I’ve been sort of incommunicado on the interwebs for a few days and that’s just fine by me. As I’ve mentioned previously in these precincts as well as on soc. med., I sometimes get tired of hearing my own voice.
In any case, today’s a big day — and not just because it’s the Chicago Cubs home opener (after yesterday’s scheduled HO was snow/colded out).
April?
Today, my fellow citizens, is the first day of early voting in the Indiana state primary. From now through noon, Monday, May 7th, you get to pretend you run this country by casting a ballot at any of the early voting centers hereabouts. Go here for locations in Monroe County. You also get to vote on the actual primary election day, Tuesday, May 8, at your local polling place. The general election is Tuesday, November 6th.
This election cycle is a biggie inasmuch as it’s President Gag’s mid-term gauntlet. Remember the last big mid-term beauty contest? That’d be the election of 2010, the year after Barack Obama took office and during which his party lost both the House and the Senate, bringing us right up to this day and age wherein the hijacked Republican Party controls everything in the known universe, up to and including the White House, the House, the Senate, the vast majority of statehouses and governors’ mansions, and even the US Supreme Court, for pity’s sake.
Funny that, since every big deal national election year, the total number of Democratic votes exceeds that of the Republicans, so either my math skills are fercockt or something else very fishy is going on around this holy land.
This week’s Big Talk will feature the respective chairs of the Republican and Democratic parties, William Ellis and Mark Fraley. Both came to the WFHB studios to record with me yesterday and, mirabile dictu, not a voice was raised in anger nor a drop of blood spilled. In fact, the two party sachems actually like each other. Well, they get along awfully civilly, let’s say that.
An interesting little tidbit: I pressed Ellis on whether his party sees Li’l Duce as an asset or a drawback and, in answering, he danced around the Q., implying that, well, if a Rep. wants to hitch her/his wagon to P. Gag’s, that’d be fine but it’d be just as well if a GOP candidate establishes a healthy distance from the party’s national standard bearer.
Brought to you by the Republican Party.
I find that most telling. In a street brawl, if you sense any weakness in your opponent, any little opening or letting down of the guard, you exploit it, fast and furiously. When a county Republican official hints that its current Big Boy isn’t necessarily the ticket to victory and, in fact, may be considered in some quarters the equivalent of a pair of cement overshoes, that’s a mighty big opening.
And why in the holy hell aren’t the Dems taking it? Why aren’t they screaming the name Trump! at the tops of their lungs every minute of the day? The key to victory is to go strong, simple, and direct. One word. Trump. That’s the stuff to give to the troops. That’s what the hell the Republicans did for eight freaking years, their passport to controlling every legislature and executive branch known to humankind in this year of somebody’s lord, 2018. They screamed Obama from morning till night and often hollered his name in their sleep.
If even the Republicans themselves sense the man-boy at the top might be a hindrance, then it’s the duty and responsibility of the Dems to make sure every single right-thinking citizen of these United States knows it, today, tomorrow, the day after, and every single goddamned day until Nov. 6.
Look, the last charismatic leader the Reps. had was Saint Ronald Reagan. And nobody — nary a sole — among the party faithful ever hinted at or even entertained the notion that he might be a lead weight. If St. R. told them they all ought to jump off a cliff, there’d have been a massing of leapers at every single ledge in this nation. Today, though, plenty o’Republicans are about as nauseated by the state of the current administration as Dems are.
Acknowledge that fact, Dems! Rub it in. Don’t let anybody forget the party that kowtowed to nativists, the gun lobby, the radical religionists, and even the white supremacists, reaped what they’d sown in their current Pres. Way too many Dems these days are afraid of alienating somebody or something by harping on the Trump connection too much. Nonsense!
Go simple: The Republicans = Trump. There’s your message. Now, start hitting people over the head with it.
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Big Talk Links
I haven’t posted the podcasts of my last two Big Talks because 1) WFHB’s website was down; and 2) I forgot to do so when the website came back up. Anyway, herein I present the link* to the Thursday, March 29 edition featuring a couple of clips from former United Nations ambassador Samantha Power‘s speech at Indiana University last month, spliced in w/ me telling the story of former B-town mayor Frank McCloskey who, as a Congressbeing in the 1990’s, became a hero to many in the world when he pushed for the US to intervene to stop the genocides in the then-new republics of the former Yugoslavia. Phew! How’s that for a run-on sentence? Power, for her part, had won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on thaose and other genocides and ethnic cleansings. She immortalized McCloskey in her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
Last week, Thursday, April 5th, my Big Talk guest was James Clawson, a prof. at IU’s School of Informatics. He was a youthful computer geek who, while earning a master’s and PhD at Georgia Tech, worked passionately on bridging the gap between computer geekdom and the more traditional health care world. His post-doc project at GT entailed developing and studying the efficacy of a portable device designed for breast cancer patients. The little Android notebook connected those patients with other patients, with their own and other doctors, with research and the latest findings on the disease, and served as a data diary for them as they embarked on what Clawson calls their Cancer Journey.
Clawson: Bridging the gap.
Okay? Again, here’s the link* to the Power/McCloskey show and here’s where you click* to get the Clawson episode.
And remember, Monroe County’s major party majordomos, William Ellis and Mark Fraley, will chat with me over the airwaves this coming Thursday, April 12th, on WFHB, 91.3 FM.
We’ll talk.
[ * MG NOTE: Well, I’ll be damned! Here I sit in the Jefferson County Public Library in Madison, Indiana, ready to click on the Publish button for this post and what do I realize but that I’ve forgotten to bring the audio files of the aforementioned Big Talk episodes to upload to WordPress. Hah — speaking of fercockt! So, cool your heels for just a little while longer until I get home and upload those episodes. I’m beginning to think I need either a long vacation or an enforced stay in a sanitarium.]
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