Another Sexual Assault/Rape Accusation… Number 17? Ho-Hum!

One has to admit that it is pretty incredible what people can get used to in a relatively short period of time. To think that a candidate and now President of the United States can be virtually immune to apparently ANY number of credible accusations of sexual harassment, assault and even rape is truly mind-boggling! Particularly so since so many of Trump’s largely conservative and even evangelical supporters just assume for some inexplicable reason that liar-king Trump, who naturally denied everything (and also typically belittled his accuser’s looks) is automatically more believable than any woman, or even worse don’t care even if it were true. I wonder how much of this is the mass brainwashing of a cult, innate hypocrisy for the sake of their political/cultural agenda (the satisfying of which is largely an illusion) or if this sort of thing (personal character) is just not a relevant or bothersome issue for Trumpites. Of course this has also been no surprise at all to any of us anti-Trumpers, who probably can’t hate him anymore than we already do! So either way, it doesn’t move the needle much except maybe for a few independents here and there. In this case, even having two of the victim’s friends publicly come out to corroborate that she told them what happened at the time in the mid-1990s doesn’t seem to make any difference to Trump lovers or Republican lawmakers. It will be interesting to see to what extent if any this becomes an issue in the 2020 campaign. I actually hope that many of Trump’s accusers show up to a presidential debate the way Trump dragged a number of Bill Clinton’s accusers to one of his debates with Hillary Clinton.

Probably the most disastrous event of the past week has been the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to not allow the federal courts to get involved in overturning even the most flagrant gerrymandering. As noted in the dissenting opinion, this is another major blow to our democracy, such as it still is. Since Republicans control the majority of state legislatures, this will clearly continue to benefit them politically as far as congressional elections are concerned, and now will probably only get worse!

Meanwhile, the first Democratic presidential primary debates have been interesting, but frustrating in view of the large number of candidates and limited time for each. Although Biden is by far the frontrunner at this point and widely thought to be the safest bet to put up against Trump, his performance was clearly disappointing, which could be a MAJOR problem if he ends up getting the nomination. I am still not convinced he is the best candidate against Trump or otherwise…his time may well be past.