Mueller Time Again

When Attorney General William Barr - whom everybody keeps calling "Bob Barr," confusing him with Bob Mueller and ironically naming a former Republican congressman from Georgia who supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton - released the Mueller report (with redactions) on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, we found out some interesting facts.  First Trump campaign officials made overtures to Russian nationals, some of whom were believed to be Americans because they contacted them through the Internet. (The Russians pretending to be Americans were sending out anti-Hillary propaganda and operating out of building in  St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg, Russia, not St., Petersburg, Florida.)  Robert Mueller's report offers a caveat that, while there were many contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians while the Kremlin was hacking computers, including that infamous June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russians operatives over possible "dirt" on the opposition, there was no agreement of collusion between the two parties.  There was no collusion . . . but only because there's no evidence that Paul Manafort and a Putin operative met at a hotel in Prague or Bratislava or wherever and hashed out a plan to sabotage Hillary Clinton.

"While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign," Mueller wrote, "the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks' release of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation."

Trump also tried to have Mueller fired or at least reined in, and he even asked then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to withdraw his recusal.  Sessions may be a bigot, but he's not dishonorable; he refused to listen to Trump.  ("Death before dishonor," as they say down in Sessions' native South.)  Many more White House officials stopped Trump from committing any act that could be perceived as a crime; in instances when they failed to do so, Trump himself didn't commit a criminal act only because he didn't know what the hell he was doing.  Because justice was not obstructed - mainly because Trump himself never actually tried to stop Mueller, preferring that someone stop Mueller for him - Mueller decided there wasn't enough evidence to accuse Trump of obstructing justice, but because of all the obvious examples of how Trump wished to impeded the investigation, that was why he could not exonerate Trump either.

Barr has since declared that Trump has been cleared, twisting the facts to suit Trump's argument while leaving out all of the evidence and the charges pointing in a different direction.  Trump, in fact, figured that the jig was up when Trump, upon hearing the Mueller would investigate Russian interference in the election, said, "Oh, my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my Presidency.  I'm f--ked."

This is all bad news . . . for the Democrats.

What???  The intent of the Mueller report is to avoid the issue of accusing Trump of any wrongdoing; rather, it is meant to provide Congress a guide for how to proceed.  He wrote that there should be a process where the evidence is weighed, the charges are made through Congress rather than through an indictment (you apparently can't indict a sitting President), and the accused defends himself.  But with enough cherry-picked conclusions to allow Trump, his supporters, and the whole goddamned Republican Party (one honorable exception: Mitt Romney) to claim exoneration at a time when most Americans don't have the stomach for a Watergate-type investigation, the Democrats have two choices, and either way they could give Trump an advantage in the 2020 elections.  If they investigate Trump in the House and possibly vote on impeachment, it will anger the Republican base and turn off swing voters more interested in health care and living-wage jobs than shenanigans in the White House.  If they don't investigate, they let Trump get away with everything he's done up to now . . . and will do later.

I've been told that the Democrats can focus on the issues for 2020 and still investigate Trump - "walk and chew gum at the same time" - but this is a party that famously blows it when faced with dealing with Republican scandals.  The Iran-contra affair should have been a boon for Democrats in the 1988 presidential election, but it was their third straight loss despite Vice President Bush, who won the Presidency over Michael Dukakis, having had more to do with that scandal than he was willing to admit.  How far back do you want to go?  The Teapot Dome oil scandal that occurred under President Harding and was uncovered after Harding's death in office in 1923 put Republicans in an embarrassing position going into 1924, but they kept the Presidency after the Democrats took 103 ballots at their convention to nominate one John W. Davis, an esteemed diplomat, to oppose President Coolidge, who won a full term.  (To be fair, Coolidge had nothing to do with the Teapot Dome.)  And those scandals were nothing compared to the Trump White House, a scandal in and of itself; the Teapot Dome scandal involved illegal profiteering on government oilfields and Iran-contra was an earnest attempt by President Reagan at détente with the Ayatollah Khomeini gone awry when renegades in his own National Security Council hijacked it to benefit right-wing mercenaries in Central America.

What we have going on now is even more serious than Watergate.  If the Democrats can't figure out how to capitalize on this level of corruption while still promoting a positive agenda for 2020, then they're finished as a party.

Less mentioned but just as important is the finding that the Russians tried (successfully, alas) to sow division, influence voters, and promote chaos and discord in the 2016 presidential election, interfering in what Mueller called a "sweeping and systematic fashion."  Even if Trump had lost, as was expected, Russia would have still divided people enough to make a Hillary Clinton Presidency a nightmare for Hillary herself.  Maybe the Russians weren't involved with WikiLeaks as much or as closely as suspected, and maybe the Democratic National Committee should have gotten a better firewall for their servers,  but even the most die-hard Julian Assange fan or the most ardent Jill Stein voter (again, I voted for Dr. Stein out of a personal dislike for Hillary that goes back long before Russian interference in our elections was an issue) has to admit that Vladimir Putin was up to something.  After all the evidence of Russian malfeasance not involving collusion or obstruction of justice, there's no other conclusion anyone can come to.  

As I believe I said once before on this blog, the twenty-teens have been a disastrous decade for the nation.  It began with Citizens United and is ending with citizens divided, with all sorts of social, political and cultural failures in between.  And no one has been able to get away with so much and profit over the polarization of Americans than Donald J. Trump.  How his Presidency unfolds and what ultimately happens with it could tear this country up eve n more.  Or it could be a catharsis preceding a rebirth and renewal of America.  On this Holy Saturday, I'm not optimistic of the latter possible outcome coming to pass. 

Julian Assange

Julian Assange was arrested by the British after the Ecuadorian Embassy in London canceled his asylum.  He'd apparently become a bad house guest, as he couldn't replace the litter his cat's box.  Among other things.

I can't make any sense out of Assange.  People think he's a hero, other people think he's a villain . . . there are certainly good arguments on both sides.  The release of  92,000 documents from his WikiLeaks site pertaining numerous "friendly fire" incidents and civilian casualties in Afghanistan - courtesy of U.S. Army soldier Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning - illuminated some of the gravest mistakes in the prosecution of the war against the Taliban, but it may have compromised the progress of the mission there.  Assange's release of  documents showing what a fraud Hillary Clinton is something I give him credit for, but he did not release Donald Trump's tax returns as he promised - which cancels out that credit.   And his efforts to help Manning hack into computers to get information he thought was necessary to make public has been dismissed as more like espionage than journalism by the very papers that published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 - the New York Times and the Washington Post.  This could scare reporters into refusing to accept ill-gotten but relevant information on important matters.  Like, say, Donald Trump's tax returns.

Meanwhile, there are two charges of sexual assault against him in Sweden.  Assange has denied both allegations, and he says he is happy to answer questions the British may have for him about the case.  One thing's for sure - the final verdict on whether Julian Assange is a hero or a villain hasn't been handed down yet.

But whatever happens, I sure do hope that someone takes care of his cat. 

Stonefaced Shutdown

On the same day that Trump confidante and Nixon apologist Roger Stone was arrested and charged by Robert Mueller's investigation with lying about the nature of his involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Trump himself was forced to end the government shutdown after five weeks and agree to the same deal he rejected at the last minute back in December to keep the government open.  This happened as FBI Director Christopher Wray was expressing outright anger over the shutdown and the impact it was having on his agency even as FBI agents were . . . arresting Roger Stone in Florida.

Stone apparently was more active than he has been willing to admit in exposing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) regarding Hillary Clinton's campaign after WikiLeaks found that the DNC had a cut-rate firewall and hacked some very damaging attitudes from Hillary and her campaign toward Catholic voters, Wall Street, her wimp-out on single-payer health care,  and just about everything else.  Stone was apparently vigorous in pursuing of Russian-hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election bid.  He was allegedly very active in talking with Julian Assange, the director of WikiLeaks - which may or may not be a Russian front - in getting the material released in a timely  matter so it could be leveraged against the Clinton campaign.  Then he tried to tamper with a witness, a talk-radio host, to keep him from telling the truth to Mueller about the nature of the conversations that had over WikiLeaks.

Does your head hurt yet?

While there is no accusation toward Trump of colluding with the Russians, it's clear that Stone was deeply involved in manipulating sensitive information to ensure a Trump victory (although the Democrats helped by nominating Hillary).  It won't be long before Trump is implicated. 

Oh yeah, the 2020 presidential election.  Bernie Sanders is running, and Beto O'Rourke won't decide for several months.  Never mind, Beto.  I'm taking a serious look at Colorado senator and rumored presidential candidate Michael Bennet . . .    

You Don't Fit the Suit

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez (below) said he was going to do something about Trump when he took over his party's chairmanship, and today he filed a suit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, Wikileaks, and Paul Manafort for hacking the DNC's e-mail server and releasing those unflattering e-mails about Hillary Clinton that Perez says tipped the scales for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Wait a minute - I thought he said he was going to do something about Trump.

So let me see if I have this straight.  The Democrats are suing numerous entities on charges of a conspiracy that Robert Mueller has not yet proven existed, with little thought toward coming up with a message that will resonate with voters in this year's midterm elections, and they're going to spend exorbitant amounts of money - even as the national committee struggles to keep the party from going bankrupt - on this suit instead of on support for Democratic candidates and for get-out-the-vote operations in November . . . and they're doing it to send a message to the Russians and warn them not to tamper with the midterms (a problem state election boards should be doing something about) and also to fire up a Democratic base to vote for candidates in the general election who more often than not will be candidates favored by the Clintons while the party tries to stop progressives in state and local primaries - even, I believe, in states and districts where progressives can actually win - and continues purging progressives from positions of power.  

Does this all make sense to you?  Because it sure doesn't make sense to me.

Even more nonsensical is how the DNC has a lot of damn gall to sue anyone for rigging the system when the DNC itself was so good at rigging the 2016 primaries and caucuses to prevent Martin O'Malley from gaining any traction and to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting anything with the traction he actually gained.  One progressive by the name of Amir Amini summed up this hypocrisy on Twitter quite nicely: "So the DNC is suing a foreign country for being unfair to the Hillary Clinton campaign in an election in which the DNC was caught undermining democracy itself, violating its own rules and colluding with the [Clinton] campaign and the [mainstream media] to stop Bernie."

And Martin.

Next time the DNC wants to rig a primary process and collude with the press and a corporate presidential campaign to put the least winnable presidential candidate forward in the general election, maybe they should consider getting a better firewall for their server.   

Also, DNC factotums should think twice before firing off any e-mails that may make someone like Hillary "look bad."

But then, Hillary didn't need any help with that.

Many progressives seem to agree that this suit is a way for the Democratic establishment, which backed Hillary Clinton to the hilt, to get back at those who stood between Hillary and the White House while continuing to refuse to acknowledge that it was a mistake to nominate her for President in the first place.  In other words, they're trying to . . . exact revenge?  Oh no, you don't, DNC!  After you screwed my candidate, you don't get to avenge being screwed yourself!  You don't have to leggo my Eggo, but keep your filthy hands off my Pop-Tarts! ;-)    

The Crash Years

The United States is the Howard Cosell of nations. That is, we're so wrapped up in our own self-importance that we have no idea how much the rest of the world hates us, at least until we elect a dim-bulb conservative to be our President - then we get a sample of such antipathy.

Ironically, Donald Trump is causing antipathy among European nations for having no idea how important we are to them.  He's had to have Cabinet members like Defense Secretary James Mattis, quickly becoming the jewel in the tin crown of an administration (though I'm willing to give Secretary of State Rex Tillerson the benefit of the doubt for now, and new national security adviser H.R. McMaster looks to be a sensible guy), assure European leaders that the Trumpster will not pull back from the NATO alliance in the face of Russian expansion.  Oh yeah, and we're not out to grab Iraqi oil either.  

Also, Vice President Mike Pence went to Munich over the weekend to reassure fellow NATO members that the alliance is strong.  The fact that he's a heartbeat away from ultimate power couldn't possibly have reassured the Europeans, though, because whereas Trump is a vulgarian, Pence is just a rube.  He denies climate science and evolution, and he tried to regulate women and preserve legalized homophobia as governor of Indiana.  European leaders tend to be rather sophisticated, like a gourmet meal.  Mike Pence is the political equivalent of ham and raisin sauce. 

While the United States tries to avoid a collision with its own allies (can you really call them "friends"?), the Democratic Party is trying to avoid an internal crackup - a crackup that, I believe, is as inevitable as Hillary Clinton's perpetual campaign for the Presidency if Clinton stooge Tom Perez is chosen as the Democratic National Committee's (DNC's) chairman.  Perez will undoubtedly push the party toward the Clintons' corporate agenda and split the party down the middle.  Diana Price of Inquisitr.com made this point quite acidly in a recent column in which she also noted that, while the Russian government may very well have colluded with the Trump campaign, the Democratic e-mails uncovered, whether leaked by the Russians or by WikiLeaks acting alone, showed how the party establishment favored Hillary and was pulling every possible trick to ensure her nomination at the expense of other candidates, including Martin O'Malley and the front-running anti-Hillary, Bernie Sanders.

"It's the height of hypocrisy," Price wrote, "for the corporate Democrats and the DNC to complain about election manipulation when the DNC emails leaked verify that the DNC - and former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in particular - was gaming the primaries for Hillary Clinton."  Not only were debates limited, but - and this kills me - there was widespread voter disenfranchisement by reducing the number of polling sites in some areas and many voters were purged from the primary and caucus registers. Among other things.  Now that the election is over, Hillary backers in the party establishment are not only unrepentant, they keep ignoring O'Malley and disrespecting Sanders.  They even got angry at Sanders for proposing that less expensive Canadian drugs be legalized for importation into the United States, a bill amendment that every Republican and also thirteen Senate Democrats - including the heir apparent to the Hillary faction, New Jersey senator Cory Booker - refused to support.  Also, Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison. the "Sanders Democrat" in the DNC chairmanship race, has actually demanded that Sanders give his mailing list to the party establishment, which would most certainly be against the wishes of Sanders supporters.

So, imagine what will happen if Perez is chosen as the party chairman?   

So, even if the Russians worked in concert with the Trump campaign - and that is a very serious charge, and one that is grounds for impeachment should it be proven - that doesn't change the fact that whoever leaked these e-mails only proved that the Democratic establishment, by trying to silence the anti-Hillary members of their party and getting them to hold their noses and vote for Hillary in November, is more to blame for Trump's victory than the Kremlin.  If Sanders or O'Malley had been the Democratic presidential nominee and WikiLeaks or the Russians or the Trump campaign or whomever found evidence that the Democratic primary process was fair and clean and that rank-and-file Democrats were happy with the nominee, there would have been nothing for Trump to capitalize on, and, likely thus, no Trump victory.     

Price sums things up nicely:

"With the huge grassroots following behind Bernie Sanders, do you really want to push that argument that Sanders is not someone you want helping shape the Democratic Party, and, in fact, Sanders is someone who offers voters an alternative party to Democrats? This is yet another example of the arrogant thinking by the DNC that voters have to choose either their chosen corporate Democrat juiced into lobbyist interests or choose a Republican. Apparently, the DNC and establishment Democrats don’t realize they are promoting a mass exodus and the demise of their own party with that argument and are incapable of learning their lessons."

A Democratic National Committee chairman who serves the interests of the Clintons rather than the interests of the rank-and-file party members will surely trigger such a mass exodus the same way Whig squeamishness over slavery triggered a defection of its northern and western members to the nascent Republican Party in the 1850s.

At which point Martin O'Malley will do what Abraham Lincoln did in 1856 - tell his old party to screw themselves and join a new party, in the present case a party that Sanders will have already formed.   

From Russia With Love

Okay, all of those Hillary fans blaming Russian hackers for their candidate's loss to Donald Trump may have a case . . . 

The Washington Post just reported that the CIA suspects that agents in the Russian government may have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee computer and, for the purpose of getting Vladimir Putin's man Trump in the White House, providing WikiLeaks all those embarrassing e-mails showing a cynical, jaded Democratic establishment trying, ironically, to manipulate the campaign.  I haven't heard anything about voting machines being hacked, but this story of possible manipulation of information designed to implicitly help is a disturbingly new spin on an old story.

Russia also hacked the Republican National Committee computer, according to the CIA, but withheld its embarrassing e-mails so as not to help Hillary.  Julian Assange, meanwhile, says WikiLeaks did not act in concert with the Russians to produce those e-mails.    

Although Trump - now famous for not receiving most intelligence briefings as President-elect - doesn't buy the CIA's charges, two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer of New York and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have called for an investigation into the charges.  McCain has cited past attempts by the Russians to manipulate elections in other Western countries and says that the integrity of our own elections is at stake.  President Obama has launched an investigation as well, which may or may not be completed by January 20.

I only hope that once they do that, someone starts investigation the rigging of the Democratic primaries.    

Some people are already calling for a do-over of the election.  Can we have a do-over of the nominations while we're at it? 

Your Serve

Leaked information from Clinton campaign keeps pouring in. The leaks, all from the e-mail account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and supposedly provided to WikiLeaks by the Russians, cover everything from the denigration of Catholics to the underhanded tactics against Bernie Sanders - nothing about Martin O'Malley? nah, even Hillary's campaign staffers didn't know who he is - but the most explosive leak may have been the report that a deputy secretary at the State Department, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy (not the former Rhode island congressman of the Kennedy family), may have tried to get the FBI to de-classify the contents of one e-mail from Hillary's own private server. 

In exchange, the State Department said that it would help the FBI get agents assigned to dangerous areas overseas.  (Wait - the FBI has agents assigned overseas?)  One individual said there was pressure from another FBI official regarding the request.  

The FBI is denying that there was a quid pro quo - Latin for "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" - involved, but it doesn't look good for Hillary.  Her camp says that the e-mails that have been released have neither been authenticated nor disproved.  Well, her staffers should either authenticate them or disprove them, and then they should let the chips fall where they may.

They may not have to do any of that, because Donald Trump is shooting himself in the foot.  He's going around mocking the sexual harassment charges against him, and he's also saying that the voting system in These States is rigged.  His charge of voter fraud make him look so ridiculous, petulant, and unpresidential that he even has fellow Republicans - known for voter-fraud paranoia of their own - denying the system is rigged.  Trump even said the Republican nomination process was rigged.  Yeah, Donald?  Well, I guess that explains why you're the Republican presidential nominee!

Then again, there may be a method to Donald's madness.  He said the GOP nomination process was rigged and thus encouraged primary voters to show up and secure his nomination.  He may be trying the same strategy to overtake Hillary in the general election, though he fails to understand that the general election campaign is completely different from the nomination campaign.    

I still think he has a chance, though, if only because the polls showing Hillary ahead don't take into account any of the voters who registered to vote for Trump in the primaries and plan to vote for him in November - but did not vote in 2012.  Presidential election polls are based on registered voters from the previous election.  I am not saying that Trump will win.  I only note that he can.   

As for Hillary's e-mails . . . I expect another leak, a couple of leaked e-mails in which Hillary staffers ask about Martin O'Malley, "Wasn't he the company clerk on 'M*A*S*H'?"  "Wasn't he the eighth President of the United States?" :-p      

Worst. Presidential Election. Ever.

This past Friday, two major leaks revealed why we need a three-party or multi-party system in These States, and they also demonstrated that, no matter who wins this election, we Americans lose.

Donald Trump was caught on tape talking to celebrity-interviewer Billy Bush while at a taping for a cameo appearance on a soap opera in which he revealed his modus operandi toward beautiful women.  This is what he said:

"I'm automatically attracted to beautiful women - I just start kissing them, it's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.  Grab 'em by the p****."

The Trumpster could have stopped there - and he should have - but, no, he went further, going on about how he tried to seduce a married woman:

"I moved on her actually, she was down in Palm Beach and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try to f*** her, she was married . . . and I moved on her very heavily.  I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture and I told her 'I'll show you where you can get some nice furniture.'  I moved on her like a bitch, and I could not get there, and she was married. And all the sudden I see her and she's got the big phony [breasts], she's totally changed her look." 

Needless to say, the Trump campaign is in free-fall.  Damage control has been swift but not effective.  Trump himself apologized immediately in a written statement then followed up with a videotape apology, but no one is in a forgiving mood.  Also, his insistence that Bill Clinton has said worse about women - funny how he picks his election opponent's husband, out of the all the womanizers in politics he could have chosen, as a comparison - does him no favors; downplaying his own guilt by citing a similarly guilty person is a sleazy mind trick out of Richard Nixon's playbook.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange finally presented his October surprise - or at least the first part of it - by releasing excerpts from Hillary Clinton's speeches to private audiences in the financial sector, and they reveal that Hillary is just as slick as her husband in talking about putting people first and then letting money talk while the people walk.  Consider this gem from an October 2013 speech to a Goldman Sachs crowd, where she said that the blame placed on the American banking system for the 2008 financial crisis "could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened":

"That was one of the reasons that I started traveling in February [2009], so people could, you know, literally yell at me for the United States and our banking system causing this everywhere. Now, that's an oversimplification, we know, but it was the conventional wisdom. And I think that there's a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on all sides, you know, what happened, how did it happen, how do we prevent it from happening? You guys help us figure it out and let's make sure that we do it right this time. And I think that everybody was desperately trying to fend off the worst effects institutionally, governmentally, and there just wasn't that opportunity to try to sort this out, and that came later."

She also told a Deutsche Bank audience a year later that even if it isn't "100 percent" true that the financial system is rigged, it still had to hurt:

"Now, it's important to recognize the vital role that the financial markets play in our economy and that so many of you are contributing to. To function effectively those markets and the men and women who shape them have to command trust and confidence, because we all rely on the market's transparency and integrity. So even if it may not be 100 percent true, if the perception is that somehow the game is rigged, that should be a problem for all of us, and we have to be willing to make that absolutely clear. And if there are issues, if there's wrongdoing, people have to be held accountable and we have to try to deter future bad behavior, because the public trust is at the core of both a free market economy and a democracy."

So she does admit that something has to be done to prevent another 9/15 (my term for the 2008 financial crisis, as it broke on September 15).  Who does she think should be guarding the hen house?  Apparently, the same foxes who previously raided it - Wall Street insiders, whom she said were "up to that job" and that the initiative for reform "really has to come from the industry itself."

Among other nuggets from this treasure trove of speeches: Hillary admitted in a speech to a General Electric convention in January 2014 that she needed Wall Street money to run for office, she showed in another speech an acute awareness of the security concerns with electronic devices, she endorsed free trade, and she admitted to supporting a single-payer health care system but opined that the American public would never go for it.  She even admitted in one speech to taking a private position for Washington insiders and a different, public position for the voters as a way of getting things done.

Thanks to the newest Trump scandal, however, none of this matters.  The Hillary leaks are mostly being ignored.  Assange's release of documents would have brought down Hillary if her opponent were anyone other than the Donald, but Trump's comments about seducing and groping married women are beyond the pale even for him.  Hillary is the luckiest woman in America right now, and she knows it, because none of these private speeches showing her coziness to Wall Street, full of dozens of juicy quotes, have produced the same outrage that the mere two quotes from Trump referred to earlier in this blog entry.  I watched Joy Reid's Saturday morning program on MSNBC for forty-five minutes yesterday, and she spent all of her time on Trump's lewd locker-room banter and not one second on Hillary's speeches.  (Reid's program runs for two hours, but I didn't get to see all of it; I can safely assume, though, that the WIkiLeaks story never came up.)  The New Jersey Star-Ledger made Trump's misogynistic comments front-page news in yesterday's edition but the WikiLeaks story didn't even make the cut.  Assange was supposed to release these Hillary speech experts a few days earlier, but he hesitated, only to release them just as the Trump scandal broke and drowned out the Wikileaks story.  Republicans are deserting Trump to the point where he may even be pressured to step down as the party's presidential nominee and let Mike Pence (!) take his place.

And to be fair, some of these excerpts from Hillary's speeches might help her more than hurt her.  Getting someone from Wall Street to police the financial sector may make perfect sense, as it proved  when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the 35th President and a corrupt Wall Street speculator himself, to run the Securities and Exchange Commission - "It takes a crook to catch a crook," Roosevelt famously said - and Kennedy ended up doing a first-rate job.  Also, Hillary's sympathy toward single-payer health care may put her in good standing with some liberals who have previously viewed her with suspicion.  True, she admitted to being a moderate, but she's done that in public.  And while she's not a progressive, as she has sometimes claimed, she certainly looks like one comported to the reactionary Trump.

One good thing has come out of the Trump scandal: Hillary's victory in November is so well-assured, I can vote for Dr. Jill Stein in New Jersey, a state already safe for Hillary before the Trump story broke, without fear of helping to split the anti-Trump vote . . . although I think that theory is balderdash.  As for tonight's town-hall debate, well, it suddenly became required viewing; it'll be interesting to see how the candidates - Trump especially - react to all of this. 

Leak Out

The WikiLeaks revelations that surfaced last week have been more comical than critical. Despite a lot of hair-tearing over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's dumping of highly classified diplomatic documents, there's really nothing in these documents, at least as far as I can see, that is really news, except for maybe the revelation out of the Middle East - that the Arab countries and Israel agree on the need to contain Iran, and that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (not to be confused with King Abdullah II of Jordan) has even advocated some form of military action against Iran because of its nuclear program. At best, it suggests that the Israelis and the Arabs could become brothers in arms; at the least, it suggests a possible short-term alliance of convenience ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend"), though our own anti-Iranian alliance with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s didn't work out so well.

Most of the "revelations"" have been laughable. Among them are that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is an "emperor with no clothes" (a similar revelation of Charles de Gaulle in the sixties would probably have been more newsworthy), Prime Minister Slvio Berlusconi of Italy is "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader" (your point being?), and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev "plays Robin to [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin's Batman." This last revelation is actually very damaging - not to our relationship with the Russians but, rather, to American diplomats, because it shows that they are so undereducated and unsophisticated that they use comic book metaphors to describe foreign leaders. The Russians probably have low opinions of us, yes, but they likely describe Obama and Biden with allusions to the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The revelation that Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, was a "weak personality" who was "driven by paranoia" and "conspiracy theories," may give anti-war activists a stronger argument in their efforts to get NATO troops out of that country and encourage new ways to resist al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It also might give Ben Kingsley a fascinating challenge as an actor if that movie about the war on terror in which he's supposed to play Karzai is ever made. But even this revelation is nothing new, as anyone who's been paying attention would tell you after seeing Karzai govern.

And Julian Assange? He's just been arrested on rape charges in London based on a pair of secual encounters in Sweden. Meanwhile, many Web sites have stopped doing business with WikiLeaks, while unsympathetic hackers try to disable the site even as Assange's supporters try to help keep it going. This story is getting stranger by the second.