PMC Commentary

Trump on "60 Minutes"

Saturday night I watched, for probably the 20th time, Basil Rathbone, Lionel Atwill, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the divine Third Coming of 1930s horror, The Son of Frankenstein. (The Bride of was the Second Coming.) I was in heaven.

Then, last night I watched, for at least the 21st time, Donald Trump in the somewhat less than divine Third Coming of contemporary conservative horror — yet another son of Frankenstein. (The original starred Ronald Reagan; the ghastly sequel, George W.) I was in hell.

Yet today's hell, I once again discovered, is a rather amusing place of endless parody.

Trump's segment on "60 Minutes" seemed longer than that, which I guess is a regular feature of chthonic burlesque. Lucifer — a still-populist orangutan in an Italian suit — was grilled by Scott Pelley, and thus the anti-Revelations gushed. We can have everything, we can have it all, it's there for the taking — at a wee price. We must pledge our loyal cretinism to the most cretinous mumbo-jumbo imaginable.

Trump kindly laid it out, and his collective swindle was magnificent. He'll give "a substantial reduction" in taxes to the middle class, a corporate reduction as well. This will provide "a tremendous incentive to grow the economy." The federal government, miraculously, will "take in the same or more money." No doubt the latter. So with that surplus he'll inaugurate a massive infrastructure program, a massive military buildup and a massively costly, anti-ISIS adventure in Iraq.

President Trump will also repeal Obamacare and replace it with some sort of (original) Obamacare — the Supreme Court, Congress and obstructionist red states be damned. He will "take care of everybody." The uninsured class? "The government's gonna pay for it." As for everyone else (somehow, everyone else will buy into this), "it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition…. They can have everything," concluded Trump.

He'll bring jobs back from China, Japan and Mexico through presidential extortion. "They're going to behave" (whatever that means) — or it's a trade war, vowed Trump. That should help.

The land shall also be cleansed of filthy "illegals," but he'll be "rounding 'em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they're going to be happy because they want to be legalized." Sound nice? That's what Trump said, only to add, "I know it doesn't sound nice. But not everything is nice." Go figure. The orangutan Beelzebub works in mysterious ways.

We must have sympathy for such devilish quackery. It's slumping in the polls, and Trump's slump may well be (and almost certainly is) as endless as his revised, innovative parody of modern conservatism's patchwork of Frankensteinian deceit. The cretinous swarm has seen this monkey show and it's ready to move on. Ben Carson promises a fresh kind of bigotry and Carly Fiorina offers many an old fraud in a fiery way. Trump may get a bit of a boost from his national exposure last night. But I'm afraid he's spit-roasting.

 

John Boehner's juncture is a bundle of Shakespearean tragi-comedy

Shakespeare wrote that our "fairest flow'rs" bloom in autumn, when we are "not yet on summer's death nor on the birth of trembling winter." Chris Krueger, investment advisor with Guggenheim Partners, disagrees. With immense trepidation he informed clients, in what has to be the campiest quote of last week, that John Boehner's departure now spikes the odds of a frigid debt-ceiling showdown.

Krueger phrased the matter thus: "Essentially, Boehner is the kindergarten teacher who is leaving his flock unsupervised and wants to get all the sharp objects out of the room before he goes off into the sunset." Yet the NY Times paraphrases the overall thrust of Krueger's advisory letter as one of "dismiss[ing] hopes that Mr. Boehner was about to play a bipartisan Mr. Fix-It on his way out the door."

I am left wondering who is confused most: Mr. Krueger, the NY Times, or me. Perhaps I'm misreading these battling quotes, but would not the removal of the sharper objects — a debt-ceiling collapse and government shutdown — be the precise act of a Mr. Fix-It Boehner, before exiting stage left?

For such a feat, the speaker requires only 30 Republican votes. Out of 247, that's doable. Pray tell me that's doable. Boehner could ram through a debt-ceiling lift, a year-long budget agreement, an infrastructure bill and a renewal of the Export-Import Bank. From The Winter's Tale to The Tempest — presto, the House's fairest flow'rs would bloom and trembling winter be postponed.

This, I should think, would be Boehner's midautumn night's dream: to stick it to the jesters and fools who have made his speakership a Dantean inferno.

Phil Schiliro, President Obama's former congressional liaison, reads the script as I do: "For most Republicans," he tells the Times, "resolving these issues now, instead of having the government shut down in December, would be a political plus." Indeed, it could spare the party from the gallows next year. Another government shutdown and perhaps a global financial explosion via a debt-ceiling collapse could be the final electoral straw for a party already straining under the burden of civil war.

Remove the sharp objects and let the extremists yelp. The latter will be safe either way; besides, they're always yelping about something. Yet those from purpling districts would be out from under the noose.

Holding hands with Boehner, Mitch McConnell could also play the partisan savior. He has some tough Senate reelection fights coming up, and the last thing he needs is for his endangered pals to be defending government shutdowns and financial detonations.

It's all up to Boehner. He says he doesn't worry about legacy. But this could be the finest historic moment of his speakership — his season of the fairest flow'rs.

I concede a lingering confusion, which borders on outright contradiction. Many times I've expressed my conviction that Republicans must take the nation to the abject bottom before the GOP plague can be extinguished. I still believe that; thus I am giddily optimistic that Boehner & Party will carry out suicide most foul. On the other hand, shutdown anarchy and economic maelstroms are hard pills to swallow. Hence I'm as torn as Hamlet — I know not where true honor lies.

 

Boehner's ouster was no "conservative" coup

Let the record show that Speaker John Boehner was deposed, by his own hand, in 1994. It was then, observes the Times' Carl Hulse in a useful recap of recent events, that Boehner joined with other Gingrichites in "agitating against the leadership with claims that top lawmakers were badly out of touch."

Let the record show as well that Boehner was deposed in 2010, when "revolutionary" Gingrichism flowered into Tea Partyism. The record must also show with essential continuity that Boehner was, in fact, deposed from 1932 to 1964 — the epochal cradle of conservatism's mature fanaticism.

All along, the fanaticism has been festering; the boils on its butt were the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement and feminist and gay-liberation movements — progressive-authentically conservative attempts at softening the brutalities of classism, racism, sexism and raw prejudice.

One might discern with equal legitimacy that Boehner was deposed in the old Old Guard's reaction to the fin-de-siecle Progressive Movement, which itself had blossomed in reaction to the Gilded Age — which fanatical conservatives have been struggling to resurrect for more than a century. It is that era — the one spoofed by that most American of all Americans, Mark Twain — that modern "conservatives" adore (and thus the Progressive Movement is that for which old-school conservative George Will reserves his deepest contempt): women were in the kitchen, blacks were in their place, immigrants were despised but capitalistically exploited, gays were locked in the closet, and government was useful only to the extent of keeping wealth concentrated among aristocratic worthies.

John Boehner surfed to power on the crest of one relatively recent conservative wave, but a much larger one — one which swelled in power from all that preceded it — overtook him. In a Times op-ed, former House Democratic staffer John Lawrence notes that Boehner possesses "a personable, thoughtful side … [in] contrast to the bombastic, tiresome nihilists who have driven him out of Congress." With each successive "conservative" crest (actually pseudoconservative, or reactionary, or even something worse, which I'm getting to), the atavistic conservative ways have been swamped and drowned. By now, continues Lawrence, it has come to this: "the Tea Party … could not care less if they create chaos that diminishes the stature of government."

Yet, in those two quotes, there's a conflict. Nihilists don't wish to "diminish" government; they wish to destroy it. And it is that philosophical impulse that defines today's conservatism. If it can't rule in toto, it can destroy; and in that there resides an unmistakable crypto-fascistic tenor. Total, unfettered power is its logical goal, for if one is gloriously 100-percent right about everything, then it follows that opponents are 100-percent wrong about everything. And in one's (often theocentric) splendor, how can one conscientiously compromise with what must be unmitigated evil?

In my view, then, the Tea Party typology that has the GOP by the balls has long since passed the rhetorical niceties of "ultraconservatism" or "pseudoconservatism" or "reactionaryism." It utterly rejects pluralism and is absolutist in its philosophy of power-by-any-means, an end-by-any-means. And in that, it is a philosophical doppelgänger of Göring's testimony before the Nuremberg court: We knew we were absolutely right about what was good for Germany and our opposition was therefore wrong, so why would we have tolerated any opposition that could have only done harm to Germany?

What we have here — here, today — is thus a massive failure to communicate. Reigning Tea Party typology isn't conservatism, or any breed of it. It is crypto-fascism. And while I have no problem communicating that, too many others are delicately reserved, perhaps for good reason: It sounds hysterical.

But it isn't. Because the Tea Party's crypto-fascism is, happily, also doomed. It just doesn't have the juice to achieve its goal of total power — and the power it does have is, demographically, as much of a dead man walking as John Boehner was. When they finally recognize it for what it is, Americans don't much like extremism, whether from the left or the right.

 

Boehner's tears of joy

Have you ever seen a giddier, more disingenuous inmate escape an asylum for the politically insane?

"Good things lie ahead for this House," said Boehner. This House.

"I wouldn't describe [my escape] as having had enough," he added.

And the granddaddy of them all: He'll "miss the camaraderie of the House."

Right. Like a rat would miss a snake pit.

***

Shortly after Boehner's pre-farewell address, CNN interviewed Republican congressman Matt Salmon, who "congratulated" Boehner for quitting. It's no wonder, said Salmon, that the frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination are political outsiders; no wonder at all, because "people are sick and tired of business as usual."

I would have loved to ask Salmon: Since 2011, how often has the (Republican) House conducted business as usual?

 

Marco Rubio: Thy name is The Cheapest of Opportunism

A despicable little shit addresses a big despicable audience:

 

 

As The Hill puts it, "Here we go again"

Whoever Ted Cruz's snake-oil supplier is, he should be commended for supplying it in bottomless bulk.

The Hill, yesterday:

Cruz’s message [to House conservatives] is simple and a repeat of 2013’s: President Obama and the Democrats will deserve blame for a shutdown, not Republicans. 

From a Quinnipiac University poll, via The Hill, Aug. 31:

Forty-one percent said they would blame the GOP, and a third of people said that Democrats and President Obama would be responsible for a shutdown.

On the other hand, give him credit. Cruz sells more than snake oil. In the abyss of conservatism's self-protected districts, 33 percent of American voters translates into at least 51 percent of electoral morons. And that's all that matters.

How it is that Cruz believes that this can ever be phantasmagorically re-translated into a national, presidential victory is a question better left to political sorcerers such as Cruz himself. When it comes to mysticism and metaphysics, I'm stumped.

 

Boehner's Words for the Day: "Fuck it"

From Politico, the whole story (literally, as of 9:32 am Eastern):

Speaker John Boehner announced to House Republicans that he is retiring from Congress at the end of October, according to multiple sources in a closed party meeting.

The extremists finally wore him down, they finally got him.

Perhaps the pope's message got him as well: hanging with violently polarizing buffoons just isn't worth it. Seek peace — in a multimillion-dollar Florida condo.

Now that's not so hard, is it? 

Let us move along. Let us now pray for a Gohmert boomlet.

***

I should think Boehner is now free to attempt the ramming of a Planned Parenthood-funded budget through the House, with of course the assistance of Democrats, with whom he can also negotiate a successor. The latter would be part of the deal.

Time to think on this, Steny. I'd much prefer allowing Republicans to destroy themselves, but Democrats usually bail them out.   

***

Politico now adds to its story: "Boehner came into power on the momentum of the 2010 tea party wave, but it was that movement that gave him the most problems."

For more on this, see earlier post here.

Politico also confirms a portion of the above speculation: "Now that he doesn't have internal political considerations to weigh, Boehner is certain to push through a government-funding bill next week that funds Planned Parenthood, and keeps the government open." What it doesn't confirm is successorship-linkage. But that, it seems to me, is too much leverage for Boehner to squander; and, as noted, Democrats always seem willing to help. 

 

Brooks and Krauthammer are a trifle upset

The conservative (as well as some of the leftist) intelligentsia has always been wary of populism. This is understandable. It's known to be perilous to put one's faith in a knowing and faithful rabble: peeps convinced of every variety of secular nonsense, from Horatio Alger fabulism to the singular splendor of American exceptionalism. Such ignorant verities are self-regarded as wholesome, but disillusionment can turn ugly. The rabble can turn ugly. It's pleasant to have them on one's side until it isn't.

And that's where modern conservatism's intelligentsia finds itself: in a very unpleasant predicament. Co-opting the rabble was a rather distasteful task for yesteryear's conservatism, since it knew of the perils. Yet, when silently pondered, the danger of reverse co-optation was always prospective, never imminent. The rabble would buy whatever the conservative elite was selling, because that's what the rabble does — it follows. If disillusionment comes, it'll come tomorrow. Today, all is well.

Oops.

Hence the conservative intelligentsia's metamorphosis from an instinctive anti-populism to a manifested anti-popularity. It positively despises its party's Trumps and Carsons, tribunes of rabblocratic ignorance. Their days may be numbered, but today they own the party; they and their herd have busted the fence and they're grazing on aristocratic land. For the conservative intelligentsia, this circumstance has been most unpleasant; and by now, it's downright intolerable.

So it is that we read David Brooks this morning, railing against the uncouth, unschooled, unwashed interlopers by name. Trumpism and Carsonism (ethnic and religious bigotry, respectively) are "ruinous to the long-term political prospects" of the GOP and "bad for the spirit of conservatism," rages Brooks; they are "a sour, overgeneralized and intellectually sloppy sense of alienation."

Though we lay down the Times and pick up the Post, we find Charles Krauthammer on the same page. The Republican Party, he writes with one hand while pointing the other's finger directly at Trump and Carson, "is flamboyantly shooting at itself and gratuitously alienating one significant electoral constituency after another."

Isn't that lovely? I am tempted, because of a recent visitor to our disheveled shores, to say divine. Brooks and Krauthammer's eyes have seen the ignominy of the coming of the Reckoning, in which Trump and Carson are liberating the vintage where the rabble's grapes of wrath are stored. Our conservative thinkers once fondled the asp and held it to their bosom, and now they're shocked by the lethal result. Or so they say, or so they pretend, or so they belatedly protest.

What must be most disconcerting to them is that the rabble is out of the tube and there is no way to get it back in. The Republican Party is now a party of two distinct, irreconcilable camps. It takes a load of herculean creativity to imagine Trumpeteers marching enthusiastically to the polls to vote for a Jeb Bush — or even dragging their sorry asses to the polls at all.

Unless, of course — what's this we can imagine? — a formal schism erupts from which an inglorious third party emerges. Such as been my faith for years, and because I'm one of the simple peeps of wholesome verities, I'm keeping that faith.

 

Steny Hoyer's sudden "What am I saying?"

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer really threw me for a moment.

Yesterday he told reporters that Democratic intervention into a possible Republican coup is just one of those things that shall be left to popular wonder. He claimed House Democrats haven't given it much thought, which he expressed thus: "We don't know what the Republicans are going to do, and our experience has been that the Republicans are somewhat unpredictable."

Prithee, Rep. Hoyer, dost though verily believe that Republicans are "somewhat unpredictable"? Steny, it seems, then caught his folly — and thereby relieved me of my worry about him: "The thing you can usually predict is that they'll create chaos in some fashion or another."

In fact, you can bet on it — usually, and quite safely.

 

Snapshooting Trump. He's not looking too good.

WaPo's Philip Bump aggregates four different polls, from their previous to most recent points, and charts this:

Bush, all in all, perhaps a bit better; Carson, much better; Fiorina, meteoric (an oddly used word in the English language, since meteors don't rise); Rubio, a clear improvement; Cruz, essentially flat; and then Trump, who, in Bump's words, is "not doing well — or, at least, he's not doing as well as he used to be doing."

Bump adds that "it's rare in recent primary elections for a candidate to suddenly spike, then fade, then spike again. In most cases, the candidate that suddenly spikes never spikes again, with the exception of Newt Gingrich in 2012."

Trump — and we — have the slide-stopping hope of his appearance on "60 Minutes" this Sunday, but that hope is a slim one. Papal speech or no papal speech, I'm sliding into the sin of despair.

 

Pope Francis's speech, and his GOP auditors

I admire the pope immensely — his brains-over-brawn eminence is truly awesome — but I'm bewildered by his office. I have never understood the purpose of organized religion; not in the modern world, where science can explain what only religion once could. As for instructing us in human ethics — which are unimposing to, and on, the unethical — there is a vast body of literature that ably competes with the Bible or Koran or any other "holy" manuscript. For courage one can read Homer; for vision, Dante; for all of humanity's richness and meanness and foibles, Shakespeare. Libraries are temples. It is from there that the modern mind initiates battle with ignorance, bigotry, and ancient sins.

The Golden Rule? Pithy. Yet political philosopher John Rawls "fleshed" it out with deeper meaning in his "veil of ignorance" — an imaginary social construct into which one is thrust, before which, one must decide what kind of society. Is slavery permitted? When you arrive, you may be one of the slaves. Ravages of income inequality? You may be one of the ravaged. And so on. So now decide. What kind of society would you wish to find yourself in? — considering, first, that you may be one of the losers in the breed of society that world religions, feudalism and capitalism have, in reality, bequeathed us.

Secular Rawls's is a longer route to wisdom and human decency, but it packs a more thoughtful punch than does "Do unto others," which most others are in the habit of merely mouthing. Rawls is an apostle of Reason.

So yes, I'm bewildered by the admirable pope's office. Speaker Boehner — a "devout Catholic," a two-word term that for reasons unknown is as inseparable as "damn Yankee" — is, however, not bewildered. Not one bit. He sees the pope as the emissary of God and vicar of Christ. For all I metaphysically know, maybe he is. Yet if that's the case, then why will Speaker Boehner proceed to ignore the divine wisdom that the pope dispensed this morning?

Francis spoke directly to Boehner and his party — that unhappy little band of polarizing pols and rebellious ideologues — about the violence and bloodshed which extremism causes. Boehner's party practices, of course, a much milder form of the kind of violent extremism that Francis deplored, but theirs is an extremism nonetheless. The pope was just practicing subtlety. And the idiots applauded. They can't even recognize themselves; so how in the name of the Holy Father can they recognize what Francis was getting at?

The short answer: They can't, and they can't because they don't wish to, and they don't wish to because cooperation with the vastly decent President Obama would result in the unselfish adventure of having their lily-white asses primaried.

So, all that holiness was squandered; what Republicans heard and applauded they neither heard nor appreciated. It was just another come-to-Jesus Sunday meetin' that will be trashed at the next political-strategy coven. To hell with cooperation and reason and the country to boot. Reelection is Lord.

To history, the pope's speech was indeed historic. To our GOP Congress it was just more nice-sounding words that can't work in the "real world," for they, mostly, are "real men" — men of brawn over brains.

 

George Will, who hates Donald Trump, actually loves the guy

Trump the Vulgarian has entered the vortex, it seems. He is now thrashing about in a way that embarrasses the viewer, rather than entertains. His once carefully crafted stream-of-consciousness political artistry has become more "slam poetry" than the startling innovativeness of a James Joyce, Samuel Beckett or William Faulkner. Were he in the music business, he'd be known as a one-hit wonder, and by now he'd be performing in Branson, Missouri. Or, working with oils, his artistry would be that of a pickled Jackson Pollock splashing but one color on canvas. Trump's "brand" preceded him, and his monochromatic personality will outlive him.

Yesterday I posted his distressingly awkward cry for attention, which rang out in his customary medium of Twitter: "FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won't be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future." That saddened me, particularly because it followed a few tedious re-assaults on Megyn Kelly. As the hip would say (if the hip are still saying it) — "That is so yesterday." Is The Donald but a one-trick biped? In answering that, he then traveled to South Carolina — and his answer was both devastating and unmistakable.

This is what bothers me about politicians. [Rubio] announces he's gonna run and they go to Jeb, "What do you think of Marco Rubio?" "He's my dear, dear friend, he's wonderful, he's a wonderful person, I'm so happy that he's running." Give me a break. That's called politicians' speak. Then they go to Marco, What do you think of Jeb Bush? "Oh, he's great, he's brought me along."

Trump somehow determined that, in reality, Bush and Rubio "hate each other." And then, inexorably, came this: "I am so tired of this politically correct crap."

That line "elicit[ed] the biggest cheers of his speech," reports Politico. Yet what were they cheering? A slogan, not an idea or a policy or a vision or anything else of any conceptual value. They were cheering mindless vitriol unleashed via a three-word phrase that, through jackhammering repetition born of That's-all-I've-got, has lost all meaning. I gather that "politically correct crap" is meant to convey whatever the haters hate. As a "concept" in shorthand, that's fine. But even the haters wouldn't buy a fifth, sixth or seventh identical Jackson Pollock — which is what Trump is selling. His act is akin to the ninth spinoff of a once-popular sitcom. It gets old; and as it ages, you'll see the buyers roaming away in ever-increasing clusters.

What doesn't sadden me about all this is that George Will, who claims to detest Trump's singular appeal, has found himself liberated by it. Indeed, he is positively swimming in it; there is no thrashing about for George. This morning, for instance, George Esther Williams Will's "tribute" to Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra is more an Olympic-sized pool of freedom to backstroke to the good old days before nasty political correctness made rhetorical pussies of us all:

DiMaggio was "Big Dago" to his teammates. Yogi was "Little Dago"…. In 1923, the Sporting News … called the national pastime the essence of the nation: "In a democratic, catholic, real American game like baseball, there has been no distinction raised except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible…. The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon — his 'nationality' is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, hit or field."

Notes Will rather approvingly, "Ah, diversity." In the end, his "tribute" reduces Berra to an ethnicity; he uses the deceased Yogi as a soapbox for his own Trumpian yearnings. This gangly, four-eyed, puffed-up 98-pound conceptual weakling (of — to me — unknown ethnic origins) sees himself as a superman of unorthodox courage. Just like Trump. Will loves what he hates.

There has never been a second act for Will. He's experienced no growth, no character development, no new thoughts or meditations of personal enlightenment. He is today what he has always been: a bore of limited appeal but boundless certainties. Just like Trump.

 

Mike Huckabee, as consistent as any of them

To those of the True Faith and who are therefore mired in the unfortunate opinion that Hillary Clinton is somehow distinctly victimized by right-wing insanity and partisan malice and gleefully relentless media coverage of both, I give them Mike Huckabee, who recently "reflected" on President Obama's guest list for the pope's White House visit. A guest list, a mere guest list, teed it up for the ordained minion of forever-recycled horseshit:

President Obama’s classless decision to transform Pope Francis’ visit to the White House into a politicized cattle call for gay and pro-abortion activists is an insult to millions of Catholics.

Why is it that Obama goes to extremes to accommodate Muslim terrorists but shows nothing but disdain for Christians? This is a new low for an administration that will go down as the most anti-Christian in American history.

Eight years of this Obama-is-pro-Muslim-because-Obama-is-anti-Christian (read: antiChrist) quackery from the right; eight uninterrupted years of this drivel — and absolutely nothing has tempered the right's exuberance for barfing it up. After all, it gets coverage. It's "fun" — just part of watching the street fight, which is also known as the electoral process.

 

Damn

Just, damn.

 

The NY Post gorges on Ed Klein's Hillary

The NY Post — that model of vastly unethical and literally unbelievable journalism, and therefore the printed darling of the right — is on one helluva Hillary binge this week, given the upcoming release of Edward Klein's exciting new exposé, Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary.

A Post story yesterday had Klein "reporting" that Hillary is "secretly worried that she’s too sick to run for president" (she's been "'frequently plagued' by 'blinding headaches' and a series of strokes" — strokes, mind you — the Post both quotes and writes). But today's Post story is much more entertaining.

An enraged Hillary Rodham Clinton blew up at President Obama, demanding he "call off your f–king dogs" looking into her emails during a tense Oval Office meeting, according to [the] new book….

The president was so stunned by Clinton’s disrespectful demands, he needed a moment to compose himself, the book claims. Obama then responded, "There is nothing I can do for you one way or another. Things have been set in motion, and I can’t and won’t interfere. Your problems are, frankly, of your own making. If you had been honest …"

That is one nice hit job. It has it all: scurrility, profanity, infighting, "disrespect," shock, betrayal; and best of all, the far right's monstrously evil one, President Obama, is now cast by Klein (and the Post) as the wise dispenser of divine justice.

I continue to resist the temptation to argue in detail that this sort of rubbish is nothing new, even as some in Camp Clinton insist that their candidate is a unique sufferer of it. To establish a historical baseline, just read the party-driven, tabloidesque coverage of the 1796 presidential election, or its rematch in 1800. That's about all I need to note. The above fantasies are quite mild compared to the alleged monarchism or murder most foul of old.

So, come on, NY Post. Get with it, Ed Klein. As entertaining as your propaganda is, you can do better. Look to the masters — two of our founders.