To Bigotry No Sanction

Yes, I run the risk of running up against Godwin’s Law. But as Mike Godwin himself said, sometimes that’s not unreasonable.

The point is not to *never* make Hitler/Nazi references and comparisons; just that they should be done with some care and thought. And I think in this case, they’re perfectly legitimate. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is Hitler — although he definitely has some tendencies that make you think he’s liable to do some similar things. It’s more the whole atmosphere around him, the people that support him, and some of the things Trump does. In addition, I really feel that anyone who supports Trump would’ve supported Hitler.

Think of the violence at his rallies, how he supports and encourages it. Often this is directed at his political opponents and journalists. For instance, he calls Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary”, says she belong in jail, and has made some not so veiled allusions that she should be subject to violence. Has any recent candidate for a major office in the USA done things like this?

He has received much support and endorsements from people associated with the KKK and white supremacist movements, and rarely if ever disavows them, sometimes incredibly pretending not to know who they were or what they represented:

“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” Trump said on CNN. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know.”

His latest campaign manager is Steve Bannon, who comes from an alt-right site, breitbart.com.

Multiple times he has taken (e.g., retweeted) images, tweets, ideas from white supremacist sites, including this image, which he quickly tried to clean up, changing the Jewish star to a circle. As quoted in this article:

“The presumptive Republican nominee is literally recycling White Supremacist propaganda,” wrote the New Republic’s Jeet Heer. “And we’re inured to it.”

He and/or some of his closest “advisers” (and family members) clearly have close connections to such sites — how else would he be finding and using such material so readily and quickly.

Never in a recent American presidential election have the white supremacists felt so empowered.

In addition to his attacks on Mexicans, Muslims, and African-Americans, there have been many anti-semitic themes and incidents during his campaign. His closing ad was widely viewed as anti-semitic.

And there are those with more substantial knowledge about how Hitler came to power that think there are some clear similarities.

All in all, this is a very serious comparison, and a very serious issue. More reason that Trump is totally unfit to be President, and perhaps more importantly, anyone who supports him is, err, either not seeing things clearly, or a despicable person.

It’s really not a difficult decision who to vote for for President this year. On one side, you have an experienced, qualified, knowledgeable, reasonable person; and on the other, you have someone who is a buffoon and an asshole, totally unqualified — and dangerous — in every way imaginable.

So, recently I was thinking, is there any newspaper that would endorse this guy? I mean, journalists, editors, and publishers have their leanings and biases, but they are still professionals, and have to have some rational justification for their views (usually). It would really be sacrilege to actually come out and say that they thought this guy was qualified to be President.

I found this page, which lists the major newspaper endorsements for the general election. At the time, *not* one had endorsed Donald Trump.

As of now, 2 papers (the page lists the top 100 newspapers, by circulation) have endorsed Trump. One is the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper recently purchased by the right-wing extremist, Sheldon Adelson.

57 of these papers have endorsed Hillary Clinton.

This site has pages for the 2012 election, as well as the 2008 election. In both of those years, things were more evenly divided (41-35 for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012; 65-25 for Obama and John McCain in 2008).

All this is somewhat unprecedented, in a number of ways, but warranted by the situation. The newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, the USA Today, does not endorse candidates; this year, they came out with a NOT Trump endorsement. Three papers had NOT Trump endorsements this year, while in 2012 and 2008 there were no such “NOT” endorsements.

Several papers that had never endorsed a Democrat, or had not endorsed one for a long time, endorsed Clinton. Some such papers chose not to endorse either of them, also a strong statement. (See the footnotes on the page listing the endorsements.)

These are *really* strong statements, and reinforce the idea that there is a clear choice in the election this year.

Ahh, my faith in journalism is restored (slightly).

Donald Trump, who the polls show is losing, likes to say the election is “rigged”. Well, that’s just more bullshit from Trump. But in fact, as surprising as that may be, there is actually some truth to that. The thing is, it’s actually rigged about as opposite as possible from the way Trump says it is. That is, instead of looking at precincts/cities/states where Hillary Clinton wins, one should look at those where Trump wins, as the more likely locations of rigging.

How does this rigging work? Really, it’s no surprise, it’s something that Republicans have been doing for a long, long time. And they’ve been going at it again quite strongly recently, what with all the voter ID laws the last few years, many of them coming on the heels of the Republican-leaning Supreme Court striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act. Unfortunately, Jim Crow voting laws are not dead.

Some people like to say that voter ID laws are to prevent the very serious problem of voter fraud. These people are either lying or deluded. First of all, the kinds of voter fraud people say voter ID laws will stop have been studied, and they are *extremely* rare. And the real impacts of these laws have also been analyzed, and, guess what, minorities and Democratic-leaning voters are the most negatively impacted.

North Carolina’s voter ID law, recently struck down by a federal court, contained many specific requirements brazenly put in place by Republicans to impact minorities and Democrats. Similar is the case with Texas’s law.

Republicans have been caught numerous times, often in unguarded moments, admitting how they use such laws to their advantage.

And it’s not just voter ID laws. There’s gerrymandering, which the Republicans made heavy use of after they did so well in the mid-term elections in the census year 2010. The “voter ID” laws also contain provisions to restrict early voting times and locations. Some states disallow, or make it difficult for, convicted felons to vote. And there are many other ways to do voter suppression as well.

Finally, Trump’s call for supporters to monitor polling places is really meant as just another form of voter intimidation, a form of voter suppression. It is illegal, and the RNC is forbidden from doing it based on a consent decree.

So we may have a ways to go until we get perfectly fair elections, but let’s be realistic about what the problems are, and which side is pushing things as much as they can.

Donald Trump likes to refer to Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” and say how she belongs in jail (and he says that *she* is the “mean”, “nasty” one! but that projection and hypocrisy is a story for another day). Well, let’s take a closer look, and see who’s the crooked one, who belongs in jail.

Trump has been involved in so many questionable activities, it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll just jump in with some.

There’s Trump University, where many of the people that paid for courses and instruction ending up saying it was a ripoff and a scam. Trump is being sued by at least one state (New York), and there are multiple class-action suits against him as well.

One state he is not being sued in is Florida. Why not? Well, the AG there, Pam Bondi, was looking into pursuing a fraud investigation against Trump U. So what does she so? She personally solicits Trump for a donation for her reelection campaign. And what do you know, a few days later, Trump donates $25,000. And then, a few days later, she says she’s not going to investigate or sue Trump. Nahhh, nothing fishy there.

And Florida isn’t the only state where something like this happened. In Texas, the AG, Greg Abbott, was also considering a lawsuit against Trump U, back in 2010. It was dropped though, and later Trump donated $35,000 to Abbott, who is now the Governor of Texas.

Interestingly, Trump is on record with quotes like the following:

As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.

When I want something I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass. It’s true.

BTW, the donation to Bondi actually came from the Trump Foundation, which is illegal, and Trump had to pay a fine to the IRS for it.

Another big, repeated issue, is how Trump refuses to pay workers and contractors, often leading to Trump being sued for non-payment and/or breach of contract. And we’re not talking about just a few times stiffing people of tens or hundreds of dollars. There have apparently been hundreds or thousands of these cases, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars, with devastating effects on small businesses and their owners and employees.

And don’t buy Trump’s BS that this is typical in the business/real estate world, or that he’s just doing it because the work wasn’t up to par. You make a deal with someone, you stick to it, you don’t rip them off or shortchange them. This is apparently a very very standard business practice of Trump’s.

In fact, Trump has even been sued over unpaid bills by legal firms that represented him in some of these suits brought by contractors.

By now, pretty much everyone knows about the almost-billion dollar loss Trump declared on his taxes, allowing him to avoid paying federal income taxes for almost 20 years. But there are many questions about whether how he did this was entirely legal.

For instance, related to such financial losses by Trump, bondholders were forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. Such debt forgiveness should be counted as taxable income. But Trump apparently used some tax shenanigans, usually reserved for corporations, not partnerships, as he was in at the time, to get around this.

From this article:

…, Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.

“Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

Other tax questions arise related to the Trump Foundation, mainly involving “self-dealing”. This article does a good job covering them.

Other questions arise around Trump’s connections with Russia. The way Trump deals with and talks about Vladimir Putin and Russia is somewhat odd (well, there are explanations, related to Trump’s personality and idiosyncrasies). Generally he’s got pretty bad things to say about foreign countries (e.g., China and Mexico), but generally he only has positive things to say about Putin and Russia. That’s odd, because Putin is really a despicable person, and he’s doing some despicable things (e.g., in Ukraine and Syria). Beyond that, he’s trying to revamp Russia into more of the superpower they were in the days of the USSR. So you’d think anyone in line for leadership in the USA would be very wary of what Putin’s doing, and be very careful about dealing with Putin and Russia. So why does Trump gush over him?

So it’s interesting that there’s some reporting and investigation about Russia’s connections with Trump. Just recently there was an article by David Corn, an experienced national security and intelligence reporter, about a retired spy who found “troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government”.

Some of these investigations have to do with Trump’s previous campaign manager, Paul Mananfort, who had to resign when reports of his connections with Ukrainian and Russian interests became more prominent.

The final thing I’ll comment on here — perhaps you’ve been waiting for me to get to it, as it’s the most salacious and prominent thing related to Trump — are the sexual assault stories and accusations, most of which have come out in the last several weeks. Basically, the guy is caught on tape multiple times bragging about sexually assaulting women — grabbing them by their genitalia, kissing them without asking, walking in to dressing rooms unannounced at beauty pageants — and then over a dozen women come out with stories of him doing *exactly* those things.

What do you say about this?! This alone should be enough for him to be dropped from serious consideration for the presidency. How can *anyone* support him after this? Yet many still do.

Some people say it’s not true, it’s just “locker room” talk, that what he was talking about didn’t happen. Ummm, these people are *nuts*, they have no ability to objectively judge truth. When a guy is caught admitting something like that in what he thought was private, and then over a dozen women come out and say that, yes, in fact, that did happen, he did that to them, it’s not reasonable to just ignore it or say it’s made up. We’re talking about over a dozen, independent, corroborated reports — of things Trump himself, in an unguarded moment, said he did. (In fact, these are probably some of the few times Trump has told the truth.)

Then there are people who say it doesn’t matter. *It doesn’t matter?!* These people are saying it’s OK to elect someone who is a serial sexual assaulter to the highest office in the land, the most powerful position in the world?! Absurd! To compound things, these are most likley voters for whom “family values” have been so important in past elections — and now they show their “family values” by saying it doesn’t matter if they vote for a sexual predator!

Well, there you have it. A compendium of some of Crooked Trump’s greatest hits. You’ve got fraud, breach of contract, tax evasion, sexual assault, bribery, and possibly a whole lot more. The thing is, there’s *even* more out there. In such a small space I can’t possibly cover all the things I know about, and I’m sure there’s plenty more that I don’t even know about.

As digby writes:

The narratives were set early in the campaign cycle, with Trump being the bigoted, crazy one and Clinton being the corrupt one. That’s just how the media frames the contest.
They got it wrong. Yes, Trump is the crazy, bigoted one. He’s also a misogynist and worse. But he’s also the corrupt one, perhaps even more than most of us who had already understood that ever imagined.

Throughout the campaign there’s been lots of talk — generally pushed by Republican sources — that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and that she lies all the time. This is kind of mind-boggling. The idea that anyone who supports Donald Trump can complain about other political speakers lying is just crazy. Trump lies *all* the time. He is basically king of the liars. You can’t listen to the guy for five minutes without hearing multiple lies.

To get a better idea of this, let’s take a look at some of the fact-checking sites and how they rate Trump — and Clinton, as well as some of the other/former presidential candidates.

Here is PolitiFact’s fact-checking of the GOP candidates:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/lists/people/fact-checking-2016-gop-presidential-candidates/

At the time of writing, 314 statements by Trump have been checked; 47 were in the “True”/”Mostly True” categories, 45 “Half True”, and 222 in the “Mostly False”/”False”/”Pants on Fire” categories. That’s 222 of 314, or 70.7%!

Of course, that’s the highest among the Republican candidates — and this is the one they picked?! Gee, it’s almost like you have to lie to do well with the Republicans.

Here’s the site for the Democratic candidates:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/lists/people/fact-checking-2016-democratic-presidential-candida/

285 statements of Clinton’s have been checked, with 145 in the “True”/”Mostly True” categories, 65 “Half True”, and 75 in the “Mostly False”/”False”/”Pants on Fire” categories. 75/285 is 26.3%. My standards are high, so I’d say that’s not good — but it’s still nowhere near as bad as Trump. And that doesn’t even convey the extent of Trump’s lying; for instance, only 7 of Clinton’s statements were “Pants on Fire”, whereas Trump had 55! 8 times as many! (For comparison, for Bernie Sanders, it’s 28.0%, 30/107, with 0 “Pants on Fire”.)

Here is another site, the “Candidate Truthfulness Comparison”:

http://www.wrfjs.org/

This site has a number of settings, like dates and weights for how to combine the different categories of statements (they use PolitiFact’s data under the covers). As of this writing, and with the site’s default settings/weightings, they give Clinton a rating of 1.70 and Trump 3.19 (lower is better; I think 0 would be 100% “True” and 5 100% “Pants on Fire”).

Here’s another article, from the Tampa Bay Times, which does the PolitiFact analysis:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/politifact-the-truth-so-far-behind-the-2016-campaign/2283673

They have a nice chart showing the different categories for Trump and Clinton, basically matching what I outlined above:

https://infogr.am/05d33198-eeb3-4636-a8b5-fc4b3898f7f5

The article includes this nice quote:

Trump has more statements rated Pants on Fire — 30 — than the 21 other candidates for president we’ve fact-checked this cycle combined.

Here’s a post:

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/politicians-lie

that’s several months old, but it’s got a nice graphic showing a compilation of ratings of statements for many politicians going back to 2007 (originally from a New York Times article by one of the PolitiFact editors). It shows Trump with the second worst rating (what would he do without Ben Carson!). Hillary Clinton comes in with the fifth best rating in this compilation. (Not so surprisingly, all of the Democratic politicians do well in this rating, taking the top 5 spots and 6 of the top 7 spots.)

Here’s a CNN article that talks about articles about Trump’s propensity to lie that came out recently in four other sources, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Politico, and The Washington Post:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/25/media/newspapers-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-lies/index.html

The LA Times article says:

Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has.

The Politico article says:

The conclusion is inescapable: Trump’s mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton’s as to make the comparison almost ludicrous.

There’s lots more out there, from many sources, and they all come to a similar conclusion, based on analysis of actual data — Trump lies a lot more than Clinton — a lot more than pretty much any candidate, for that matter.

Trump uses the phrase “Believe me” quite often. But the evidence is in, and it’s quite overwhelming, you should absolutely *not* believe him.