At this point in the game, Julian Assange’s best bet with hacked email from Hillary Clinton is to quit timing releases to try to undermine the election and try instead at her presidency.  Don’t bother until the day of her inauguration.

Unless maybe the theory is to get the coming “T Party” opposition to hang onto — a head start.  (The “Deplorables” merchandise is a mock worthy, they need some new phrases to throw around.)

And here we see Pat Buchanan, now absorbing the fact that his favored politician is politically dead and having to get ready for Hillary, is complaining about insensitive comments (politically incorrect?  Locker Room Talk?) made from Hillary Clinton’s email conversations — damned the Catholic Church and its opposition to some of our issues!
Sure.  Trumped up grievances.  It’s tossed in with the horrors we see in Clinton trying to assemble — and defeat — the celebrity appeal of Trump (the surface-level discussion is what’s throwing some conspiranoids digging into the wikileaks) and caricatures of Bernie Sanders supporters (no less unflattering than what the current wikileaks – supporters have said / posted in the past.)
Funny thing, though.  The dominant religion amongst Mexicans, including immigrants from Mexico in the US — both those legally here and not legally here — Catholicism.  Insulted publicly.  But Pat Buchanan is not terribly concerned.

Leaving Trump on the ticket will “simplify the GOP’s quadrennial exercise of writing its post-campaign autopsy, which this year can be published November 9 in one sentence: ‘Perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan.’” — George Will

Revisit the 2012 Republican Party “Autopsy”, and we’re back at one  basic outline: Republicans need to figure out how to win some Hispanic votes.
The question coming out of 2016 becomes a sort of — how do you drag a core of Republican voters to respond to this… something about compromise… even in terms of rhetoric.

I have a theory that a feedback loop is clogging up the electorate here.  Sure, there’s the problem when a part of the public steers their news coverage to conservative talk radio and Fox News — and encouraging the — er, loud boisterous voices that come with it.  But more-so than this, it’s the Presidential electorate versus the Midterm electorate — the former receives a 60 plus percent voter turnout, the latter runs into the 40s.  It produces different incentives for the politicos up in each set of elections, and creates the effect coming out of 2010 and, more importantly and especially, 2014 that the American Public… why, everyone must hate Obama and the Liberals as much as I do — just look at these election results.

The good news for the Republicans is that is that this 20 point gap and attendant mid-term drubbings destroyed a Democratic bench, and so the Democratic Senate candidates clump into groups of retreads and hazy not quite theres.  I presume it is likely to come around for these down-ticket races back to something resembling even the barest of coat-tails, as Trump tanks and takes his supporters with him — Donald Trump’s own bizarre feedback loop — he’s speaking before his cheering crowds.  (Please note, to understand the political strategy of Donald Trump from here on out — in reference to a straight news article following the first debate suggesting that Donald Trump is doing “the opposite” of conventional wisdom in winning segments of the vote — this is where we land.)

Trump had been getting the most tepid lesser-of-two-evil support from the Mormons of Utah.  Now?

Wacky polls from Utah.

The poll shows Clinton and Trump tied at 26 percent, McMullin with 22 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson getting 14 percent if the election were held today.

Or there’s this.

Among Utah voters likely to cast ballots in November’s presidential election, 34% currently support Trump, 28% back Clinton, 20% back McMullin, and 9% support Libertarian Gary Johnson.  Green Party candidate Jill Stein has 1% of the vote and another 6% are undecided. 

Basically the conservative vote splits three ways, consolidating the liberal vote.

Of course, being that there are no competitive down state campaigns — not that I’m aware of — for Hillary to try to get any coat-tails on, it would be pointless for Hillary Clinton to chase these electoral votes.  So it is a matter of whatever happens, happens.  But it is neat to consider, and even neater to consider the 3rd party — and not even one of the renown third parties — winning a state.

It is worth pointing out that the hero for the serial killer in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho …

… and, yes, I know: everything is fantasy sequences from the CEO boardroom and there is no serial killer here per se …

… reflecting a sociopathy of 1980s corporate New York …

And the hero of Patrick Bateman is… Donald Trump.

(An earlier vintage, I suppose.)

A curious archtype we have here.  And that question swirls about… “How did he come to the summit as nominee of a major political party?”  As far back as the late 80s / early 90s, he was an obvious foil to fulfill this role in (controversial, a book described by an actual murderer as his “bible” and floats about lists for “banned book week”) literature.

And trying to analyze the appeals and dis-appeals of the candidates will lead one into a little trouble.  We got this one in 2000, and I’d wager George W Bush makes a better Paul Metzler than Donald Trump — but assemble Al Gore and Hillary Clinton for Tracy Glick, with now the gender bias coming fully into place.  So,when (sans movie) an editorial appears after the first debate describing the teen film motifs with the know-it-all honor student (girl) who’s done his homework and the sneering devil may care (boy) who “plays by his own rules” — an anti-hero who I suppose fulfills his role — I see this later derided in a liberal mag as an example of media sexism.  Which presents the problem / question of trying to analyze and spell out sometimes sexist motifs running across the American electorate.

Trying to churn Donald Trump into a sympathetic and redeemable character (and the ghost writer for Art of the Deal deeply regrets doing so) and you inevitably land on this contortion.  Another William Randolph Hearst / Citizen Kane.  And we await Donald Trump on the eve of his election walking to the balcony as his angry crowd of misguided true believers (who somehow think a Clinton 20 point landslide was “stolen” from the rightful winner Trump) is now desperately shouting “Rosebud!”

It might not fit strictly the definition of “moral panic“, or maybe it does.  There is an epidemic clown sightings, creepy creepy clowns — reported by “the kids” all over America.

I understand the “clown scare” problem as stemming from a psychological projection out of current events.  What creepy clown is running around out there that “the kids” are being bombarded by in the news media in this, the year 2016?

[…]

You know who looks like a total moron right now?  Ted Cruz.  Here is a guy who took a “brave principled stance”, risked and received boos at the Republican Convention by not endorsing him during his convention, obviously weighing his future political prospects against a possible Donald Trump implosion, and then at about the time Trump seemed to be riding high apparently reconsidered his political position and endorsed Trump, and now???

This makes for awkward viewing.  To be sure, it appears to be only one woman shouting “BOO!”, right up until the time that Republican Senate candidate Joe Heck calls on Donald Trump to step down.

Van Jones brings this back to the issue of the Central Park 5, where Donald Trump sticks by rape convictions that were not true.  Protesters shout out “U!S!A!” because — Trump and Van Jones…

… and I’m left pondering the matter of Van Jones.  Whose name surfaced on a “9/11 Truth” petition, and was thus summarily dismissed from his appointment in the Obama Adminisration — and wikipedia give a bit short shift to the controversy.  All too riotous — you can’t have any whiff of conspiracy mongering taint the White House like that.

Donald Trump’s twitter feed is pretty hilarious, retweeting comments from his twittering supporters, and declarations that every Republican abandoning him will now be going down to inglorious defeat.  The difference between a Walter Mondale as he faced defeat in the eye and a Donald Trump:  Mondale steered his end of campaign to save Democratic seats; Trump…

All eyes are on the big Green Bay Packers versus New York Giants game.  (Was Trump as concerned about the debates being scheduled against Major League Baseball playoff games?)  Theoretically, the debate will cover foreign policy.  And yet… no one will be covering whatever the candidates say about foreign policy.

The election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump…

… or, as I overheard one cynical Bernie Sanders supporter have it, “George W Bush and George Wallace”… and I suppose Assange’s much overmatched dumping of Clinton Wall Street speech material against the much more viral Donald Trump acting like a boorish buffoon sells him on the idea.

That’s one leak.  The other one… quite possibly spells the death of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign shot — the reason I’ve once thought that this campaign is anywhere between a close Trump victory and a historic landslide for Clinton —

Somewhere between Obama’s easy win but not landslide over McCain but not where you have Reagan over Mondale.  But who knows?

What needed to happen for the former, electorally and polling-wise, was coming into the focus during Hillary Clinton’s week off due to pneumonia.  What needs to happen for the latter — well, that will happen if (suburban Republican) women drop from Donald Trump EN MASSE, and it was never hard to figure out how that might end up happening.

I have this vision of  Hillary Clinton, and her campaign, trying to figure out how to effectively press the advantage and having a boat-load of Donald Trump material at the ready.  There’s a danger of it sliding into static background noise (like everything else with Trump’s campaign that would spell the end of any normal politician), and there’s a danger of it being “old news” by the time of the election, super-ceded by … oh, transcript revelations that Hillary Clinton was very chummy with Wall Street officials, for instance.

So you start by you run the theme-centering ad of kids watching Trump’s vulgarisms.  When you zero in the misogynistic angle for a follow-up on the ad, you do so at the time of the first debate.   The debate is where you bring up the issue of Miss Universe.  And you do so at the end of the debate, so it will be the thing most people will most remember, and where Donald Trump will have been worn out.

The comedy of Julian Assange knowing the timing of when to dump the damnable material out on Hillary Clinton — to confirm the biases to that guy who thinks this election is Bush versus Wallace… right before the second debate… is that Hillary Clinton and her campaign also know when to dump things and this is when  you leak this tape.

So Donald Trump can defend it as “Locker Room” “Private”, and most amusingly…

“Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close.”

Oh, if Bill Clinton’s private talk were public, he would not have survived.  Come to think of it, the same is the case with Richard Nixon, isn’t it?
Yes.  I am familiar with the armchair psycho-analysis on Bill Clinton with a “Saturday night Clinton” and a “Sunday morning Clinton”.  I’m also familiar with Bill Clinton having a Sunday Morning Clinton as distinct from a Saturday Night Clinton.  Which I’m not familiar with in regards to Donald Trump.  And beyond that… there’s that matte of …

The “golfing with Clinton” angle poses a question to a class of Trump supporters (out in “alt right” territory — though, for that matter also his constellation of angry white downtrodden men)… isn’t that a little too chummy — like, is Donald Trump then going to run with Bill Clinton to the Bilderberg Group meeting, or something?