Editorials

P.S. on Tuesday: Since what’s below was posted on Saturday, things have gotten even more baroque. On Saturday night a quick glance at the New York Times provided an advance look at the bombshell in the Sunday issue: Trump used all those losses he racked up with his 90s bankruptcies to offset taxes on subsequent profits. What the newsies seem to be missing today is that all those deductible losses were on the backs of the people he owed money for work done. Stiff your plumbing contractor for a measly $100k and low and behold, you can skip some of your tax obligations for years into the future.

Quoting the master: “That’s business…I’m a smart guy.”

If you want to be really scared, you should make it over to the Berkeley Repertory Theater to see their dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here”. The Chronicle reviewer, who increasingly seems to have a tin ear for politics, found it boring, but I expect she’s younger than I am and can’t recall past near misses with “right-wing populism”, AKA fascism. The only false note for the contemporary situation was that the hero was a liberal small town newspaper editor, a breed that has been almost rendered extinct in the world of big conglomerates and social media. They don’t make them like that anymore.

And it's not as if the big papers hadn't been warned. Take a look at this, from 1990:

Banks Approve Loans for Trump, But Take Control of His Finances, By RICHARD D. HYLTON

In Ring One we have Ms. Hillary Clinton, daringly executing a solo turn on the high wire, in fact on the highest wire any female performer has hitherto attempted. So far, she’s been admirably cool and balanced.

So why have the guys in the bleacher seats been booing?

Well, she’s one of those annoying types, the Smart Girl in the Class. 

[Here I must admit that I successfully avoided co-education until I was 19, so I was never at risk of sharing the teenage angst caused by irritating the boys by being the girl who knew too much. But I’ve heard about it from my friends.] 

E.G., here’s a typical male reporter opining in The Comical last week: 

“Mama don’t preach: Clinton too often comes across as an ‘eat your vegetables’ politician, telling voters what she believes they need to know, rather than what they want to know.” 

Smart Girls become Preachy Moms, right? 

Paul Krugman in Friday’s NYT thinks that’s it’s not just anti-Girl stuff on the part of The Boys on the Bus. They remind him of “the cool kids in high school jeering at the class nerd. Sexism was surely involved but may not have been central, since the same thing happened to Mr. Gore.” 

But Krugman’s one of the smallish number of men smart enough to appreciate being married to a smart woman, one who even shares his byline sometimes, so what would he know? 

Hillary’s problem is not just Smart, it’s the bad combination of Smart + Woman—no matter what you do, you can’t please them. 

When I reached this point in my cogitation, I thought to google “Clinton smile”, trying to retrieve the many printed comments I’d seen on her womanly demeanor, especially during Debate Number One. "She smiles too much. She smiles too little. Her smiles seem insincere"…blah, blah, blah…. 

I discovered that Samantha Bee had beaten me to it, with a completely hilarious compendium of live pronouncements from a great variety of TV personalities on the topic of Hillary’s self-presentation. That’s all I’m going to say on this: You simply must watch it for yourself. It’s enough to say that that candidate Clinton never seems to please anybody, let along everybody. 

So that’s Hillary on the tightrope: too smart, too well prepared, too cheerful, too polished. Many are hoping to see her take a fall. 

In Ring Number Two you have a couple of jugglers, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Every time he thows up a ball he seems to drop it—some suggest this might be because he’s an admitted stoner, which can kind of throw off your balance. 

Many of Jill’s ideologue admirers seem never to have seen her perform, but not to put too fine a point on it, she’s an idiot. It’s not just that she’s a vaccination denier or at least waffler, though she is. I watched her 20 minutes of fame on MSNBC on debate night, and she wasn’t able to tell the interviewer which of the two main candidates she thought would be the worst president. Really? 

And Johnson wasn’t able to name a single world leader past or present that he admires. Really? Someone on today’s Times op-ed page called him an idiot too. 

Forget about Ring Two, then. 

Which brings us to Ring Three. There you can see a great lummox with an orange clown wig swinging with one hand on a trapeze. Every 3.5 minutes he takes a flying leap out into the ring—but no one’s there to catch him. He hits the ground, bounces up and tries it again. How many times does he have to land on his head before they throw him out altogether? 

The last four days with Donald Trump have simply been beyond belief or description. The media persist in portraying what’s going on as a contest between him and Clinton, but he’s a show unto himself, not even in the same circus or perhaps not even on the same planet. 

It’s one thing to snuffle his way through the debate so that some more experienced than I are muttering about “blow”. Maybe he’s a closet Libertarian, exercising his freedom to use the old white boy’s drug of choice. 

It’s another thing to allow his opponent to lure him into the trap of demonstrating his sexism and racism in the debate. But his post-debate solo performance, culminating in his paranoid 3 a.m. tweets about Alicia Machado on Friday morning, defies rational explanation. 

And now he’s starting to go after Mr. and Ms. Clinton’s sex life. Or, more precisely, after Bill Clinton’s sex life. Even Trump hasn’t dared to say anything about hers. 

I confess, I used to mock Hillary for putting up with Bill’s womanizing. However, regardless of his sexual shenanigans he seems to be one of those men who like women with brains as well as bodies, so maybe that’s why she has stuck with him. She’s not been his only smart girlfriend—I recently learned, to my surprise, that a very brainy woman I knew in the 1980s, now a professor, was his steady squeeze when they were undergraduates together. 

It seems that men who lust after power also frequently lust after, well, just lust. At least three presidents in the last century had a little something on the side: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy—all of them good or even great at their job despite their peccadillos. We don’t think less of Eleanor Roosevelt or Jacqueline Kennedy because their husbands were philanders. 

It’s risky business for a thrice-wedded adulterer who’s scattered progeny all over the place to denounce a woman who stayed in a marriage with the father of her daughter and even managed to reconcile with him after he strayed. If his main advisers pushing Trump towards this strategy are Rudy Giuliani (whose second wife learned that he was divorcing her via a press conference) or Roger Ailes (subject of a multimillion dollar settlement in a sexual harassment case) or Newt Gingrich (who strayed as his wife was on her deathbed) he’s in even bigger trouble. 

It’s hard to believe that Americans are so stupid that they can be so distracted by Trump’s insane performance to the extent that they ignore the real and pressing problems that this election is about. Newspapers are now falling all over themselves to endorse Clinton, realizing perhaps for the first time that they’ve spawned a monster by devoting such a huge amount of ink to the seductive Trump sideshow. Let’s hope it’s not too late.