The Clinton News Network

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Aug 2016

Due to a failure of my cable company, I could not watch either business news or the one serious general news channel on TV.  The only general news channel I could get was the Clinton News Network.

And their pants were on fire.

To a man and woman the talking heads of the Clinton News Network were darkly accusing Donald Trump of having made a death threat against Hillary Clinton.  This was on a day when tangible proof of pay-for-play appeared: favors from Hillary Clinton’s State Department in exchange for million dollar speaking fees to Bill Clinton came to light in emails Hillary failed to turn over to the State Department.  This failure to turn over was in violation of more than one oath she swore.  Proof of perjury, to say nothing of corruption.

Apparently, actual proof of perjury is less newsworthy than a partisan interpretation of an off-hand remark.  I guess it depends on what the meaning of sensational is.

(It would be too much to expect of the Clinton News Network to report that the man whom Julian Assange had just indicated was his source of the leaked DNC emails was been murdered under mysterious circumstances less than two weeks ago.)

Trump’s side was not aided by the tut-tutting of commentators on the right, for whom Trump is anathema.  He’s not turned the corner, and never will, pronounced syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.  As if this expectation of corner turning on the part of Krauthammer is a valid measure of Trump’s capability and performance as president.

Americans have this funny expectation, and even desire, that their presidential candidates lie to them.  You see it frequently in the comment that a candidate moves left or right during the primaries and then tacks to the center during the general election.  Apparently, saying what you believe and sticking with it is too radical a concept, and Trump isn’t changing according to the formula.

For all their age, the hot-house plants of the Washington commentariat have never encountered a type like Trump.  Trump is obviously completely confident in front of a crowd.  He seeks to entertain them, at the same time that he is informing them.  Trump is absolutely comfortable in his skin.  He knows who he is, and for the most part those listening to him speak in person know who he is also.  Trump has not had his personality warped by a lifetime in politics and of being hammered throughout his adult life in the public square on the grounds of political correctness.

With Trump, what you see is what you get.  If he is saying it, he believes it.  There appears to be no calculation in it.  He reasons to his position with no premises of political expediency for himself.  When he announced his candidacy, he took an extremely inexpedient position on illegal immigration.  He said what he thought, said so entertainingly, and in a way that said, “and I don’t care what other people think”, and it happened that millions of people liked what they heard in spite of the fecal-storm in the media that accompanied it.

With Hillary, all you know for sure is that you have a congenital liar before you saying things she has focussed grouped to death.

The Second Amendment was adjudicated twice recently before the Supreme Court, the Heller case and the McDonald case.  The Heller case established beyond a reasonable doubt that the right to keep and bear arms was an individual, common law right founded upon the right of self-defense that existed in the law prior to the adoption of the U.S. constitution.  It was not a right granted, it was a right affirmed by the constitution, for purposes of clarity and so that law-makers couldn’t make law to deprive people of their means of self-defense.  The Second Amendment was inserted into the Bill of Rights because the British had tried to confiscate privately owned firearms of the American colonists as a means of quelling the simmering revolution.  That episode is part of the reason why the Second Amendment begins with “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state…”

At the beginning of the republic, the country could ill-afford a large standing army, and one would have been looked upon with suspicion by the people anyhow.  The people were to look to themselves primarily for defence against tyranny, either foreign or domestic.  The private ownership of firearms in the United States is thus connected not only with self-defense against criminals but with defense against tyranny.  An attempt by government to confiscate privately owned firearms is the first sign of impending tyrannical action on the part of the government, by depriving them of the means of resisting tyranny.

Baked into the idea of the Second Amendment is the capacity to rebel against tyrannous action.  Thus when Trump said that Second Amendment people might be able to stop Hillary Clinton from arranging for the deprivation of their rights, he touched on the capacity for rebellion against such deprivation.  This the Clinton News Network interpreted uncharitably as hinting that Hillary could be killed, and for Fox to lament that Trump had given CNN and the like another opening to make malicious accusations.

These constant malicious accusations against Trump are not going to stop.  What Trump does is baked into the cake.  There he is.  He is not turning any corner.  People understood that Bill Clinton was a liar and a rogue and voted for him anyway.  People may come to understand that Trump is who he is, that he is not vicious as Hillary is, and will vote for him anyhow because he is going to change things in Washington and Hillary is not.

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