American Politics – Page 28

Joe Biden: Lame duck or solution?

December 11, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Before the U.S. Vice President’s visit, Foreign Minister Stéphane Dion explained Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Ottawa last week as routine. While some people might see it as a stick in the eye of incoming U.S. President Donald Trump, Dion treated the visit as routine. There was nothing routine about it.

To have the lame-duck Vice President address the Canadian Prime Minister and provincial premiers was unprecedented. And for Biden to underscore the need for co-operation between Canada and the United States on climate change is to underscore the need for Donald Trump to be kept to a single four-year term. How Canada can help cannot be openly stated.

It will be whistling past the grave yard for Canada to be ballyhooing its environmental efforts in the face of Trump’s avowed lack of concern. He has said during his election campaign that global warming is a plot by the Chinese government. And when you read the background on Trump’s choice of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head, you wonder if the agency will even survive four years?

And does anyone think Canada is going to be high on Donald Trump’s Christmas card list after feting the outgoing Vice President? Joe Biden does not exactly fly around under the radar. There had to be American news media flying with him.

Biden is a very astute politician and he was saved the embarrassment that Hillary Clinton suffered this year. It was her one and only run for the White House and her only consolation was that she won the popular vote. The bad news is that she lost the presidency to a schlemiel like Donald Trump.

Biden must be betting that it will not take four years for Americans to realize what a disaster Trump is as President. As he and Trump are not far apart in age, he could be betting that he will be well positioned to take him on in four years. If Trump has built up a sizeable animosity by then, Biden will have an easy run for the White House.

In the meantime, Canada will have earned Trump’s ire for even inviting Biden to come to Canada at this time. While Dion thinks that diplomatically it should be a non-issue, he forgets that Trump knows nothing about diplomacy. Trump is spiteful and will remember it as a slight against him.

The cost of Biden’s pleasantries to Justin Trudeau at the state dinner for him might be more expensive than anticipated.

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A trumpeted win for Trump in Indiana?

December 4, 2016 by Peter Lowry

You have never heard so much BS from so many supposedly knowledgeable writers. Why would anyone think that Donald Trump’s grandstanding in the Indianapolis Carrier plant was a win? It was a farce that cannot survive an Indiana winter.

For President-Elect Donald Trump to show up at that plant with his Vice-President Elect in tow was nothing but hokum. He is reported to have threatened the management of the plant if the production there is moved to Mexico. He is reported to have told them that he would impose exorbitant tariffs on their products coming back to the U.S. if the plant is moved. That would be a serious breach of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

You would think that VP-Elect Mike Pence would know that. You would also want to believe that somebody told Mr. Trump that. A smart lawyer could probably convince a judge that the plant management thought the President-Elect was kidding. No harm, no foul.

But Trump cannot keep doing that. He would be interfering with the free trade agreement as well as making an ass of himself. And he is hardly going to keep threatening big business. Business people know that they just might be the only possible beneficiaries of the Trump Presidency. We know he is no fan of people. He uses women and fires men. A shrink might question whether he even likes himself. We know he has one hell of an ego but he has to look in the mirror as well.

The more serious challenge at this time is that big business supports free trade. Free trade contributes growth and profits and will continue to be an anchor of business support for the politicians. Business expects that Trump will come to them for advice and they will now be hoping he comes earlier than later.

What we writers will have to do is set up a tally board to record President Trump’s goofs. They will need to be graded in some fashion as not all goofs are the same. We could measure them, for example, on a scale of one to ten. That way a small goof based on his vanity that did not much harm to the economy would be a two or three. A cataclysmic boo-boo that cost thousands of jobs for Americans would rate an eight or nine. Going to war, as did George W. Bush, would earn a ten. We could get the same people as keep track of the Doomsday Clock to keep track of Mr. Trump’s boo-boos. There are going to be a lot of them.

We should all hope there are no number tens!

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Lord Black lauds buddy Trump.

November 29, 2016 by Peter Lowry

You get the feeling that there could be another boring book by Lord ‘Cross-the-Pond’ in this. Yes, Conrad Black came out of seclusion on his Toronto estate the other day to promote another book that will look good on your coffee table. He told the news media that his raison d’etre for the lordly appearance was to defend his pal Donald Trump. He managed to both insult and needlessly flatter his Global News interviewer while name-dropping throughout an argumentative interview.

Black’s text for the interview was that his close pal Donald Trump is not a fascist. He actually appears to believe that the pompous ass is going to be a very productive President of the United States. In a rapid series of name-droppings, Black explained that his good friends, the Clintons and members of the Bush dynasty had raped and pillaged the scene in Washington for much too long and his pal Trump would certainly fix things.

The interviewer (Toronto-based newsman Alan Carter) remained stuck in the groove that Trump might be a fascist. He did not seem to understand that one takes considerable risk in arguing polemics with the likes of Lord Black. Wiser heads in discussing the Trump phenomenon see him as more of a laissez-faire capitalist than a fascist.

Trump’s only serious fascist trait has been in the use of the big lie as introduced in the 1930s by Hitler’s information minister Doktor Josef Göebbels. President-elect Trump seems to have cottoned to the idea that if you tell an outrageous lie often enough, some people will eventually accept it as the truth.

Oddly enough the counter point to the Conrad Black interview was the earlier interview on the Global Television Focus Ontario program with Doug Ford who has also just published a book on Ford Nation in memory of his brother Rob. Doug Ford comes across as something of a rube in comparison to Lord Black. You get the feeling that both of them should jump with both feet into the Conservative Party of Canada leadership.

You want redemption, Conrad, there is your chance.

You want redemption Doug, there you go.

Oh poop, we forgot the citizenship problem. To our knowledge, Conrad is still not a Canadian.

Oh well, he could get a work permit as a temporary foreign worker and act as Dr. Leitch’s campaign manager. If that did not stir the pot, we would at least be assured that her literature is grammatically correct.

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It was not Trump’s win; It was Clinton’s loss.

November 24, 2016 by Peter Lowry

We were all guilty. Our prejudice said Trump cannot win. We just did not look hard at Hillary. She thought she was winning. She acted like she was winning. She was running a losing campaign and we all got sucked in because we could not believe in Trump.

Who could believe in a guy who objectifies women, alienates Latinos, puts down blacks and lies like a fascist. From day one, we tried to ignore him. He is no politician, he lacked a fund-raising organization, he had no state by state teams of workers, he knew little about domestic policy and less about foreign affairs. He was just a side show. At first.

And he had a stupid slogan. He said that he was going to make America great again. You saw it on signs and hats and bumper stickers everywhere. He kept saying it from the beginning right through to the end of the campaign. He obviously could not come up with a better slogan, so he stuck to it.

Do you remember what Hillary Clinton’s slogan was?

And then she made a mistake: she referred to some of Trump’s supporters as ‘deplorables.’ That was when the pundits became mired in the possibilities. We had seen the bikers, the red necks, the gun crazies and the angry coming to Trump and we saw them as a disorganized rabble. Nobody expects a mob such as that to even find a voting booth.

What we were not willing to see were the holy rollers and social conservatives who were voting for the Anti-Christ because they had nowhere else to go. We were not counting the exurbanite and rural voters. These were the people who were swallowing the garbage about ‘dishonest Hillary.’ Like any good lie, it just had to be said often enough to become a truth. Otherwise sane people were telling us that Hillary Clinton should be locked up. For what? When did the law suddenly forbid using your own choice of e-mail server?

Trump was just being a good con man. It is how he built his wealth. His loud lying, cheating and stealing are simple tools to accomplish his objectives. It will be very interesting to see how these skills serve him in the White House.

But we do not need a tag day for Hillary Clinton. She let us down. She failed to understand the message of Bernie Sanders. She did not understand that it was not enough to appear smarter and cooler in the television debates. She did not understand how to fight a street fighter. Like many of us, she tried to handle him as though he was a politician.

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Let’s have a tag day for journalists.

November 22, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Professor Penny Collenette wrote in the Toronto Star the other day that “all news is not fit to print.” Frankly Penny, your problem is that you need to define ‘news.’ Do we really know how to separate bias, comment, opinion, speculation and reporting from the comic pages?

And do we have the right to define news for others?

We are all concerned that journalism is dying. Tirades, whether by a Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star or in a Trump tweet in Twitter, are still tirades. They are also, in some cases, news.

If they start editing FaceBook and Twitter and the like for the news value, these mindless platforms for self aggrandizement will go broke. Mark Zuckerberg would have to go back to Harvard and learn something. Some people would have to go back to wearing a trench coat and nothing else to satisfy their need for exposure. They could use the telephone to assure themselves that they have friends.

But saving journalism will not happen with a shield law that protects the news persons’ sources. In fact, it would drive journalism into further depths of distrust. Any writer has to stand firm for what they claim. Protecting an unnamed source is not the answer.

If you are concerned about the butchering of truth during the recent American election, there is a simple test the writer should try. Just be your own editor for a while. You will find that the mind sees what it thinks is there. You can miss some terrible clunkers.

In the same way, the avid supporter will accuse your opponent of using words that really should have been attributed to you but they did not fit with the persona you have created in their mind. We saw it throughout Trump’s campaign for the American presidency that no matter how crude and bellicose and misogynist Trump could be, he still had his loyal handmaidens.

North Americans hardly live in something as specious as a ‘post-factual’ society. We know that facts matter.

But facts are also a matter of belief. If we really believe that we can sail off the edge of the world today, the fact that the world is round will still be argued by many tomorrow

Maybe we need to understand why, as in the last line of George Orwell’s 1984, we can all love Big Brother.

And people who deliberately use the Big Lie of totalitarianism can come to the same miserable end as Doktor Josef Göebbels.

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The Party is Over?

November 19, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The good news is that we are doing away with organized political parties. The bad news is that we are doing away with organized political parties. And one or both of these statements has the seeds of a problem in it.

The bad news is that non-political people with very large egos and lots of money will be your candidates for office in coming elections. The good news is that we are going to be rid of those rotten politicians who knew what to do when they got elected.

The bad news is that the people running for office will all lie to you. The good news is that you will not have to listen to the truth.

And obviously, we will do away with all that left and right confusion. All candidates will be considered populists. You will only have to vote for people who will cut taxes and build just the roads you need to use. Maybe we can all quit work and go on the dole.

Since nobody is working, the newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations will all stop functioning. A few volunteers will keep the Internet going so that you can read all about your political candidates on their FaceBook pages. The only news will be posted on Twitter. You will have to use YouTube for entertainment.

You can fill in the blanks from there. Did Donald Trump really mean to destroy the Republican Party in the United States? Just as serious, did Justin Trudeau really understand what he was doing when he told Senators, they could no longer be Liberals? Did he have a clue as to the long-term consequences of further disorganizing a highly disorganized Liberal Party of Canada? A leader without an organized party has rabble to gather. You have to keep putting yourself in front of your mob.

And comes the day when you find an arrow in your back, you know that someone behind you wants your position. It creates an endless cycle.

But there are people who understand the importance of organized political parties. They are of the same importance as the organized food distribution systems we have created over the years. They serve a purpose.

Parties provide food for the mind in their policy development. They define our principles. They raise political funds and choose our politicians and leaders. They communicate for them. They make the system work for all.

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Breaking in the new POTUS.

November 17, 2016 by Peter Lowry

POTUS is what the U.S. Secret Service, who are charged with protecting the President, call the President of the United States. The service has a long tradition of doing that job. It is a job that can involve four years of excruciating boredom and three seconds of horror.

It is a job that has been glamourized by Hollywood. Even Dirty Harry (actor Clint Eastwood) had an opportunity to stop shooting bad guys and portray an aging Secret Service agent determined to protect his President.

But the truth is that it is an almost impossible job. The lone, crazed person with a gun is the danger and fits no pattern or obvious threat. The politician in POTUS and the ego demands access to voters, admirers, crowds and nobody knows what danger lurks in a gun-happy environment.

In years of being involved in public events in Canada’s largest city for the Prime Minister of Canada, we learned from the Americans the screening systems, the checks and changes that could keep the event as safe as could be. It was routine to provide information to the Metro Toronto Police and the R.C.M. Police detailed to the event.

One of the first of these Canadian events for us was a large dinner at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel for Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. The party had provided a seat at one of our media tables for the wife. She was dropped off at the Prime Minister’s suite in the hotel after the dinner and speeches while we completed some wrap-up details with the media. (It was years later that the task was referred to as being a ‘spin-doctor.’)

When coming back to the Prime Minister’s suite, the hall door was open and there were only two people there. The protection detail had dropped off the Prime Minister and wandered off. He was sitting on a love seat with the wife, deep in conversation. The man actually blushed when I came up behind them and said, “Hi dear, who’s your friend?”

‘Mike’ Pearson was a gentleman and it was a delight to know him. He was the last Prime Minister of Canada to not have a regular R.C.M. Police detail for protection and the last P.M. to routinely drive himself to work at the parliament buildings. The world has changed very much from those days.

No doubt the Americans will have to increase the U.S. Secret Service detail on the new POTUS-elect. The honeymoon for President Donald Trump might not be too long.

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The Trump Travesty.

November 10, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The Bastille has fallen. The Reign of Terror will soon begin. The tumbrils will roll in Washington. President Obama will keep that stiff upper lip as the patricians of politics are dispatched. Donald Trump will not be the first incompetent in the White House. He is just the most dangerous.

Did you watch the vacuous Trump entourage take the stage to accept their victory? He now has the FBI, the NRA, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Armed Forces on side. Wow, has he ever got weapons of mass destruction at his bidding. He has even got nukes to settle the upsets in the Middle East. A new approach to ‘peacekeeping’ is in the offing.

He told his foolish followers of the new era of infrastructure to come. He wants them to build him a pyramid in the Washington Mall. And it best be finished in four years.

Hillary Clinton’s speech the next morning was gracious. It must have taken her writers all night to write it. If she had sounded that positive throughout the marathon campaign, she would have had an even better speech to give.

But what do you say when a congenital liar gets into the White House. Will we just get used to the hyperbole of the con man? How do you ignore him?

Hey, his con worked you know! There are people in the United States who really think Hillary Clinton belongs in jail. Why? And why did it take so damn long for people to realize she is smarter than her husband? The only thing she was guilty of was not understanding how to handle Donald Trump. He is no politician. He is not even a Republican. He is a lecher and a misogynist. He is just a con man.

But look folks and friends in America, somebody has to drive a wedge between that fool and Congress. If those people get to work together, you are not going to like the results. You have to filibuster his Supreme Court appointments. You have to make sure people are not dying on the streets without medical services. You cannot keep militarizing the police across America and giving them free rein to shoot people.

And somebody has to pay some taxes. You might have a President now who does not think the rich should pay but nobody wants to loan that deadbeat any money. You have to clean up the fiscal mess.

There has always been a great respect for the American dream. We should take care it does not become the American nightmare.

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Lament for the late United States of America.

November 9, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The unease set in early. While Americans were voting on Tuesday afternoon, we were sifting through public opinion polls trying to analyze what was wrong. Donald Trump was acting unusual. We assumed it was either the stress of the campaign or heavy doses of Valium. After all, how much experience at this did he have?

Trump’s last public act before the vote count was to start to sue one of the western states for letting people vote.

Our search of the polls proved nothing other than pollsters do a lot of bad guessing. People lie to pollsters. And if you were going to vote for a disaster such as Trump, would you not also lie?

This was not voting; this was giving Washington the bird. Yah, Washington is dysfunctional. That is hardly Hillary Clinton’s fault.

And yet thinking back over this marathon of an election, we had little to say about Hillary Clinton. She was just the candidate for one of the parties. Bernie Sanders was far more interesting. He addressed the real concerns while Clinton was the same-old, same-old.

It is too bad about the Obama legacy. He was a good president. Trump will make him look like a place-holder.

This is supposed to be a mia culpa. We screwed up. We only gave four to one odds on Trump. We can share the guilt with about 40 million Americans.

It hardly mattered that Hillary Clinton won the presidential debates. It was Donald Trump who won the presidency. America can repent at leisure.

It is fascinating to think of the Americans having a president who does not believe in telling the truth. He can spend the next four years lining his own pockets while impoverishing the people who voted for him. He is a person without ethics or morals, a lecher and a misogynist, and a confirmed liar with no understanding of the job of president.

The wife has had us planning to spend some of the harsher winter weeks on a trip around the Gulf Coast of Texas. Thanks, but no thanks. We are going to hunker down in our catbird seat here in Canada and be thankful that our political leaders are at least house broke.

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We might be wrong about Donald Trump.

November 6, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Watching Donald Trump over the past year has been fascinating. Our first struggle was with our own preconceptions about politicians and political races. What we had to resolve in our own mind is that Trump is neither a politician nor running a political campaign. It was in coming to this premise that we felt he had some of the characteristics of Italy’s leader in the 1930s Benito Mussolini.

But we were wrong. As the campaign comes down to the wire, the only person we feel we can compare him to is Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Trump is not a leader; he is a destroyer. He is like al-Assad in that he seems willing to destroy his country before relinquishing it to others. If we do not play by his rules, he is taking his ball and bat and going home. Trump is not a builder. He is a child creating sand castles that afterwards he angrily kicks down.

Reading comments that he is generating on social media and the campaign he is spewing across the Internet, the only feeling we have is one of sadness. We feel so bad about it that we are really looking forward to the former Vice President candidate Sarah Palin joining the final day’s campaign. You can think her as the cherry on top of a campaign of absurdity.

But it is how long it will take Americans to recover from this trauma that has us worried. The arguments over his “Corrupt Hillary” campaign will have long legs in a negative Congress. Hillary Clinton will have to work with whatever Congress the voters select. It might not be easy.

Trump must know by now that his has been a losing campaign from the beginning. He is making all the charges and complaints that losers resort to.

There are few people betting that he will go quietly into the twilight. It is neither in the man’s make-up nor character to accept the inevitable. There are also some of his less democratic followers who might want to cause trouble.

The major trouble makers today before the November 8 vote though are Trump’s hated news media. They are delighting in stirring the pot. And the pot is a witches’ brew of alarmist headlines, questionable opinion polls, reporters’ speculation and tongue-tied talking heads who have said all they can. And, so have we. God Bless America: whatever happens.

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