Trump's Attack Tactic: What Have I Got to Lose?

A few weeks ago Donald Trump’s closing argument in his appeal to Afro-Americans for their vote was, “What have you got to lose?” After years of not achieving a better life under Democratic presidents, he reasoned, blacks should switch allegiance and vote Republican. “What have you got to lose?” 

Apparently Trump is intent on taking his own counsel when it comes to confronting his latest setback, the release Friday of an inflammatory, sexist, degrading 2005 tape of his comments and behavior toward women. Already lagging in their support, particularly from suburban housewives in key battleground states, Trump seems poised to blast away at Hillary and Bill Clinton for the former president’s infidelities and his wife’s aggressive defense of him and attack on his accusers, some of whom, in the end, proved to be aggrieved parties. 

Trump is casting Hillary as a bully who attacked, shamed and intimidated her husband’s “victims.” He might well level those charges against her during their debate Sunday night.

It’s a risky tactic, given his low ratings among female voters. But Trump might reason he has nothing to lose by sharpening his assault on the moral code of the Clintons at a time when his own compass has been tossed topsy-turvy beyond what he has already said during his campaign about Megyn Kelly, Rosie O’Donnell, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz’s wife, Gold Star mother Ghazala Khan and former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. 

Trump might further reason that his Republican base doesn’t want him to retreat. A poll released by Politico Sunday morning found “just 12 percent of Republicans — and 13 percent of female Republicans — agree. 

“As of now, GOP voters largely want the party to stand behind Trump. Nearly three-quarters of Republican voters, 74 percent, surveyed on Saturday said party officials should continue to support Trump. Only 13 percent think the party shouldn’t back him.” http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/politico-morning-consult-poll-229394

It’s not uncommon for viewership of presidential debates to drop off after the first one (the initial debate was the most-watched in history—some 84 million tuned in). Given the exposure of Trump’s powderkeg tape, which obscured the release by WikiLeaks Friday of troubling Clinton emails, the audience for the second debate could equal, if not top, the first.  

They’ll be tuning in to see how far Trump will go over the line of decency and, equally intriguing, how Clinton will respond. It makes for “must-see TV,” but not on NBC (which originated that phrase back in the 1990s) because the peacock network will be televising the football game between the New York Giants and host Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin, one of the battleground states. For the sake of most marriages, not just among fans of both teams, I hope households have more than one TV or will do as I do—DVR the football game for later viewing. 

Symbol of Oppression

I can’t explain or understand why, but one of my father’s favorite shows when he was just a few years older than I am now was The Dukes of Hazzard. Friday nights after dinner, whether we were visiting my parents in Brooklyn or they were with us in White Plains, he’d watch Bo and Luke Duke do their shenanigans while riding around in the General Lee, their orange Dodge Charger with a Confederate battle flag painted on the roof. To enter and exit the car the Dukes had to climb in or out through the side windows.

Sitting next to my father during these TV times would be our son Dan, all of five years old when the series ended its six-year run. So it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to me that one day during his formative years, when Dan and I were riding around in my Chevy Vega hatchback, he asked if he could get out of the car “like the Dukes.” 

The General Lee is back in the news. After the massacre of nine Afro-American parishioners in Charleston, SC, by a white supremest who posed for pictures with the Confederate battle flag, professional golfer Bubba Watson has removed the flag from his copy of the General Lee, replacing it with an American flag.  

As a symbol of oppression, the Confederate battle flag ranks right up there with the Nazi swastika and the Communist hammer and sickle. And, if we’re going to be historically correct and objective, with the Christian cross and the crescent of Islam, both religious symbols used to subjugate and annihilate millions of non-believers down through the centuries, throughout the world. Perhaps in another posting I’ll delve deeper into the realm of religious conflagrations that continue to this day, in the case of Islam, for example, or the once daily strife in Northern Ireland, or the genocide in Bosnia. In the interim, you can look up the histories of numerous wars, invasions and mass murders done in the name of religion.

For now, let’s confine ourselves to the table talk discussion at hand, the meaning, and thus the fate, of the Confederate battle flag. Flying the flag, its supporters say, respects those who died fighting for the Confederacy, the heritage of the South, its history, its way of life. They reject any suggestion that it stands for racism, segregation and white supremacy. 

The flag went into battle, they say, in the War Between the States.

In not recognizing that conflict as The Civil War, they fail to understand and accept that the cause they so faithfully cherish was fought, and the soldiers who fell under its banner died, to preserve the right to own another human being! 

The whole foundation of the South was built on slavery. Today’s Republican electoral domination of the South is based on gerrymandered districts and restrictive voting rights laws that diminish the power of Afro-Americans. 

The Confederate battle flag has come to represent a distilled segment of disobedience, of rejection of the common good. Rebellion. A belief that majority rule does not apply if it undermines outdated, biased, principles. 

It is interesting to recall that during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, or the resistance to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one, to my memory, ever rallied dissenters by waving the Confederate flag. Yet, when the nation finally started to recognize and do something about inequality in the 1950’s and into the 1960’s, the Confederate battle flag reappeared across the South. 

Coincidence? Hardly. The Stars and Bars were meant to send a signal that just as Afro-Americans were not equal citizens in the Old South their status would be no different in the New South.   

Anyone who defends the public showing of the Confederate flag except in a display inside a museum just doesn’t get it. And if they haven’t after all that happened in Charleston and around the country over the last year, they probably never will.

The Real Mass Murderers Among Us

Safe to say, Afro-Americans have suffered more discrimination in our society than any other population segment. Yet, other than Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad shooter who killed six commuters and wounded 19 others in 1993, I’m hard-pressed to recall any other instance over the last several decades when an Afro-American vented his frustrations and executed a mass shooting and murder as perpetrated last week by James Holmes, another white man, in Aurora, Colo., or in Columbine, Colo., or at Virginia Tech, or in Tucson, Ariz., or just last week ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where, thankfully, none of the 17 people shot in a bar died (okay, technically, the Virginia Tech shooter was Asian, but hardly a member of a discriminated race).

Through their gangs, blacks have the unfortunate habit of shooting and often killing their own, both gang members and innocents, often children unlucky to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Those are serial events, not the singular violence shooters like Holmes trigger. You’d think if anyone could be justified in taking it out on society it would be an Afro-American, or maybe an Hispanic-American. Thankfully, they don’t.

I don’t mean to belittle the tragedy in Aurora, but the real tragedy of America is that gang-related murders evoke little more than hand-wringing and not enough resolve to alter the conditions that are killing hope in minority neighborhoods. In Chicago, for example, 272 have been killed this year through June 30, mostly from gang-related incidents. That’s up 36% from a year ago. 

Since the mass assault in the movie theater in Aurora we’ve been trying to analyze the alleged shooter, determine his motive, flesh out his psyche, somehow try to figure out what would drive an individual to do such an extreme act against society. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to figure out why whole groups of men have abandoned social mores. Let’s figure out how to stop their discriminate and indiscriminate shooting rampages.

We’ll never stop random acts of mass murder, no more than we can eradicate random acts of terrorism. But we must work to stop what has become “institutionalized” murder by gangs, even if it’s against other gang members. We don’t tolerate Mafia wars. We shouldn’t tolerate minority wars. We cannot allow neighborhoods of our cities to degenerate into semblances of drug-cartel controlled Mexico where the value of a life has lost its true meaning. 

Getting back to James Holmes, did anyone else look at his picture and think he resembled the devil incarnate, what with his lips turned up into a smirk, pointy ears, arched eyebrows and two wisps of hair on each side of his head looking for all accounts like horns? Click on this link to see a picture of Holmes. Make up your own mind: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1118502.1342871848!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/james-holmes.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/james-holmes-aurora-shooting-suspect-med-school-dropout-loner-neighbors-article-1.1118501&h=491&w=635&sz=30&tbnid=ISjZJ4mf-HKI4M:&tbnh=92&tbnw=119&prev=/search%3Fq%3Djames%2Bholmes%2Bpictures%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=james+holmes+pictures&usg=__LG6xslFseV5rCVNdS1W0W4GxJ-Q=&docid=C6KP7QA6-EN9NM&sa=X&ei=hKQNUNqnH4m40QGviNDIAw&ved=0CFoQ9QEwAw&dur=547