[This post is long, but it’s important.  The future of our nation is at stake.  Read on, please.]

It’s enough trouble that Mrs. Bill Clinton is running neck-and-neck with Mr. Donald Trump in a recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll—IN VOTER DISAPPROVAL RATINGS as well as popular vote.  Mr. Sanders is consistently doing better against Mr. Trump in national polls.  She can’t generate any enthusiasm; Mr. Sanders generates the crowds.  The news media wrote off that Carson, CA crowd cheering Bernie Sanders as “a few thousands turned out in support of Mr. Sanders.”  Mrs. Bill Clinton “packs” a small hall but with only a few hundred!  As Mr. Trump has stated in his inimitable insulting manner, the problem Mrs. Bill Clinton is having is that she can’t “put Bernie away.”  He recently won Oregon outright by 10 percentage points and fought her to a virtual tie in Kentucky, a state she carried overwhelmingly against Mr. Obama in the 2008 primaries.  Mr. Sanders won’t go away, he has nothing to lose, and, even if he did go away, his voters just might spurn the Clinton dynasty and sit this one out.

But not before making noise.  There will be more crowds in California as that primary draws near.  There will be crowds in NJ (there already are—last Saturday right here in Montclair).  Mr. Sanders has an energetic following.  It’s amazing that this old guy can generate this kind of energy.  It’s not so amazing that the old gal can’t.  He wiped that imperious entitlement grin off her face early.  As we’ve progressed through the primary season, those who didn’t know her learned about her and didn’t like what they saw and heard. She’s flawed, lyin’, and connivin’, and her smug, waffling husband is even worse (maybe less smug now than a year ago?).

She wants that old philanderer to solve the economic problems?  Please, not another NAFTA!  Not another crime bill (how is it that blacks support this deadly duo again?)!  On the other hand, the more people hear about Mr. Sanders, the more they like him—except those old blacks and Hispanics and others swallowing the Dem establishment’s lies and forgetting about the she-devil’s negative attacks on Mr. Obama in 2008 that were stealthy racist appeals directed at white voters.

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The pundits don’t know what to do with Trump and Sanders.  The parties don’t know either.  Both candidates are tapping into the smoldering anger that has turned into a conflagration in this campaign.  Both are anti-establishment candidates.  There the similarity ends.  Trump has been a one-percenter all his life, his political choices always determined by his analysis of the deal: what does he get out of it (or America, we hope)?  He’s a narcissistic sociopath (that’s a diagnosis of a mental condition, not an insult…and not one of Trump’s words that needs bleeping) and a real streetfighter—if you hit him, he hits back.

Whereas Trump has absolutely no political experience—even his touted business acumen and displays of one-percenter excesses received a huge initial boost from daddy’s gift—Sanders’s story is the truer American success story.  His father was a Polish immigrant and his mother was second generation in another Polish-Russian immigrant family.  Yeah, those immigrants Trump loves to hate.  Clinton fails by comparison too.  Where Sanders has been consistent and loyal to his principles, she’s been all over the board and unprincipled.  I love consistency, and I respect someone who sticks to their principles.

I’ve been consistent my whole life too, my only tweak being the development of a hawkish counterterrorism mentality because of 9/11 (Sanders has to work on that in particular and foreign policy in general, but I’m still more in tune with Bernie’s worldview than with Hillary’s).  For most domestic issues, Sanders and I are like twins.  OK, maybe I don’t like it when unions tolerate and try to hide incompetence—I don’t like incompetence anywhere and don’t want people to get paid for it—but that’s a nit I won’t bother to pick.  He’s the candidate whose viewpoints come closest to mine; there’s an enormous gap between him and everyone else.

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Because titles aren’t subject to copyright, I’m stealing Garcia Marquez’s title from his novella (“Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada” in the Spanish original, the version I read).  It seems appropriate to describe the situation in American politics this election year.  The American political system is on its deathbed, many factions are responsible for the attempted murder, and I foretold that many times in these pages.  Yeah, that’s flagrant pessimism and paranoia.  But you know the adage about paranoia, and this situation is horribly real.

Let’s take the 2016 presidency first because many things hinge on the campaign results (not that they matter much in general, only in the details).  On one hand, you have a tired old banshee and her philandering husband who want to continue their dynasty.  They seem to be successful at collecting the delegates and are the favorites of the Democratic establishment.  Their success is largely attributable to pandering to minorities, Blacks in particular, especially in the old South.  Because minorities are known to vote against their own interests, the Clintons are on a roll.

On the other hand, you have a narcissistic and fascist demagogue whose solution for every problem is attack, attack, attack, whether verbally or with physical force.  Because he’s confronting such a weak field of GOP candidates in the primaries, he has steamrollered almost all of them and is successfully bullying his way to the nomination.  He’s strong in the South too, by the way, because the GOP is always strong in the South.

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The races to determine the traditional U.S. parties’ nominees for president is on.  Europeans, not worried about policy details (they probably worry about them more than the traditional U.S. parties and their voters, though), might look at the party names and seek comfort in that one party is called Democratic.  That probably doesn’t include Germans, who will remember that German Democratic Republic, and other European countries bordering the Iron Curtain, who remember all those Democratic Republics in the old U.S.S.R.  Indeed, the Democratic Party in the U.S. is far from being democratic!

Why do I say this?  Consider that Sanders tied Clinton in Iowa (yes, it was a tie) and beat her by a wide margin in New Hampshire, yet Clinton walks away with more delegates than Sanders!  Huh?  “How did that happen?” you ask.  Easy.  The Democrats have something very anti-democratic built into their primary process, whether we’re talking about caucuses (like Iowa) or straight votes (like New Hampshire).  That something is the notion of super-delegates.  Check it out.  After New Hampshire, Clinton already has a commanding lead in delegate count, 394 to 44, because she has committed super-delegates in most primary states already.  44% of the Democratic Party’s delegates are NOT determined by popular vote.

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Mrs. Clinton has been around too long.  Her past drags her down, especially those events reflecting on her trustworthiness.  Her lack of vision diminishes her future electability.  And she learned to waffle from her hubby.  In the last days before the Iowa caucuses, she said she was the better candidate because she is more moderate.  Now, in New Hampshire, she’s saying she’s the progressive.  I put her more toward center than the Bern, but her ties to big money, special interests, and lobbying groups all mean that whatever she’s saying at the moment just represents empty rhetoric on her part.

Trust?  It’s hard to imagine any politician being trustworthy.  “Trustworthy politician” is an oxymoron.  The longer s/he’s around, the more opportunities there are for a politician to lose our trust.  Part of young people’s distrust in Clinton and trust in the Bern can be attributed to two facts, of course: Mrs. Clinton has been around so long that people know she’s untrustworthy; the Bern has been around a long time too, but people don’t know him that well.  When that happens, any sane person focuses on policies (there are a lot of insane ones among voters, of course).  The Bern talks about policies—maybe not enough, but at least he does; Clinton talks in fifteen-second sound bites with zero policy content, keying her remarks to impatient media and TV viewers instead of intelligent people who look beyond all that to policy details.

Clinton’s references to her past service record remind me of job applicants who tout their wonderful past accomplishments (it’s bad when you see they weren’t so great, as in the case of Clinton).  First, they don’t tell me much about what the applicant will do in the future.  When Clinton says, “Look at what I’ve done and what I’ve put up with, so it’s my turn,” it just doesn’t cut it with me.  She isn’t promising a chicken in every pot, of course, so she tries to reduce our expectations.  In fact, she is promising more of the same.  She’s the establishment candidate with the constant litany that she’ll continue Obama’s programs.  That’s living in the past, not the future.  We need more than Obama’s programs!

Saying she wants to continue with what Obama started might eventually win that well-intentioned but ineffective man’s endorsement (he seems hooked on this legacy thing—not bad, but he could have done so much more), but the next Democrat in the White House should be trying to fix the things wrong with what he started, the first priority being to break all ties with one-percenters who are destroying this country (they might be only one percent of our population, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to them as well).  That’s a huge gap in any vision Clinton pretends to have—channeling Obama will not get the country’s problems solved and will piss off a lot of people who know he caved to special interests in too many circumstances.

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Conservatives read the Wall Street Journal, progressives the NY Times—that’s an old cliché that doesn’t have much basis in fact.  Progressives also read the Journal—one had to be stupid not to do so in the events leading up to and during the 2008-2009 financial implosion, even if it was just to see how much money your IRA or 401(k) was losing (or the money wonks were stealing, depending on your interpretation).  Today’s markets bring similar woes, thanks to China’s imploding economy and its decreased demand for oil killing the oil prices and tumbling markets everywhere, not to mention Greece, Spain, and other spending economies dragging the markets down.

This article is about journalistic integrity or the lack thereof, but I only will have bad things to say about the NY Times because we know where the Journal stands—it’s conservative, of course, reflecting its name.  The Times, on the other hand, is far from being the progressive bastion conservatives love to attack.  Consider it a sophisticated and arrogant example of yellow journalism, sort of like bile in color and use, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but never impartial.  Let me consider some examples.

First, a general comment: the Times’ reporters and editors decide what news is fit to print (probably mostly editors, of course—the worker bees generally don’t have much say in any big corporation).  This isn’t new journalistic practice, of course.  What’s egregious here is that the Times pretends to cover all sides of an issue but slants the news following an agenda that’s neither conservative nor progressive—their number one goal is the same as the Daily News and other rags, that is, to sell more papers (the Daily News covers are often classics).  The Times criticizes those other NYC rags, for example, if it even bothers to acknowledge them, but their brand of journalism is still yellow.  Sgt. Friday’s dictum, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is unheard of in many Times’ articles.  I can stomach that when the article is op-ed, opinions don’t have to be based in facts and op-eds are often slanted because they’re opinions.  I’m talking about what the Times calls news.

They censor or embellish the facts too often, often hiding sources under the cloak of freedom of the press, that old constitutional favorite the Founding Fathers never imagined would lead to so many lies and deceit.  Those “unnamed sources” or “sources close to X” are frustrating for concerned citizens who want to check facts.  (Maybe the Times doesn’t worry because there are so few left?)  If you believe for a moment that a reporter or editor is always truthful, you don’t understand journalistic legerdemain (this is one reason why I say a journalism degree is better than an MFA as prep for a fiction writer).  What reporters write and editors approve are always designed first and foremost to sell newspapers, no matter the official orientation of the paper or whether it’s op-ed or news.  My motto is always trust but verify, or maybe distrust and verify, but how can you verify when the facts can’t be checked?

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“Diversity is America’s super power.”—Will Smith

As a boy, my friends and I had a “secret club” where we could be boys (grossing each other out with bugs and snails, practicing fart noises or having burp contests, and talking about those strange creatures called girls).  Sometimes that childhood club only has one member, but that one kid can let his imagination roll.  (I’m being sexist, but I never observed this among girls until junior high when they created their cliques.)  These secret societies are relatively harmless (except when the school ones turn to bullying).

Grown-ups participate in them too.  There are the really obnoxious ones—fascist militias, the Ku Klux Klan, East LA gangs (street gangs anywhere, for that matter), the Mafia, and so forth.  There seem to be good ones—the Shriners, Masons, Key Club, and so forth.  There are also the ambivalent—Scientologists, Better Business Bureau, fraternities and sororities, and so forth.  Most of these represent people coming together to form some kind of tribe, people with a “me-against-them” attitude and agenda, and that’s where problems arise.  People amongst like-minded people feed off both positive and negative emotions and ideas, some recognized, others unconscious.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a secret society, a super-exclusive one.  According to the LA Times, its members are 94% white and 77% male.  They’re also old, most above sixty.  The first percentage compares to the Ku Klux Klan; the last one to the Klan and most men’s lodges, even if they have a lady’s auxiliary.  Moreover, no one knows who they are!  They are supposedly so-called “experts” and impartial judges who determine who in the industry deserves to be recognized for cinematic achievement.  The impartiality is questionable.  In most cases, the Academy’s nominating process is like asking members of ISIS to determine which evangelical in America is the best Christian.  Hollywood is dominated by old white men; they own the studios, they set the priorities, and they have zero qualifications for determining cinematic achievement precisely because they’re old members of the status quo.  As Spike Lee says, Hollywood is rotten from top to bottom (in Mr. Lee’s defense, that’s my paraphrase—I have no desire to be politically correct here by coddling the members of this institution).

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[All politics today, along the lines of “Did we deserve all these bad presidential candidates?”  I’m seriously depressed….]

Item. Daughter Chelsea shows her stripes.  It’s not enough that Hillary trots out old Bill to try to sell her brand of snake oil, but she also employs their daughter Chelsea.  Apparently the couple has coached her well in the art of dirty politics.  Her spin on Bernie Sanders’s healthcare plan?  She said he wants to destroy Obamacare.  Even Hillary had to backtrack on that one!  What Sanders wants is to improve Obamacare by eliminating the insurance companies and Big Pharma’s stranglehold on it.  It’s called single payer, folks, and I’ve been pushing it for years (Hillary did too, for a time).  That’s socialism, you say.

OK, is Medicare socialism?  Maybe.  Aren’t all government services?  In the tristate area, you can hear Wall Street bankers complaining about socialism while they ride in on the commuter rail from their million-dollar mansions in posh areas of Connecticut.  Socialism is only a necessity that recognizes that capitalistic corporate America isn’t service-oriented but profit-oriented.  But ask any elderly person whether we should eliminate Medicare and you’ll get a ration of you know what.

Sure, Medicare has some problems (not enough pursuit of scammers, for one), but it mostly works.  And it’s much better than Obamacare because it’s 100% single payer for Part A and 80% for Part B.  I’d upgrade Part B to 100% (insurance companies offering supplement plans would resist that, of course) and make Obamacare single payer too.  Even generalizing the current Medicare to all ages would be better than Obamacare.  That’s what Bernie is proposing.  Chelsea’s spin is a lie.

Item. Where’s my freedom of religion?  Did you notice the two nuns in the audience at Obama’s State of the Union address?  The new Speaker of the House invited them.  I thought it was a nice touch at first—who doesn’t love Mother Teresa?—but I wondered why they looked pissed most of the time, a bit like nun-teachers in a parochial school.  Turns out they’re business moguls because they run thirty for-profit nursing homes.  Because they’re a business with so many employees, they have to offer healthcare to their employees.  They fought paying for birth control services to female employees under Obamacare.  A work-around was offered so their female employees could go to a third party for birth control meds.  The nuns are still fighting it, though, because they don’t want anything to do with that dirty business.  Why do these nuns have the right to force their religious preferences on their employees?  That IS a failure of Obamacare, but it was imposed by the conservative Supreme Court.

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Readers of this blog know me as a progressive, so I usually lean toward Dems.  Unlike some, though, I cherry pick ideas because reasoned conservatism has a place in American society (Tea Party candidates and Donald Trump are excluded from any discussion about reasoned conservatism, of course).  Moreover, I can’t stand any politician who has the arrogance to think that her/his electability is her/his right.  Readers of the blog also know I find political dynasties despicable.  With Jeb! out of the way, we’re halfway there, but we still have to get rid of the Clintons.  Hillary is the nation’s shingles to Bill as chicken pox.  Remember Bernie’s gracious apology on the debate stage?  That was doubly gracious considering that Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chairperson had gone overboard to punish the Sanders campaign.  Hillary agreed to open up her records in response to the apology but still hasn’t.  The reason?  First, I can only suspect that Hillary’s team did what Bernie’s did, only earlier, as Sanders said.  Second, things are tighter in Iowa and Bernie is leading in New Hampshire, so the Clintons don’t want a replay of 2008.

The Clintons play dirty politics, and they have the DNC in their stable.  Bernie doesn’t have a chance with their sycophant Wasserman Schultz and the DNC biasing the primary process in Hillary’s favor.  The GOP doesn’t have a monopoly on sleazy politics—the Clintons have been doing that for years.  Hillary already lost to one grassroots candidate—Obama came out of nowhere to stop the dynasty in 2008.  She and Bill are doing everything they can to go after any new threat they see threatening the continuation of their dynasty.  It’s old politics as usual for them.  They’re arrogant enough to move their agenda forward, but it’s an agenda many people want nothing to do with, and those people aren’t just Republicans!

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Given that the Donald and the other GOP candidates have made the rest of the world and many in the U.S. wonder what’s happening in America, the Land of the Free, it seems appropriate to list the things that we’re doing or might do to let ISIS win and return this world to the Dark Ages.  The GOP candidates own a lot of the hateful rhetoric described below—I refuse to believe all GOP voters do.  Here’s the list:

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Discriminate and persecute Muslims.  Trump and his supporters seem to forget that there’s freedom of religion in this country.  The Founding Fathers thought that this right was so important, it’s the first sentence in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  Trump, of course, is using hate and paranoia to pander to his base, which seems to represent about a third of GOP voters—that in itself is frightening—but he’s also proposing something he could never deliver without amending the U.S. Constitution.

While Islam faces the same problems as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and their offshoots and alternatives—how to maintain an ancient faith in a world that’s increasing secular and expecting spirituality and beliefs to be more of a private choice, not a public demonstration that infringes on others’ rights—its members, as do all religious members, need to eschew discrimination and violence and convince its members to control and ostracize those members who turn to them.  Every religion has a bloody past.  The world must move on.  Religious strife does NOT belong in the 21^st century.

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