Category: American Politics

You can hardly be a political maven and not want to delve deeply into the political phenomenon of Donald Trump. He challenges the experience and intellect while he corrupts the political scene. We have written so much about him over the past months that some readers have been referring to our Trump commentaries as rants. We apologize for that but from every angle from which we look, the Republican candidate for President in the United States is without redemption.

But in understanding the Trump phenomenon you have to talk to his supporters. And that is a challenge in itself. Ask a sweet motherly lady why she wants to vote for a man who disrespects women and she tells you “It is all about leadership.” It is the sincerity with which she says it that leaves you dumbfounded. Hell, Trump and his supporters can leave anyone dumfounded.

If you were very generous in your assessment of Trump, you might say he is a populist. You could say this about his ability to deal with people on their level. He appeals to their emotions, be they anger, bigotry, distrust, envy, hopelessness, jingoism or anything else that a liberal abhors.

Yet Trump is not a conservative. He is certainly not your typical American Republican. He is by no stretch of the imagination a Tea Party holly roller. The only God he acknowledges is what he sees in his narcissistic mirror.

The man thinks he is smart because he pays no taxes on the millions, he parlays, purloins and pulls out of deals he makes with the gullible. The poor who want to vote for him would stay poor as he would only share the profits of office with others of his ilk.

The only political profile that he fits is fascism. He lacks the malevolence of an Adolph Hitler but there are strong similarities to the buffoonery of Benito Mussolini. Trump would ‘Make America Great Again’ in the same sense as Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time. It would hardly be fun.

But he certainly subscribes to the big lie of fascism. He tries to run over his opponents like a run-away truck. Be they the poor aspirants to the Republican nomination or his Democrat opponent, Trump will lie about them. He does not just denigrate his opponents; he seeks to destroy them and he could care less how.

If it is any consolation, at this point in time, Donald Trump has almost no chance of winning the presidency on November 8. You should also bear in mind that in the last free election in Germany in 1933, Adolph Hitler and his Brown Shirts only won a third of the votes of the German people.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Donald Trump has found his roar back. It is the brass ring of political campaigns for losers. His mantra of “Corrupt Hillary” has been brainwashing his supporters for months. With the inept help of the Director of the FBI, he is now putting legs on the mantra.

When you read the actual letter the foolish director sent to congressional leaders you find that there is no accusation of wrong-doing against the Democratic Party candidate. That hardly stops Trump from piling on further vilification of his opponent. That is what losers do.

Trump has nothing substantive with which to go after his opponent but that does not concern him. He must have heard somewhere about the roar back that losers do at the end of a campaign to try to stem the tide for their opponent.

It has nothing to do with the polls. It is the few politicians that he listens to who are telling Trump that he cannot win. He has no election day team to pull his vote—and he is counting on people who do not normally vote.

Trump has already alienated the thinking Republicans. He has denounced their party’s leadership. He embarrassed the Republican Party at the three presidential debates—showing the world how unprepared he is to be Commander in Chief. He is a misogynist and a liar and a blow-hard. It would be giving the finger to the civilized world to put someone like him in the world’s most powerful office.

It is much too late for Hillary Clinton or her campaign team to do anything but fume about the FBI announcement. It is not about her. And Trump is using it as an excuse to escalate the lies he loves dishing out.

And the voting is already underway. Early voting is reported to be heavy. On November 8, it will be all over except the counting.

We are going to miss this campaign. It is the most unusual political campaign we have ever watched. Trump broke every rule of politics. If you have to self-fund a campaign, you are a loser. And remember that half the voters are going to be women. Misogynists and lechers need not apply. And do not broadly condemn entire ethnic groups such as Latinos, blacks or Muslims. Do not build your campaign on a pile of lies. After a while the voters can only assume everything you have to say is a lie.

The only disappointment is that nobody we would normally make a wager with would offer to bet with us. We have been offering 4 to 1 odds (to friends) against Trump since before the Republican convention. Now that the horses are at post, the wagering window is closed. Babel-on-the-Bay’s Morning Line is still at the top of its game.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Some readers who have followed our commentaries for several years will have fond memories of the Crappie Awards. We do not give out these awards frivolously. They are reserved for particularly egregious political pronouncements to the media—mainly in the category of Consolidated Reports on Approved Policies (CRAP).

But today’s Crappie award goes to a Kingston, New York concern calling itself the Trends Research Institute. Why it thinks a commentator’s daily comment would be classed as media is questionable to begin with. What the organization sent us was a scurrilous attack on Michele Obama.

And while the Institute claims it is non-partisan, the only beneficiary of such garbage would be the dismal final days of the losing campaign of Republican candidate Donald Trump.

There are some faint memories of having received missives from this American address before. The name is familiar from our daily dump of spam while trying to rescue treasured e-mails from readers. Since we have never reported on anything from their previous missives, no harm, no foul.

But for them to attack the First Lady of the United States is absolutely disgusting. And to expect a Canadian to participate in their plot, deplorable.

This attack was supposedly to counter Michele Obama’s appearances in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency. This news release had the nerve to say that while Mr. Trump’s statements about women were offensive, “they pale in comparison to the loud chorus of rapper’s filth and denigration of women that Michele and Barack Obama have continually promoted, championed, wined and dined at the White House.”

To say that the President and his wife promote that language is disgusting and fallacious. While some of us might disagree, rap is considered an art form. Like many other music genres, rap has often succumbed to using crude and sexist language to try to shock the listener. It is a sad reflection on society.

But the point is that people who are successful in the arts and in sports are routinely honored with a visit to the White House. It is the same as the entire winning team of the World Series being invited for a photo opportunity on the White House lawn.

Most of these invitations are routine and White House staff try to work them into the President’s calendar. Frankly the same people choosing to honor these rappers are probably the same people choosing the turkey to be pardoned for Thanksgiving.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

If you follow business news, you know this is the year of Twitter. It might be its last. Thanks to Donald Trump and his millions of Twitter followers, this has been a banner year. And thanks to Donald Trump this might be the year of Twitter’s disgrace.

Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey explained on Twitter’s tenth anniversary earlier this year that Twitter allows people to see what is happening in the world. They can see what is happening about any event.

Twitter is what keeps Donald Trump awake nights twitting rants about his opponents (in both political parties). There is no fact check on Twitter and he can lie, defame and corrupt his gullible followers as he wishes. He relishes in dispensing falsehoods to polish his ego. He denies his transgressions.

There is little need for truth on Twitter. There is no room for proof.

And Twitter barely needs content. CEO Jack Dorsey is very proud of one English Twitter user who set his camera to see a puddle outside his window. The puddle ended up with some 650,000 viewers. We wonder how many advertisers are interested in people who would think a puddle is interesting?

But Trump seems to have many millions of followers on Twitter. You wonder when these people have last taken the trouble to read a real newspaper? Is he only pandering to the ignorant? What does that say about Twitter?

Hillary Clinton said something early on in the campaign relevant to the lack of social graces of some of Donald Trump’s followers. That was a no-no. Politicians know better than to malign their opponent’s supporters. You are trying to win them over, not make them mad at you.

Mind you, that has never held Donald Trump back. Nobody ever accused him of being a real politician. He has been a sham and a bad smell in the political field for more than a year.

It is amazing throughout the United States that academics are only now starting to compare Trump’s actions to incidents in the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. While Adolph Hitler was far more circumspect than Donald Trump, the Trump big lie approach to politics is straight out of the book as though written by Reich Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels.

Our only advice to the people pushing Twitter is they better exercise some control over their domain on November 9. There must be laws in the United States that make inciting to riot or insurrection a criminal offence.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The third presidential debate is over. Donald Trump’s run for the presidency is over. He is a lost cause. That was not a man ready for the American presidency we saw last night, it was a spoiled child acting out.

From our first observations of this year’s American process for choosing a president, we have rated Donald Trump’s odds as long. It is not as if we knew much about the man. Never watched him on television. Have never knowingly been in a Trump-built building. And have never gambled in a Trump casino. Our paths have never crossed. Our opinion was based on the man’s lack of political experience. He is no politician. He does not like them.

And that is what his rag-tag army of followers like about him. He is entertainment, not politics. He is anger, not policy. He panders to prejudices. He appeals to the ignorant. He is a reality show posing as political strategy.

He made the colossal mistake of criticizing his own political party to the point where its leadership started disavowing him. This is unprecedented in American politics. How he will get those dumber followers of his to the polls to vote is a good question? He is losing states in the polls that have not voted Democratic since reconstruction after the American Revolution.

Last night in the debate, Trump was abusive, bellicose, childish, devious and you can keep going through the alphabet of ugly adjectives for a loser. There was a better moderator but even he had difficulty shouting down Trump’s tirades. And Secretary Clinton lost it a one point and the moderator could not shout her down. It was nobody’s shining hour.

But the entire debate hung on one crucial point. It was the discussion of accepting the decision of the voters. A fundamental of English and North American democracy is the acceptance by the candidates of the decision of the voters. When the moderator asked Secretary Clinton, she immediately affirmed her belief in that principle. Donald Trump refused. With the spite of an angry child, Trump truculently refused to acknowledge that the decision of the voters is final. He smirked and told the viewers to wait and see.

Nobody wins a debate such as this. It was interesting to see a very confident and aggressive Hillary Clinton—that bodes well for the next four years. At the same time, it was not the Donald Trump everybody expected. It is probably too bad that there are no drug tests for these events. Trump seemed to be in a different time zone.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

We have figured it out that Republican candidate Donald Trump is more eloquent when discussing something he knows nothing about. He obviously assumes that if he knows nothing about it, his followers will know even less. Ergo he can say whatever he wants.

He was testing that assumption last Sunday when he was railing against Obamacare during the second presidential debate. His followers know very well that Trump is four-square opposed to the Affordable Care Act that opponents refer to as Obamacare. The other evening, he said it was a disaster. And to make matters worse, he said the Hillary Clinton’s proposed fixes would create a system like Canada’s—which he described as catastrophic.

What he did not realize though was that millions of Canadians regularly watch American television programs and as those programs were all pre-empted by the debate, there were millions of Canadians idly watching the debate—hoping it would be entertaining. And it was.

At least it was entertaining until Mr. Trump informed them that their Medicare system was catastrophic. He informed them that many Canadians come into the United States for health care because their system is so slow.

To make this even worse, Canada has no tracking system for patients giving up on waiting and heading south. A study funded by the Fraser Institute has supplied estimates to raise the panic levels on this. The Fraser Institute is famous for paying academics to prove its right-wing theories. It is sort of a reverse of ‘publish or perish.’ Instead it is publish a paper for the Fraser Institute and then perish as your fellow academics send you to purgatory.

But that does not detract from the hard work constantly being done in Canada to reduce wait times for patients after seeing a medical specialist.

The only problem is it still provides fodder for detractors such as Donald Trump’s right-wing sycophants who hang on his every word as gospel. He can talk about groping women as he wishes and still win the votes of people who talk about ‘family values.’ He can still rail against the world-wide Muslim religion and win the votes of so-called Christians. He can say disgusting things about his country’s Mexican neighbours and still expect to be handed the keys to his country’s White House. Mr. Trump is the catastrophe.

And before you think that is the deciding factor for November 8, we should report on a recent interview with an American Trump supporter. The interviewer was asking the lady if she was not concerned about Mr. Trump’s attitude towards women. “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she said, “It is all about leadership.”

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Some wit on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio opined the other night that the public corporation could no longer report on Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump as news. He thought it should all be referred to the CBC’s Entertainment Division.

But there are changes coming folks. Donald Trump says he is taking off the gloves. He says he will no longer be Mr. Nice Guy. For the four remaining weeks of the American election campaign, he will campaign as he wants to. He has declared all-out war against what he calls ‘disloyal’ Republicans. The people deserting him are basically the leadership of the Republican Party.

That leaves the Trump campaign with somewhere between 12 and 25 million Twitter followers, who are in a tizzy. Somehow between now and November 8, he hopes to change those twits into voters—at least the ones registered, old enough to vote and can actually find out where to vote.

And this is why Trump’s entire campaign for the presidency is in free fall. He has no concept of what it takes in politics to turn promises into votes. He knows nothing about real political campaigning or the ground game that transforms offers of support into votes in the ballot box. He has been running a campaign against the establishment. Why would that establishment want to help him now?

In one of Trump’s silly tweets the other night (he might be suffering from sleep deprivation) he said: “They don’t know how to win—I will teach them.” This was directed against the leadership of his own Republican Party. Hillary Clinton and her team must be sitting back wondering what else is going to help them win.

The Democratic candidate has never been in any jeopardy throughout this terribly long campaign. The Democrats have every right to be angered by the constant lies about her spread by Trump. Vilification of your opponent has never been a good campaign tactic and Trump has reached a point that nothing he says about his opponent can be believed. The attitude today is “So Donald Trump lies. So what?”

All of this is going on as the failed Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City is again shut down in bankruptcy. It is just an interesting indicator of the general condition of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

You hardly measure an event such as the second presidential debate last night as won or lost. It is more like a war of attrition as ground is lost and taken in an interminable back and forth.

But last night Donald Trump needed to regain some ground and he failed. At the same time Hillary Clinton needed to hold her ground and she did.

If Secretary Clinton ever needed to show that she was fully capable of being President of the Unites States, it was last night. The final question set her up for it. The questioner challenged both candidates to say something nice about the other candidate. Trump was for once tongue-tied when asked to respond first. So Clinton, the politician, stepped forward and complimented Trump on his family. She was gracious and closed well.

Trump, on the other hand, had to question Clinton’s sincerity. He had a conversation with himself and finally decided that his opponent was being genuine. What he said positive about Clinton, this commentator forgot to write down. It escapes us.

But the close of the event was revealing in itself. The moderators, the questioners, the candidates and the candidate’s families were on stage and milling around thanking people. The candidates finally shook hands—something they did not do at the beginning.

What finally told the story of the evening was a long camera shot showing the entire stage and the people milling around and talking to each other. This shot told you who was the winner and who the loser.

The Trump family at first gathered protectively around their man. After a while, a few people broke through to get selfies with Donald Trump.

In the meantime, you could see the political team of Bill and Hillary Clinton working the stage like a fund-raising cocktail party. Hillary was glad-handing the people on stage right and Bill was working stage left. These two professional politicians were in their element. They walked away with the most votes of that supposedly undecided audience.

The only thing for Trump to do is to get his doctor to recommend a good ear, nose and throat specialist to check out that sniffing in his speech. It was far more obvious last night than it was at the first debate. It could be as simple as post-nasal drip but he needs to check it out. It is becoming very distracting for people with whom he wants to communicate.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

It was the turn of the American Vice President contenders the other evening. As did most watchers, we gamely stuck with it for the first half hour. That was the limit that most could handle. It was not just bad television; it was bad politics. It was like watching children squabble. It was something that only a parent is genetically suited to handle.

That guy Pence from Indiana is a bully like his boss. And Virginian Tim Kaine was snapping at his opponent’s heals like a Chihuahua in heat. Neither paid much attention to their moderator, who was obviously the smarter of the three. Her only problem was that she could not seem to follow what the two candidates were talking about either.

Pence’s problem was that he had no defense for Trump and Kaine was bringing up Trump at every opportunity. Pence’s only claim was that he and Trump had a plan to use more coal. Pence appeared programmed to make the case for Trump and to ignore all questions and logic that might be used.

What was particularly annoying about Pence was from the get-go he was tearing down America. The America he describes is a sorry place and he seems to have no solutions but to vote for Trump and let disgusted Americans get even. The Trump team seems stuck with their slogan to “Make America Great Again” and they resent what progress has been made by others.

Pence’s answer to the most telling points from Kaine was to ignore them. He appears to feel that anything that has not gone well in world politics in the past 20 years is Hillary Clinton’s fault. If she was as old as Trump, they would also blame her for World War II.

But the Kaine-Pence event will soon be forgotten. The main contenders are due to meet in a town hall Sunday which could allow for more physical confrontation. A better alternative might be to have each presidential candidate in a sound proof room with the moderator capable of turning off the microphone and camera on each. That way there would be no more cross talk, interruptions or mugging as each candidate has a chance to have a say.

There is no question but that Americans would prefer to have adults running their country.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

In very few weeks from now, the American people will have their say. Given nothing catastrophic in the intervening weeks, the Republican candidate is going to hear “You’re fired!” It will spell the end of the worst reality show in American political history.

Nobody deserved this. It has been a frightening prospect for Americans and their friends. A giant, puffed-up ego has been dominating the airwaves and Internet. It has been the worst of extremes and chilling in what it portends and pretends. All other subjects pale in face of the horrendous possibilities. Nothing titillates more and no greater lies can be told.

And we have been watching a campaign of lies. This is a man whose entire life is a series of lies and pretenses. He (maybe) built a house of cards that promised billions and he does not want anyone to know the truth. Is the truth dust? Is it all in his imagination? Did he build towers on imagination?

But does anyone seriously believe he could guide a country? Can a man who insults and belittles women as sex objects lead them? That type of person is called a pimp. Can a man who wants to build walls and interdict an entire religion from the country help maintain a world at some level of peace?

How un-Godly does this person have to be to finally turn off the ardour of the born again? How hidden do the real figures have to be to turn off the respect of the fiscally conservative? How limited does his understanding of world affairs have to be to please the true xenophobe?

But even then there is the occasional vote he can count on—if only they get to the polls. And that is what it all comes down to on November 8.

In politics, it is called the Ground Game. It is that effort that is made in politics to identify your support and then to deliver it to vote on election day. The facts are that the Republican Party that could have supplied that army of volunteers to carry out the ground game cannot do the job. The Republicans are too busy trying to rescue what political wins are possible as the Trump campaign crumbles. House and Senate seats are at risk.

The Republican Party leaders are sure of only one thing. They never want the embarrassment of running such an ego again.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]