November 2, 2016, Oh joy
I'm not at all deterred from my intention, as I have done in 2006 and 2008, to travel to Pennsylvania on Election Day as part of the Democratic Party legal team monitoring polling activity, notwithstanding the alleged plans of "White nationalists" to deploy their own poll watchers intent on intimidating non-White voters. Interestingly, for the moment, at least for people like me [White, upper middle class, regularly employed...] , this is still mostly a free country, and, while I have more problems with her than I can count, if Hillary Clinton is elected, I can at least be assured that it will still be mostly a free country... with Herr Drumpf, given his tendencies to extremist statements and his courting of extremist support... and a party that, if it controls Congress, may well just go on a feeding frenzy... who the hell knows?
I will say that, this weekend, while finishing the Suffolk County Marathon (no. 46!) a few minutes faster than last year, I observed a goodly number of Trump/Pence signs... more, actually, than I had seen in the entire country (albeit mostly confined to points in the Northeast, as far West as swingy PA and OH and as far North as ME)... still, other than two in someone else's house on my own block here in Brooklyn, no Hillary signs... just sayin'...
Where was I? It seems to me that rumors of Republican FBI Director James Comey's professionalism and even-handedness are greatly exaggerated. Admittedly, he was put in a preposterous position earlier this year given Attorney General Lynch's hopeless conflict in the matter (thanks Bill!), but nonetheless, he did tiptoe right to the edge of propriety in commenting on the various "extremely careless" handling of emails amidst a rather damning rampage (which ended with "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against Hillary Clinton). There's nothing even remotely reasonable or defensible, however., about Mr. Comey's October Sextprise [TM], that is, his abrupt, totally unvetted statement to Congress duly made public that a new trove of emails supposedly relevant to the Clinton investigation popped up on Anthony Weiner's home computer and devices, presumably shared with his estranged spouse Huma Abedin, Hillary's majorette domo... and it seems, the underage girl who received Weiner's lewd text messages now objects to the FBI Director's making her a political pawn in this (because God knows Weiner gave her up in a New York minute).
Of course, it at least takes news of Donald "The Donald" Trump's own alleged abuse of an underaged girl (in this case, the rape of a 13-year old girl)... off the front page... as if it were getting any coverage anyway!
And besides inspiring "poll watching," apparently it seems the Donald's fans are inspired to do other things... such as burn down a historically Black church in Mississippi, and then write "Vote Trump" in the wreckage. In neighboring Alabama, the Secretary of State suggests that it would "cheapen" the work of civil rights heroes if too many people (you know who we mean) actually registered to vote. for his part, the President laments about low Black turnout. []Of course, no one lamented when high Black turnout in Super Tuesday states, coupled with the bullshit practice of super-delegates signing on with Hillary before a single primary or caucus, more or less finished off Bernie Sanders before the damned thing even started, pretty much putting the Democrats-- and the nation-- in the precarious situation we are in right now of a possible Trump presidency. Just sayin'.]
The President also said that the FBI "doesn't operate on innuendo." Good one, Barack.
Well, six days to go... the many band-aids placed on our frayed social order, such as, oh, tolerance for people of different ethnicities, colors, genders, religions... have all been torn off, rather painfully, in the last year, year and a half. The best one can say is that maybe the wounds were festering, and getting this out in the open is the only way we can ultimately come to grips with whether, going forward, this will be a country of atavistic cracker assholes, or whether it can be something better. I'm not particularly optimistic, but I will do the little I can, and I urge you all to do the same.