Who's Afraid of Virginia State?

The 2016 Presidential Debates will resemble
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The moderators for the 2016 presidential debates have been announced and a startling image came into my mind. The second debate will be co-hosted by CNN's Anderson Cooper and ABC's Martha Raddatz. This will be the first time both the debaters and the moderators will be opposite-sex pairs. It made me think of the event as a horrible nightmare version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, two drunken couples clashing in an all-night boozefest. Here's my version of the debate:

Who's Afraid of Virginia State (with apologies to Edward Albee)
Hillary Clinton as Martha
Donald Trump as George
Anderson Cooper as Nick
Martha Raddatz as Honey

The scene: a living room in Washington DC, late at night. The set is in darkness. We hear loud voices arguing offstage. The door opens, Hillary and Donald enter, returning from a late-night party.

Hillary: What a dump!...What's that from?
Donald: How the hell should I know?
Hillary: It's from some damn movie. Some damn Warner Brothers epic.
Donald: Ah ha! Your memory is failing. Just like I've been saying. Your health is terrible. You're falling apart. You don't have the stamina to be president.
Hillary: Listen, baby, I can drink you under any goddamn table you want and don't you forget it. You're the one who's in terrible shape in spite of what that crazy doctor of yours says. Now fix me a drink, lover.

Clinton vs. Trump: Wicked Stepmother vs. Drunken Uncle

I get it. I understand how many voters are frustrated by both major party candidates in this presidential election. Let's take a look at both sides of this difficult bargain. Trump is a total non-starter, totally unacceptable even in a nightmare to be the leader of the free world. Can you imagine the havoc he would wreak. Every day he'd shoot his mouth off insulting a world leader, breaking a treaty, being "sarcastic" and we'd be on the perpetual brink of World War III. It's reached the point now where even members of his own party are disowning him. He doesn't even understand basic grammar or concepts of rhetoric. This past week, his "off-the-cuff" controversial statements on "Second Amendment people" and Obama "founding" ISIS caused violent reactions among the media and in the halls of power, and were purposefully ambiguous. He could have clarified them, but he wanted the explosions to detonate. It's his way of having fun. (He often says during his rallies after inciting violence and mocking his enemies, "Isn't this fun?")

Trump or Clinton: Who Is the Biggest Pirate?

Jimmy Olsen #118

Politics rears its ugly head in the weirdest of places. Earlier this week I went to return a Jimmy Olsen comic to the guy on 40th street in Manhattan who sold it to me (It turned out I already had a copy of it--It was the one from the late 1960s where Jimmy turns into a hippie and launches a Hate-In against Superman.) The comic-book seller also has numerous campaign buttons for both Clinton and Trump on his card table. He was engaged in conversation with another gentleman with a British accent. The English guy was saying he'd won a bet of several hundred pounds that Trump would win the Republican nomination and he was laying a similar wager that the Donald would become President. He went on to say that Hillary was a tremendous crook and there would a Watergate-sized scandal if the Justice Department did not indict her for the email thing.

Political Thoughts

God help us!

GOP candidate Chris Christie recently said parents shouldn't have to worry about sending their kids to school and not having them come back alive. The irony is he was speaking in reference to the San Bernadino shootings by a radical Islamic terrorist couple. He's overlooking the fact that parents have been worried about their children's survival ever since the crazy guy shot up that school in Newtown, Conn. GOP candidates are picking and choosing which mass shootings to be concerned about. If they involve Muslims then it's a real cause for panic. If it's white guys then there's basically nothing we as a society can do about it because that would mean taking away someone's precious gun. You'll notice no one is doing anything about the militant ranchers taking over a government wildlife preserve in Oregon because they didn't like a judge's ruling on their court case. Could it be because these guys are white and Christian? Can you imagine what would happen if they were African-American, Native American, or Muslim?

Donald Trump: Raging Id

Donald Trump Free of Hairspray

We have reached the point where Donald Trump is no longer a joke, but a threat to civilized discourse and the political process. He has become the raging id of the American public like the invisible monster in Forbidden Planet which is really Walter Pidgeon's subconscious. No matter what outrageous, childish thing he says, his supporters still favor him. Many pundits are saying none of the traditional rules of politics or even civility apply to Trump and the media lets him get away with all kinds of incredible lies, distortions, evasions, and exaggerations. (Where in New Jersey did he personally see thousands of people cheering for the Twin Towers falling? He said he personally saw this, not film of it on TV.)

I've concluded that a certain percentage of US voters wants to be like Trump. They want their racist, sexist, entitled white male identity to go unchecked and unchallenged. Like schoolyard bullies, they want to be able to make fun of disabled people, foreigners, women, gays, anyone with a difference or expressing an opposing viewpoint, without being called on it by the teacher and made to stand in the corner. They want say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays and not feel guilty about it--and they want to force everyone else to say Merry Christmas. (Trump said at a rally-"When I'm president, everyone will say Merry Christmas" How is he going to accomplish that? With a Christmas micro-chip implanted in our brains and we get a shock if we say Happy Holidays?)