October Surprise Number One   (2016Oct07)

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Friday, October 07, 2016                                         11:38 PM

Well, that ought to do it. Not that I didn’t recognize Trump for what he was thirty years ago, or whenever I first saw his bullying-entitled-looking face on TV—sort of an Eddie Haskell/Biff Tanner nightmare, grown spoiled and rotten by lack-of-consequence and by age. Bless his billionaire heart. And here we are, with some states already in early voting, with concerns about the southeastern seaboard being able to pull itself back together in time to vote—something that seems to trouble Florida, even without a hurricane.

I’m seeing some frog-in-a-pot-of-cold-water-type behavior in the Trump surrogates now—they have slowly been expected to cover for greater and greater breaches of decorum and decency—and they reached a point, with this new avalanche, of flailing blindly for any rationale that can either distract from or excuse the inexcusable. I’ve said before that Trump is a person I wouldn’t have in my home, much less the White House—but now I have a chorus of TV pundits saying the same thing. My blog posts have been railing against the GOP nominee for almost two years straight. Now I feel I wasted all that time—Trump didn’t need me to lose this election—all he needed was some public scrutiny .

Which is what I’d suspected all along—my posts were mostly exasperated expressions of disbelief that such a horrible creature could get so near our highest office—that so many people could be taken in by his shtick. So, I guess I’ll be blogging again tomorrow—about all the people who are still with him, in spite of today’s disclosures. I actually find his insistence, against law and science, that the Central Park Five were wrongfully acquitted by DNA evidence—and shouldn’t have received compensation for unlawful imprisonment—even more damning, in some ways, than the video of his sleazy banter confessing to his predatory sexuality.

Not that both aren’t disqualifying—please don’t misunderstand me. But the naked bigotry of his obsession with those wrongly-accused children, twenty years ago, and today, is an uglier surprise than the Billy Bush video—it’s not as if we didn’t know he was a sleazebag already. We had less warning of his deeply racist motivations—though that, too, is no great surprise. The surprise is that he would raise the issue himself, weeks before Election Day.

My only concern now is that low poll numbers for Trump might suppress the Democratic voter turn-out, rather than pump it up. It would be the ultimate irony if he got himself elected by proving himself un-electable.

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