I wrote:
It seems timely to document the scrapheap fire that is the 2016 USA General Election....
Does the metaphor 'scrapheap fire' work? I was aiming for an Oz equivalent to the USA/Canadian slang expression 'dumpster fire', a very common pundit turn of phrase in relation to the Trump campaign. A dumpster, more properly a Dumpster, is a trademarked corporate term for a particular brand of skip, a large rubbish bin. On, wait, the term _is_ known in Oz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster I will admit frankly that the ongoing persistence and viability of the trump dumpster fire (campaign) is humbling, as it has driven home to me that the USA so quirky and multfaceted that even native citizens such as yr. humble servant can be frequently overwhelmed by sheer WTFery. Being a politics junkie, I sat through most of the first presidential of several scheduled televised debates between the competent candidate and Trump -- about an hour and a half of it. The difference was stark: Secretary Clinton absolutely walked all over the Orange Menace, and closed with about the most masterful sixty seconds of trolling I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG8y4eisOOw (I hope and expect you can view that.) But this clip has slightly better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0T3c4jtn-w Transcript: Clinton: This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs. And one who has said pregnancy is a convenience to employers, who has said women do not deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men -- and one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them, and he called this woman 'Miss Piggy'. Then, he called her 'Miss Housekeeping, because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name: ... Trump [trying to interrupt]: Where did you find that? Where did you find that? Clinton: ...Her name is Alicia Machado. She has become a US citizen, and you can bet she's going to vote this November. [mic drop!] That was the closing moment of the entire debate, a masterful stroke of political rhetoric and guaranteed to push Trump's buttons. Notice that both of those have been excerpted out for the Spanish-language viewership -- no coincidence whatsoever. In addition to starkly putting Trump's profound misogyny on display, it also highlighted his ethnic anti-Hispanic bigotry. So, two separate -immense- segments of the electorate were attacked. Not to mention anyone who ever had weight-control problems. But wait: I anticipated that Trump wouldn't let that go, and he did not disappoint. He did what with any other candidate would be a truly remarkable, nay, inconceivable thing: He doubled down -- in a spectacular fashion that RE-offended those two groups of citizens, _and_ also dramatised Trump's erratic, impulsive, rage-driven nature. While caught digging a hole, and in the eyes of the world, he found a way to dig much deeper: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-meaning-of-trumps-early-morni... Yesterday, quite a few days after the first debate, the storm of controversy raised _and_ the sudden rise to prominence of the eloquent Ms. Machado, campaigning for Clinton, having continued to reverberate, Mr. Trump decided to lash out yesterday... by personally slurring Ms. Machado in a series of several tweets between _3:20AM and 5:30AM_ local time. As John Cassidy of _The New Yorker_ points out, basically WTF? A man running for the highest office in the land is getting up in the middle of the night to rage-tweet and lash out personally at a former beauty-contest winner? ¡Senor Trump, que están locos! (Hey, I'm posting from California, where even we Scandinavians speak some Spanish.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/09/29/trumps-on-a-ro... http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/1/1576512/-View-from-the-Left-She-dese... http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/caught-in-trump-s-cycle-of-rage-and-abus... As the last of these three links points out, Trump falls back on _exactly_ the logic of an abuser, right down to the literal, classic phrase 'She deserved it.' He engages in what author Marshall calls 'dominance politics', and it's appalling. I _hope_ that the women voters of the USA, in particular (not to mention Hispanics, people with weight-control struggles, and, well, everyone with higher cerebral functioning) is paying attention. But the thing about this very bizarre election cycle is, you have a difficult time knowing. All the old rules seem in doubt. Bonus link (of which the top two entries would probably be most of interest): http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/vote.html