The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Thursday, September 08, 2016

considerations vis a vis the next american presidential election

I don't think Donald Trump can win.
On a State by State basis he's holed below the waterline.
His insults to Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and former President George Bush have probably cost him Florida.
His insults to Ted Cruz and his wife and again to President Bush have possibly cost him Texas.
Yes he indeed may lose Texas where it's all but impossible for a Republican candidate to lose in a Presidential election.
Trump is dead in the water.
He's gone.
There's nothing left.
Yet still I wonder.
Can anything happen now that would hand him the Presidency?
Principled voters whether Democrat, Republican or non aligned, won't have him at any price.
We won't have him because of his business partnerships with mafia members.
We won't have him because we believe his fortune is based solely on borrowings and we have serious questions over how a man who refuses to repay a multi billion dollar loan, can get another multi billion dollar loan, and then refuse to pay it, and then get another billion dollar loan and refuse to pay it, and then get yet another billion dollar loan and refuse to pay it, and then get more billion dollar loans which maybe he'll repay or maybe he won't.
Let me be precise.
Companies controlled by Mr Trump have gone bankrupt, that is to say he has refused to repay the billion dollar loans he obtained using those companies, on four separate occasions.
And banks still give him billion dollar loans.
This too reeks of mafia.
Mr Trump will not be saved by the apparent vulnerabilities of his main rival Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton.
I would contend that principled voters regard the various partisan attempts to criminalise Mrs Clinton via a fishing expedition trawl through her emails, as a supremely unmerited politically motivated piece of game playing.
Email is a comparatively new technology, the modern equivalent of office memos.
There are no established procedures for handling it.
And we don't want any procedure to be established that would make sending an office memo an exercise in legalistic neurosis.
If every politician had to work in the knowledge that their emails over any period might be seized and perused with a view to retrospectively interpreting and ascribing wrongdoing to them in order to sabotage that politician's career five years down the line, the business of government would cease.
The only politicians we would have would be people who say and write and think nothing.
The merest exchange between any politician and a third party would be lawyered up, that is to say, it would be carried out only after advanced legal consultations obsessively and exhaustively neutering anything that might be communicated.
My analysis is that most Americans will remain dismissive of the obviously opportunistic and blatantly partisan attempts to criminalise Hillary Clinton through inuendo regarding her email procedures.
Those of us who disagree with Mrs Clinton on policy and who have questions regarding her competence and who are repelled by her endorsement of the abortion of unborn children, are also singularly unimpressed by the attempts to ruin her reputation because of her email procedures.
But I ask again.
Are there any circumstances in which Trump might win?
I suppose if the specious attempts to criminalise Mrs Clinton result in prosecutorial charges, he might win.
Or if the unworthy and increasingly desperate attempts to label her as "frail" gain traction in the public mind.
Or if the mafia controlled trade unions, the Teamsters et al, decide to withdraw their traditional support for the Democratic Party and gerrymander a few key constituencies for their more directly controlled candidate.
Or if the Jihadis nuke an American city.
I am hoping these things will not happen.
And even if they did happen, principled voters might still refuse to endorse a candidate they believe is fatally flawed in terms of his character, values and personal integrity.
My prediction is that Mr Trump will suffer an historic defeat.
Which begs another question.
Will he bring the Republican Party down with him?