A Turkey of an Election

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has repressed and silenced opposition to his government and within his government as well.  He has a failing economy on his hands.  He badly mishandled the earthquake that hit central Turkey earlier this year.  A lot of people in metropolitan areas like Istanbul, Ankara and . . . er, the metropolitan areas of Istanbul and Ankara don't like him.

So how did he just win re-election?

Stuff that would bring down any other world leader only seemed to strengthen Erdogan.  The results of the election demonstrated his invincibility.  Ballot recounts should confirm his victory, but he's a very crafty and resourceful leader, like Vladimir Putin.  Box Erdogan in a corner and he'll come out fighting hard.

And what exactly did he do to win?  Well, just go back to the previous paragraph, take the first word of each sentence, and make a new sentence out them in the order of appearance.

And that's not all. He exercised control over Turkish media.  He gave himself one hour of air time on Turkish broadcasting for every minute his opponent (I could look up hs name, but he's irrelevant) got.  And Erdogan was very good at activating his base of rural voters (sound familiar?).   

The Turks see to have given up on democracy after a hundred years of an uneasy relationship with Westernization.  Rather than fight for democracy, they're sitting down and putting their feet up on their ottomans.

See what I did there? 

Sacre Bleu!

Marine Le Pen survived the first round of the French presidential election, finishing second in a field of eleven candidates just behind Emmanuel Macron, who has promised to keep France in the European Union, keep France in NATO, and keep France sane.   Le Poison Pen would ask France to withdraw from both groups and go off on its own, and proceed to regain the greatness of its imperial age.  Ah yes, the one that ended with the Germans at the gates of Paris, Louis Napoleon surrendering Alsace, Lorraine and his throne, a group of Communists controlling the capital, and the country on such an edge of desperation that it could only be saved by . . . an Irishman!

Be that as it may, Macron's narrow lead in the first round of the election has given observers some hope that the French will not make the same sort of mistake that British made when they voted to get out of the European Union or a mistake like the one the Americans made when, despite Hillary Clinton's popular-vote win, they elected Donald Trump President (which could have been avoided had the Democrats nominated someone else - an Irishman!).

Maybe Macron's call for patriotism over nationalism and his confidence and youth (he's 39)  will win out over Le Pen in the end.  I hope so.  Because, after seeing Great Britain and the United States screw up, it would be pretty scary to see the land of fine wines, Truffaut, Pierre Renoir, Jean Renoir, the City of Light, the Riviera, croissants, Berlioz, the Enlightenment, Henri-Pierre Roche, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Sophie Marceau, a whole slew of other great actresses with supermodel looks, Balzac, Impressionism, Cezanne, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Cousteau, and all sorts of other groovy contributions to Western civilization go . . . completely off its rocker.

Oh yeah, speaking of rockers, France gave us Johnny Hallyday too. 

Come on, frogs - do the right thing and put Emanuel Macron in the Elysian Palace!     

How an Election Ruined a Friendship

I actually lost a friend as a result of the presidential election.  This person, however was not a Donald Trump supporter; it was someone who supported Hillary Clinton and was angry at me (and other people) for not voting for her.  You would recognize this person's name, as I have talked about this ex-friend on my blog before, but henceforth I will refer to this person as ТБ - the Cyrillic initials of this ex-friend's name.  Note that I haven't mentioned the person's sex.  Sorry, I don't want to reveal that either.

Anyway, it all started on my birthday, which came just a few days before Election Day, when ТБ sent me a birthday greeting with a warning that if I went ahead and voted for Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein as I had made clear that I would, Trump would win as a result of a split anti-Trump vote.  I gleefully ignored this warning, as I had ignored all of the warnings I got from Hillary supporters who said that my vote for Dr. Stein would be no more than a spoiler vote against Hillary, and I did indeed, as you already know, vote for Dr. Stein.  And it worked out fine.  Hillary won my home state of New Jersey with 53 percent of the vote - a majority -  beating the Donald by nine points and winning all of New Jersey's fourteen electoral votes.  Because the presidential election is a state-by-state, not a national, election, my vote for Dr. Stein had no impact on the outcome.

A couple of days later, I noticed that ТБ, who had been one of my Facebook friends, was a Facebook friend no longer.  I found this odd and I wrote to ТБ asking why I had been "unfriended."  ТБ told me about deleting from Facebook everyone ТБ knew who did not vote for Hillary, because now that f**khead (ТБ's word for Trump) was now going to be President and those of us who voted for a third-party candidate were responsible.

But what the fact that my vote for Dr. Stein didn't have any effect?  This is what ТБ said about that:  "I don't care if your state went Democratic; you're a writer and you have influence."

What?

I have influence?  Did ТБ think people in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania read my blog entries about how it was important to vote for Dr. Stein to help build up the Green Party and voted for her, thus skewing those states in Trump's favor?  Does ТБ really think my blog is that widely read?  Most of my blog entries get no more than thirty or forty views at a time!  My beautiful women picture blog is more widely followed than this blog.  Is ТБ kidding me?  Influential how?  How am I influential?

I'm flabbergasted by this, because I've known ТБ since before I even joined Facebook, and I can't believe that ТБ would terminate our friendship over me casting a third-party ballot that not only didn't influence the election, it didn't even help the Greens get up to the national five-percent threshold for immediate ballot access and federal matching funds for 2020.  (Besides, even if everyone who voted for Dr. Stein in swing states won by Trump except Michigan had voted for Hillary, the Democrats still would have lost.)  I thought that my vote wouldn't hurt anyone.  In fact, it hurt me.  It didn't obviously hurt ТБ, whom I wrote afterward pleading to keep our friendship intact and explaining how much I valued the friendship between us, because ТБ didn't respond to my plea, preferring to move on without regret.  So I guess ТБ wasn't much of a friend at all.  If ТБ can't live with the fact that I cast a third-party ballot in the presidential election, than to hell with ТБ.  Good riddance!

Oh yeah, I hadn't even been able to see ТБ in person since Independence Day.

Independence Day 2009.

So I guess it wasn't a real friendship anyway.  It couldn't be, if it was so weak its mere existence depended on whether or not  I voted for Hillary.  It makes me appreciate the friends I still have . . . some of whom voted for Trump.  

I have influence as a writer, huh?  If that's true, how come Martin O'Malley isn't becoming President in January? :-O

Sarah Palin Can Write?

The Palinistas are out in full force, getting ready to rally to Sarah Palin's stops on the tour for her book, which, after so much Sturm und Drang, finally came out today. The noted book-banning wolf killer, who's read no more books than she's "written," has pumped a lot of excitement in Republican circles for a possible presidential bid in 2012 even as only 24 percent of Americans opposed the very idea of her candidacy in a recent poll. Although polls consistently show hostility to Palin and her views, she doesn't need a large base of support in the Republican nomination process in a crowded field of candidates where you only need a small plurality for momentum.

Meanwhile, details involving Palin's outlook on life demonstrate how unfit she is for the Presidency. Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has described Palin in her columns as vindictive and spiteful. She compared her viciousness toward opponents to that of Richard Nixon, though I can't recall Nixon ever accusing John F. Kennedy or even George McGovern of palling around with terrorists (even Nixon himself palled around with Communists like Mao and Brezhnev), as Palin did against Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign. Palin has complained about political correctness, and not the kind of loopy political correctness that encourages us to accept the legitimacy of Kwanzaa but the kind of political correctness that encourages sensitivity towards racial and ethnic minorities. Never mind her intolerance for criticism against her.

Her lack of sensitivity toward urban blacks, like the President, was displayed not by her accusations that Obama was bosom buddies with a former Weather Underground member but her desire to push his connection (since severed with Jeremiah Wright, to push the connection to the black urban population and strike fear into hearts in the heartland. John McCain, to his credit, refused to exploit the Wright association.)

The success (well, box office success, anyway) of the movie 2012 has given more popularity to the idea that the world will end on December 21 of that year due to the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar. (So much for Christmas.) Just as scary, however, is another date on the 2012 calendar - November 6, the date of the next presidential election. If Sarah Palin is elected the next President of the United States in three years, Armageddon is going to look preferable . . . and attractive.

Loathing and Marriage

Dick Cheney has been appearing so much on television talk shows these days, people think he's considering a presidential run in 2012.

What would he run for, the excitement? With his heart? Why would he run, because of his excellent chances of winning? With a nineteen percent popularity rating?

And why would her suddenly endorse gay marriage, given the opposition to gay marriage among the Republican base? Since his daughter Mary is a lesbian, what stopped him from endorsing it in 2004? Oh, wait - Karl Rove.

Then again, the first caucus is in Iowa, and the first primary is in New Hampshire, both states as of today having legalized gay marriage. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed the bill making it legal in the Granite State today.

Nonetheless, we may have a pretty hard time accepting Cheney as an avuncular figure of trust, like Walter Cronkite.

Incidentally, this leaves Rhode Island - the place once described in the seventeenth century as a moral sewer by Massachusetts Puritans - as the only New England state not to allow gay marriage. Several attempts to change that have failed.

Meanwhile, putative presidential possibility Newt Gingrich says that maybe he was too strong in calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Oh - now he tells us!