No Respite From Ridiculous Campaign

(WASHINGTON/TNS) —

The potholed path to election 2016 is so treacherous, we need a break from the awfulness. So instead, let’s marvel at the weirdness.

Donald Trump is pivoting among his positions so fast it’s dizzying. Would-be Hillary Clinton voters are dumbfounded by her blind eye to the perception that much pay-to-play occurred when she was secretary of state and held a great many private meetings with donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Where can we find respite from these daily assaults on sanity?

Well, there was that delicious photo opportunity of Trump in flood-ravaged Louisiana helping unload donated humanitarian supplies from the back of a truck. He spent less than a minute in manual labor, during which he was photographed handing a box of Play-Doh to Mike Pence, his running mate.

The scene was, no doubt, set up by Trump’s newest batch of handlers, who have been struggling to make him softer, less bigoted, less racist, less xenophobic… and have pushed him to read off teleprompters so he won’t say anything outrageously offensive, as he has been happily doing for more than a year. But, really. Play-Doh?

And what’s up with going before white audiences to talk to black Americans, saying their experience is: “Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities. … And I ask you this: … What … do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out.”

That’s gotta be a sure-fire way to lure the 97 percent of blacks who say they don’t want a Trump presidency.

The Trump campaign is trying to insinuate that Clinton is not physically well despite her doctor’s reassurances. [So she] opened a jar of pickles in a now-famous test for proving good health. We are blessed she did it with a modicum of effort.

Trump is demanding a special prosecutor look into Clinton’s granting of access to financial supporters of her family foundation, which, admittedly, has done valuable charitable work. If elected, she says there won’t be any more foreign or corporate donations accepted. Why didn’t she say that when she was in the Obama administration?

Trump says he knows how the game is played because he has always handed out “yuge” donations to politicians to give him whatever … he wanted from them.

Meanwhile, Trump refuses to discuss what would happen to his complicated business empire if he is elected. Secret trust? It’s not as if you can just forget you own Trump Tower, golf courses and Mar-a-Lago. And what about the hundreds of thousands of dollars his businesses owe in debt, including to foreigners?

He castigates Clinton for resisting the release of her private emails. But, unlike her, he won’t release his tax returns. (His excuse of an audit is no excuse, say the experts.) Is it because he doesn’t pay much if anything in taxes on all those billions of dollars he supposedly has?

Clinton hates the press and avoids press conferences as rigorously as most people resist root canals. Trump bans reporters from The Washington Post from getting credentials to cover his rallies. But in the vein of there’s no such thing as bad publicity, he basks in the free publicity the media eagerly gives him.

Clinton promises she will fight for the middle class, insisting she understands their angst, unease, needs, fears and hopes. But she and her husband are worth a hundred million dollars, by some estimates, gleaned from cashing in on being public office holders. And she raises millions and millions of dollars in the richest enclaves in the nation, hobnobbing with the mighty and the famous.

Trump boasts he is self-funded but now that donors are contributing to him he raises the rents he charges his campaign for office space in his own properties and the use of such things as his private planes.

Sorry. I lied. I promised you a diversion, and you just feel worse.

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