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SYNDICATED COLUMN: No, Everything Is Really Not Going To Be Alright

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Ted Rall
            After president-elect Donald Trump’s 10-15 minute scheduled get-to-know-you with lame-duck president Barack Obama ran an hour and a half, too many of my friends who ought to know better contacted me with some variant of “maybe everything really is going to be OK after all.” No. It really isn’t. SNL’s Dave Chappelle says he’s “going to give Trump a chance.” We should not. Trump’s wide-eyed expression as he sucked in his new DC digs, pathetically reminiscent of the stupefied expressions of Bolshevik revolutionists wandering the Winter Palace, brought it home: the barbarians are at the gate. Do not be fooled by what the media is attempting to present as a smooth transition of power, a quirky one to be sure, but generally falling within American political tradition. Do not believe Trump’s condescending tweet damning liberal protesters with faint praise. “President Trump” cannot end well. Remember how, the morning of the election, the New York Times gave Trump a 15%…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Here Comes the Rise of the Anti-Trump Left

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Ted Rall
            Let me get this out of the way first: I’m irritated at all the media people repeating that “nobody” saw Donald Trump’s “upset” win coming. I saw it coming a million miles away. Here, let me touch myself…am I someone? Yep, I still exist. Is it really possible that I’m the only pundit in America who grew up in the Rust Belt and goes home to visit? Of course the corporate media morons didn’t see this coming. They didn’t see looming disaster in the invasion of Iraq. During the primaries, they ignored the polls that proved Bernie Sanders was a better candidate than Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. It certainly never occurred to the corporate media morons that reducing tens of millions of middle-class workers to poverty, in order to line the pockets of globalization-besotted elites, might turn them into tens of millions of angry voters. The bigger the news outlet where these mainstream political hacks work, the more…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hate Trump AND Clinton? There Are Better Alternatives

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Ted Rall
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least popular presidential candidates of all time. So why vote for either one? You wouldn’t know it to watch or read the news, but living in a duopoly doesn’t require you to hold your nose as you vote for someone you hate – merely because you hate the other candidate even more, or you’re deathly afraid of them. There are alternatives. And they don’t require you to compromise your ethics or vote against your own interests. We’ve all heard it so often that we take it for granted: if you don’t vote, you’re apathetic. If you’re apathetic, you don’t have any right to complain when someone you don’t like wins and messes up the country. That might be true when at least one of the candidates is palatable. But the argument falls apart at times like this, when most Americans agree that both are awful. You and me, we may or may not…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Win or Lose, Hillary is Finished

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Ted Rall
            Hillary Clinton, they say, is the most qualified person ever to have run for the presidency. They are, of course, mistaken. But one week away from an election that, for once, really may prove to be the most important of our lives, what boggles the mind of those of us who are paying attention is just how terrible a candidate Hillary Clinton has proven to be. It feels like years ago, but remember the primaries? Polls notwithstanding, Hillary’s supporters – the editorial board of The New York Times and the CNN talking head who slipped her debate questions so she could cheat against Bernie – argued that her awesome resume put her in a better position to take on Donald Trump in the fall. Yet here we are with national tracking polls in a dead heat or within the statistical margin of error, with Ohio firmly in the Trump column, Florida probably leaning the same way, and the whole…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hey Lefties: Hillary Is Not Your Friend

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Ted Rall
           If you lean left, the only presidential candidate who shares your values is Dr. Jill Stein. But she can’t win. The two major parties have left — sorry for the pun — you and your concerns high and dry. Certainly, Donald Trump is not your man. Though he has recently made noises to the contrary, Trump has repeatedly argued that wages are too high and that America’s pathetically low minimum wage should remain at its present poverty level. He’s a fan of torture. Trump calls the police — the police! — “the most mistreated people” in America. The governing philosophy that best approximates his ideology is authoritarianism. His opposition to “free trade” and the Iraq War aren’t nearly enough to justify casting a vote for him. Polls show Hillary Clinton heading toward the White House. But that prospect should make liberals shudder in horror. Like Trump, Hillary is an enemy of human rights and the struggle for equality and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The 4 Things Hillary Could Do To Close the Deal Against Trump

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Ted Rall
She’s ahead in the polls by roughly three to four points. Given her opposition, however, Hillary Clinton ought be doing a lot better than that. Consider Clinton’s structural advantages over Donald Trump. Whereas top Democratic Party officials are so supportive of her that they even cheated to defeat her primary opponent, hundreds of leading Republicans – including the speaker of the house and the last two presidential nominees – have declared war against him. She’s been wildly outspending him in televised political advertising. She has campaign field offices in most counties; he doesn’t have any in most states. The news media despises him. Then consider her personal advantages. Trump is a novice, never having run for political office. She has served in the cabinet, presented herself for the Senate twice, run for president, weathered countless scandals and political storms. Whereas he rants and raves incoherently, her experience has taught her how to debate, crisis manage, issue sound bites, and carefully…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Trump’s Guerilla Politics Are Here To Stay

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Ted Rall
Donald Trump is a cat with 12 or 13 lives. This past weekend felt like August 1974. Everyone knew Richard Nixon was toast. We didn’t know exactly how or exactly when he’d be forced out. But we knew it was coming. After a video/audio recording of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” open mic of Donald Trump sharing his reality TV update of the medieval droit du seigneur surfaced on Friday before Sunday’s big second presidential debate, dozens of Republican lawmakers and senior officials abandoned ship. All that remained, it seemed, was a Trumpian version of the GOP bigwigs who trudged to the White House in ’74 to deliver the news that Dirty Donny could no longer count on Republican support in Congress. Calling for the mass expulsion of 11 million people didn’t finish Trump. Demanding that Muslims be banned from entering the United States didn’t do it. Encouraging supporters to beat up protesters didn’t do it. Making fun of John McCain…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: 7 Reasons I Won’t Vote for Hillary Clinton

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Ted Rall
            To my many friends and readers who plan to vote for Hillary Clinton: please stop bullying me. Also please lay off other people, progressives and liberals and traditional Democrats and socialists and communists, citizens who identify with the political left, who plan to vote for Dr. Jill Stein or stay home. I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump. I agree with the mainstream liberal consensus that he should never hold political power, much less control over nuclear launch codes. He’s dangerous and scary. But that doesn’t mean I have to vote for Hillary Clinton. So I won’t. The main reason that I’m not going to vote for Hillary Clinton is the same exact main reason that I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump: I don’t vote Republican. Being age 53, Nixon was the first president I remember. Hillary Clinton’s politics (and her paranoia and insularity) remind me of Richard Nixon’s. I can’t bring myself to think of…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Thrilla at Hofstra: Trump Beat the Spread

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Ted Rall
He won last night. I know it runs counter to conventional wisdom – that’s so rare for me! – but I award last night’s first 2016 presidential debate to Donald Trump. This isn’t to say that I disagree with what the mainstream men and women of the pundit class said they witnessed. Like them, I watched a well-prepared Clinton outmaneuver a political amateur who showed up to class after a night of partying following a year of refusing to crack open a book. Trump rambled, repeated himself, interrupted and bullied. He conflated NATO and the EU. He even unleashed a fat joke. All things being equal, I would agree with the corporate media consensus that Hillary won. But that’s the thing – things are far from equal. Hillary Clinton is a pro. She should have wiped the floor with Trump. Instead, she delivered a performance on the line between a B+ and an A-. Trump gets closer to a C-.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hillary: It’s Political Malpractice, Stupid

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Ted Rall
            Hillary Clinton supporters are freaking out. And rightfully so! Eight weeks from Election Day, she and Trump are basically neck and neck. And that’s before the three presidential debates, which I not only expect him to win but can’t imagine a scenario in which she does not lose. Democrats are wallowing in the Anger stage of the Kübler-Ross model of grief. How on earth, they howl on op-ed pages and cable-news talking-head shows, can this be? Why doesn’t the electorate — that useless “basket of deplorables” — not see what is plain for all to see, that Hillary possesses more qualifications for the nation’s highest political office in her tiniest pinkie toe than The Donald has in his whole 267-pound body? For that matter, why isn’t the media holding him accountable for his lies? “Donald Trump, who lies whenever he speaks and whose foundation is a Ponzi scheme compared to the Clintons’, is being graded on a ridiculously generous…
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