considerations of the american presidential election

             
Re Hillary Clinton

1. The ongoing attempts to criminalise Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton through her email procedures are a desperate manoeuvre to defeat her on a technicality. The attempts to sub poena (ie legally seize) every email she ever sent during her political career are a fishing expedition. Emails are the equivalent of office memos. The application of notional standards of probity re email (standards invented merely to harass Mrs Clinton) would paralyse the basic business of government if instituted generally.

2. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's announcement ten days before the Presidential elections that it was reopening an enquiry into Mrs Clinton's email procedures represents an improper intervention in the electoral process. Ironically Mrs Clinton's husband Bill benefitted from a similarly improper intervention a quarter of a century ago on the eve of the 1992 elections when an investigation was announced with days to polling into the Reagan Administration's selling of arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Contras, a movement fighting a communist dictatorship in Nicaragua. The 1992 announcement of an enquiry certainly seemed contrived to imply guilt to Republican candidate sitting President George Bush who had served as Vice President in the Reagan Administration. President Bush had little time before polling to dispel the impression of wrongdoing, created by the announcement of an enquiry. That announcement handed the Presidency to Bill Clinton. It is also ironic that in the early 1970's Hillary Clinton herself as a young lawyer seems to have been party to ultimately successful attempts to sub poena President Nixon's tape recorded records of his presidency on what was another fishing expedition by political rivals frustrated at not having managed to bring him down with the Watergate scandal. President Nixon had already weathered the Watergate scandal, winning an election in its aftermath, when the tapes were seized. The fishing expedition trawl through the daily tapes revealed a President in various unbecoming moods, using foul language to his aides. The electorate had never dreamed such a thing was possible and Nixon's political career was over. The fishing expedition trawl through the Nixon tapes in the hope of finding something to damn him, is a precise precursor of what is being attempted with Hillary Clinton's emails today.

3. The critique of Mrs Clinton based on her email procedures has been propagated domestically by political opponents who never managed to defeat her in a rational debate on policy issues. The leaking of emails purporting to belong to Mrs Clinton by Julian Assange and his Wikileaks website is interesting in that there is substantial evidence that Mr Assange is a proxy for the present resovietising Russian government of Vladimir Putin. I find it remarkable that anyone of any political stripe would allow their viewpoint or their democracy to be manipulated by someone of the calibre of Mr Putin. I suggest that Mr Putin is using Assange to engage in destabilisation tactics regarding American democracy.

Re Donald Trump

1. The attempts by the Democratic Party and others two weeks ago to discredit the Republican Party Presidential nominee Donald Trump through uncorroborated suggestions that he habitually groped women, are invidious.

2. The use of the term "possible sexual predator" to describe Mr Trump by Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly is manipulative and slanderous. Her assertion that she could use the term "sexual predator" as long as she preceded it with the word "possible" is thoroughly dishonorable and a mearsure of her own integrity. Megyn Kelly's presumption of guilt if applied generally would mean that any political career could be derailed two weeks before an election by orchestrated allegations of this sort.

3. A multi millionaire businessman called Mark Cuban who supports Mrs Clinton, claimed last week to have two friends who had been what he called "molested" by Mr Trump. When lightly pressed for details of his anonymous friends' claims Mr Cuban said: "He propositioned one of them and made an unwanted remark to another." This tosh was not challenged by the interviewer who was clearly content to let the term molestation be applied quite frivolously to Mr Trump. By no stretch of the imagination could the vague uncorroborated nonsense contained in Mr Cuban's allegation be interpreted as molestation. We should not accept Mr Cuban's tendentious claims relating to anonymous allegations of behaviour being attributed arbitrarily to Mr Trump, Remember that Mr Cuban himself was not a witness to any misbehaviour on Mr Trump's part. Someone merely told him something or so he claims. His intervention is indicative of nothing other than Mr Cuban's own opportunistic partisanship on behalf of the Democratic Party.

gang warfare in ireland

A new and deadly phase in Ireland's vicious mafia gang wars has dawned this week.
The emergence overnight of a gang styling itself An Garda Siochana has shocked the nation.
An Garda Siochana, composed almost entirely of police officers, and known colloquially as The Nyards, has threatened to plunge the country into lawlessness and terror if the government refuses to pay them extortion money.
"We want money and we want it now," said Nyards spokesman Garda Sean Payrise. "It doesn't matter if our contract as police officers includes a promise that we will not go on strike. Who is going to force us to keep our promises? We're the Nyards. Nobody but nobody ----s with the Rah. I mean the Nyards."