Here’s a quick update on the numbers for the Republican nomination. So far, Trump has 680 delegates. Neither of the other two can do anything but slow him down, so who cares about their totals so far? Concentrate, people!

Trump has 680 so far. Working in conjunction with Nate Silver and his Five Thirty Eight blog, I calculate Trump is likely to get another 508 delegates. That will give him a total going into the July Republican convention of 1188, a full 49 delegates short of the outright nomination. That feels about right to me. Nate seems to think he’ll be only 29 short, but I like my number better. So it seems like standard wisdom now that there will be a brokered Republican convention in July in Cleveland. Gosh – I’m really shocked and surprised by that. No I’m not. You know I’m not since you know I predicted this outcome – how many months ago? Check previous posts – I was talking about this outcome in Pennsylvania at Christmas. Yes, I continue to be the Oracle – just ask me anything except the Power Ball numbers.

So what happens then? Will this be another Lincoln in 1860 or will the Republicans wimp out and jump like lemmings into the sea with their DtheT candidate? Okay, since I see myself as the Oracle, I’ll go ahead and predict the outcome.

There will be a billion eyes watching around the world as the first round of the delegate count begins in Cleveland. Everyone will be holding their breath as Trump falls short of the necessary 1237. There will be speeches, both for and against Cruz as the alternate candidate. There will be a second ballot, and the numbers will even out a bit – fewer for Trump, more for Cruz and less more for Kasich.

That’s when the real deals begin to be made. Will it be a third party? Will Trump do what he’s wanted to do all along – be bought off by the Republican establishment and take his marbles and go home? What happens to the millions of schlemiels that voted for him along the way? Here’s what happens.

There is a deal made in the back rooms of the convention hall. Trump says he’s rethought the situation and realizes he would be letting down the country by continuing when it’s obvious that there is a conspiracy on the part of the Democrats to steal the race. Details of the conspiracy will follow, based on information he gleaned from his ‘sources’, all of which he will have made up. As a consequence, he will give all his delegates to….drum roll, please! It surely won’t be Ted Cruz – everyone hates him. It won’t be John Kasich because he really is a loser. In fact, it won’t be any of the candidates that have pursued the nomination thus far. It won’t be Mitt Romney – another loser. Who will it be? Why, it’ll be little Paul Ryan, the current Speaker of the House. He will cast those big eyes down, and say he’s only doing this for the country and for the party. And he will get all Trumps and Kasich’s delegates and he will win the nomination. And he will win the presidency over Hillary. Funny how things turn out, huh? And after the smoke clears and Ryan nominates a right wing Supreme Court justice who will be swiftly approved by the Republican dominated Senate, Trump will tally up how much value his brand accrued with this exercise in American democracy. It’s in the billions – no, let’s let Trump be Trump. He will say publicly that it was worth a cool trillion dollars to the Trump name for him to have pursued this ersatz campaign. And those schlemiels? They’ll say they knew all the time he was just pretending. And as long as a Republican wins, who cares? After all, Republicans take care of us the best.

You heard it here first, folks. Sit back and watch it – and say, “I’ll be damned – she was right again. Scary.”

Indeed.

A Twilight Zone episode from 1961, entitled It’s a Good Life starred little 7 year old Billy Mumy playing a 6 year old named Anthony. Anthony had a very powerful mind, and could destroy anything he wanted to with that power. The family was a little intimidated by him as a result, as anyone that told him “No” got zapped and went away. Sound like anyone we know that runs an Asian country with North in its name? You betcha.

Kim Jong-un, or the “Young-un” as I call him, has gotten a little carried away, playing with his toys like missiles and nukes. As a consequence, the UN voted to place onerous sanctions on North Korea. China – North Korea’s last friend – joined in on the sanctions that allow any ship going to North Korea to be searched and seized if it’s shown to be North Korean. This happened in The Phillipines this week.

The question, of course, is how will the Young-Un react to this? And second, given enough time, will sanctions cause instability in the country, the fear of which has prevented China from being firm with its little brother since he took over in 2012. His older half-brother was supposed to take over, but got busted for trying to go to Disneyland in Tokyo. Funny, huh? Well, maybe not.

The Young-un got into a fight with his uncle about who controlled fisheries on the west coast of the country. As a result, uncle was purged and killed – along with his entire family. Allegedly, the Young-un had his cousin killed by being burnt alive with a flame thrower. Nice, huh? As you can see from his picture, The Young-Un has put on a few pounds, allegedly from gorging on swiss cheese since he ascended to the throne of leadership. He apparently has joint trouble, having disappeared from view in 2014 for about a month – allegedly having surgery on his ankles – ankles that have to support all that weight. He and his wife – a former Korean singer – have just one daughter. So succession within his immediate family won’t happen. That means if and when he’s gone, unless he has a son, leadership will go to the Disneyland boy or to the other son that follows Eric Clapton all over the place. It’s anybody’s guess how that’ll turn out. But the Young-un is still young – somewhere between 32 and 34, depending on who you ask. But in the ensuing years, he can still do a lot of damage – to his own country and the countries surrounding him. Is that likely to happen?

Those in the know believe the Young-un got very nervous as the US invaded Iraq and then bombed Libya. He fears a similar outcome for his regime. The boy king keeps the nukes handy to ward off any such intrusion. Recall there are nearly 29,000 American troops currently stationed in South Korea. Pyongyang is only 120 miles from Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The military strength of the two respective nations is about equal, but with the south’s population double that of the north, the south could immediately ramp up troop strength to double that of the north. A nuclear provocation against the south could make that happen. It’s also been suggested that the US is going to provide South Korea with the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system. It is thought that China’s buy-in to deploying such a system signals their concern about the Young-uns adventurism in nuclear deployment.

So what’s next for the world and North Korea? According to a piece I read over the weekend, Pachinko winnings in Japan help pay for North Korea’s nuclear adventurism. Some ex-pat North Koreans in Japan play pachinko – a wildly popular pinball game – and give the proceeds to North Korea to protect family members stuck in the North. Finding routes for these payments and stopping them is likely the only way to cut off this funding and put a crimp in the Young-Un’s follies. But the price to be paid by these families – and eventually the entire southern part of the Korean peninsula – is what’s at stake here. Just like with little Anthony in the Twilight Zone episode, it’s not a good idea to make him mad. If you do, he could turn you into a Jack in the Box.

Reviewing a bit of history, I was surprised to find that there were, in fact, three Democratic candidates that ran against Lincoln the Republican in 1860. There was Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge and a guy named John Bell. I’d heard of John Bell Hood, the reckless Confederate general, but hadn’t heard about John Bell. But here’s my point: the Republican party in 2016 bears a striking resemblence to the Democratic party in 1860, without the issue of slavery. How so? Let me ‘splain.

John C. Breckinridge was the vice president under James Buchanan, a one-termer whose ambivalence toward slavery gave him a slot in the ‘worst presidents ever’ list. A splintered Democratic convention resulted in Breckinridge and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas both being nominees for president. Breckinridge was called the ‘southern Democrat’ and Douglas just plain ‘Democrat’. While popular history has it that Douglas was Lincoln’s principal adversary in the election, the actual results don’t support that. I’ll get to that in a minute.

John Bell’s nomination was the result of former Whig’s getting together with a couple of other splinter groups to form the “Constitutional Union” party, which obviously advocated to oppose secession. The clear result? Three Democratic candidates split the popular and subsequent electoral vote, allowing the Republican Lincoln to win the national election with northern and western votes. Bell took Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Breckinridge swept the south, and Douglas only won Illinois. Something very similar to that will happen in the 2016 election.

Let’s look at the current factions in the Republican party. While the three candidates don’t necessarily compare directly with the three southern Democrats, the split in ideology is analogous. Essentially, we have a ‘moderate’ (Rubio), a radical conservative (Cruz) and DtheT, who can only be described as a canny marketer whose candidacy is the result of too many years of stringing poor whites along with promises not kept. Rubio is too light-weight to win, as DtheT – and Chris Christie showed us in the debates. Ted Cruz is gratingly pedantic, turning off the electorate as well as his peers with his alienating style and substance. And DtheT is – well, you know what he is – everybody knows what he is. His popularity is as much a product of the distaste for the rest of the field as it is wishful thinking on the part of the electorate that they really can put a thumb in the eye of their elected Washington cadre.

So if the analogy holds – and current ‘establishment’ Republican rhetoric continues in the current vein – you could see multiple Republican candidates in the form of DtheT and

‘third-party’ entities emerging from the Cleveland convention in June. That would be semi-analogous to the election I thought this one would resemble: Nixon versus Humphrey and Wallace in 1968. But instead of DtheT, I had Jeb Bush in the role of Nixon (typecasting if there ever was) and him clearly winning. But I hadn’t dug deep enough. It seems DtheT and Nixon actual had a tie in common – Roy Cohn. Ironic, ain’t it? Roy and Nixon helped Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy become an ‘ism’, and Roy was DtheT’s attack dog attorney in the ’90’s. Oh my. What can be said about that? Wow.

So I suppose you could call 2016 a mash-up of 1860 and 1968, but with the opposite result: Hillary Clinton will be the 45th President of the United States, with 322 votes in the electoral college to Trump’s 218 and the third party candidate put up by the Republicans likely not even making it to the finish. When that happens, on Wednesday, November 9th, a new Republican leader will emerge that will be analogous to Bill Clinton’s emergence after Michael Dukakis’ defeat by George H.W. Bush in 1988. And who will that leader be? I predict it will be Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada, the guy Obama thought could be his ‘trump card’ in appointing a Republican to the Supreme Court. He’s governor until 2019 when he’s term-limited out. Watch him rise as the next leader of the Republican party, and watch the ‘new’ party take over from a disappointing Clinton Presidency in 2020. And why will Hillary’s presidency be disappointing? Because anybody in that seat for the next four years is doomed to failure. Too many challenging issues; no unity in D.C. So there it is – watch it unfold and learn, grasshoppers.

Yes, the soliloquy from Hamlet as he contemplates suicide and its alternatives. That is the situation the “establishment” Republicans find confronting them. But which form of suicide? Death by Trump or death by opposing him and ending their Trump troubles? They were all asleep nine months ago when they could have rallied around Jeb! and smothered Trump’s candidacy in its infancy. But I think they liked the free media exposure his campaign afforded; they figuried he would fall on his sword at some point with his outrageous statements. But no. Now they’re stuck with him. In their dreams they can stop the Trump juggernaut. Couldn’t happen to more deserving folk.

But what about the denouement? Who will be there to say, “Goodnight, sweet prince?” I think that’s the most interesting part of this evolutionary saga. Even though Trump will not win the Presidency, his legacy will live on. The ‘new’ Republican base will look very different. Much less concerned about Planned Parenthood and Obamacare, and much more interested in radical leadership, and the potential for repressive governance. The GOP in DC is going to have to morph into a very new bird if they want to stay in power. Can they do it? Doubt it. “There’s more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I think we are seeing the beginning of a major shift in the American ethos. But where it ends up is tough to predict. But what the hell – let’s give it a shot!

Angry. Undereducated. Meme-susceptible. Overweight. Joe the Plumber. Loves Palin and Limbaugh, but hates Coulter and Beck. Favors country music and shotguns. Thinks minorities are getting ahead at their expense. Not financially prepared to retire, but getting too unhealthy to work. These are demographic realities, not just images from my imagination. This group is fast going down the tubes, they know it, and they don’t like it. So what will be their likely recourse? They’ll rally around the next demagogue. But this one won’t be just a performance artist like DtheT. He’ll be a meaner version of David Duke. They’ll all be primed to advocate violent overthrow of the government. They’ll be big on symbols, so expect to see new flag designs with intertwined snakes and maybe a dagger or two. Sound like Berlin, 1932? You betcha. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark? Nope – in des United States. Watch it unfold…as I predicted in my play, Fear of the Sixth Extinction. Check it out.

The results are in from the South Carolina primary. After weeks of debate, polling, talking heads’ opining and everyone holding their breath, now the GOP vector is fairly well set. How so? Let us begin to analyze these outcomes.

Trump won every Congressional District in South Carolina and Jeb Bush finally quit. Whew. But there’s more data out there, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But here’s the upshot: the only chance the GOP had of winning the presidency in November just quit. Goodbye, Satan. The GOP will miss you.

I kind of know how Patty Hearst must have felt when the cops killed the Symbionese Liberation Army (look that one up, you young’uns). It’s a shock to realize after 22 years of waiting – yes, 22 years since the Newt Gingrich-led conservative Republican takeover of the government – that it’s finally over. And it appears that the entire GOP electorate has revolted against their revolting masters. They are ostensibly supporting the man who is the furthest thing from a dream candidate for the GOP establishment that could be found. Ain’t it great? Yeah, but no. Let’s think on.

What will emerge now is a pitched battle between DtheT and Little Marco Big Heels Rubio (Lil’ M for short). The betting site PredictWise has it a 50/46% split between the two. Jeb dropping out pushed Lil’ M up 7%, as he’s now the anointed allegedly moderate candidate. Sir Ted the Dour is at 2% and might not be long for the race. So that means the GOP establishment is having to pin all its hopes on a neophyte, pretty boy who can’t stand the heat in a not-very-tough debate format, a Senator they loathe, or John Kasich? Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

PredictWise also has the outcome at a consistent 61/39% breakdown for the Democrat over the Republican in November. And that Democrat ain’t The Bern. So, gentle readers, the best – and likely only – chance the GOP had to retake the White House in the fall just left the building, and – more importantly – I’m confident the party elders know it. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at their breakfast gathering this morning.

In order for DtheT not to get enough delegates to win, this will have to be a three or four man race. That means Ted and/or Kasich will have to stay in the race for the long haul. Watch big money come pouring into Kasich’s campaign. The only hope now is for it to be a brokered election to stop DtheT. That which they wanted to avoid has now become a necessity. But in the process of stopping him, they will likely put the final nail in the coffin of the GOP. The party is now is like a patient with pancreatic cancer and Donald Trump is radiation and chemo all rolled into one. DtheT: the destroyer of cells and organs and everything else in this aging and frail body.

But the real irony – and one that eventually Op-Ed writers will stumble upon – is that DtheT is the ultimate product of all these years of ‘making shit up’ perpetrated by the party and its surrogates: The Weekly Standard, the NRA, the Dick Cheney and Fox News. The empire is crumbling because it finally produced Caligula. And the net result of all this? After Hillary wins, she will nominate someone to the Supreme Court that is left with a capital L. The dark side of the force is destroyed. Welcome back to the country of progress. I guess I won’t have to move to Norway after all. No wardrobe changes needed. Whew!

(The Zika mosquito)…

Well, let’s start with things economic. The stock market continues its slow, downward descent, caused mainly by investors’ correlation between the decrease in oil prices and the world economy. But is there causation or mere correlation? I’d argue there’s only correlation. Let’s discuss.

Start simple. Where are the five biggest oil producers? They are (in order from biggest down):

The U.S. (we passed Saudi Arabia in 2014 as the world’s largest, thanks to fracking)
Saudi Arabia
Russia
China (!)
Canada

Here is each country’s cost of production, measured in $/barrel, in order from lowest to highest:

Saudi Arabia $9.90
Russia $17.20
China $29.90
U.S. $36.20
Canada $41.00

Average: $26.84

So Saudi Arabia comes in nearly 3 times cheaper than the average. At current reserve estimates, they have about 90 years of oil left, given current export rates. So Saudi Arabia is betting that they can drive the competition out of business by flooding the market with oil. Seems like a logical step, eh?

But – yes, there’s always a but – They might get Canada, China and the U.S. to run the numbers and curtail production, but can Russia afford to do that, what with being under sanctions and having a ruble that loses value by the day? Half the government’s revenue comes from oil. It’s military budget has ramped up, with expenditures in Syria now adding up to $4 million a day for its bomb strikes against the regime’s opposition. But even at $30 a barrel, the Russians are still making money, although significantly less than when oil was selling at $100 a barrel. But how long can this go on? Every day there are ‘rumors’ of OPEC cuts. Do you see any middle east country other than Saudi Arabia in that list of the top 5? No. So if, say the UAE – the latest source of the rumor – cuts production, it just means more room for the others to increase their production. So the name of the game is market share. If there’s always more than enough to go around, one or two smaller producers can cut production, and it won’t change the market dynamics. I expect to see oil at or below $30 a barrel for years to come – as long as there are countries left that will fill the void. Enjoy the budget boost. But one should not assume the decrease in oil prices has anything to do with the shape of the world economy. It dun’t (with a nod to Ricky Ricardo).

Next topic: Syria. Despite the skepticism, there was an announcement yesterday of a proposed cease fire in Syria to allow for humanitarian aid to be delivered to the beleaguered city of Aleppo. Go to google maps and see what it looks like today, versus five years ago. OK – here are the pictures.

Aleppo in 2010:

Aleppo in 2010 was was a thriving city, concerned about such things are preservation of antiquities and urban planning. Syrians were happy to shop and welcome tourists to their city, without fear of bombs falling out of the sky from a variety of sources. But then came the so-called ‘civil war’, and Aleppo changed rather considerably.

Aleppo last week:

Glad you don’t live there? Aya. But here’s the thing – the neocon wing of the Republican party advocates for ramped up military intervention in Syria. Last November, all the major Republican candidates advocated for ground troops to be dispatched to Syria – and that’s what would happen to them…they’d be dispatched (look it up – it means killed). The Russians aren’t fighting ISIS – they’re fighting the so-called Free Syrian Army to get Assad his country back. So our role in this is … what? Let’s send troops to fight against whom? Gets real complicated real fast. In fact, Adam Garfinkle of The American Interest put forth a very interesting – and hopefully implausible – scenario for the Syrian conflict:

“What if, just to toss out one scenario, the Assad regime with the Russians look to actually win the civil war, and what if they are then willing, for their own reasons, to empower the Kurds for use as leverage against the Turks? What if, too, it were to be revealed that the Russians were secretly aiding and arming PKK cadres inside Turkey, perhaps through both PYD and Chechen intermediaries? Under such circumstances President Erdogan might believe that he has no choice but to order the Turkish military into Syria, to prevent both the fall of the north to the regime and the consolidation of PYD control adjacent to the Syrian-Turkish border. That could spark direct Turkish-Russian hostilities, and it’s hard to think of two leaders we would less like to see in a situation like that than Putin and Erdogan. That in turn could lead the Turks to invoke Article V of the NATO treaty. Then what? We would know that coming to the aid of the Turks under such circumstances could presage a U.S.-Russian fight, and if that occurred no one could glibly rule out escalation—either horizontal escalation that could activate a front in Europe, or vertical escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. No, the Syria crisis is not directly analogous to the pre-World War I situation in Europe. But even if it shares only a single thematic feature in common, it’s enough to give one pause.”

We’d better do more than pause. And that, gentle readers, is why we need to think twice about electing any of the current crop of Republican candidates. Be careful what you ask for – I know, I am repeating myself, but don’t you think something this important bears repeating? I’d say so.

After the results of the Iowa caucuses were announced, and DtheT didn’t “run the table”, I started to think about the numbers. Yes, I know, I am always thinking about the numbers, but this time I wondered: could the rest of the primary season and delegate assignment be reduced to a spreadsheet, generated by an algorithm?

So on Tuesday I gave it a try. At first I put columns in the spreadsheet for criteria, like moderate vs conservative, age groupings, etc. Then I realized how difficult that would be to quantify. So instead, I took a cue from Nate Silver and his relatively simple method for predicting the outcomes of the 2012 elections.

But a bit of explaining is necessary to set the stage for my methodology. First – and most important – the Republican National Committee set a rule that all primaries between February 1st and March 14th had to distribute delegates proportionally. After that, states are free to distribute the way they want. Here’s the thing: between now and March 14th, almost half of the delegates will be assigned – to a field that still consists of at least 7 candidates. Remember who they are?

Donaldo the Trumpeter
Sir Ted the Dour Cruz
Little Marco Big Heels Rubio
Ben the Sleeper Carson
Jeb – can’t control his body language – Bush
John – the Ohioan – Kasich
Chris – the corpulent – Christie

Then there’s Carly Fiorina who I’d rather not discuss, but I’m pretty confident she’ll be out of the race soon.

So you’re divying up – quite unevently – 1113 delegates 7 ways, it’s clear nobody will have the edge before the pile-on begins. What’s the pile on, you ask? From March 15th to the last primary (South Dakota on June 7), 10 states have a ‘winner take all’ position. That amounts to a total of 537 delegates. However, the diversity of voters in those 12 states practically guarantees a distribution amongst at least the top 3 candidates. So where am I going with this? Ah, to the methodology.

I took the most recent New Hampshire polls and distributed the delegates according to those results. I did the same for South Carolina. Then I used the proportion from the Iowa caucuses – the only actual data so far – and distributed them to subsequent proportional distribution races according to their percentages. Adding up those results, here’s what I get on March 14th:

Donaldo the Trumpeter: 280
Sir Ted the Dour Cruz: 256
Little Marco Big Heels Rubio 219

And where’s everybody else? Pretty much in the two digit range. Ok, so far no surprises. But then there’s the Florida primary on March 15th. 99 delegates are at stake – a full third of what each of the main three have accumulated. But here’s the thing – what if favorite son, ex-governor and of course by my definition, Satan himself – wins Florida? He’ll go from 40 delegates to 139. Then there’s the Ohio primary, also on March 15th. What if favorite son, ex-governor and pretty nice guy John Kasich wins those 66 delegates? He’d go from 38 delegates to 104. It’s unlikely that either of them could catch up to the top 3. But where all this is going is:

A BROKERED CONVENTION!!

Dum, dum da dum dum da dum dum da dum… (that’s supposed to represent the music from Star Wars when it switches back to the death star)

There hasn’t been a brokered Republican convention since 1948. The pooh-bahs don’t like it because all that bickering and the necessity for a back room deal makes them look bad. But as things stand now, that is clearly where they’re heading. And Bush with his 139 delegates and Kasich with his 104? They could each have a significant influence on the outcome. And what would that look like? They both hate DtheT, and Ted the Dour for sure. But Bush has a special, smoldering, burning hatred now for Little Marco. Why? Because Jeb brought that boy up through the ranks and made him what he is today. And in return, Little M turned on satan and struck out on his own. So he tried to kill the boss – you think he won’t get fired for a thing like that? Oh, where’s Violet Neustead when you need her?

So there it is folks, a brokered convention with the two moderates in a position to make deals. How it will turn out is anybody’s guess. But I wouldn’t rule out the Bush machine quite yet. Things are going to get really interesting around here come the morning of March 16th. What fun!

I woke up at 2:58 am this morning with the lyrics of this old song running through my head. It’s by Harry Chapin from his Album, Verities and Balderdash, which came out in about 1974. I know this is long, so those of you with ADD are just going to have to bear with me.

What Made America Famous

It was the town that made America famous
The churches full and the kids all gone to hell
Six traffic lights and seven cops and all the streets kept clean
The supermarket and the drug store and the bars all doing well

Now they were the folks that made America famous
Our local fire department stocked with short haired volunteers
And on Saturday night while America boozes the fire
Department showed dirty movies, the lawyer and the grocer
Seeing their dreams come to life on the movie screens
While the plumber hopes that he won’t be seen
As he tries to hide his fears and he wipes away his tears

But somethings burning somewhere
Does anybody care?

We were the kids that made America famous
The kind of kids that long since drove our parents to despair
We were lazy long hairs dropping out, lost confused, and coppin’ out
Convinced our futures were in doubt and trying not to care

We lived in the house that made America famous
It was a rundown slum, the shame of all our decent
Folks in town, we hippies and some welfare cases
Crowded families of coal black faces, cramped inside
Some cracked old boards, the best that we all could afford
But still too nice for the rich landlord to ever tear it down

And we could hear the sound of something burning somewhere
Is anybody there?

We all lived the life that made America famous
Our cops would make a point to shadow us around our town
And we love children put a Swastika on the bright red firehouse door
America, the beautiful, it makes a body proud

And then came the night that made America famous
Was it carelessness or someone’s sick idea of a joke
In the tinder box trap that we hippies lived in
Someone struck a spark at first I thought that I was dreaming
Then I saw the first flames gleaming and heard
The sound of children screamin’ comin’ through the smoke

And something’s burning somewhere
Does anybody care?

Oh, it was the fire that made America famous, the sirens wailed
And the firemen stumbled sleepy from their homes and the
Plumber yelled, Come on let’s go, but they saw what was burning
And said, Take it slow, let ’em sweat a little, they’ll never know
And besides, we just cleaned the chrome, said the plumber
Then I’m goin’ alone

Well he rolled on up in the fire truck and raised the
Ladder to the ledge where me and my girl and a couple of kids
Were clinging like bats to the edge, we staggered to salvation and
Collapsed on the street and I never thought that a fat man’s face
Would ever look so sweet

I shook his hand in the scene that made America famous
And a smile from the heart that made America great
We spent the rest of that night in the home of this man
We’d never known before; it’s funny when you get that close
It’s kinda hard to hate

I went to sleep with the hope that made America famous
I had the kind of a dream that maybe they’re still
Trying to teach in school of the America that made America famous
And of the people who just might understand that how together

Yes we can create a country better than the one
We have made of this land, we have a choice to make
Each man who dares to dream reaching out his hand
A prophet or just a crazy, damn dreamer of a fool
Yes a crazy fool

And something’s burning somewhere
Does anybody care? Is anybody there?
Is anybody there?

Harry was famous for his song Cats in the Cradle which has been terribly abused over the years for its sickly sweet sentiment about spending time with your kids before they grow up and don’t have time for you. It was on the same album, but this was the song that spoke the most to me. I actually used it as part of a presentation to a group of kids about five years younger than me in a college English class in 1977. They knew virtually nothing about the Vietnam era and what it was like for young men to be subject to the draft. It reminds me of young people today, who have virtually no memory of anything that doesn’t come from the internet. They I started thinking about Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

So here’s a portion of David Brooks’ column from The New York Times yesterday. He titled it Time for a Republican Conspiracy! Take your Adderall and keep that ADD at bay!
________________
The Tea Party, Ted Cruz’s natural vehicle, has 17 percent popular support, according to Gallup. The idea that most women, independents or mainstream order-craving suburbanites would back a guy who declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin is a mirage. The idea that the G.O.P. can march into the 21st century intentionally alienating every person of color is borderline insane.

Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win. Very few presidents are so terrible that they genuinely endanger their own nation, but Trump and Cruz would go there and beyond. Trump is a solipsistic branding genius whose “policies” have no contact with Planet Earth and who would be incapable of organizing a coalition, domestic or foreign.

Cruz would be as universally off-putting as he has been in all his workplaces. He’s always been good at tearing things down but incompetent when it comes to putting things together.
_________________

He goes on to recommend a grass roots uprising to support candidate C – any of the others that could be C, instead of the two truly dangerous A and B candidates. And he ends his column with a rather plaintive request of Republicans:

Please don’t go quietly and pathetically into the night.

I say: Don’t allow Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to “let us sweat a little” and get us to worrying about the polished chrome. I know – I previously wrote a piece that said there have been other presidents in the past worse than Donald Trump. And that is possibly true. And I’m sure firemen in Peshawar, Beijing and Tehran have saved people from burning buildings. But those countries are already ruined beyond salvation. Let’s not let America be ruined too by electing either of these “gentlemen”.

I think most people know exactly what New York values are: socially liberal, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, focused on money and the media,” he said.

That’s an anti-Semitic dog whistle if I ever heard it. And apparently, the writers from Saturday Night Live were the only ones that picked up on it. Whew – Bibi Netanyahu, how’d you like dem Republicans now?

Does this sound familiar? If you were a sentient being in 1962, it should sound familiar:

Friend, either you’re closing your eyes
To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
Or you are unaware of the caliber of disaster
Indicated by the presence of a _____ in your community.

I left the key word blank. Know what it is? Here are your options:

1) Muslim immigrant
2) Tea Party Congressman
3) Planned Parenthood clinic
4) Member of Cliven Bundy’s family
5) None of the Above

Give up? If you tune in to Fox News, might that provide the answer? Nah. CNN? Uh, nope.

How about Turner Classic Movies? You’re getting there. OK – it’s a movie? Is it:

a) Dr. Strangelove?
b) Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
c) The Manchurian Candidate?
d) The Terminator?
e) None of the Above

Right you are – it’s the last one. And what is this terrible thing that will lead to gloom and doom?

Here it is folks: brace yourself:

Terrifying, right?

Here’s my point. Many of the candidates running for president in this year’s elections are using the same tactics that Professor Harold Hill employed in the 1962 film The Music Man. His goal was to frighten parents in River City Iowa into giving him money for instruments and uniforms for a boy’s band – to keep the young ones “moral after school” and out of the pool hall. Most of the Republican candidates are trying to frighten Americans into thinking that the pool table is Isis and they are coming to kill us all.

Your chances of dying at the hands of a terrorist? About one in twenty million. The likelihood that you’ll die when riding a bicycle? One in 141,000. So do the math: bicycles are 140 times more dangerous than Isis. So let’s recap:

Friend, either you’re closing your eyes
To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated
By the presence of a bicycle in your community.

I’ll warn Erik.