No Beating Around the Bush

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. - Hannah Arendt

Fridays are a notoriously bad time to divulge exposés and scandals. It's at the end of the weekday news cycle, so there could have been better times for the latest outrages to come out than last night. However, in the case of Donald Trump, the release of the #Trumptapes (the #1 trend on Twitter since last night) guarantees wall-to-wall coverage all weekend long of Trump's 2005 conversation with GWB's cousin Billy Bush.

     However, there was yet another Wikileaks dump that came out at almost the same moment, one that was overshadowed by the more sensationalistic and salacious Trump tape- It's a large cache of documents hacked from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's email account. Both are qualified bombshells that show there's only one sane, ethically upright person still in this race: Dr. Jill Stein and that all the others are unqualified.

     If you haven't heard it already, the Access Hollywood Trump tape is horrifying in its sheer level of casual misogyny, so horrifying that actor Robert DeNiro wants to punch him in the face. Trump has made no friends with these comments that nearly rise to the level of an Ipecac emetic. A source to his running mate's family stated off the record that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is outraged (enough to boot out his reporter pool when they broke the news to him as he was trying to eat at a restaurant in Ohio) and his wife is "beside herself" over Trump's comments. The Governor said he hoped Trump would "show what is in his heart" (while cancelling a campaign event for tonight). 

     House Speaker Paul Ryan also weakly hoped Trump would apologize for his comments and show that's not how he truly feels about women but also said he'd disinvited Trump from one of his campaign events in Wisconsin (he doesn't even want to be seen with Mike Pence, who had nothing to do with this). Republican Illinois Senator Mark Kirk called Trump, "a malignant clown" on his Twitter account. And, perhaps most damning, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, one of Trump's most supportive surrogates, essentially threw Trump under the bus on which he was recorded and said,  “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.”
     Melania herself isn't very thrilled with the tape herself and can scarce believe these words came from her husband's mouth (especially as they were uttered mere months after she'd married him).

     But then, as with Ryan and Pence, Priebus broke out the lipstick tube and tried to smear it on Trump's foul mouth. Because the election is in less than five weeks and, to paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you don't change pigs in the middle of the sty.

The (Republican) Party's Over

     Remember when we thought this Bozo was the worst we could possibly do?

     Miss him, yet?

     The one bad thing that could never be said about Bush was that he was a lecherous, skirt-chasing womanizer (the occasional ass-grabbery notwithstanding) and the same applies to his patrician father (the occasional ass-grabbery notwithstanding). That doesn't mean, however, that the dead-enders who voted for them back in the day weren't casually dismissive of such behavior. What follows below are actual comments from the Youtube video I'd linked to and are all, nor surprisingly, from males:

"agreed... happens to the best of us once in our lives... even Trump is human ;)"

"He was 49 when he said it. I don't like the infidelity, but I don't know what his marriage arrangement is. Besides that. No big effing deal."

"I'd rather have Trump because I care about my country's sovereignty. I won't vote for Clinton because corrupt, liar and globalist bitch who would sell the country to the highest bidder. Also, I not voting for a pastor of the US but for a president."

"what he meant by sayinh grab her by the pussy is akin to just playing with her pussy...nowhere on that tape does he say he would grab her by the pussy withoit jer consent, so wheres the sexual assualt at? THIS IS HOW MOST MEN TALK. HE WAS TALKING HYPOTHETICALLY"

"He didn't demean women. Do you know where babies come from?"

"The more rocks you throw at Trump the more he kicks a:s:s. APOLOGY ACCEPTED MR. PRESIDENT!  Now GO take that hag killary for a spacewalk KILLARY FOR PRESIDENT OF MORON AMERICANS. Let's keep destroying America. That's what the Chinese and many others want."

      All these (often misspelled) comments could've been written by the idiot cousin of the idiot above. On the tape, Billy Bush could be heard giggling at Donald Trump talking about grabbing pussies like a 13 year-old hanger-on in a high school locker room listening to the quarterback boasting about his sexual conquests. 

     The single greatest mistake we could possibly make in this matter is to conclude that Donald Trump owns Republican misogyny, that we've never before heard proof of the Rio Grande-wide streak of misogynism that runs through the Republican Party like an inherited defective gene. As recently as the RNC convention in Cleveland last July (and I saw shit like this while on assignment there), the GOP tucked into anti-Clinton-based misogyny like a trencherman into a seafood platter (here are some more examples from the convention, if that didn't sufficiently turn your stomach). Plus, it can't be said the infamous War on Women started within the ranks of the Democrats.

     It wasn't much farther back than that when Todd Akin lost his bid for the Senate because of his infamous remarks about "legitimate rape". Then there was SC state Sen. Tom Corbin's crack to a female colleague about women being "a lesser cut of meat". Then Senate candidate Tom Smith said being forced to have a child after a rape was analogous to having a baby out of wedlock. Later in the campaign, the same fool claimed that women were talking about shoes at a Paul Ryan campaign event.

     Six years ago, the Ohio GOP sent out a flyer calling to put Rep. Betty Sutton "back in the kitchen." And, back in the present day, New York's Republican leaders actually tried to wedge some daylight between Trump and his comments by playing the "hate the sin, love the sinner" game.

     Obviously, this is a far from exhaustive list of examples of Republican misogyny but I disagree with Ana Navarro in her diatribe last night about Trump: Donald Trump absolutely shares Republican values.

From Touchy Feely to Out of Touch

     Meanwhile, in non-vagina-grabbing news, the emails of John Podesta were hacked and released on Wikileaks' website. They weren't the full transcripts of the Wall Street speeches for which we've been clamoring but the excerpts already solidify what we've all suspected they would contain: In fact, there's a bullet point at the beginning of one of the emails that blatantly states, "*CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH*". Which she is. This is Hillary Clinton in her own words to Goldman Sachs on Feb. 4th, 2014:

I'm kind of far removed from the struggles of the middle class because the life I've lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy.

     Keep in mind, this is from a woman who makes $225,000 an hour to give a speech but thinks you're not entitled to more than $12 for that span of time for your hard labor.

     The mass email to the campaign (dated January 25 of this year) starts out with, 

Attached are the flags from HRC’s paid speeches we have from HWA. I put some highlights below. There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy.

     In other words, s/he was already warning the campaign about what to "scrub" should the transcripts, for some reason, ever come out (almost as if s/he was anticipating the hack and subsequent leak). And this staffer was savvy enough to know that no amount of Bleachbit would ever scrub these comments that expose Clinton as just another out-of-touch psychopathic oligarch who thinks the presidency should be given to her by fiat.

     There's a reason why, as the staffer says, Hillary Clinton's speech transcripts are neatly segmented into universities and corporate speeches and guess which ones only are released to the press? This is because Hillary's a triangulating politico who says one thing to Wall St and another to impressionable Millennials whom she privately says are themselves out of touch and unrealistic when she herself is the one trying, and unsuccessfully at that, to mislead them.

     Hillary Clinton is an example, virtually a unique one, in American politics: A self-loathing female misogynist who has no problem with whipping out and co-opting the female victim card on behalf of others who are offended by Trump's statements. But secretly, Clinton seethes with fury she was born a woman and had to wait until she was nearly 70 years-old to secure a party nomination for the presidency. But it can hardly be said her easy, cookie-cutter feminism has paid any dividends for women who are much more powerless than she.

We Came. We Saw. We Created a Terror Network. Elect Me.

     Since the invasion of Libya and the forced regime change, as we now comfortably euphemistically refer to overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, it's generally accepted in the MSM that female empowerment hasn't exactly been on the rise. Yet rarely if ever, as this Independent.co.uk article proves, the blame for this serious setback in women's rights is ever placed on Hillary Clinton's doorstep in Chappaqua. In fact, rarely if ever is her name even mentioned, even though the overthrow of Gaddafi's regime was solely her brainchild (it received the sanction of neither the UN or the US).

     In short, what Bush did in Iraq, deposing a dictator and letting militant forces run wild to protect petroleum interests against nationalization and standing idly by while those militants turned into a terrorist network, is exactly what Hillary did in Libya. Yet we as a nation have yet to make that analogy, especially in an election year in which Hillary promises more of the same. Why?
     The consensus of the leaked Podesta emails is that Hillary Rodham Clinton, who cynically keeps using her husband's name for the brand recognition, has no friends outside of the boardrooms of white shoe Wall Street banks and other firms. She is no friend of the poor and middle class, she is no friend of Millennials she insists on stereotyping as "basement-dwellers" living with Mom & Dad, she is no friend of Muslims who don't toe the corporate line, she is no friend of African Americans and Black Lives Matter activists and she is certainly no friend of women.
     As she did when she was Secretary of State, she would continue playing both sides of the fence in her dealings with Israel and the human rights abuser Saudi Arabia for whom she'd paved the way for arms deals in exchange for massive bribes to the Clinton Foundation.
     What the simultaneous disclosures of both Trump and Clinton in unguarded moments did was indelibly prove neither of these power-hungry sociopaths is fit to be dog catcher let alone the most powerful person in the Free World.
     The great Jewish journalist and political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote, "Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing."
     This is usually the story of our nation. It is one in which high crimes and misdemeanors are not hatched spontaneously by the powerful and well-monied in the arable land of events, as Keats once put it. They are toxic crops of which we are both farmers and gleaners, ones in which we all share an awkwardly equal guilt. We created Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, allowed them to grow to their present outsized proportions. And, one way or the other, we will reap the flesh-ripping whirlwind.