The Dangerous Ambiguity of Trumpian Rhetoric

"[If Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton] gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Let's break this down for anyone who really feels like Donald Trump is discussing the power of voting and political action.

You can't vote or use political action of any kind to unseat Justices or overturn their rulings. Trump clearly implies here that should that happen, the only way to solve the problem of Justices with whom we have ideological differences is the use of 2nd Amendment arm-bearing.

This isn't mis-speaking, and it's not a matter of semantic interpretation. He is either suggesting or joking about the coercion or shooting of either Clinton or the Justices she chooses.

This is possibly one of the best examples to-date of the way Donald Trump uses cleverly-worded and seemingly ambiguous rhetoric and offhanded comments to bolster his candidacy. Trump supporters who are horrified at the thought of political violence will defend him and insist that he was not suggesting violence...Trump supporters who are advocates of violence against the state or their political enemies will feel like he is the candidate for whom they've been waiting all their lives.

It's the Megyn Kelly "blood coming out of her wherever" comment on an even more dangerous scale. Every misogynist in the country knew exactly what Trump meant when he implied that his examination by a journalist was made more hostile by her menstruating. Every Trump supporter who wants to willfully believe that they don't intend to vote for a womanizer can hide behind the fact that he didn't explicitly say she was on her period.

There's a phrase for this. "Dog Whistle Politics." This is Richard Nixon's promise to restore "Law and Order" to Southerners who were fearful of social change, this was Ronald Reagan's use of "Welfare Queen" to stigmatize blacks on social assistance. This is each and every use of the word "thug" to describe a young black man whose political beliefs convince him to take to the street in protest. It's the use of an innocuous phrase to resonate with what is worst and most prejudiced in people without their realizing it.

Needless to say, black people aren't strangers to Dog Whistle Politics. We see (and see through) Trump's nonsense. It's just a slightly less artful and more broadly applied version of the same bile we've been on the receiving end of ever since the Federal Government decided once and for all that States didn't have the right to block our vote.

We're just wondering why it's taking the rest of you so painfully long to figure it out.

Mitt Romney was right, and that's why we should have elected Hillary Clinton

Here are the facts:
1) NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers has made it clear: a foreign government hacked the campaign of a particular candidate in a foreign election - OUR election - with the intent of giving an advantage to Donald Trump.

2) Donald Trump has refused to speak ill of Russia in his entire time on the campaign trail, instead preferring to stoke resentment against our NATO allies...ones that currently and justly fear Russian invasion.
3) Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has publicly stated that the Russian government through embassy staff had contacts with the Trump campaign, later confirmed by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Here is the context:
1) In the 2012 election Mitt Romney rightly declared Russia to be the US's "#1 geopolitical foe." For the last 4 years, Republicans (and later even Democrats) accepted this assessment, until Donald Trump won the Republican party's nomination, at which point the entire party went dark on anti-Russian rhetoric.
2) Though President Putin himself has been carefully neutral Russian (government controlled) media has been overwhelmingly pro-Trump.
3) Anyone even remotely familiar with the practices of intelligence agencies knows that intelligence chiefs are typically housed in embassies with more innocuous titles and jobs as covers for their actual work. If Trump was going to be meeting with a foreign spy, "meeting with embassy staff" is how it would be spun.
4) Before the election, Donald Trump was reported to have repeatedly refused to accept the assessment of intelligence personnel in briefings when they told him that Russian agencies were responsible for the DNC hacks.
5) The Russian government is known to carry out cyber-attacks against neighbors, usually to further Russian goals in one way or another. Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014 are obvious examples.

Here is my assessment:

1) There is a clear linking of interests and priorities between the expansionist autocratic dictator Vladimir Putin and President-elect Donald Trump.
2) Foreign dictatorial influence is bigger than "emails" and bigger than the run-of-the-mill corruption that was inevitable under Hillary Clinton.
3) In our attempt to avoid electing a corrupt candidate, we have instead elected the preferred candidate of the most dangerous man since Adolf Hitler.