plenty to pass along. So, he said America was the highest-taxes nation on Earth. It isn’t. Not even close. 

He said the Obama administration had “reversed” crime rates – upwards. But they’re way, way down. Lower than they’ve been in decades. 

Trump said that Hillary had “invented” ISIS. This one is so crazy, it’s hard to know where to start. But the fact is that the Islamic State got its start in Iraq in 2006 – when, you know, the Republicans ran the show. 

Trump said Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment, the one that allows Americans to bear arms. His claim is unadulterated BS, however: Hillary Clinton has never said any such things. Ever. 

And so on and so on. Looking like a Cheeto in a tailored suit, Donald Trump lied like a rug. He lied, lied, lied. His supporters didn’t care. 

Thus, the GOP follies ended with Trump edging upwards in the polls. In battleground states, surveys found that Trump was tied, or even a point or two ahead of Clinton. Shocking, right? Appalling, yes?

Appalling, sure. But shocking? No. Donald Trump’s stormtroopers aren’t going to abandon him now. For more than a year, they’ve stuck with him through serial controversies: Muslim bans, likening of women to pigs, Mexicans are rapists, tributes to Putin, mocking the disabled, disrespecting POWs, dismissing NATO. And on and on. They stay with him, despite (and perhaps because of) the hate. 

As a consequence, the Democrats – and other Americans – need to acknowledge one truth: those angry, older men in Rust Belt states have been left behind by profound economic and technological change. They have. 

They feel marginalized. They feel isolated. They see no future. 
To ensure that Donald Trump loses – to ensure there is no October Surprise – Hillary Clinton needs to reach out to those marginalized, isolated folks. The ones who see no future. 

When Hillary Clinton acknowledges that one irrefutable truth – that the American Dream hasn’t worked out for many – she will overcome all of Donald Trump’s myriad lies. 

And she will win. 

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So, the chair of the DNC picked sides. 

In my experience, in every leadership race, every party official picks sides.  They want to keep their job, so they have a perhaps-understandable tendency to oscillate towards the perceived winner.  Happens all the time.

That said, a few observations about the Democratic Party’s “scandal,” which – when compared to the fun-loving cross burning ceremonies in Cleveland last week, resembles a gathering of septuagenarian Rotarians in a dry state – as follows:

• the emails about Bernie Sanders’ religion, or lack thereof, are despicable and simply outrageous – and more heads than Wasserman-Shultz’s need to roll
• the elephant in the room isn’t an elephant: it’s a bear, the Russian one – and it is now clear that Russia is actively working in concert with pro-Putin Donald Trump (and whose campaign boss is a Putin lobbyist)

This stuff isn’t a scandal.  It’s an opportunity.

One, by forcing the controversial Wasserman-Shultz to walk the plank, Hillary Clinton showed herself to be decisive and in-control.  That isn’t what we witnessed with Donald Trump last week: he sees nothing wrong in maintaining the support of really bad people.

Two, Trump clearly is hoping to define himself as an authoritarian nationalist, rather like his pal Putin.  But by edging too close to the Russian dictator – and by actually acting as Putin’s surrogate with the DNC leaks – Trump further risks splintering the GOP base, which is made up of people who grew up detesting and fighting Mother Russia, and who still see value in NATO.

Three, we have now entered an alternate universe where the Democrats are the anti-Russia party, and the Republicans are the ones who are soft on Soviet-style expansionism.  It opens up a world of possibility for Hillary, wherein she scoops up bushels of pro-military Republicans, many of whom were already appalled by what Trump has said about POWs.

Donald Trump is working overtime to engineer his own defeat in November.  All that would save him, at this point, is an October Surprise.  And I’ll have more to say about that later.

 

 

 

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Johnny Rotten in MALIBU. Beside a VOLVO.

Whenever I’ve interviewed him, he was sleek, supercilious and snarky.  He’s obviously now going for a different look.

Get back on tour, Big Guy.  California is not good for you.

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And apologies to Mr. Cruz, still not dead. 

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