Rather than trying to explain this, I want to demonstrate it. The idea is that voting records of office holders do not matter.

Let’s take two Senators, say Tester and Daines from my former home state of Montana, one a Democrat and one a Republican. Lets assume that there are ten pieces of important legislation, and that Tester and Daines voted as indicated:

• 1. A bill to designate certain areas of Montana wilderness. (DEFEATED 27-73) Tester votes Yeah, Daines Nay.
• 2. A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code to index the floor over which Social Security benefits are taxed. (DEFEATED 46-54) Tester votes Y, Daines N
• 3. A bill to release highway funds for portions of the Montana Interstate badly in need of repair. (PASSES 95-5) Tester votes Y, Daines votes N
• 4. A bill to remove marijuana from the banned substances list. (DEFEATED 96-4) Tester voted N, Daines voted N.
• 5. A bill to protect endangered species by re-listing wolves as a protected species. (DEFEATED 60-40) Tester voted Y, Daines voted N
• 6. A vote to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. (Approved 67-33) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y)
• 7. A bill to authorize funding for forest fire fighters for the coming fiscal year (PASSED 61-39) Tester voted Y, Daines voted N)
• 8. A bill to overturn portions of the Affordable Health Care Act regarding mandatory payment of premiums to private corporations. (DEFEATED 57-43) Tester voted N, Daines voted Y
• 9. A bill to override presidential veto of approval of the Keystone Pipeline (PASSED 67-33) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y
• 10. A bill to approve the weapons budget for the coming year. (PASSED 98-0) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y

Looking over the voting record, the Conservation Voters, based on votes 1, 5 and 7, gave Jon tester a 100% approval record, and Steve Daines a 0% approval rating.

Based on 8,9 and 10, the American Conservative Union gave Jon Tester a 67% approval rating, and Steve Daines a 100% rating.

AARP issues a favorable scorecard to Tester based on 2 and 8, and Daines a negative.
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Now, go back to the list above, and reverse the votes. Change every Tester Y to a N, and the same for Daines. Note that in doing this, nothing changes except two very critical bills – TPP and Keystone. On those votes, their votes would have made a difference, and they both voted with the Republican majority.

However, each will have a completely different voting record to present to voters and to the groups that tally votes.

Voting records do not matter. They can be and are tailored to suit the needs of the office holder.

• Most votes are lopsided, so a senator can vote either way without affecting the outcome.
• Senators agree in advance on who is allowed to be for or against certain bills, often based on election cycles.
• Some bills, like TPP and Keystone, are supported by powerful interest groups, and so transcend parties and always receive just enough support to pass.

Tester could easily present himself as a Republican, Daines as a Democrat, without affecting the outcome of legislation, and voters would support them based on party affiliation.

Voting records are completely meaningless.

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” (Orwell, Introduction to Animal Farm)

I could write about partisan politics, as such writing is encouraged and has no impact on power. It also generates readership. Partisan blogs run up all kinds of numbers. People love to squabble back and forth about our false issues, fake division, wedge issues, false ideologies. The whole notion of “left” and “right” fades to black time and again when some issue, important to power, comes to the fore. Whether it is the Trans-Pacific Partnerships, the Keystone Pipeline, wars or selling off of the commons or refusal to regulate or punish wrongdoers, criminals and corrupt officials, the parties are one.

But on trivia, they are at each others’ throats. Thus do we enjoy the illusion of freedom from censorship.

I was just reading Orwell’s introduction to Animal Farm, which was not published with the original book. In it he’s upset that he is not allowed to criticize Russia, and that the implication that the book is about Russia has prevented its being published. His biggest complaint is what is that he found censorship in England to be largely voluntary, but still able to silence people with “surprising effectiveness.”

So too in the U.S. in 2015 – all of that prattling about partisan politics goes on because it is allowed to go on. Electing a Democrat or a Republican is a harmless activity, as each is beholden to the same powers once elected.

On the other hand, discussions of unpopular issues is not allowed in mainstream publications and media outlets. We are as effectively censored as the U.S.S.R. was ever, and it is done without overt government pressure. The only noise that is allowed to escape the cage is the pointless chatter.

Orwell closes his Introduction with a chilling thought:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

How much of our civic dialogue is about who should or should not be allowed access onto public forums, as if people cannot use their brains and judge ideas on their own merit? If a group of dedicated citizens question official truth about public assassinations or 9/11 or any other important event, so what? Why make them shut up? Why turn them away at the door? What scares power so that it cannot allow some honest dissent? Why do people go along with it, as if censorship makes them smarter?

Censorship in this country is pervasive and oppressive. I feel it. If you don’t, it can only be because you are thinking thoughts that do not trouble anyone in power.

Anyway, tomorrow I carry on as I have been. I am aware of two things: People are curious, and afraid to be known to be curious. For that, you should be ashamed.

In the coming days and weeks I am going to write about the important events of my times (I turn 65 this month) with an eye on details. I will write short pieces, as long pieces do not get read. (This piece is 626 words, and too long. I don’t imagine that longer equals better. Quite the opposite.)

I will try to walk and chew gum, including not only our important historical coups d’état, but current events in Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, France and Germany. We appear to be on the verge of something big. My focus will be on details, as most of what we are intended to see is a lie, and only details can help us punch through to get at truth.

Americans are encouraged to be incurious about major events. People of a more inquisitive nature have been successfully marginalized, so that we have, in effect, a tyranny of the dull. It’s an effective thought control regime, and is extremely difficult to overcome. Normal exposure to American news and entertainment media offers no incentives towards intelligence or curiosity.

Here are some elements of the herding effect of our news outlets:

• FOX News has an older audience who have mostly lost their cognitive skills. Note in the breakdown by age to the left, that 2-3% of senior citizens were proficient in cognitive skills, a serious decline from the 12-13% of younger people. Natural aging might explain this, but it might also reflect years of exposure to a dumbing-down media. There is no avenue in mainstream media for maintaining higher levels of intellectual ability.
• People who do have higher cognitive levels are more likely to get their news from NPR, PBS, or perhaps the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (which is charged with containing a smart and investment-savvy following). These audiences imagine themselves better informed than their FOX counterparts. They all absorb the same information in different formats, and are only segmented for marketing purposes.

News consumers above are effectively walled off from each other. There’s little travel between the segments.

There is more segmentation:

• There is an Agitprop media, right-wing talk radio (and a small “left” counterpart). Audiences for these outlets, functionally illiterate and kept in a state of perpetual anger, are used as a bludgeoning force against members of the media and public officials. It’s an enormous echo chamber where people absorb only selected talking points of selected “news” events*
• On the “left,” among more intellectually curious people, there is a court jester system in place. These are outlets like Daily Show, Bill Maher, John Oliver and the whole of the MSNBC crowd. (Oliver appears to be almost poised to say something important. He won’t, of course. Bill Maher learned that lesson in 2002.) These outlets encourage their self-imagined smart-set followers to focus on the failings of their opposites in the two-party system. (Jon Stewart made a career of ridiculing FOX, whose viewers are barely sentient.) The effect is to mute any energetic organizing by keeping people focused on the wrong targets.
• The vast majority of Americans are turned off and indifferent, only passively absorbing information in a haphazard manner from primary and secondary education and the entertainment systems. Passive exposure yields a muddled mainstream, but they are strongly encouraged to vote and imagine themselves vigilant citizens.

It is important to break free of this system. I was as much a part of it as any when a few details that did not make sense caused me to look a little deeper.
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*Thus do we see leaders of the Republican Party, who need this sector in their voting base, behaving as if they were stupid. That is only an act to satisfy the Limbaugh set. Some, like Ted Cruz, might be genuinely stupid. Most are not.

On these early spring days I’ve been working in our garage while listening to Mae Brussel radio shows from the early 1970’s. She was on the air for one hour weekly for years in northern California in a time when radio stations had “public affairs” departments. That’s an oxymoron, I realize.

Brussel was an unusual woman, inquisitive and thorough. She harvested information from newspapers, magazines and news reports, maintaining cross-referenced files on people and subjects in the manner of J. Edgar Hoover, but for a better purpose. She read every book that time allowed her. In so doing, a different world unfolded before her. She was not mystical, just observant.

Today we would label such behavior an aberration, and she would be called a “conspiracy theorist.” That is part of our thought control regime, designed to keep normally curious people from straying out of bounds. These are oppressive times – we have so much information at our fingertips, and are so afraid to access it. Worse than that, people are mostly boring, smug and credulous at once, self-infused with the idea that they are somehow clever and wise for all of the things they do not know and refuse to investigate. Eeesh!

Incuriosity and indifference, even if studied, are indistinguishable from stupidity. But I digress.

I am not nostalgic. I do not believe in the ‘good old days. I listen to Brussel with an ear attuned to similarities between those times and now. There are many. Then as now, public officials were usually in some manner compromised if not overtly corrupt, and TV was a drug.

But there was a difference. Brussel’s audience was people attuned and aware of incongruities between news and reality. She was constantly fielding letters and calls from sharp listeners. It was a minority of people of course, but enough that her radio show had a large following.

Mae was speaking to college students too. She was warning them that the government was tired of the activism of the sixties, the protests, teach-ins – a climate of vigilance that made the ordinary criminal activity of public officials more difficult. They wanted to dumb it all down again. She saw on the horizon a problem with drugs, and told college kids that they would be easy to come by and to avoid them. She urged her listeners to keep their minds clean and sharp.

That was prescient, I would say. Drug use has always been with us. We all know the image of the stoner and the attitude that accompanies habitual marijuana use – a mildly delirious indifference.

Pot is legal where I live, and the movement is spreading. This is not a sea change – as my son reminded me, pot has always been legal for white folks. Legalization will allow it to penetrate deeper into society. It was a huge tool in the law enforcement arsenal for harassing and imprisoning minorities, and police will have to reload their quivers with other tools. They’ll figure that out.

Legalization of marijuana is a step forward for civil liberties, for minorities anyway. But habitual use ought to be discouraged as well. A government that can stigmatize intelligence and curiosity ought to be able to attach a touch of shame to pot use. But they won’t.

Pot and stupidity go hand-in-hand. But a dumbed down public is a good doggy. Here’s a bone. Or a bong.

It is a good time to pause here and reflect on what has transpired these past days on this blog. I have introduced hard evidence and reviewed a few methods of critical thinking. I have been greeted with derision. I quite expected this.
Continue reading “Why even care about truth?” →

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” (Voltaire)

I am enjoying the news media as they wrestle with Hillary Clinton’s handling of official U.S. business on a private email server. It’s not complicated. She is hiding things we should know about. There is no other plausible reason.

She will be forgiven and the matter will pass, as the U.S. media does not investigate powerful people. We’ll get coverage, but no insight. [Along those lines, Daily Beast does its doody here]

In a recent post I pointed to (painfully obvious) planted evidence, a “hijacker’s” passport found several blocks from the World Trade Center after 9/11. No bodies survived, none of the millions of parts used to make a jet aircraft were found in the rubble. But the passport turned up.

I asked readers, including two commenters directly, to consider the implications.

The predictable response was no response. Such a glaring anomaly pushes subconscious fear closer to the surface. I fully understand the silence of the readers.

Such oppressive silence is a manifestation of hidden power, and is common in every age. Andersen published The Emperor’s New Clothes in 1837, but the story can be traced back centuries before that. Galileo was not arrested for spreading lies, but exposing hidden truth. Julian Assange lives the Ecuadorian Embassy in London now, Bradley Manning is in prison, Edward Snowden in Russia … for saying things that happen to be true.

Even recently with the Charlie Hebdo affair in France there has to be discomfort among thoughtful people that the supposed murderers were hooded men – they could be anyone. Shades of 9/11, the supposed perpetrators left behind an easily discovered driver’s license.

I know the sense of betrayal that one feels when a cherished illusion is destroyed. But we all have to grow up some time, and now would be an excellent time to start.

Robert Siegel is a news reader for NPR, and widely considered one of the better ones in the country. He is the host of a show called “All Things Considered” which airs each evening.

Siegel once commented that he would not be interested in “… airing the views of such media and political critics as Noam Chomsky” on All Things Considered. (Yes, I too marvel at the inappropriateness of the program’s name.)

Siegel routinely allows all manner of right-wing and right-center commentary on its programming, but insists that Chomsky is not welcome. He has said that Chomsky

“…evidently enjoys a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness and media manipulation.”

The word “evidently” is a tell, indicating the Siegel is not familiar with Chomsky’s writing or his world-wide reputation. If Siegel had real chops, he would be eager to discuss Chomsky’s ideas among critics and supporters and with Noam himself. Listeners could draw their own conclusions rather than having Siegel act as gatekeeper.

Not so. Chomsky is simply dismissed. He has been interviewed widely all over the world on media outlets large and small. He routinely fills concert halls and other venues when he lectures both in the US and abroad. But only rarely, perhaps three times in fifty years, has he been allowed on the American mainstream media.

Ours is a heavily censored media that allows discussion of issues only within a very narrow framework, that of our two corporate financed parties. It is true that there is passion involved as they debate horse races and candidate speeches or wedge politics. They do give the appearance of diversity of views. This is important, as it reinforces the illusion of self-government.

The natural effect of the censorship is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind environment where media distracts more than informs, and points our attention at minutiae while ignoring the vital issues of our time, the ongoing investigation of major events part of it. Siegel (or Brian Williams or Jon Stewart) would be quickly out of a job if he dared discuss the glaring contradictions in the official 9/11 story, but is on safe ground talking about legalized pot or a mosque or abortion.

If you really want to be challenged to consider ideas of thinkers of high caliber, go back in time and watch the following, from an era when there was a freer marketplace for ideas, though even then heavily censored. (Buckley, after all, was given free access to public television for his whole right-wing agenda, while no such access has ever been allowed dissidents of Chomsky’s ilk.) The two clips in total are about nineteen minutes.

“The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” (Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America)

Conspiracy theorists are really nothing more than skeptics. But as the case put forward by the Warren Commission began to collapse in the late 1960’s, CIA saw a need to immunize the general population from doubt, and so instructed its media moles to start branding skeptics as that. (In the late 70s we learned that CIA had placed 400 or more moles in the news media and academia, giving us our nightly news and scholarly books on current events, basically rewriting our history as we go.)

Skeptics, now belittled as conspiracy theorists, are the vigilant citizenry that a republic might need if there still existed a chance to keep it.

It appears now that the education system, nothing to brag about from the 1900’s forward, has gotten very proficient at turning out graduates at all levels who are not capable of exercising skepticism, or critical thinking skills. Consider this:

In 2003 the Department of Education did a study of adult literacy, and the findings were unsettling. Here is how it defined “proficient,” its highest level of skill:

Only 13 percent of Americans qualified as proficient. More interesting, only 31 percent of college graduates did. [More disturbing yet, see page 15 of the study: The grouping of those involved in graduate studies is only 36% proficient!]

Knowing the basic skill sets of most Americans, government, the media, advertisers and public relations people, writers and elected officials are able to lie with ease. And they do. As the bumper sticker says, everything we know is wrong. Here’s an extreme example (a 17 second clip):

(I do like that the news reader in this clip said “if you can believe that.”)

Stop and think: We were told that a jet aircraft slammed into a building at 500+ miles per hour* and that in the resulting inferno the planes and everyone aboard were incinerated.

Knowing that, what are the chances that one piece of paper encased in plastic not only survived, but ended up several blocks away? It has to escape the blaze, be transported in some manner, and be found in the huge mess that was Ground Zero. It has to be that one person’s passport, and not that of another passenger or airline employee, or even one of the several thousand people who died that day.

I do not have to calculate odds here. It is simply impossible. That passport came from some other source.

Given that the passport could not possibly have survived the inferno and then move blocks away, what are the implications?
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*Passenger airliners can only travel at those speeds in rarified air at 30-40,000 feet. At ground level, flying at that speed would cause a jet aircraft to disintegrate in midair due to resistance. The process of landing an airliner takes a half an hour or more because the pilot is slowly reducing his speed to allow him to enter heavier air as he approaches the airport.

One of my favorite teachers growing up was a nun with a mustache, Sister Janice (ju-neese’), who I had in fifth and sixth grade. I probably did not learn anything worthwhile. By that time I knew how to read and cipher, so school was just repetition and testing. I do remember her, standing by the window overlooking First Second Avenue South in Billings as she talked about the death of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations on September 18th of 1961, the day before. Sr. Janice, of course, thought that it was the International Communist Conspiracy that killed him, and we kids were brought up in that paranoid circus, so we thought that too. She spoke with gloom abut the world we were going to inherit.

It would be years before I came to learn that Hammarskjold had been gunned down by our old buddies in the CIA, who had not too long before that also murdered Patrice Lumumba. In the coming months CIA would also dispatch Ecuadorian President Jose Velasco and General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

The theme behind the murders was the dominant propaganda meme of the time, that they were communists. The real reason for their deaths was that in the wake of World War II, with Britain and France greatly weakened, former resource colonies were breaking free of chains and charting independence courses for themselves. The CIA, Capitalism’s Invisible Army, was appointed the new keeper of order and was in brush fire mode.

The murders served both to get rid of pesky democratic forces, but also to warn all others in the colonial world that a new sheriff was on the beat. Any who got in the way of American corporations’ access to local resources would encounter assassins, marines, fighter jets and thugs parading as American elected officials.

One such thug was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a crude and coarse man who once, when asked why we were in Vietnam, took out his dick and shook it at reporters saying “This is why.” Johnson was a murderer, but only a local thug. Many have inferred that his crimes in Texas suggest he had a role in the assassination of President Kennedy, but he was, in my view, merely controllable due to his corruption, much like Harry Truman. Those who wheeled him into the Vice Presidency, and ultimately presidency, knew he could be easily managed due to his past. His rightful place was in prison, or passing into the netherworld in a Texas gas chamber. He was that corrupt.

That’s just how it works – to the naive it appears that men and women arise from the grassroots and run for office and get elected and do the people’s business. There are indeed many people like that, but they don’t often get elected. They are not corruptible. One key to getting elected is a skeleton in the closet, a lever by which a person can be controlled.

• Side note: Often enough, if a good lever does not exist, it can be supplied. For instance, the amazingly beautiful woman who did business with Elliot Spritzer and brought him down as governor of New York was part of a honey trap, a common ploy used to compromise troublesome officials. Please ask yourself, gentlemen, what you would do if this woman stumbled into your lap.

Many people know about Bobby Baker. He was a scandalous Washington, DC figure in the early 1960’s who ran a club where powerful people could engage in trysts and enjoy some protection. The Kennedy boys were clients, and JFK’s famous dalliance with an East German spy, Ellen Rometsch originated there. But Baker had many irons in the fire, and was tied to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and so JFK had decided that in the 1964 election, Johnson would be dropped in favor of North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford.

That’s all filthy, but not unusual. Anywhere there is power, there is corruption, hookers, drugs, bag men and assassins. Johnson’s favorite assassin was guy named Mac Wallace. One witness has placed Wallace in a certain book depository on 11/22/63, but that’s more a rewriting of history, as CIA is anxious to do anything to deflect blame from itself in that murder. So there’s a school of thought that traces the JFK murder to LBJ, but it falls apart on close examination. Johnson was not powerful enough to orchestrate an event of that magnitude.

But Mac Wallace was a busy man.

Another friend of LBJ’s was Billy Sol Estes, who was doing a sale/leaseback scam for fertilizer storage tanks in West Texas. It sounds mundane, but there were 33,000 of them and it was a multi-million dollar enterprise. Following the money led back to a man in the Agriculture Department, Henry Marshall, who was tied to LBJ.

LBJ ordered Marshall’s death – “get rid of him.” A man resembling Mac Wallace asked direction to Marshall’s home one day, and thereafter Marshall was bound with a plastic bag over his head and a hose running from an exhaust pipe, and was plugged with five bullet wounds. It was very clumsy. His body was moved to a nearby farm, and when the five bullets holes were tied to a shotgun found nearby, it was ruled a suicide. I guess it makes perfect sense in Texas.

In the succeeding months thereafter, George Kritilek (carbon monoxide), Harold Eugene Orr (ditto), Howard Pratt (need you ask?) and Coleman Wade (small plane crash – gotcha!) all turned up dead, and all ties between Billy Sol Estates and LBJ were severed. Billy Sol testified to all of this in 1984, after LBJ was dead, naming LBJ as a participant.

That’s your country, folks, just a small slice of real history. A thief and murderer sat in the White House for four years, in real life a man who should have been sitting in prison. Had he waved his dick at anyone there, it would have been severed.

The population of the United States is a smart bunch, generally, well-educated and well-versed in politics. Not much gets by them. I have been in and around politics most of my adult life, and so have familiarity with the attitudes and ideas, and the tactics by which people are grouped, for all our good, into movement politics.

By far the most effective, educated and cagey group is the Democrats. I was born and raised to be a Republican, but as I like to say, I got over to the other side as soon as I could. Once enmeshed with the culture, I found a rich garden, a full life complete with outlets for activism, self-education, and leadership. Democrats had all the bases covered. If I wanted to work to preserve the environment, they offered candidates and pamphlets and legislation designed for that purpose. If I wanted to work for human rights, where else to go? The Democratic program for Central America, the Middle East, South America and Southeast Asia was a feed bag of programs designed to advance development, democracy, and basic human dignity. The national platform included platforms on anti-racism, choice, the environment, control of the corporate sector, and most importantly, peace.

That’s why our society is so well equipped for world leadership. It’s not our leaders – sometimes we introduce clinkers like George W. Bush, but the society as a whole is so vibrant, so well schooled in ground-level organization, and so well-educated that he was but a passing ship in the night, an aberration. Soon enough he was upended and put out to pasture, and a real leader took is place, a highly intelligent man, a scholar, a community organizer, a charismatic figure, and one who was of a minority race. That sort of man could only come to a leadership position by the vehicle known as the “Democratic Party.”

So it is with some regret that I see Barack Obama’s term come to an end. Yet, and this speaks so highly of the party, there is no shortage of leaders. The party has a strong bench. Waiting in the wings is another person of intelligence, compassion, vision and skill, and a woman. I am four paragraphs into this, far enough down that everyone has stopped reading. I’ll return to the theme for the last paragraph, where most eyes generally skip when bored.

James Carville spoke at the Mansfield-Metcalf dinner in Helena last weekend. I should not have put the words “Mansfield-Metcalf” in this paragraph, as skimming eyes might pick up and read what is really being written here. But I think I am safe that most are moving on to the last paragraph. Swede brought me a quote, verified, from Carville, a man who I like for some reason. He said “The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic operative instead of a Republican was there were more Democrats that didn’t have a clue than there were Republicans.” I am feeling a surge of pride in reading that, as I said as much on my own accord in the post below this, that Republican leadership does not have to lie to its base the way that Democrats do, as they are all “Benghazi crazy,” or on the same page ideologically, right-wing extremists who feed on and support one another.

Democrats are a wonderful party. I had to say that at paragraph opening for deflection purposes. Here is what is real. Democrats are a largely ineffective group, tending to be soft and idealistic to a degree, but who care more about winning elections and earning validation points than actually knowing anything about politics and policies. They are so easily buffaloed. Even now, as they are set to say goodbye to Neocon Obama, they are welcoming Neocon Hillary into leadership. She’ll win their nod because she stands a good chance of winning, and because her being a woman feeds their need for that sense of moral superiority they so crave. They’ll ignore her warmongering tendencies and vote her into office, if possible. This country is such a zoo, a well-to-do banana republic with a political iq somewhere in the teens. What was that blockbuster Tracy Jordan movie? Oh yeah. It was called Hard to Watch.

With Obama leaving office, we now might stumble, but I trust the Democrats, with such a deep bench, will put up another person of such intelligence and vision. I hope it’s Hillary, but I trust my party. If not her, someone of equal talent will rise through the ranks. Remember, Obama was known to no one, and by a natural process of grassroots percolation, found himself in Chicago at Grant Park in November of 2008. I saw the tears, the smiles, the hopes of a nation. Maybe that moment will never happen again, but I trust that in 2016, November, an New York, a similar moment comes about when a woman, with her former-president husband and daughter and grandchild at her side, speaks to the throngs of worshiping admirers.

This is our essence, our sense of purpose, our homeland, our hope for the future. We are all Americans, but as a Democratic American, I stand just a little higher in pride and fulfillment than the honorable members of the other permitted party.