Month: November 2024

Oh, I hope so. I really hope so.

FLASHBACK

Trump defends his comments about grabbing women “by the pu$$y”:

“Historically, that’s true with stars…If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true…Unfortunately or fortunately.” pic.twitter.com/mnlmXNrq9m

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 1, 2024

Tomorrow is election day, the last day of voting in this tumultuous 2024 campaign. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Just a year ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was challenging former president Trump for the GOP nomination by saying the word “woke” at least a hundred times a day while former S. Carolina Gov Nikki Haley competed for what’s left of the “normie” Republican vote. A clown car full of grifters and kooks, meanwhile, used the primaries as an opportunity to suck up to Trump, whom everyone knew would inevitably be the nominee. After all, he’d been running non-stop since 2015.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, incumbent president Joe Biden was an unchallenged shoo-in for the Democratic nomination and most people felt he’d probably be able to replicate his 2020 win despite being unpopular due to a lingering hangover from the pandemic. After all, Trump had incited an insurrection and was facing lawsuits and felony trials in federal court and two different states stemming from a variety of alleged crimes. Surely, he couldn’t possibly win after all that?

Since that time, Joe Biden was revealed to be just too old to run for president again and was replaced by his younger Vice President, Kamala Harris who sparked a massive rise in enthusiasm among Democrats. And Donald Trump has likewise shown that his millions-strong cult of personality is fully intact and they are ecstatic about putting him back in the White House in spite of his many flaws (maybe even because of them.) We could find out the winner as soon as tomorrow night — or maybe not.

If it’s as close as many of the pollsters say it is it could take a while before we know the final results. And it goes without saying that unless they call the race for him right away, Trump is planning to cry”fraud” and will do everything in his power to create the illusion that he won regardless of the count and we can expect chaos. He’s made that very clear.

The polls have more or less shown a tied race nationally and in the swing states for the past couple of months. Whether that’s correct or not, we don’t know. Because they missed some Trump voters in 2016 and 2020, everyone is on edge that the same thing has happened again despite the pollsters’ going out of their way to correct the problem this time. With the polls this close that error could translate to a repeat of 2016 which has a whole lot of people losing sleep these last few weeks.

But something unexpected happened this past weekend that may have called those assumptions into question. The Des Moines Register poll, considered one of the best in all of politics due to pollster J. Ann Selzer’s excellent track record, dropped its final poll of the cycle and it landed like a nuclear bomb. Iowa is a solid red state and the previous poll had Trump winning the state handily as expected. Now the numbers showed Harris beating Trump 47-44. Boom.

Iowa is one of the whitest states in the union, so race isn’t a factor which makes it an interesting proxy for white voters in other swing states with similar populations (like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, for instance.) The paper reported that while Trump has maintained his base of men, evangelical voters, rural residents and non-college educated voters, women, specifically older and politically independent women, have swung in large numbers to Harris. And just as surprising, Harris is winning voters over 65, which has been a GOP base vote for decades. What in the world does this mean?

First, it’s pretty clear that reproductive rights are driving this race for a whole lot of people. Iowa, in particular, is now living under a draconian 6 week abortion ban that was upheld by its far right Supreme Court last summer. Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his notorious opinion that “women are not without electoral or political power.” It appears we may be about to find out the truth of that.

People expected that younger women would vote in large numbers on this issue but there seems to be some surprise that older women would be motivated to do so. Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno was caught on video bemoaning the “single issue” women voters and wondering why women over 50 would care about it.

At a town hall, Ohio GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno attacked women that are “single issue voters” on the topic of abortion:

“It’s a little crazy by the way, but especially for women that are like past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’” pic.twitter.com/A5okklkcIp

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) September 24, 2024

I guess it’s hard for right wingers to understand why anyone would care about someone other than themselves. But it’s more than that. The reversal of Roe vs Wade was deeply offensive to many women of all ages, something we could only see as a direct attack on our basic human rights by a group of men (and one very conservative woman) determined to turn back the clock to a time when women were literally second class citizens. Women can see where this is leading and it isn’t toward freedom and equality — for any of us.

The Republican party and its leader, a predator found legally liable for sexual assault, is running for election on a platform of flagrant misogyny. Donald Trump literally said, ‘I was able to kill Roe v. Wade’ until he belatedly realized it wasn’t popular, at which point he came up with his fatuous rationale that “everyone wanted it to go back to the states” which is utterly absurd and most people know it. He’s lately taken to saying that he’ll be women’s “protector” which coming from him, is more of a threat. In fact, in recent days he’s said that he’ll “protect” women “whether the women like it or not.”

“I'm gonna do it whether the women like it or not.”

Really makes one wonder how many times he’s said, thought, or acted on this over the years.#HarrisWalz2024 #mepolitics #RoevemberIsComing
pic.twitter.com/YxEJ4Chbbh

— Bruce Bourgoine (@BruceBourgoine) October 31, 2024

Then you have his choice for Vice President JD Vance, who thinks that women should stay in abusive marriages, thinks abortion should be banned nationally even in cases of rape and incest and wants to prevent women from travelling out of state to obtain them. And he famously believes that “childless cat ladies” are the cause of everything wrong in our culture and agrees that “the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female is child care.”

And people are surprised that women of all ages are refusing to vote for these people?

This Iowa poll may be an outlier and all the chatter about this remarkable result will end up being nothing more than election year lore. Most analysts still seem to think that it’s nearly impossible to believe that Harris will actually win Iowa. But this poll is one of the very few that caught the hidden angry non-college educated Trump vote in 2016 and 2020. There is every reason to believe that it may be catching the hidden pissed off college educated and independent women Harris vote in 2024. Nothing would be more satisfying than for this voting block to be the one to spell the end of Donald Trump’s political career. 

Update: A Trumper

Gaetz thought it was a great idea before the 2022 midterms to say that women who were upset about Roe being overturned were all fat & ugly.

Now, on the eve of the 2024 election, he claims that the Barbie movie was released to brainwash men not to vote.pic.twitter.com/CBEN8eGSr8

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 4, 2024

That’s going to work out just great.

Salon

All the way through the tape

Heather Cox Richardson recounts how when in the 1850s it seemed “elite enslavers had become America’s rulers,” Americans (might we say real Americans?) organized and fought back, ending slavery once and for all:

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn.

It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. It could be a long night. Then again, it could be a blowout loss for the orange blow-up doll. Filmmaker Michael Moore predicted a month ago that “Trump is toast.” He still thinks so.

Moore wrote in October:

Right now, if you know how to really read the polls, or if you have access to the various private and internal polling being conducted by and shared only amongst the elites, Wall Street, and Members of Congress, then you already know that this election was over weeks ago. 

That feels right. So I’m increasingly annoyed that the press and the Harris campaign are portraying the presidential election as razor thin. They have their reasons. Holding eyeballs, for the former. (For the press, it’s also obeying in advance.) Keeping volunteers juiced and door-knocking, for the latter. It’s as if there’s a giant, um, agreement(?) to hype a photo finish. But a close-race narrative is just what Trump is counting on to give credence to Big Lie 2.0 when he loses. Not helpful.

Be joyful warriors and keep running through the tape, as Coach Walz says. That’s helpful. Run up the score. There’s another once-and-for-all to accomplish. Because our present rhymes with our past, Richardson reminds us:

In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power. 

And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong. 

Reflecting on the movement built since Trump arrived on scene, Richardson has hope. “[I]t looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom.”

What are you? Get loud now.

Polls will be open by the time I post again tomorrow morning. Millions will stand in line to vote, to at least imagine that they are the true sovereigns of this republic. In front and behind them will be neighbors prepared — eager even — to surrender their freedoms to oligarchs, madmen, and theocrats.

America’s anxious, non-cult majority wants the 2024 elections over. Trump to be over. MAGA to be over. To return to a normal we almost can no longer imagine. Never in memory have things felt more like Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 visual tone poem scored by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance.”

Compounding that sense for survivors of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina is waiting for what comes out of our taps once more to be drinkable. For the mud to wash away. For the roads to be drivable. For the downed trees, logs and branches lining them to disappear. For bridges to be rebuilt. And lives.

Before normal returns we must have elections, including for president. God knows they won’t be anything like normal. Democrats’ slate of candidates here in North Carolina is the best I’ve seen. And Republicans’, the biggest dumpster fire.

Has the felon Donald Trump declared himself the winner yet? We’re a day and a half out. What’s the pathological liar waiting for? Actual election results? Another rendition of “Y.M.C.A.”?

November 5th is not another September 11th or January 6th. There will be no excuse for anyone to swear they did not see Trump’s preemptive victory declaration coming. “No one has an alibi.” Republicans have been broadcasting “Donald Trump Determined To Strike in US” in front of cameras for months as Trump’s mind visibly disintegrates. Gird yourselves. Remind everyone you know, loudly, what’s coming.

James Fallows last night:

The things we do know

1) That Donald Trump is already declaring victory, and will do so more stridently on November 5. The press needs to be prepared.

As I wrote recently about the powerful new movie The Apprentice, among the lessons young Donald Trump absorbed from his mentor, Roy Cohn, was: always claim victory, no matter the score. Never admit defeat, especially when you’ve lost.

Trump has been using that approach nonstop since 2020, with his “stop the steal” mantra now embraced by most of the GOP. For months he has been priming his base to believe that he is “way ahead” in all 2024 polls, so any result except a Trump victory must be a fraud.

Trump is sure to switch from saying “I will win” to “I have won” less than 48 hours from now. On Tuesday as the first exit polls come in, Trump himself will say that they look “better than anyone expected,” so a big win is ahead. The Fox team will back him up. As the first real counts come in after 8pm from Pennsylvania, they will favor Trump, because of the usual GOP-skew of same-day-vote results. Trump will use them to announce he was won the crucial state and thus the election.

We saw this drill in 2020. It is likely to be worse this time. Partly that is because Trump has conditioned his entire party to expect fraud. Partly it is because the Fox News team that made a brave, correct, anti-Trump call of Arizona results four years ago has been fired for that transgression. From top to bottom Fox is now on board.

Fallows expects that “the Harris-Walz campaign team is fully prepared to rebut these false claims.” Ranks of Democratic lawyers will have legal actions ready to file and be suited up for “the inevitable courtroom battles that will follow.”

I’ve inquired with election protection leads here myself how they plan to respond to Trump’s Election Night revival of “The Big Lie.” (No, I didn’t expect an answer.) When Trump again issues orders for his minions to get “wild,” what then? Yes, I know they’ve got harshly worded lawsuits teed up. And then what are they prepared to do? It could take more. And require more of us.

November 5th isn’t the end. More likely, it’s “the end of the beginning.” For now, ignore the last-minute flood of play-by-play disinformation, Will Bunch advises:

The only things that matter between now and 8 p.m. Tuesday are casting a ballot, and talking to family and friends or even knocking on some doors to make sure as many as possible do the same. Vote as if your life depends on it. Because if you finally have health insurance, if you believe in clean drinking water, if you or a loved one plan on having a child or want control over your own body, or if you live in an immigrant community, your life does depend on it.

Normal depends on it.

It looks like the Madison Square Garden hatefest was a huge mistake

Trump actually thought it was a great idea to hold a massively covered rally in the final days in which the speakers were all given the go-ahead to insult virtually everyone including at least one voting block they desperately needed to win the campaign. Not a great idea:

“I have heard from the Puerto Rican community directly about how much they were offended” by Hinchcliffe’s remarks, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said Saturday while campaigning for Anna Thomas, a Democratic running for Pennsylvania state representative. “I think it woke up the community in a way that is going to turn them out in even greater numbers for Kamala Harris.”

Pressed to explain why these remarks might resonate with voters who are not already firmly in one corner, when so many other Trump or Trump-related comments have failed to damage him, Shapiro said, “This is my sense from being all over the state: that it broke through, and it resonated in a way with the community, where it made them say, ‘Well, wait a minute, that guy’s not for us. That guy doesn’t respect us.’”

They report tons of anecdotes from various politicos in the state saying the same. Also voters like this:

Nilsa Vega and Neidel Pacheco of Hellertown, a borough south of Bethlehem, both said they had never voted before, but Hinchcliffe’s remarks were the reason they planned to vote for Harris on Tuesday.

“That hit the spot right there,” Vega said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”

Pacheco saw Trump’s decision to pose in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin the following day as an additional insult. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” Pacheco asked.

That garbage truck stunt was so MAGA insider that it went right over the heads of most people. It made little sense if you hadn’t followed the ins and out of the rally and Biden’s garbled comment and the gleeful Deplorables 2.0 hissy fit. Nobody but the most ardent Trump cultist understood it and when they started dressing up in garbage bags for Halloween it looked like mockery.

This is the problem with allowing Don Jr. and JD Vance’s little bro contingent to have too much influence on the campaign. They’re just preaching to faithful and because the faithful are a bunch of people who behave like 13 year olds and speak their own cutesy little language nobody who isn’t in it knows what the hell they’re talking about. It often goes awry.

Remember this one?

If you aren’t conversant with that meme, Snopes has a full rundown. (Has anyone mentioned that these people are just plain weird?)

It’s one thing to have your little secret handshakes and cute inside jokes but in the midst of a hardfought campaign it’s probably a good idea not to make racist jokes about voting blocks you’re counting on to vote for you. They did it anyway and it may cost them the whole enchilada.

Final Univision poll in PA has 64-30; among Puerto Ricans, 67-27. Trump holding only 82% of his '20 voters (vs. Dems 89%)

The garbage joke broke through. Voters heard about it & don't laugh it off: 69% say it was "more racist than humorous", 67% see it as sign of Trump racism. https://t.co/mdV1M5XmOj pic.twitter.com/RxAgI4TeQ1

— Carlos Odio (@carlosodio) November 3, 2024

Trump, talking about the protective glass around him on stage at his rally in PA: "To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind." pic.twitter.com/s0pDzWAS6z

— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) November 3, 2024

Get a load of this:

Trump’s just blurting out whatever comes into his head:

Former President Donald J. Trump told supporters on Sunday that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his term during an end-of-campaign rally where he vented angrily about a spate of new public polls showing him losing ground to Vice President Kamala Harris and joked about reporters being shot at.

The former president also described Democrats as a “demonic” party at the rally, at an airport in Lititz, Pa., his first of three swing-state stops planned for his second to last day on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump’s voice was audibly hoarse and his speech sluggish as he made unfounded claims about election interference. He praised himself for ditching his prepared remarks, saying it meant the “truth” could come out.

“We had the best border, the safest border,” Mr. Trump said of his time in the White House. He said that the economy had been in good shape, before mentioning the chart he had been pointing to featuring immigration statistics when he was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pa., in July.

“It said we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump continued. He added, “We did so well, we had such a great—” and then cut himself off. He then immediately noted “so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”

The remark echoed what Mr. Trump told some aides within days of his 2020 election loss: that he wasn’t going to leave the White House.

“I’m just not going to leave,” Mr. Trump told one aide. He told another, “We’re never leaving,” and added: “How can you leave when you won an election?”

There is no doubt in my mind that if he would have had more support from within the government (including the military) that he would have simply declared martial law and refused to leave. He just didn’t have enough institutional support to stage a full coup.

He won’t have such impediments going forward. He will have the full support of his party in the congress and the courts. And they will ensure that there are no Milleys or Kellys among the top brass. He could certainly get it done in 2028, even if it’s just to turn the whole thing over to the person he believes should succeed him.

Some of you who aren’t on social media may not have heard about this since it’s getting zero coverage in the mainstream media. I suspect this is what the rumor everyone was talking about week or so ago was all about. In another time, it would be an earthquake but in this election I think they’ve decided that it’s just too much.

The Daily Beast reports:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast.

The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time.

The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein and will add to debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his attitudes and conduct towards women, just days before the election.

The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship of two former friends and their very different paths–one towards infamy, prison and suicide–the other toward power, the Oval Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn star.

Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.”

The tapes also offer unusual insight into a friendship of two men frequently out on the town together and pursuing women, prowling New York and Atlantic City, using their wealth and power.

Epstein painted a complicated portrait of Trump. He called him “charming,” and “always fun,” capable of extraordinary salesmanship and suggested he was personally in favor of Trump’s policies on“the transgender stuff.” But he alleged Trump was a serial cheat in his marriages and loved to “f— the wives of his best friends.”

He also claimed that while Trump has friends, he was at heart a friendless man incapable of kindness. And he alleged that Trump had had scalp reduction surgery for baldness and called himself “The Trumpster.”

Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied: “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his Fire and Fury podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner workings of the Trump administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap.

They think those pictures may have been confiscated by the FBI when they arrested Epstein. But they may still be out there…

You may wonder why Ghislaine Maxwell hasn’t blown the whistle on this since she’s in prison probably for the rest of her life. I have no idea. But I do know that if I had observed the way Jeffrey Epstein went out while he was held in prison (and holding out the possibility that he didn’t die by his own hand) I might not feel very safe in incarcertation if I said the wrong thing.

Wolff is not the best source on stories like thes except that he has all these tapes. If they are authenticated they should be pretty damning. But despite the fact that the right has been obsessed with Epstein for years on the assumption that his story would take down Democrats, there just don’t seem to be much interest in this story. Go figure.

Update — yikes:

He’s going to “protect” women…

Considering what Obama, Biden, Walz and others have meant when they say that America might not survive another four years of Trump.

“I think you have to look at what the definition of ‘survive’ is. You can put me on a breathing tube tonight, but it wouldn’t be surviving like I’m surviving now. 

That’s the best way of putting the threat that I’ve heard from anyone. We might survive but we’ll never be the same.

Clinton gave a wide ranging interview to CNN and it’s quite good:

Over nearly three weeks straight of 10-hour days – which means he’s had a much more active schedule than Harris, Trump, Tim Walz, JD Vance, Joe Biden or Barack Obama – Clinton is adamant in his speeches about his unique perspective as the only person on the planet who’s done the job and personally knows both candidates on the ballot Tuesday.

“You did pretty well when I was president, and I think I’m entitled to my opinion about who would be better,” he often says, his soft Southern accent now with a permanent rasp.

Standing in a church gym in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, he recounted a bit that he had read a few years ago about Dwight Eisenhower saying he worried how much longer the oldest continuous democracy could survive with all the effort it takes.

[…]

He insisted that this tour focus on towns and counties where a president has never been before, like South Haven, Michigan, where he spoke from a front porch in the middle of a block – a scene that would have been too conventional for Norman Rockwell to paint.

The people show up, and not just for the 40-minute, no-notes speeches that are more like chats – just with only one person talking. Clinton’s visit “cements something for me going forward,” 25-year-old Berrien County Commissioner Chokwe Pitchford told a few hundred people in the patio of a microbrew pub in Benton Harbor on a Wednesday afternoon, referring both to boosting local pride and Democrats winning elections there.

He expressed regrets about NAFTA and acknowledged the fact that it ended up fuelling some of the populist backlash that Trump rode to victory. He believes the economy is about to take off and whoever wins will be able to take advantage of it. He’s right about that. Just imagine Trump with this economy…

He said this about George W. Bush:

There’s only one living former president missing in this race: George W. Bush. Many people think they know where he stands on Trump, even though he has refused to say.

Clinton, who has his own long history with the Bush family, defended the 43rd president’s choice to stick to his rule of avoiding campaign politics in his post-presidency.

“First of all, he’s spoken up, I think, more than he’s gotten credit for, and he takes every opportunity that I’ve seen to talk about how important immigration is and how we can’t survive without it,” Clinton said, leaving hanging in the air the implication of that contrast to Trump’s nativism.

Bush really did want to get out of politics, Clinton said, before dropping in passing that “he likes Colin Allred,” who happens to be Bush’s local congressman in Texas and is trying for a potentially Democratic majority-preserving upset Tuesday against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Clinton said Bush told him that directly: “Oh, yeah. He’ll tell anybody that, that he’s a good guy.”

Bush left a congratulatory voicemail for Allred, when he first won election as the congressman from his home district in 2018, and they met in person once, but the former president has not gotten involved in the Senate race.

“He also knows, beginning with our relationship, it’s very different when you’re out of political life, when there is no competition, no consequence,” Clinton said. “And I think he believes that since he was a proud Republican all those years, it’s enough for him to make clear what he believes with all this, without giving up the party he’s been with all his life.”

When read Clinton’s comments, a person close to Bush told CNN, “President Bush has indeed moved on from presidential politics, but he has been working quietly and diligently to keep the Senate in GOP control.”

The person declined to comment on whether that work included efforts on behalf of Cruz.

To hell with the Bushes. If they can’t speak up now, when even Dick fucking Cheney is doing it, they are just as bad as we always thought they were. He loses nothing by doing it and neither does his brother or his wife. His daughter Barbara is canvassing for Harris but that’s not enough.

I think Clinton’s right about this though:

Clinton’s case for Harris is looped through with his own experience: The reason he’s so sure Americans will soon start feeling better about the economy is because that’s what happened in between Democrats’ devastating 1994 midterms after he made huge cuts to the shrink the national debt, and how they felt about the surging economy years later. He said he feels for Biden, complaining at the White House about not getting credit for infrastructure projects like replacing lead pipes and other spending that he says helped save the economy, “but that happens to all of us.”

The list goes on – but nothing is so aching for Clinton as what has always been the regret he couldn’t reconcile: His failure, up until almost the day he left the White House in 2001, to land a permanent peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Especially since October 7, 2023, people who have spoken with Clinton told CNN he has talked with anger and remorse in private about what could have been and what didn’t have to be. Standing in Michigan, reflecting on Arab American politics in the state sent him off on an extended riff through history and emotional understanding, building up to the missed crowning achievement that might have gotten him the Nobel Peace Prize and almost certainly would have saved many of the lives that have been lost without it.

“The only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth is when he promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out,” he said, starting to tick through the details of the would-be agreement and the history of its approval by the Israeli Cabinet.

“I can hardly talk about this,” Clinton said, audibly choking up for a moment.

“How about we stop funding it?” a woman called out.

He kept going. There’s one president at a time, he said, but he thinks America needs to restart the bigger peace process.

“I’m going to do everything I can to convince people that they cannot murder their way out of this. Neither side. They can’t kill their way out. They have to make a new beginning,” he said.

The answer, he pleaded, isn’t being so mad at Biden that they turn toward Trump or other candidates that might help the Republican win. Show up for Harris, he told anyone listening, and it’ll be up to the next president to restart the peace process and pick up where he’d been forced to leave off.

“We have to find a way to share the future,” he said.

He muses about aging and it’s genuinely fascinating. He was the youthful first baby boomer president all those years ago. Now he’s in the twilight of his life.

If Trump wins he says that he’ll go back to work on his foundation if Trump will let him, which reflects his feelings about the possibility of revenge against him and his family (which is very real.)

He said he would be standing by to help if Harris wins, whenever she wants him:

“My belief is that you should always help if the president asks you to. I said, ‘I can help you on natural disasters, I can help you on some problems, but I will never call you,’” he said, proudly noting his 24-year, four-president run of never being the one to initiate a call, despite the many that have come in.

“She’ll call and say thanks to Hillary, me, and I’ll say, ‘We’re as close as your phone, but you’ve got a hard job, and the last thing you need is anybody like us working you.’”

I know his legacy is forever tarnished by his personal behavior but he remains a very interesting and, in some ways, powerful figure, as is Hillary. In the great scheme of things, they define the last three decades in American politics just as much as Trump does.

“Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face”

The anti-fluoridation conspiracy theory is so old and crazy that Stanley Kubrick warned us about it in Dr. Strangelove (1964). For a half century it was THE political litmus test for nutjobs. RFK Jr is now trying to normalizing it.🙄 pic.twitter.com/ylpk4Kzm7r https://t.co/iPVCiS4ZEm

— Sanho Tree (@SanhoTree) November 3, 2024

Anti-flouridation conspiracy theories were a staple of Bircher propaganda back in the day. It was so ubiquitous that Dr. Strangelove, 1964, mocked it in the greatest satire of the right ever made.

Unfortunately, we are not living in a movie satire. Check this out:

That would be just another crazy RFK rant except for this:

Trump/Measles 2024 https://t.co/5qVa6mCRP2

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) October 28, 2024

He’s not backing down:

REPORTER: You said you would like RFK Jr do whatever he wants with healthcare-

TRUMP: Oh, he's gonna have a big role in healthcare

R: You're comfortable with his views on vaccines?

TRUMP: We'll be talking about a lot of things but he's gonna have a very big role on healthcare pic.twitter.com/zjouDSULH7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2024

The Republican Party continues to show itself to be completely spineless toadies. If Trump pulls out a win he will be seen as the unbeatable Colossus, a literal god, and they will do anything to please him. After all, they already are. It will only get worse.

Tim Scott, who has been a strong supporter of fluorinated water, refuses to distance himself from RFK Jr's proclamation that his first order of business will be to eliminate fluoride from water pic.twitter.com/LzWcj2lh7g

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2024

Update: Dennis Hartley and I were on the same wavelength today which is not surprising since are both huge Strangelove fans. So enjoy two Strangelove posts!

[*sigh*] To paraphrase the Giant in Twin Peaks…”It is happening again.”

On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S​. water systems to remove fluoride from public water. Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. President…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 2, 2024

What I’m referring to, of course, is life imitating the art of a certain 1964 film:

The General elaborates further:

General Jack D. Ripper : Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake : [very nervous] Lord, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper : You know when fluoridation first began?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake : I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper : Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

Context? JICYMI:

From my 2016 piece on Dr. Strangelove:

“Mein fuehrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic 1964 masterpiece about the tendency for people in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why Kubrick and company bothered to make it all up. […]

There are so many great lines, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks.

Try as you might, you really can’t make this shit up.

On the homepage and across two pages in the paper:

Their headlines and story placement have been terrible this year. But they’ve come around here at the end with some great features on the stakes and the editorial board is not pulling any punches.