when did this train begin running downhill?

Sounds like Beagles is putting a tentative toe unto the Trump train, one foot on the platform the other on the train, as the beloved old song goes.  He's not crazy about the engineer, but he likes the direction the train is going which would appear from the freehold to be uphill, after going downhill for decades.

Well I reckon I have been hearing that the country is going downhill for decades, that would be six or seven of them.  If I care to extrapolate, and I do, I would reckon that complaining about the country going downhill has been going on since, well I suppose 1796 when we at last had two decades of history to rub together.

I wonder what decade Beagles would choose that marked the point where the train of state went from rolling upwards or at least level to go down into that loathsome valley for decades.  I'm going to guess the fifties.  The world was bright then.  Remember how the sun used to shine when you got up early in the morning before the rest of the family and realized it was a summer vacation day and you stood on the sidewalk and in front of you a whole world stretched out from sea to shining sea?  And those were pretty good years for America.  We were still basking in the glow of having kicked ass in WW II, our exciting automobiles were the biggest and the best.

Into this garden slithered the Red Menace, amazing the hysteria this provoked.  From the floor of the sunny frontroom on Homan Avenue I analyzed the political cartoons on the front page, and decried those vile forces that were opposing brave Joe McCarthy.

But for all that, there wasn't much red menace in the hood, everything seemed pretty good.  The way we went downtown in those days was we caught the 55th street bus and it went straight east to Wentworth or maybe Indiana then turned north to go where the tall buildings were.  We would roll down out windows and stick our heads out, looking up at the big exciting buildings.

But before we got downtown, a little east of Western, things would change.  Black people would be getting on the bus, they would be walking on the sidewalks.  We would cringe in out seats as they began to fill the bus.  The word in the hood was that they all carried knives.  Their neighborhood was crappy and dirty compared to out neat rows of bungalow on top of bungalow.  Why were things like this?  It didn't seem right.

A lot of people think it was the assassination of Kennedy when things changed.  Maybe, the early days of Kennedy there was a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of optimism, idealism, and then it was gone justlikethat.  The unpopular war started soon afterwards.  Some think Kennedy would have avoided it the way he avoided WW III in Cuba.  Maybe, it's hard to tell.  But LBJ went for it in a big way.  Americans were no longer marching together with enthusiasm and optimism and idealism into the next decade, and I don't think we have since then.


The party in power always loses in the off year election, though sometimes by more and sometimes by less.  Obama was clobbered in his last off years.  A lot of people thought it was Obamacare.  People hated Obamacare, and the reps fanned the flames, incessantly braying about  it as it were.  Now that they have seized the reins of power and can accomplish their sacred goal of abolishing ObamaCare, they discover that most people don't want to abolish ObamaCare and only like 17 percent like their own version of ObamaCare.  Mitch and the boys are cooking up some hot mess in the senate which they will unveil quickly so that nobody gets a good look at it just before voting time.  Those Republicans whose states are not ruby red will be thinking about their off year elections.

Still With the "THEY"?

For a guy who claims that he doesn't believe in THEM, Uncle Ken sure talks about THEM a lot. Once more, for the record, I never said that THEY put Trump in office, I just said "they", no caps, no bold type, just regular "they". What do you call it when you mean other people who are not us? Be that as it may, I have already conceded that they did not vote for Trump to make the Republicans look bad, they voted for Trump because they liked him, or at least disliked him less than they disliked Hillary. Maybe it was not accurate to call them protest voters if, by "protest voters", you mean people who vote for a candidate whom they don't expect to win. What I meant was that they were protesting the way the country has been going down hill for decades, to the point that they were willing to put a guy like Trump in there if that's what it took to reverse course. He seems to be doing it too. I saw on the news today that Trump has been methodically cancelling all the executive orders that Obama made. Good for him! Trump may be an asshole, but I'd rather see an asshole doing the right things than a nice guy doing the wrong things.

I did not own a television in the days of George Wallace, I was too busy establishing my real life after completing my military service. Maybe I wouldn't have voted for Wallace if I had seen him making a fool of himself on TV, but all I knew about him was what I had read, and I was favorably impressed. There was a lot of anti-Black sentiment in Michigan at the time, since they had recently burned, looted, and pillaged Detroit. I didn't care about Detroit myself, but I figured if they could do it in Detroit, they could do it anywhere. I kept my guns close at hand during the whole summer of '67. They were legally carried, unloaded and enclosed in their cases, but I could break them out in a minute if need be. I finally put my guns away in the closet after deer season, figuring that they wouldn't attack during the winter. Voting for Wallace in '68 was a no brainer for me, and I didn't know why more people didn't do it. As it was, Wallace took five states that time, more than any third party candidate has done before or since. He took Michigan in the primary of '72, and everybody said it was because of the crossover voters. I still didn't own a TV at the time, and the internet hadn't been invented yet, so I got my information the old fashioned way, from the guys at work and the guys in the bars who, in those days, were pretty much the same people.

I understand that Obama brought in a lot of new voters too, but he couldn't seem to motivate them to vote in the congressional "off year" elections. Whether or not Trump can do so remains to be seen. I think that most people vote the same way all their lives, and the elections are largely determined by who does and who does not show up to vote on the big day.

you can never have too much incessant braying

The Them I am talking about  is The Them that worked to get Trump elected so that the big girl would win.  Myself I don't believe They exist.  The dems who would want their candidate to win have zero influence in the republican race, and the Republicans didn't want their candidate to lose.

I think crossover voting is mostly a myth, people talk about it but by and large they don't do it.  They didn't find democrats voting in the republican primaries in the last election.  They did however find a lot of new voters.  Trump bragged, and some of the more simple-minded republicans were heartened, about all the new people entering the republican party, growing it as it were.  But these new people weren't republicans they were Trumpists and had no allegiance to the GOP.

I remember watching one of primaries in New England in the heart of the winter.  There was a polling place on some desolate stretch of snow and it was packed, people standing in long lines with sniffling noses while the highway behind them was a stretch of headlights glowing deep into the horizon.  Ah, Americans turning out to vote, a Norman Rockwell crowd of clear-eyed Americans expressing their opinion at the polls. You know the pundits are always scolding us about how many people don't bother to express the right to vote, won for us on many a bloody battlefield.  Well here they were, my heart beat with pride, and then I realized most of these guys are probably voting for Trump.


Stoopid Vikings, didn't even have enough sense to put horns on their helmets, it took some fancy pants opera stagers to make them look cool, long after they had given up raiding and settled into socialism,

Twice backed, damn, just as I was doubling down on my earlier, very clever (lots of very smart people say that I am the cleverest man in America), Idaho, Montana, potato, potana,  Damn.  The tater tot was a clever little afterthought though, wasn't it?

I don't  know why Old Dog rails against incessant braying, without which the proud institute would be little more than a Consumer Reports on ice cream making machines.  Speaking of braying, I expect that this Trumpian wake up call, will not wake up Americans anymore than shooting that second baseman in DC will bring all our politicians under the umbrella of civility.


This Wallace thing.  Maybe Beagles voted for him because he was for state's rights or maybe he thought both McGovern and Nixon were commies, but I suspect that people of his ilk were way outnumbered by white people who did not like black people, and I'm sure that if had won one of his first orders would have been rolling back integration,

And I don't know about  the protest vote, though I do think if Beagles had voted for Trump he would be in some inner turmoil.  The idea that a protest vote has some effect on the pols seems weak, like they will look at a large protest vote and decide geez maybe they ought to change their ways.  I don't  include the Bernie vote in this because Bernie had a chance to win so I wouldn't count him as a protest vote

The Protest Vote

The more I think about it, Uncle Ken might be right about how Trump got elected. The crossover vote might have helped him in the primary, but that wouldn't have done him any good in the general election. I think what put him over the top then was the protest vote. Lots of times people don't vote for a candidate, they vote against the status quo. As it was in the days of George Wallace, there were people who believed the country had gone too far in one direction, so they voted for someone who promised to lead it the opposite way. It's a shame that they couldn't find a better person than Trump to be their standard bearer, but they may have felt he was the only one willing and able to do so. The Republicans ran moderate candidates for president two elections in a row, and they lost both times.

I was considering a protest vote for Trump myself until Uncle Ken pointed out that, in the unlikely event that Trump actually won, I would be kicking myself in the ass for the next four years. I ended up voting Libertarian, considering it a protest vote against both Trump and Hillary, so I got two protest votes for the price or one. Some people have long believed that there should be a way to vote for "none of the above", well this is it.
 

Dealing with it

Ronda Rousey, huh?  T'wasn't me in deep appreciation at the Ten Cat, and Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets.  I believe that myth began with the staging of an opera in the 19th Century and has become part of the cultural folklore.  The last I've heard of Ms. Rousey is that she got her ass whupped in less than a minute at her last bout.

See now if I go to that Viking article I will have to read the whole thing to glean whatever point the Old Finn wants to promote...

No point is being promoted as such; it's a deep article and covers a lot of material, not all of which I fully understand.  Any summary I make might not convey the true gist or have an unintended bias, and I see no point of introducing an additional layer of misunderstanding.  Go to the source and read it yourself; we've discussed this sort of thing before.

And, Uncle Ken, as long as you mention fact checking, please explain what you mean about a "twice-backed" tater tot.

-----

In accordance with the election laws of this great nation, Donald J. Trump is the duly elected president, like it or not.  His campaign proved his ability as a salesman even as he peddled his own brand of snake oil, appealing to a narrow base of voters who may have felt he had their best interests at heart, which is not the case.  Trump did not appeal to their hearts or minds, but to their guts; his appeal was visceral.  And much to their dismay, they will be among the first to feel the negative impact of Trump's poorly thought-out policies.

At the core, Trump has shown to care little of anything but Trump.  He is a showman, a carnie, a huckster, a prevaricator of the first order and that will be his demise.  The checks and balances will work, eventually, and his legacy will be that he gave this nation a painful wake up call.

The media coverage, both old and new media, is becoming an incessant braying of pundits, both professional and the losers sitting in their mothers' basements.  It is shameful that the quantity of the speculation does not match the quality of the facts.  The media coverage is starting to remind me of that line from Macbeth:
     It is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
     Signifying nothing.

-----

I don't know the demographic breakdown of Trump supporters,but I have to give them credit; they don't seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths, unlike some more liberal types that I have known.  Support for many social programs, like rehab centers and halfway houses, runs strong with the more enlightened types unless they're built next door to them.  As a city dweller, it's difficult to put one's self in the minds of the more rural types, but I try; different does not mean wrong.  Unless you need to pin the blame on them, Them, or THEM.

-----

And speaking of the mystical "them," I wonder how they figure in the investigations that are "following the money."  Nothing much has been written yet about the roles of the Mercers, the Koch brothers, George Soros, the Davos Group, the Bilderberg Group, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Gnomes of Zurich or all the other players in the fever dreams of the tin-foil at brigade.  It's the Russians!  It's the Zionists!  It's THEM!  And never us.

The Illusion of Central Position

Just as there is no Society with a capital "S", there is no Them with a capital "T". There are lots of them with a small "t", just as there are lots of societies with a small "s". Each one of them probably thinks of themselves as the capital Them, but they don't call themselves "them", they call themselves "us", and they call us "them". I think what enlightened me on this was when I found out that most primitive tribal societies called themselves "The People", or "The Real People". The Valley People called their neighbors who lived in the mountains "The Mountain People", but the Mountain People didn't call themselves "The Mountain People", they called themselves "The People", and they called their neighbors who lived in the valley "The Valley People". The reason it took our people so long to figure this out was because most of them called these tribes by the names they learned from other tribes, not from the tribe in question. For instance: Our local indigenous people, the Anishnabe, were called "Algonquians" when we went to school because that's what the Iroquois called them, and the Iroquois made contact with Europeans before the Anishnabe did. I read somewhere that the Anishnabe name for the Iroquois translates as "Real Serpents", although the book didn't say what the name was in the Anishnabe language. I also don't know what the literal translation of "Algonquians" is, but I assume it wasn't any more complimentary than the Anishnabe name for the Iroquois. What complicates matters even more is that neither of these tribes had a written language, and the first Europeans they met were Frenchmen, most of whom couldn't even read and write in French, much less English. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that we were not the first people to call other people "them".

That being established, we are still left with the question of who were those people that voted for Trump, and why. Since there were millions of them, I think it's safe to assume there was more than one group of them. I think it's unlikely that they all got together at a single meeting and planned the whole thing. I'm sure there were meetings (plural), attended by different groups (plural) of Trump fans, and  people in each group thought of themselves as "us". I'm not sure what they called the people who attended different meetings, but I'm pretty sure they thought of the Hillary fans as "them". I also think it's reasonable to assume that some of the voters in the primaries were crossovers, at least in the states that have open primaries. I remember there was talk of crossover voters when George Wallace ran for president on the Democratic ticket back in '72. I wasn't one of them, I voted for Wallace because I wanted him to win. How's that for sticking it to the man?

paper, straw, and dead, tigers, dogs, and horses

Wiki says the term paper tiger comes from China, and it is what you call your enemy when you don't think his bite can match his bark.  I think the expression called for here is a straw dog, also from China, where you use a weak form of your opponent's argument to demolish him in debate.  To this menagerie we can add dead horse, which it feels like we are beating because we have gone over this material many times before, but, as one of my esteemed colleagues has pointed out, that has never stopped me before.

So if it wasn't Them who put Ttump in to help the big girl win, who was it?   I don't believe it was the rank and file pulling the levers.  They were mostly all republicans.  Why would they want the big girl to win?  It wasn't the dems, even though some foolish ones, such as myself, watched it happen happily assuming that this would ensure victory for the big girl, because what effect could we have over the republican primaries?  So Who was it then?  This has to be a group powerful enough to control the outcome of the republican primary, but too weak to effect the results of the general election.  Seems like a group of power brokers to me.

Or, or, maybe it was the Russkies. But so far it doesn't look like they were up to their shenanigans during the primary, and they certainly would never want  the big girl to win.  But it's looking more and more like they were into it up to their elbows on Trump's behalf, and it is looking more and more like Trump's people were more than appreciative of the help..


I think we can all feel that stick it to The Man tide, I daresay, distinguished gentlemen such as ourselves have felt it from time to time, but outside of why now, which I simply blame on the internet, is the question of why this guy, why would anybody think that this guy, who looks an awful lot like The Man, would be chosen to stick it to The Man?

My main theory previous has been because he is obviously no politician.  For some time I have thought why don't they pick a nice guy,, not a repellent guy, to stick The Man with.  But the thing is all politicians pretend to be nice guys, none of them purposely puts on the guise of a big fucking asshole, so a guy who freely expresses his big fucking assholeness, why this is clearly not a politician.

But if you poke at this theory it is a little weak.  Yesterday I read an article that seems to make more sense.  It's anger.  Everybody hates to be mad, or do they?  There is a certain purposefulness in anger, a feeling that you are getting things done, that you have identified the enemy, that you are right, nay righteous, brother.  It feels good.  And that is why they like him.  They, not Them who never liked him and only used him to help the big girl, and who now it appears that Beagles is denying the existence of.  You know it  wouldn't be a whole lot of trouble for the Russkies to slip a sub up the St Lawrence and into that river that drains from the top of Michigan to not far from the feehold and deliver a sack of money or vintage yellow beer for a certain freeholder to pretend he never heard of Them.