Leve doesn't love Love's...

...chances for reelection. Leve leaves the impression Love will lose.

That was my takeaway from this piece in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Michael Brendan Dougherty...

...has a piece in The Week titled "The existential despair of Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump" in which he argues that -- yes, you guessed it -- you shouldn't feel like you have to vote for "the lesser of two evils."

I'm sure you've heard some variation on this already: This will be the dirtiest election in history! Or: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have the highest negatives ever! Or, whatever.

According to Mr. Dougherty:

Don't let anyone tell you that the nearly uncontrollable urge to retch at the thought of this election is disproportionate, or somehow uncivil. When you contemplate the fate of your country in 2016, you have the right to be depressed, or even despairing.

By refusing to choose or — more boldly — refusing to care, you will be joining millions of people, who, in any given year, act as if voting for one of the two major parties is useless. 

Many of your friends will tell you that if you go on this way, refusing to choose, you are engaging in a "both sides" fallacy.

But this really is a "both sides" fallacy. I mean, come on, even most Republicans -- under Sodium Pentothal -- would admit that Donald Trump is unqualified to be president. Right? But when I said this to another couple recently neither one debated the point. Instead, the woman launched into a diatribe about why Hillary Clinton was unqualified for the office: "Benghazi," her email "scandal," the Clinton Foundation, etc.

I was in a good mood (they were buying), so I only responded by noting that Mrs. Clinton had served as both a United States Senator and Secretary of State, two jobs generally thought to be good preparation for the Oval Office.

And I didn't even mention that Hillary had been an integral part of two very successful eight-year administrations. You know, that whole "peace and prosperity" stuff? (Maybe she picked up a thing or two along the way.)

I also didn't talk about all those Republican Congressional committees (is it seven, or eight?) that have spent countless tax dollars and man-hours investigating "Benghazi" without turning up a single thing. Not one! And the email "scandal"? I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-informed person and yet I can't for the life of me get why this is considered a scandal. Do people -- even rabid Fox News-watchers -- really believe that Mrs. Clinton had some sort of "criminal intent" here? Really? (And I'm not including those who think the Clintons had Vince Foster murdered. I'm talking about people who don't own a tin foil hat.)

As for Mrs. Clinton's record in the Middle East, i. e., Libya, Syria, the vote to go to war with Iraq, the nuclear treaty with Iran, et cetera, et cetera -- who has gotten it right in the last however many years? George W. Bush? John McCain? Who's gotten it right ever? Psst: the Middle East is a great big mess -- it always was and it probably always will be. What's the Republican answer? Send more troops! Even Trump doesn't agree with that anymore.

Dougherty concludes with:

Someone will inevitably ask you this question: "But really, gun to your head: Do you want President Trump? Or do you want President Clinton?" You should reframe the question for them like this: "When someone asks, 'Gun to your head: Do you want a gun to your head? Or a gun to your head?' The only response is: 'Just get over with it.'"

(How about, Gun to my head: I'll take four more years of Obama!)

Now, look, I won't go so far as to say I'd like to have a beer with Hillary Clinton. I never cared much for her or Bill. They're both just a little too oily for my taste. But this isn't about having a beer -- I don't even drink beer -- it's about electing a president. (Preferably one who could actually do the job.) And who's the next best thing to President Obama? (No, not Bernie Sanders -- he got beat, remember?) Hillary Clinton. Why? Because she'll continue the legacy of the 44th president. And it's a good one.

P. S. Prediction: I'll say Mrs. Clinton does a good job and is reelected in 2020.

David Lamb, an author...

...and War Correspondent, died at age 76.

According to his obit in the Times (my emphasis):

He began his career at 14, after writing to The Milwaukee Journal and volunteering to contribute a weekly column about his beloved Braves from the perspective of a teenager who had seen the team desert Boston for Milwaukee. The Journal’s sports editor agreed, and David’s father rented him a typewriter for $9 a month.

Nothing like supporting your kid's dreams!

Looks like it's "curtains"...

...for Phyllis Curtin, an American soprano who died at age 94. There will be no more curtain calls for her.

(Sorry.)

Paul Ryan seemed positively...

...shocked -- shocked! -- the other day at Donald Trump's comments about a federal judge's Mexican heritage. They were "out of left field," gasped the Republican Speaker of the House.

From an article in the Times this morning, "Democrats Jump on Allies of Donald Trump in Judge Dispute" (my emphasis):

No prominent elected Republican came to Mr. Trump’s defense unreservedly. And others found themselves wondering aloud what it would take — what Mr. Trump would have to say or do — for Republicans who have endorsed him to start jumping ship.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, another former primary rival of Mr. Trump’s, urged Republicans who have backed Mr. Trump to rescind their endorsements, citing the remarks about Judge Curiel and Mr. Trump’s expression of doubt on Sunday that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the same lawsuit, given Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim noncitizens entering the country.

“This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” Mr. Graham said. “If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it,” he added. “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

And yet:

It remains very unlikely that ambitious Republicans and those on the ballot this year will publicly break with Mr. Trump until it becomes politically advantageous for them. At the moment, Mr. Trump enjoys wide support from the sort of rank-and-file Republican voters whom elected officials are loath to antagonize.

In a speech on the Senate floor as Congress returned from a break, the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, sought to yoke Mr. Trump to his counterpart, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — and to every Republican running this fall. Mr. Reid pointed out that Mr. McConnell, interviewed on NBC on Sunday, had “repeatedly refused to say Donald Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel’s ethnicity are racist.”

“This is precisely the type of failure that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place,” Mr. Reid said. “That’s because the hate emanating from Trump’s mouth reflects the Republican Party’s agenda here in the United States Senate for the past seven and a half years.”

And Sen. Reid is right; although I would say it's been much more than the last seven and a half years. I think you could trace today's Republican Party meltdown all the way back to the early 1990s and its treatment of Bill Clinton, the "accidental president."

Do I have to remind anyone that Clinton was impeached over an extra-marital affair with another consenting adult (who came on to him)? Or do you still think it was because the president "lied under oath"?

Both are wrong. Clinton was closer to the truth when he said his impeachment was a "coup d'etat." In other words, since Republicans couldn't beat Clinton at the ballot box they tried to defeat him by other means.

(I think that's when I first soured on the GOP. If you can't win in the marketplace of ideas maybe you should rethink your ideas.)

Republicans, through their media arm, Fox News, and from talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, have been dumbing down and thus creating Donald Trump's voters for over twenty years now. The chickens, as they say, have finally come home to roost.

And the establishment, for its part, has been mostly silent.

(By the way, that clip above isn't evidence of John McCain's courage -- his response should be considered baseline behavior. If someone tells you the earth is flat, you don't get points for telling him it's round.)

Let's see: Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and now Paul Ryan. Nope -- not one of them has stood up to what used to be called the "lunatic fringe." It's now just known as the "Republican Party base."

It's true: you reap what you sow.

The presidential election...

...will be held on Tuesday, November 8, exactly five months from Wednesday. Where do we stand?

Tomorrow Hillary Clinton is expected to clinch the Democratic nomination with a victory in New Jersey, before the polls in California even close.

Forgetting the Electoral College for a minute, in which the Democrats have a big advantage, here are just a few numbers to put it all in perspective.

Donald Trump won the Republican nomination with 11,676,355 votes out of 28,055,109 cast (before tomorrow's contests). That's about 42 percent of the total. That's a plurality, of course, but only of a party that represents about 42 percent of the overall electorate. Or, only about nine percent of the roughly 126,000,000 votes cast in the 2012 presidential election. In other words, Mr. Trump will have to persuade almost 50 million more Americans to vote for him in the general to exceed Mitt Romney's total in 2012.

Now, admittedly, that's a little misleading. After all, Romney only garnered a little over 10 million votes (52 percent) in the Republican primary of 2012 and managed to take over 47 percent of the popular vote against President Obama. So the election will probably be a lot closer to 50/50 in November.

But right now, according to Election Betting Odds, Hillary has about a 70 percent chance of winning vs. less than 25 percent for Trump. And if last week -- in which Trump struggled while Hillary seemed to gain confidence -- is any indication, Clinton could even exceed Obama's 2012 margin.

P. S. I'll say last week was the one in which Donald Trump finally peaked.

The Unfortunate Name...

 ...of the Day belongs to John Birch, the owner of Wyeth, a high-end furniture store in SoHo.