Tag: Bill Clinton

By on

Hear me out on this one. This might take a minute.

I never got Ronald Reagan. His charm eluded me but a comfortable majority of the country disagreed. They loved him which allowed him to change the American political environment. The free market/small government ideas he espoused still dominate the political debate nearly 40 years after he left office. If you don’t believe me, try raising taxes anywhere in the United States and the overwhelming response will be no. Americans prefer potholes to good public services.

Reagan had a nice guy personality that connected easily with the public and is completely different from our current president. Criticism rolled right off Reagan’s back and he worked with his political opponents whenever possible while respectfully disagreeing with their ideas. This enabled him to incorporate much of his political agenda into American life.

This worries me because Trump is such an obvious asshole. I think a lot of his own supporters think he is an asshole. They support him any way because they agree with his politics. Nearly half the country for the last three elections has voted for him despite him being an asshole, an idiot, a misogynist pig, a racist, and a corrupt detestable human being.

Where would he, and more importantly, the country be if he was slightly less obnoxious? My fear is he would have even more support than he presently does which should put the fear of God into the Democratic Party, but doesn’t. I have been supporting the most left leaning candidate my whole life (voting since 1976) and have met with disappointment almost every single time. These candidates somehow fail to catch fire beyond the left leaning communities they come from and the Democratic nominee (see Carter and Clinton here) is generally more conservative than I prefer. Obama is the only successful exception that I can recall and keep in mind his best result in a general election was 52% of the vote.

So when leaders on the left try to say Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are the answer, I seriously have my doubts. Don’t get me wrong, I would like them to be the answer, I just don’t think it will happen. If an obnoxious asshole like Trump can win elections, imagine how a less obnoxious asshole can do.

By on

I admitted the other day that I would love to see Donald Trump pardon Ghislaine Maxwell — mostly for the pure entertainment value of the experience. Upon thinking about, I have some reservations but I am still leaning to the hellfire that Trump will unleash. Here are my problems:

  1. Maxwell wants to get out of prison. She will do anything Trump wants to do so. This means, given her record of aiding and abetting a man engaged in human trafficking, she is capable of anything, so lying to protect Trump would be very much in her wheelhouse. Nothing coming out of her mouth can actually be trusted.
  2. Pardoning Maxwell is not the same as releasing the Epstein files that Trump’s Attorney General is so closely guarding. If Maxwell clears Trump without the release of the evidence regarding Epstein, we will probably learn nothing new.
  3. Given that Trump is the president she has to please, Maxwell had every reason to throw the Clintons and any other Democrat caught in Epstein’s web under the bus. So, in the short term, at least, Maxwell could torpedo the present Democratic Establishment. Personally, I am all for it. The sooner the debris from Democratic Party Past is cleared, the sooner we can get on with the business of defeating Trump and building a more representative Democratic Party. But it will be ugly. Really really ugly.

So pardoning her is not without repercussions. But one things is for certain, Donald Trump will release the hounds from Hell if he pardons Maxwell, and, if anyone deserves the Hounds from Hell, it is Donald Trump.