Monthly Archives: October 2016

Prince George’s “Democratic” flyer via suspended Sylvania Woods school principal?

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The election flyer that landed in Prince George’s County mailboxes on Friday, October 21, looked typical. Banner top front: “2016 Democratic Sample Ballot for the General Election,” above screamer “Democrats 2016.” Banner bottom front: “VOTE DEMOCRATS 2016” and “DEMOCRATIC GENERAL ELECTION,” with the election date. Heading on the reverse: “2016 Democratic Sample Ballot.” Also, “Take this with you when you vote.”

The flyer endorses four Prince George’s County Circuit Court judges–incumbents Herbert Dawson, Dorothy Michelle Engel and Karen Mason, and nominee Ingrid Turner, who defeated Judge Erik Nyce in the primary. The four judicial candidates are pictured beneath photos of Hillary Clinton, Senate candidate Chris Van Hollen, and House candidates Anthony Brown and Steny Hoyer.

The flyer also endorses five school board candidates. Unlike sample ballots, it includes just one candidate for each position–David Murray in District 1, Patricia Eubanks in District 4, Cheryl Landis in District 5, Alexander Wallace in District 7, and Edward Burroughs III in District 8. Murray is unopposed. Trying to find out more, I emailed the mailer to local school activist Genevieve Demos Kelley. As Kelley noted in her blog, the mailer looks at first sight like any official Democratic Party mailer, but the county’s Central Democratic Committee voted not to endorse in school board races this year.

Committee flyer endorses four Prince George’s County judges and five P. G. school board candidates 

The flyer was actually mailed by the Prince George’s Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges; see below.

Five of the Prince George’s County Board of Education seats, as mentioned, are up for rotation November 8. Two contests include school board members who in August wrote a letter to County Executive Rushern Baker, asking the board’s chair and vice chair to step down after revelations of abuse in county schools. And one of the two has a challenger endorsed on the “2016 Democratic Sample Ballot.” That is to say, Verjeana Jacobs in District 5 not only has an opponent, but her opponent has the implied blessing of ‘Democrats 2016’ from Clinton on down to Van Hollen and Brown and/or Hoyer. (Two other members on the letter, Beverly Anderson and Sonya Williams, are not up for reelection this fall; one is vacating her seat; and one, Edward Burroughs III, received an endorsement.)

The Washington Post endorsed for school board only incumbents and/or non-participants in the letter. Full disclosure: The troubled Judge Sylvania Woods Elementary School is in District 4, my district, and I myself voted for challenger Abel Olivo in early voting yesterday. And speaking of full disclosure–

Fine print

On the reverse, bottom left, smallest print on the page, comes the required-by-law “Authorized by: David S. Coaxum, Treasurer, Prince George’s Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges” and “Committee for reCharge At-Large, Calvin Brown, Treasurer.” The return address (top front left; they don’t make this easy) reads “P.O. Box 2072, Upper Marlboro MD 20773-2072.”

Directories and public records show the postal address as held by Michelle Lynn Fanning, now Michelle Williams, of Gambrills, Maryland, in the Bowie area. Principal Michelle Williams is suspended from her position at the head of Judge Sylvania Woods Elementary School, near Bowie. The telephone number listed for the address is out of service, and Principal Williams has not replied to an emailed query. The main office at Judge Sylvania Woods Elementary did not return a call.

As has been widely reported, a volunteer aide at Sylvania Woods produced child pornography at the facility, using students for his videos.  Additional reports are linked here and here. Law firm Joseph Greenwald Laake has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents of some Sylvania Woods students. All of this might reasonably raise a question as to why a suspended principal is engaged in politicking. Another question is why it is allowable for the principal to engage in behind-the-scenes politicking for either judges or school board candidates. In the near future, both the courts and the school board in Prince George’s County may have to weigh in on issues arising at Sylvania Woods Elementary, among other issues.

Children at Sylvania Woods Elementary School

Children at Sylvania Woods Elementary School

The Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges sent out a similar mailer for a fundraiser back in February. Same contact information. Somewhat different candidates, since one went down to defeat. An email to Judge Erik Nyce has not been returned.

The same flyer was being handed out at early voting locations yesterday. I spoke briefly with Ms. Engels’ husband, who happened to be standing near a box of the mailers.

Along with Coaxum, the Maryland state Board of Elections campaign finance website lists as chair of the committee Elizabeth Marie Hewlett of Bowie. No one answered the phone at the number provided. Along with chairing the Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges, Hewlett is also chair of the M-NCPP Prince George’s County Planning Board. Questions placed by telephone with an assistant to Ms. Hewlett have not been returned.

This committee looks interesting. The Maryland campaign finance database makes information on contributions fairly accessible. The Prince George’s Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges has received many contributions, loans or transfers since its founding. Many are small donations; many donations of varying amounts into the thousands have come from attorneys, law firms, lobbyists, judges’ relatives and others in the legal community.

In February 2016, the Joseph Greenwald Laake firm–which is representing stakeholders at Sylvania Woods Elementary in the lawsuit–donated $4,000.00 to the committee. A telephone call and an email to Joseph Greenwald Laake have not been returned. Judge Engel’s husband, Michael C. Engel, donated $4,000 on March 8, 2016. The similar Montgomery County Committee to Retain the Sitting Judges of Montgomery Co MD PAC also transferred $4,000 in March 2016. Prominent attorneys and key lawyer-General Assembly members like Joseph Bonsib, Gerard Evans, Mike Miller and Joseph Vallario also made four-figure donations.

Emails to County Executive Rushern Baker, Principal Williams, Coaxum and Brown have not been returned. Calls to the offices of Coaxum and Brown have not been returned. This seems to be a quiet and modest group of people.

The mailer also includes a small-print disclaimer that “This message has not been authorized or approved by any other candidate or committee.”

A “vanilla characterization”: Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Hillary Clinton

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Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Hillary Clinton. Your cash is good at the bar.

Emails recently released via wikileaks restore little hope about the Clinton team behind scenes. The excerpts below, verbatim and in-house, pertain to that vexed topic of Clinton’s paid speeches for Wall Street.

They’re pretty clear. Little editorializing required. As Halloween approaches, some naked self-exposure of cynical willingness to fool the public is highlighted in orange:

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Dan Schwerin <dschwerin@hillaryclinton.com> wrote: > Following up on the conversation this morning about needing more arrows in > our quiver on Wall Street, I wanted to float one idea. In October 2014, > HRC did a paid speech in NYC for Deutsche Bank. I wrote her a long riff > about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, > precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever > asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those > fat cats. It’s definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it > now, but it’s much more than most people would assume she was saying in > paid speeches. (Full transcript is attached and key riff is pasted below.) > Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter > and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too > close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can > point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power. Downside > would be that we could then be pushed to release transcripts from all her > paid speeches, which would be less helpful (although probably not > disastrous). In the end, I’m not sure this is worth doing, but wanted to > flag it so you know it’s out there.

The suggestion did not meet with unmitigated moral contempt or a generous wrath. On the following Monday, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon passed it along:

Reviving this thread because AP is working on a story similar to Pat Healy’s article in Sunday’s NYT about HRC’s “Wall Street image problem.” The reporter, Lisa Lerer, plans specifically to note that her paid speeches to banks were closed-press affairs, and transcripts are not available. She is asking if we wish to characterize her remarks in any way. I think we could come up with a vanilla characterization that challenges the idea that she sucked up to these folks in her appearances, but then use AP’s raising of this to our advantage to pitch someone to do an exclusive by providing at least the key excerpts from this Deutsche Bank speech. In doing so, we could have the reporting be sourced to a “transcript obtained by [news outlet]” so it is not confirmed as us selectively providing one transcript while refusing to share others.

There were demurrals. As Mandy Grunwald responded the same day,

I worry about going down this road. First, the remarks below make it sound like HRC DOESNT think the game is rigged — only that she recognizes that the public thinks so. They are angry. She isn’t. Second, once you start looking at speeches, you run smack into Maggie Haberman’s report for Politico on HRC’s Goldman Sachs speech, in which HRC isn’t quoted directly, but described as saying people shouldn’t be vilifying Wall Street.

In other words, the suggested riff might not obfuscate enough to be helpful. As Grunwald went on,

Maybe you think the Deutsche Bank speech takes the sting out of the Goldman report — but I am concerned that the passage below will exacerbate not improve the situation.

For nostalgic reasons, I like seeing the name Deutsche Bank come up. Remember the great moment in Casablanca when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) entertains an official from Deutsche Bank?

Clip on Youtube here

Playing it again

Playing it again

The dialogue names names:

53. I’m sorry sir, this is a private room.

 

54. Of all the nerve! Who do you think…? I know there’s gambling in there ! There’s no secret . You dare not keep me out of here! You

 

55. Yes? What’s the trouble? ABDUL This gentleman — GERMAN RICK Your cash is good at the bar. GERMAN What ! Do you know who I am? Yes? What’s the trouble? This gentleman ….

 

56. I’ve been in every gambling room between Honolulu and Berlin and if you think I’m going to be kept out of a saloon like this, you’re very much mistaken.

 

57. Hello Ugarte. Uh, excuse me, please. Hello, Rick.

 

58. What! Do you know who I am? Your cash is good at the bar

 

59. I do . You’re lucky the bar is open to you.

 

60. This is outrageous. I shall report it to the Angriff!

 

61. Huh. You know, Rick, watching you just now with the Deutsche Bank, one would think you’d been doing this all your life.

 

62. Well, what makes you think I haven’t.

Nobody was ever going to out-mediocre them again

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Today’s history lesson: Back home in Arkansas after Georgetown University, Oxford, and Yale Law School, William Jefferson Clinton ran for governor in 1978, and won. He had previously run–in his twenties–for the U.S. House of Representatives and lost, then for state Attorney General and won. In 1979, he became the youngest governor in the U.S.

National attention; widespread political awe, admiration and envy; a seemingly limitless upward trajectory for a ‘boy governor’ and Southern political rock star who seemed to marry the best, or anyway most electable, elements of good ol’ boy (including the treatment of Arkansas women) and elite education. Then Clinton ran for reelection two years later–and lost, in a stunning upset and reversal, to Republican Frank White in deep-blue Arkansas.

Frank D. White

Frank D. White

So much for ‘electable’.

Quite the setback for someone who had run for every conceivable office from his time as a student.

As one might expect, soul-searching ensued. During this period, reportedly both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton opposed the death penalty. Bill Clinton had after a fashion opposed the Vietnam War.

So what did the highly educated and fairly well-traveled Bill Clinton conclude? 1) He was simply too good for the populace. As with Mark Twain’s Hank the Boss in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the populace was not up to his level. And 2) he was never going to make that mistake again. In diluted parallel to the infamous determination made by George Wallace, Clinton resolved that nobody was ever going to out-mediocre him again.

My own take is that Bill and Hillary Clintons’ joint career has been shaped by and has fulfilled that determination ever since. They do not go out ahead of fellow pols on issues of peace and justice. They back-pedaled the early opposition to the death penalty, with its proven racial disparities, so despicably that Bill Clinton flew home to Arkansas during the 1992 campaign to be present personally for the execution of a learning-disabled African-American man. Bill Clinton has been called every name in the book, but if you really want to get his goat, try calling him a leftist. For decades, both Clintons have persistently courted the favor and money of big donors, choosing Wall Street and management over working families and labor. They viewed every rising Democratic politician who appealed to the working class as a threat. They undermined any  succeeding state Attorney General who moved in favor of employee rights or the working poor. They did little to nothing, putting it nicely, for women in Arkansas; not in law enforcement, not in academia, not in journalism. (Female wealthy family members do not count as exceptions.) Like some pale-blue and GOP pols in other border or near-border states, they dismantled the populist legislation of the early twentieth century.

And they left the Democratic Party in Arkansas a shambles.

The irony is that there was a grain of truth in Bill Clinton’s perception of his problem. Yes, on one hand the idea that somebody like Clinton was ‘too good’ is ludicrous. Yes, on the other hand the illusion that I’m just too good is one that anyone could succumb to temporarily.

But there were in fact individuals who resented Clinton’s early success. I can remember private conversations about the reaction. Educated people went to the polls with the attitude, ‘I’ll show him [he’s not so great].’ And they voted accordingly. And everyone waked up the next day to find that Arkansas had elected a Republican governor for [only the second time]* since Reconstruction. (In the next election, they reversed and put Clinton back into the governor’s office, where he stayed until the run against George H. W. Bush in 1992.)

Too bad Clinton didn’t take out his umbrage on his fellow cheesy white-collarites, who played a large part in voting him out, instead of on working people.

But instead the Clintons adopted the education-lite platform. If you replace crummy white bread with (fairly) good white wine, that’s progressive. No need to support the right to collective bargaining or to cap interest rates on loans.

There is a short moral in this story for 2016: Do not jump to the conclusion that you are too good. This moral is especially pointed not only for Secretary Clinton–who is assiduously courting elite GOP pols as I write this–but also for major media outlets. As I write, a dangerous narrative is shaping up, pushed from more than one direction, opposing the ‘elite media’ on one side to the crowd or ‘the mob’ on the other. The narrative is being pushed by Trump rallies on one side. But it’s being pushed by self-serving media representations on the other. Some take the form of less-than-clinical analysis of the many-headed. Generally the authors are not analysts.

My own perception of 2016 is shaped by my perception of earlier and ongoing issues.

The invasion of Iraq was a betrayal, and the media voices now raised in opposition to Donald Trump were not heard, for the most part, when George W. Bush was pushing the invasion of Iraq. The subprime-mortgage debacle was a betrayal, and the silk-stocking financial press was MIA. The selection of Secretary Clinton as Democratic nominee before a vote was ever cast was a betrayal, and the national political press did nothing to clarify what was happening.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave hope to millions of people. But Clinton allies behind the scenes took little account of that hope, as their emails amply make clear. Nothing transformative. Nothing inspiring. No passion for the public. At best, an endless obsession with the minutiae of self-advancement and appearances, greed and politicking.

And this attitude is shared to a disheartening degree by their allies in the media.

So, the inevitable response now becoming more and more explicit in 2016: You didn’t listen to us. So why should we listen to you?

*Correction. Winthrop Rockefeller was the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction.

Secretary Clinton all smiles at newest Trump tape; will media mention Juanita Broaddrick?

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For that matter, will they mention the invasion of Iraq?

The 2016 primary elections in Maryland, by the time we actually got sort of a chance to vote, were a mixed bag. Full disclosure–I myself voted (early voting) for Bernie Sanders and Sanders delegates, a Democratic senate candidate who won, a House candidate who didn’t, and some local judgeship challengers as well as incumbents. Not everybody made it. We had an overflow of good candidates in Maryland’s 4th district. Maryland’s 8th had a similar problem.

We did not have an overflow of good candidates in the presidential race. I supported Sanders heartily, but the fact remains that the Clinton team worked for years behind the scenes to shut out better candidates including Vice President Joseph Biden. Indications are that Clintonistas have spent more time playing keep-away, over almost eight years, than on producing public benefit. Thus the Clinton gravy train continues, and its big-money appeal looks to be the Clintons’ pattern of shafting labor. Note the boost for “open trade and open borders” in Secretary Clinton’s Wall Street-friendly and Wall Street-compensated speeches, as in recently hacked emails. Cheap labor is the Clinton track record.

Will they mention U.S. labor?

The behind-the-scenes domination and the lack of open participation were not small-d democratic. I was and am disappointed in Clinton ‘super-delegates’, who stacked the deck before a single vote was cast. Ditto media commentators who often referred to Clinton’s ‘delegate total’ without clarifying that it was padded by super-delegates. Predictably, an undemocratic process produced an undemocratic candidate. But given the stakes, it is frightening that a bunch of Democratic insiders, dominated by mega-donors, joined beforehand to boost any one candidate. Going forward, we need to make the nominating process more democratic. It would help if we had more clarity about what happened in the run-up to this ‘election’–but we don’t seem to have many news reporters available, to tell the public about it. (What is the good of all that access to individuals of prominence, if you burn the access any time you actually report something?) I am still curious to know whether the Clinton inner circle green-lighted Mitch McConnell’s opposition to President Obama from day one.

Senator McConnell

Senator McConnell

Envy and jealousy do a lot of harm when people are willing to act on them, especially insiders. I still think that President Obama has not gotten enough credit. I wish Mrs. Clinton had strongly supported and defended him, wish she were the Sanders or the Elizabeth Warren she sometimes channeled in the campaign, wish she would actually ‘fight for us’, wish she were solid on economic justice. But that’s not who she is. One of the recent Clinton flaps is Bill Clinton’s trashing Obamacare. We can only hope it’s not a glimpse of the future, under another President Clinton–a Wall Street agenda come to life–of undoing everything the Obama White House has accomplished.

It may be noted that the Democratic Party ‘nominated’ someone who openly speculated about assassination, when Barack Obama was her opponent in 2008. She does not handle being behind in a campaign well. She does not handle being ahead well, either. Right now, Clinton is openly jubilant about Trump’s difficulties with GOP biggies following the leak of his repugnant tape-recorded remarks. But then, Clinton’s most consistent appeal is to big-time Republicans, whom she has been working hard to attract.

Neither major party has given us much good regarding the major crime of sexual assault. The GOP does not seem to have much problem with the might-makes-right outlook. The Democratic Party should be better, and often is, but anyone focused on Election Day 2016 is not going to bring  up rape–given Hillary Clinton’s decades-long joint public career with her husband.

For the record: I listened very carefully to Juanita Broaddrick on national television in 1999, and I believe her. It would be wrong not to say so. Sexual assault is the least reported, the least prosecuted, and the least convicted of all the major crimes. (The Obama administration has begun moving on the issue of sexual assault, including Vice President Biden’s public statements; the Clintons do not mention it.) But when I raised questions on social media, immediate responses from Clinton supporters were the usual troll litany–calling me “bitch” (naturally), “scumbag,” and “psychotic”–none of which I am–ridicule, shaming over my alleged lowly status or lack thereof’, advice to quit, counterfactual claims about Bill Clinton, and dismissing the issue because ‘he was not convicted’.

Not that I am crushed. Unlike the Bush family, I actually am from Texas, and doing that stuff to me is like the old joke about Have you got the wrong vampire. For what it’s worth, I also have a doctorate in Renaissance literature, and in an invective contest, I wouldn’t necessarily lose. But I prefer that we educate the public better about sexual assault. These bullies, after all, may be summoned for jury duty some day.

Back to the present

We can probably look forward to a new release of some sort, weekly, about both Trump and Clinton, over the next few weeks.

In the most recent release about Trump, some vulgar language came out on tape–rather than behind closed doors or on the Internet, where it usually appears. If you listen to the tape recording, you will also hear the jollification supported by Billy Bush, cousin to our 43rd president, nephew to our 41st president, successful entertainment host on NBC, which for years was in the tank for the Bushes. (Lauren Bush has recently appeared evidently supporting Hillary Clinton.) No question, Trump’s language was garishly offensive. (No wonder Hillary Clinton is all smiles nowadays. It is rare for the Clintons to have even the faintest,most tenuous claim to the moral high ground on any topic, let alone that of sexualized grossness.) Billy Bush sounds pretty appreciative on the tape.

Trump’s language was rich-guy locker-room talk. It was crude machismo, partly boastful and partly not. It may even have been Clintonesque. But I am not going to pretend that I was shocked by it. I wish I were. In any case, Joe Biden is wrong to call it “sexual assault.” There are some words that should not be used as metaphors–rape or sexual assault, lynching, mob, riot. They should characterize only the deeds themselves, not be trivialized to characterize discourse, however offensive.

If commentators and candidates now shocked, shocked about Trump feel resistant to my statement, then I invite them to try a single test. Here it is:

When was the last time you, major candidates or media commentators, et al., figuratively called someone a ‘child molester’? How about you, ladies of the WaPo? When was the last time you called someone a ‘child molester’ metaphorically?

No? So that means you know that there are some terms that should not be used metaphorically.

Makes me wonder why you don’t know that about rape. Has sexual assault been trivialized so successfully that it now ranks as mere scurrility?

 

 

 

Toxic atmosphere 2016

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Re the 2016 presidential election

My immediate political concern is the current atmosphere. Poisonous rhetoric swirls around both major-party candidates like a toxic dust cloud. It comes from both of them and goes at both of them. It comes from their allies and supporters, both sides, and is directed against their allies and supporters, both sides.

My concern is that there is a particular danger this year. If the two major-party nominees are a ‘charisma’ candidate (Donald Trump) and a ‘bureaucratic’ candidate (Hillary Clinton), as the terms are used in political science, then–not to be morbid–the lethal danger is to the charisma candidate.

Defining terms here: calling a nominee the charisma candidate is not the same as calling a private person charismatic. The charismatic, the bureaucratic, and the feudal/traditional were Max Weber’s classification of modes of authority. This tripartite classification was drawn upon in 1969 by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page, in the best book on U.S. politics that I have read–American Melodrama, about the 1968 election.

An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968

An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968

Of course, the poison is also aimed at and swirls around the major ‘third-party’ candidates–Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. At a time when death threats are an Internet commonplace in conversation threads, it would be almost odd and distinctive if a third-party candidate were not perceived as a threat and treated as such–i.e. with threats–in the dynamic that psychologists call projection.

I have seen and heard the trend on a macro level–national politics, national television, large daily newspapers–and at a micro level–un-neighborly spats and back-biting, sometimes motivated by envy, generally not checked by self-awareness, never from individuals one would characterize as brilliant.

From whatever combination of historical causes, there is a really lethal poison cocktail being passed around this year. (The historical causes will be a later topic.) Any time a sizable group of individuals feels that it has both a) the moral high ground and b) the upper hand, things are destined to get bad. And by ‘bad’, I mean fascistic. This one is hard to guard against, too: after all, most of us would prefer to have the moral high ground. And most people must have moments at least when they would like to have the upper hand, although that one might be harder to confess.

The cocktail of high ground and upper hand gets deadlier when distilled in our concentrated-in-a-few-hands news media.

It doesn’t sit well with me that raving about Trump as a ‘Nazi’ or a ‘fascist’ often comes from the very same people who helped get George W. Bush into the White House. They went along with the invasion of Iraq. They contributed to changing the Republican Party from anti-slavery in the 19th century to pro-segregation, pro-racial-disparities death penalty, pro-redlining, pro-economic inequality, etc., etc., in the 20th century.

Amnesia, much?

Not that I’m not used to media hysteria. It happens every time a presidential candidate comes along who is not controlled by the insider-media types. Secretary Clinton is eminently controllable. Thus she has a lock on The Boys on the Bus, including female boys on the bus. The reverse has been true of Mr. Trump.

Thus any fair criticisms of Trump’s candidacy end up part of an amalgam of hysteria that we have seen before–about candidates not remotely like Trump. The common denominator is that any time a candidate comes along who is not controlled by a few major media outlets, he/she is hysterically represented as a threat. Does anyone remember what the insider media said about Jesse Jackson, even while he was the candidate who received by far the most death threats?* Remember how they treated Ross Perot with blatant cross-cultural stereotyping? If your hatred of either Jackson or Perot is still so engrained that you can stomach any conjecture against them, however false, what is your excuse about Howard Dean?

Remember what the insider media did to Howard Dean, who was showing strong potential to take on the incumbent President George W. Bush? They represented him falsely as having an affair with a female staffer, for one thing. One of the most talented, capable, professional political candidates to come along in years–a successful physician and a candidate who had been elected repeatedly to office in Vermont–and CNN among other outlets ran a continuous loop of Dean supposedly screaming at a rally, with the crowd noise suppressed in the video so that he seemed to be making noise all by himself. Ridicule rampant. Stupidity, envy, and gratuitous ill-will ditto. To make matters worse, most of the media personalities who pulled no punches ridiculing a candidate with character and intellect pulled all their punches when it came to evaluating Dubya. If they’re getting anything right about Trump now, it’s too bad they cried wolf so often.

Some of them probably still tell Jimmy Carter jokes. Oh, yes–a reminder, in case you didn’t know. Some old-fashioned bigot ‘jokes’ previously aimed at African-Americans were converted, in the Carter years, into anti-Carter jokes. I decline to provide an example.

In the immediate future, there is not only an election at hand. Before that, and after, there is also a crucial need to rein in the blood lust. All hands. The Clintonistas may represent all the negative rhetoric as coming from one direction. Some Clinton supporters may honestly believe that it is. If so, they are mistaken.

A word to the wise is sufficient.

 

*It was Dan Rather, then on CBS News, who reported that Jackson received more death threats than the other candidates combined. Probably one more reason the suits couldn’t wait to fire him. Another badge of courage for Rather, in my opinion.