Stump Speech: Election 2016
Wincing Through the Waning Days of Hillary & Donald’s Dance BY MAX BURBANK There are a host of reasons media coverage surrounding the race for the White House is recognized as being bad. Mainly, as we all know, it’s rigged (or RIGGED!, as the Trump campaign likes its CAPS LOCK setting). Not as in the dictionary definition of that word, implying actual rigging by actual riggers, but because it’s so unfair. No major paper or network has endorsed Trump; that’s totally unprecedented, very nearly statistically impossible, and it cannot be plausibly argued that it has anything to do with Trump being a whole big bag of awful. There’s another big reason coverage has been so poor though, and, as a very important, widely read and critically admired pundit, I’m in a unique position to let you in on it: We can’t prepare. Every word you’ve read about this entire election has been a first draft, and as any Freshman Creative Writing 101 poorly-paid adjunct professor will tell you, first drafts are garbage. And not the nice kind of garbage you’d consider making a sachet of to stick in the back of your frilly unmentionables drawer, either — the real stinky kind. Case in point: I knew this deadline was coming up. Halloween was fast approaching and my plan was to be spooky drunk Monday evening and violently hung over Tuesday morning. I prepared. I read deeply, took notes, made an outline, wrote a rough draft — all that writer crap. I wanted a polished column in the can before the first baby Deadpool whined about the total lack of chocolate in my candy bowl — but then, on Friday, BAM! SWEET CRIMMINY, WE GOT MORE EMAILS! Holy, what the, it’s a whole big DUMP of CLINTON EMAILS, the FBI is gonna OPEN UP… they’re gonna…with the incriminating…It’s a GAME CHANGER on account of…of…EMAILS! RUN FOR THE HILLS! So all my preparation went in the crapper and you are reading a first draft — which I think you already knew, on account of how objectively terrible this column is. Okay, before we do any looking into what this is all actually about, let’s see if we can bypass what sounds like work by reviewing what we already know about Hillary Clinton and emails: They are bad. She should not .com
have them, write them, receive them, or do things with them on account of mostly they are “classified,” a word that means you have to be very careful with them or Bad Hombres could learn all our secrets, unless the Bad Hombres are Russians, in which case, good. There are also “servers” — a word we all pretend to know to look less stupid when the IT guy at work has to flip the switch after we accidentally stepped on the “surge protector” (two words that describe a thing which is like an extension cord, but blockier). When a woman person, in this case Hillary, does bad things with emails and servers, they need to be “locked up” and probably “executed” (two words usually preceded by other words like “trial,” “judge,” “jury,” “verdict,” and “guilty” — but in this case, not, because SHE DID A EMAILS!). Knowing all this, do we really have to dig deeper about what these new emails are and where they came from and what they’re about? Really? Fine. I think I may have mentioned a hangover F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been embarrassed by, but fine. Bastards. The FBI confiscated a laptop belonging to one Anthony “Weiner” Weiner, aka Carlos Danger, aka Thin Tony “Nobody Wants To See That On Their Phone” Weiner. Allegedly it contains emails belonging to his estranged wife who, because this is the Lifetime Movie version of an election, also happens to be a top advisor to Hillary Clinton. Allegedly, some of these emails are from Clinton, and allegedly, they prove beyond doubt that she is a genderbent Dr. Doom who can only stop emailing to perform really late fourth-trimester abortions. Are you happy now? Do you know enough? No? Eugh, you people. Fine. James Comey, Director of the FBI and well-known corrupt cog in Hillary Clinton’s vast criminal enterprise, informed select members of Congress of new evidence proving Hillary Clinton was “extremely guilty” of wrongful emailage and “double super perjury” regarding her “perfidious emailery” and that he was sorry he’d been such a traitorous worm previously, #MAGA. I’m kidding. Comey wrote: “The FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant and I cannot predict how long it will take
us to complete this additional work.” Translation? I found a thing and I don’t know what it is yet, and I won’t know until after the election is over, but I do know my three paragraph letter has the words “Secretary Clinton,” “email” and “server” in it, so you monkeys will go predictably nuts and the media will cover this story as if my letter had any actual content, which it clearly does not. That ought to be well worth violating the FBI’s long-standing practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations this close to an election. Less than a week. My column should have been about the long slog from Iowa. I’d have spared a line or two for an old Socialist Jew who had a shot at being the Democratic nominee. Imagine how that would have flown with the Friends of Pepe! I could have looked at Clinton’s political track record (something she actually has), or that the very possibility of a female American President is amazing and inspiring and hopeful. I’d certainly have covered Trump publicly undermining our electoral system and refusing to say he’d acknowledge the results of the election to “keep us in suspense,” because what’s more suspenseful than a credible threat of violence at the polls? But no. As a member of the media my eye is fixed on the latest shiny, spinning object. Less than a week to go until the election and it’s all emails, all the time. More than a year of shenanigans all comes down to “The existence of email means Hillary Clinton must perish for high treason” vs. “There is nothing a human being, no matter how highly placed, can do with email that has any bearing on reality.” Trump is right: The media is RIGGED. He’s just wrong about what it’s rigged for. It’s not rigged for Democrats or Republicans or insiders or global banking conspiracies. It’s rigged for simplicity and sensationalism. And if you combine the two? Well, that’s some prime media smack, isn’t it?
If nothing else, Comey’s letter about a thing he found that might be a big deal but he won’t know until after the election proves that Trump is full of crap about anything being rigged specifically against him. You thought it couldn’t get stupider, but it can, it did, and it only stops getting stupider on November 9 if we are very lucky, or if we’ve been very, very good. Review the last year before you vote. Have we been good? Is it too late to start?
Image by Michael Shirey
Image by Max Burbank
November 03 - 09, 2016
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