Berning Ambition

March 9, 2016

il_570xN.535435305_spjsLight drizzling rain this early Wednesday on California’s north coast as we hunker down for more ‘conveyor-belt’ action.
According to the NWS this morning, three to six inches of rain could drench us heavily on-and-off until Saturday, creating flash flooding, especially with low-lying byways — poetic warning from our weather-service people: ‘It can be impossible to tell the condition of a road before it is too late! Turn Around, Don’t Drown!

Indeed — a sense and sensibility design, too, of America’s current attempt to elect a new president.
Except there’s no political mechanism for turning around.

(Illustration found here).

Yet despite a most-horrific bullshit-noise level, it’s also near-impossible to tell the condition of the road. (VOX):’Earlier in the night, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver said that a Sanders win in Michigan would “count as among the greatest polling errors in primary history.”
Strange street…

Bernie Sanders supposedly shocking upset of Hillary Clinton yesterday in the Michigan primary another turn in this twisted 2016 presidential campaign, and further indicating Hillary could way-easily implode/come-apart as we teeter on down the flooded road.
The big scare-question out of last night is can Bernie beat The Donald?
And Trump trumped himself, too.
The loudmouth asshole won the Michigan GOP primary, too, as well as in Mississippi and Hawaii.

In a way-ass-weird news conference last night, Trump blubbered about the victories so nearly incoherently the scene looked like surreal parody. I watched a huge chunk of it live on BBC news, and after awhile, really didn’t understand why the Brits would allow the clip so continue so fucking long.
An interesting take on that point this morning by Jack Mirkinson at Salon:

He was there to give a triumphant press conference after winning primaries in Michigan and Mississippi.
What he gave instead was a totally deranged, nearly hour-long coke binge of a “speech” in which he spent more time hawking his water and his wine—appropriate for someone who probably thinks of himself as a messiah by now—than talking about anything actually happening in the Republican race. (He also showed off a bunch of steak; it was that sort of evening.)
He eventually took questions from reporters, but the questions were barely audible.
The familiar mixture of baffled incomprehension and sheer terror that accompanies all Trump occasions surfaced instantly.
What also surfaced was one overwhelming question: Why in the world weren’t any of the cable news networks cutting away from this nonsense?
While Trump was holding court, Hillary Clinton spoke to her supporters at an event of her own.
She got exactly zero seconds of live coverage.
Oh, and Bernie Sanders was pulling off one of the most unexpected upsets of the entire election in the Michigan primary — a scrambling of conventional wisdom with potentially large implications about the kind of electorate facing the nominees in the general election.
None of it mattered as long as Trump was around.
CNN reduced the Democratic race to a graphic in the corner, which showed Sanders steadily increasing his vote share over Clinton.
But all that had to wait—Trump was having fun with old ex-Yankees!
Nothing, it seemed, could pull cable news off of its addiction to him, no matter how irrelevant or worthless his comments.
It was perhaps the starkest display yet of the media’s serial, monomaniacal focus on Trump, a focus that all-too-frequently slides into cynical, ratings-juicing irresponsibility.

Hence, a major obstacle for Democrats, especially Bernie. Can Bernie beat The Donald? Maybe/most-likely Hillary could, if she doesn’t freak.
The horror is The Donald being the next president of the United States.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.