Special Announcement- October 30^th Drew Nickell’s Birthday Gift Drawing to be held for a copy of Drew Nickell’s signed book and a beautiful Bending Your Ear Locket Necklace

To those who have already read and/or are planning to read Drew Nickell’s book, Bending Your Ear – a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times soon:

First of all, thank you for your support. In light of my fifty-eighth birthday on October 30^th, I wish to present one of you with a complimentary signed copy of Bending Your Ear – a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times, AND a beautiful Bending Your Ear locket necklace, from Origami Owl to match. The entire gift package of the book and locket is worth over $100.00 and will be awarded based upon a random drawing.

As a new author, I have recently learned that much of the success in selling a book depends upon the number of favorable reviews received on Amazon. Therefore, to qualify, each contestant will need to write a review of the book on the Amazon.com website. Once the review appears on that site, (https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc ) an entry will be made into the contest, and from this pool a single winner will be chosen, at random. I will be contacting the winner to arrange for shipping, and both should arrive just prior to the election, provided the winner has been contacted with their shipping address verified.

So please read my book, take a moment write that review, and thank you for your participation.

I am, appreciatively,

-Drew Nickell, 29 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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Debate Double Team Tag-Teams Trump- Holt Helps Hillary at Hofstra

Alliteration aside, last night’s so-called presidential debate at Hofstra University quite managed to achieve the impossible. As if Candy Crowley’s moderation of the 2012 Obama/Romney debate couldn’t get any worse, in terms of a moderator taking sides and propping up one candidate against another, NBC’s Lester Holt outdid even that performance, in helping Hillary by tamping down Trump.

Holt routinely and repeatedly interrupted Trump and sought to stop Trump in mid-sentence, on more occasions than could be counted. Rarely did he interrupt Hillary Clinton, nor did he ever attempt to stop her in her tracks. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the substance of Holt’s questions might have believably been provided by the Clinton campaign, itself. For instance:

Donald Trump was asked about the release of his tax returns, but where was Holt’s questioning of Hillary’s many thousands of missing and deleted e-mails?

Donald Trump was asked repeatedly about the years’ long inquiry into Barack Obama’s birth certificate, couched in the spin of its being motivated by racism. Where were Holt’s questions about the inception of this inquiry at the hands of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008 when she was running against Obama for the Democratic nomination?

Lester Holt pointedly asked about Donald Trump’s presumed misogyny in his views towards women, based on comments he has made about Rosie O’Donnell and a former Miss Universe, but where were the questions about the way Hillary Clinton treated women ranging from Monica Lewinsky to Kathleen Willey to Paula Jones to Juanita Broaddrick?

Holt asked about a class action lawsuit against real estate developers, including Donald Trump’s firm in the early 1970s for discrimination in housing, but where were Holt’s questions related to the installation and use of an illegal private server while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and where were his questions concerning Clinton’s handling of classified information contained in her unauthorized use of this server?

Lester Holt hammered Donald Trump regarding whether or not the Republican nominee supported the Iraq war, based on a brief aside Trump mentioned in Howard Stern’s radio show before the Iraq war began, while ignoring the many and documented arguments Trump had with Sean Hannity, against going to war in Iraq- well before the fact. Holt still doubled-down on the accusation that Trump was for going into war, regardless. Where were the questions from Holt about Hillary Clinton’s vote to approve Operation Desert Storm and authorize going to war in Iraq- a vote which actually had consequences as history unfolded?

Holt challenged Trump on his advocacy of “stop and frisk” protocols, alleging that such policies had been deemed unconstitutional when, in fact, it was only in the practice in one specific precinct, that was deemed to be constitutionally discriminatory by a judge, in a specific case. Where were Holt’s questions concerning Hillary Clinton’s once referring to young black men “super predators,” as she did in 1996, and her support of the Black Lives Matter movement with regards to their war against law enforcement?

While it can be argued that Hillary Clinton, with her decades of being involved in politics and the fact that she has participated in thirty-eight one-on-one debates during her long career, came into the debate well-prepared and more comfortable in such a format, it can also be equally argued that Donald Trump in his very first one-on-one debate is neither an experienced nor a skilled debater, as well.

Such is the inherent difference in one Hillary Clinton, who is well-versed in the forensic arts of debate, and one Donald Trump, who is well-practiced in the “real world” arts of business and contract negotiation. The first requires the “gift of gab,” which Hillary has well-honed over the years. The second requires a clear vision as to the stakes at hand and a forceful determination to create, implement and execute a satisfactory outcome in any negotiation, as is Trump’s forte.

While the mainstream media will attempt to drive home their impressions that Hillary Clinton somehow managed to out-perform Donald Trump in their first debate, they will casually overlook what Trump was able to accomplish last night. For all the world to see, he came off looking presidential in his demeanor- not like the madman he has been painted out to be, but rather as the serious and determined candidate with a clear vision as to where he wants to lead this country, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with that direction.

The fact that Hillary Clinton can more capably communicate prevarication and posturing, than Donald Trump can do at answering questions candidly and honestly, speaks volumes as to the comparative values of presentation versus character, in responding to the questions put forth. While the world will never know what truly lurks in the heart of one Hillary Clinton, the watching world knows exactly how Donald Trump feels about what needs to take place to effect change- real change, so necessary to fix the problems that ail our nation and our world.

So the only question which remains, regarding their first debate is this…

…If Hillary Clinton is so experienced and so prepared to take office, if her policies are truly correct in their composition, and if Donald Trump is so unfit to become president, and so incorrect in his approach to the issues of our times, then why does a candidate like Hillary Clinton need so much help from a moderator, like Lester Holt, in the first place?

Why, indeed…?

-Drew Nickell, 27 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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Charlotte’s Web- a Festering Disease that Spreads

In the run-up to Monday night’s debate at Hofstra University, between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, what is taking place in the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina is a microcosm of a disease that has reared its ugly head across America.

Many in the major media will say that this is the result of yet another black man being gunned down by the police and, as was the case in Ferguson, Baltimore, Dallas and several other cities across the United States, is based on nothing more than a lie- a lie that has been spread by members of the Black Lives Matter movement and by politicians who are exploiting the unrest for their own political purposes.

Let us be clear. When people loot and riot and assault police officers en masse, as has happened in all of the aforementioned cities, this has nothing to do with peaceful protest and everything to do with felonious activity on the part of criminals taking to the streets. There is an ocean of difference between holding up a sign, yelling about perceived injustice, and tossing a park bench through a storefront window so as to help oneself to cans of Red Bull, packs of cigarettes and Air Jordan sneakers. When such looting is followed by throwing bricks and stones at police officers, the bedlam that ensues has nothing to do with civil rights and everything to do with unleashed anarchy in the streets.

Worse, the one man whose gift of public speaking and use of words might otherwise quell and calm the anger which is fomented in the actions of the young and impassioned is curiously silent and this, in and of itself, speaks volumes about where he stands on the violence taking place. In his silence, President Barack Obama has effectively taken sides with the rioters and against the police whose job it is to protect lives and property and uphold law and order. From the onset of his presidency, Obama has driven a wedge of distrust and discord between whites and blacks, between law enforcement and communities of color, and between the left and right to an extent not seen in generations of presidents, and his is the virulent virus that is spreading pandemically across this country.

Into this year’s presidential election is injected this same illness, with Hillary Clinton exploiting the unrest in shamelessly pandering to gain the black vote, by ginning up another lie- the lie that Donald Trump is a racist, as are those who support him. Hers is the same tactic used by Adolf Hitler, to divide and conquer through the rhetoric of division and discord.

With any hope, these lies which have perpetrated the disease will, at long last, be rejected by enough of the American voters who seek change- real change in the way we go about dealing with the difficult issues of race and want and fear amongst our people.

Such change won’t happen with a president who expresses rage against his political opponents to a degree never seen against Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and who refuses to condemn violence in the streets of his country. It won’t happen with a corrupt and callous candidate who has called the supporters of her opponent deplorable racists, and worse, and uses this divisive rhetoric to mine for votes. It won’t happen with the major media who spread such lies in an effort to boost their own ratings. It won’t happen on university campuses whose codes of political correctness seek to hide the real truth of what is taking place.

Yet such a change might happen with an outsider candidate who just wants to make America first in all his dealings, and who offers possible solutions to the many problems that plague the inner cities of a county led astray by the powers that be.

In this election year, such are the stakes with which voters are confronted.

-Drew Nickell, 22 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

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Implausible Deniability – the Obama/Clinton Foreign Policy

Time was when politicians routinely played the verbal game of “plausible deniability” in a dubious attempt to escape culpability when asked, “What did he/she know, and when did he/she know it?” This strategy was most notorious in the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, when the primary issue of the hearings centered on whether or not President Richard Nixon had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in, and the cover-up that followed. During that hearing, the most important and prescient question was asked by then Senator Howard Baker (R-TN), “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Forty-five years hence, the game of plausible deniability has taken on a new and more-menacing twist- the idea that the President (Obama) and his Secretaries of State (Clinton and Kerry) can pursue foreign policy initiatives which are damaging to U.S. interests and, in effect, aid and abet the enemy.

Take, for instance, the transfer of money to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In separate transactions during the course of this year, more than $ 1.7 billion has been transferred from the United States Treasury to the Iranian regime, most notoriously in the form of a cash transfer of over $400 million (in Swiss francs and euros) as ransom payment in exchange for the freeing of four American hostages held in Iran. Additional money has also been transferred from our government to theirs, in the form of electronic funds transfer, the details of which are still being made known, as of this writing. While this money indeed originated from Iranian assets seized during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the reimbursements of these assets included compounded interest, more than thirty-five years’ worth, and was integral to getting the Iranian regime to agree to Obama’s nuclear arms deal with Iran- an arms deal begun by Hillary Clinton and implemented by her successor, John Kerry. All three have promised the American people that the pursuit of this treaty, including the requisite transfer of money, would be the first step in engaging the Iranian regime towards more normalized relations, and improve Iran’s behavior on the world stage, despite the fact that opposition to this deal from a host of experts in the foreign policy arena was widespread and well-noted…and what happened?

Iran was able to bring to an end the inspections of both their own nuclear stockpiles of enriched uranium, and the centrifuges which manufacture these stockpiles, walk away with billions in payments and have become even more bellicose and belligerent in their actions against U.S. naval warships in the Persian Gulf.

Predictably, when the “you-know-what” hits the fan, the response from Obama, Clinton and Kerry will undoubtedly be, “We acted in good faith but, alas, Iran didn’t hold up their end of the bargain,” or some such rot, in their attempt to cover up their own incompetence with plausible deniability or, in this case, implausible deniability, since most of the American people vehemently opposed this deal and its cash payments, from the get-go. Worse yet, the very reasons that there was such opposition to the Iran deal in the first place, warning that the U.S. would be getting screwed in the process, will render the deniability for its abject failure most implausible, and not even the overt collusion with much of the mainstream media will be able to cloak the culpability that the Obama administration and Secretaries Clinton and Kerry possess, in the creation and implementation of the worst foreign policy deal in U.S. history. In essence, billions of dollars will have been squandered in a dubious attempt to create a legacy for Barack Obama, one that will rest on his shoulders and those of his incompetent Secretaries of State, for decades to come.

But what’s a few billion dollars to them? After all, it’s not their money, but ours…

-Drew Nickell, 20 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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Campaign via Remote Control- Hillary in Absentia

One has to hand it to Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. Never in our lifetimes has anyone ever been a major party’s nominee and has exerted less effort in running for the nation’s highest office. Not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection campaign has a candidate spent less time, well, campaigning for president, following his/her respective nominating convention, and FDR was running for his fourth term, for cryin’ out loud!

In the month of August, Hillary Clinton was absent from campaigning for seventeen of the thirty-one days comprising the eighth month of the year. Her participation in September has even been more lackluster, as she has been absent for all but a few days since the beginning of this month.

Compare that to her Republican rival, Donald J Trump, who has scarcely taken a day off from campaigning since his nomination in mid-July. If the election were determined strictly by a candidate’s personal effort, Trump would win by a landslide of epic proportions.

It’s not that Hillary’s campaign itself has lagged…no, not by a longshot. Her surrogates have been feverishly running for president in her stead. From her running mate Tim Kaine, to her husband Bill Clinton, to her daughter, Chelsea, to even the current office-holder, Barack Obama, the Democrats’ “A-listers” have been putting forth their maximum efforts to make her the next president, while she has spent much of her time resting with her feet up in her Chappaqua, New York mansion.

Any doctor worthy of his/her license to practice will tell you that older people who lay about too much risk acquiring pneumonia, and if that is what truly ails Mrs. Clinton (one can’t be sure of anything related to Mrs. Clinton), it is certainly understandable why she might need some downtime. Then again, considering news reports (assuming that is what they are, given her adoring media) that she was only diagnosed with a mild case of bacterial pneumonia in one of her right lung’s lobes last Friday, why the light schedule since she was nominated in July?

Having had both viral and bacterial pneumonia on a few occasions ourselves (one episode so serious that our lung capacity was reduced by two-thirds), we do know that seizure-like collapses, as was hers on Sunday the 11^th of September, don’t happen…not like that, anyway. While her doctor’s report that she hasn’t developed any new conditions (other than the pneumonia, bronchitis, ear and sinus infections, etc.) in the past year, and that qualifier does not necessarily mean that there aren’t other conditions that might have already been present, prior to this past year.

While we admittedly lack the medical training and therefore are certainly in no position to proffer diagnoses on Mrs. Clinton’s condition, her episodes of fainting, frequently occurring over the years (according to her husband), are suggestive of a neurological disorder most frequently found in sufferers of advanced Parkinson’s disease. It has been noted that such patients who suffer these types of episodes find that wearing sunglasses with cobalt blue lenses aids in preventing such episodes, not unlike the shades seen on the first lady, as she was wearing when she emerged from her daughter’s apartment a few hours after her collapse.

While it can be said that Hillary Clinton is always ready, able and willing to show up for any and every campaign event where money is being offered up in large sums, her presence out on the stump has largely been lackluster and comparatively brief, with most of the rousing speeches being delivered by her surrogates, instead. Given the secrecy and obfuscation that is the sine qua non of all things Clinton, it is certainly not outside the realm of possibilities that Mrs. Clinton suffers from something much more serious than a slight case of pneumonia and puts into question her physical fitness for the job of being president, notwithstanding the glowing report released from her own doctor. Given the right incentive and the right individual, a patient’s doctor can say anything that a patient wants them to say- after all, a patient’s actual medical profile is entirely confidential, when one gets down to it.

This much is certain. If Mrs. Clinton suffers such a seizure again, in front of cameras, that is to say, her fitness for service will rightfully come into question, and her viability as a presidential candidate will come to a cease. That said, running a campaign via remote control is not going to help her in her quest to defeat a tour-de-force like Donald Trump, and a Hillary-in-absentia cannot, nor should not, prevail in November’s election.

After all, she’s no FDR…

-Drew Nickell, 15 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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Deplorable: Hillary Clinton Stumbles

Much is being made about the Democrats’ presidential nominee having to prematurely leave the 9-11 Memorial Ceremony on Sunday, 11 September 2016. As she was walking to an awaiting SUV, supported on each side by aids trying to assist her into the vehicle, her knees buckled and she appeared to have fainted, losing a shoe in the process, according to eye-witness reports. After two hours, her campaign spokesperson indicated that she had become dehydrated and, after she had been whisked to her daughter Chelsea’s apartment, the former Secretary of State later emerged from the apartment smiling, waving and even stopping to sign an autograph for a young girl on the sidewalk. Later on Sunday, according to her physician, it was announced that she had been previously diagnosed on the Friday immediately before, as having pneumonia and was being treated with antibiotics and advised to take a break from her normal schedule of campaigning. There we have it- two explanations, within a few hours of each other, for a candidate who has been regularly taking weekends off, since the Democrat National Convention which nominated her to the nation’s highest office.

While faltering and stumbling is nothing new for the former first lady, as she has been shown many times being assisted up staircases and tripping and falling while entering jetliners, this latest episode of foundering has renewed suspicions about the overall health and well-being of the former first lady, who suffered a serious fall and concussion in December of 2012 which, according to her husband, required six months of convalescence just “to become herself” again. Nevertheless, the Clinton campaign has stuck to the mantra that she is in perfect health. If this is so, why is it that she seems to be constantly accompanied by another physician, with a pre-loaded injection at the ready?

While public concern for the health of presidential candidates is a relatively-recent phenomena (remember the absolute secrecy surrounding John F. Kennedy’s suffering of Addison’s disease and the medicine cabinet full of daily prescriptions he was required to take for this, as well as his spinal troubles), it is nevertheless a legitimate question about which, and the right of the electorate to know, the general health of those they elect to public office. Once again, the Clinton campaign answers these concerns with multiple, varying answers which only serve to feed lingering suspicions that all is not well with the Democrat candidate for president.

Yet, even on the very evening of the reported diagnosis of pneumonia, according to her doctor ex post facto, Mrs. Clinton seemed to be in good enough health and spirits to read the following prepared remarks at an event hosted by Barbra Streisand, and they were very well-received, with laughing approval, by the wealthy fundraisers in attendance:

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into     what I call the basket of deplorables…right?… racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it…and unfortunately, there are  people like that, and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their  websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric…these           people are irredeemable and not America.”

-Hillary Rodham Clinton, speech to LGBT Fundraiser, New York City, 9 Sept 2016

The tens of millions of Trump supporters, half of whom were so maligned and slandered by this comment were not so amused, and even many Democrats who intend to vote for their party’s nominee, were appalled that she would make such a statement in the first place. Mind you this was not an aside caught in an unscripted moment on an open microphone, as was the infamous “47 percent” comment of Mitt Romney in 2012, but rather scripted in a vetted speech delivered on teleprompter thus indicating a categorical imperative to besmirch a very large segment of the American populace. To make matters worse, her feeble attempt to walk this back, indicating her single regret in using the term “half” to describe those she insulted, seemingly cemented in the minds of voters her utter contempt for the working people of all walks of life who only seek to make this country better, safer and more prosperous, by supporting a candidate who just happens to be running against her in a presidential election.

In short, Mrs. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” is but a basket filled with the fruits of her own undoing…the repeated lies, the endemic deceit, the record of dishonesty and, yes, the utter contempt she holds for the American people, and this is where Hillary Rodham Clinton has most egregiously stumbled in her quest to become President of the United States.

-Drew Nickell, 12 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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(author’s note- In recognition of Sunday’s fifteenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I am reposting this essay from September 11, 2015, for your consideration and reflection.)

9-11, Fourteen Years Later

Once upon a time, when the world was young (and so were we), we naively believed that, by and large, we were safe from the ills that plague the Middle East. We told ourselves, “Yeah, it’s pretty screwed up over there, but we are here, thank God, and all of that bad stuff is all over there…so why worry?”…

…Then a jet airliner flew right into one of the twin towers at New York’s World Trade Center…

Our immediate reaction was, “That must be one screwed up pilot…How could he possibly have not seen that building on such a clear day?”…

…Then, a second jet airliner flew right into the other tower at New York’s World Trade Center…

…and then, we knew that these collisions were no accident…

…Then, a third jet airliner flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a fourth plane, bound for the United States Capitol dome, crashed into the fields of rural Pennsylvania…

…and then, we knew that we were at war…

For an all-too-brief while, our country- the United States of America, which had a long-standing tradition of uniting during times of war, pulled together and resolved to do whatever it took, in order to stop the sinister ideology that prompted such dastardly deeds. For a brief moment, we forgot our ideologies, we forgot our partisan affiliations, we forgot our creeds, and our races, and all of our identity groups, and everything else that seeks to separate us, and we united behind the effort to get the sons of bitches who did this to us…

But then, partisan politics and advocacy journalism, on the part of the mainstream media, began creeping in and thus dividing us into partisan blocs, pitting liberals against conservatives, pitting Democrats against Republicans, pitting the poor and middle classes against the rich, pitting blacks against whites, non-believers against believers, gays against straights, etc., etc., ad nauseam…until we were united no more…

Seven autumns later, these divisions- with complicit help from a mainstream media, bound and determined to do whatever it took to make history by ensuring the election of the nation’s first black president- saw the election of a very different kind of president- a president who did not believe in American exceptionalism, a president who seemed to be above such childish notions of patriotism and “the American Way”, a president who derided Americans who “cling to their guns and religion”, a president who, in reality, had nothing but contempt for Americans and all that America has done, over the many decades, to preserve equality and freedom throughout the world. This new kind of president traveled the world, apologizing for all of his country’s transgressions and telling all of the world that we are no better than they, and for this they awarded him a Nobel Prize for Peace- for having done nothing more than being elected and disrespecting his own country…

This new kind of president- one whose psychological makeup and ideology is vastly different from all of his forty-three predecessors, did everything he possibly could to tear down this country, to further divide this country, to set Americans against Americans, thus fulfilling his 2008 election night promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” by changing us from a country leading the world towards a better tomorrow, to a country “leading from behind” in a concerted, determined effort to enable all of the world’s many problems to visit our shores and infect our national psyche. Due to this one man, and his nefarious agenda, race relations are worse today than they have been in sixty years. Due to this one man, we are far less safe today than we were, even on the sunny morning of September 11, 2001. Due to this one man, and an imbecilic Secretary of State, he has struck a deal (a deal whose details have not been fully disclosed) with the most evil regime on earth, Iran- one that will assure their acquisition of nuclear weapons and inter-continental ballistic missiles with which to deliver these weapons on the shores of a nation they call “the Great Satan”, the United States of America. This one man, who would have us believe that unsubstantiated claims of man-made climate change pose a greater threat to our national security, than radical Islam, illegal immigration, and a nuclear Iran, combined…

What have we, as a nation, learned since that sunny Tuesday morning, fourteen years ago?…

Apparently? …not a damned thing…

-Drew Nickell, 11 September 2015

©2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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Beyond Labor Day- a Force Majeure

Labor Day 2016 has come and gone, and across the nation, school children find themselves back in their classrooms, longing for the idleness and freedom associated with not having to be tethered to schedules that will last until mid-June, next year- an eternity to such youngsters. We recall such feelings from our own childhood and it was for this reason that we somehow came to associate September with ominous feelings of dread- another school year of homework and bedtimes and shrinking afternoons of shortening daylight, wondering if the magic of care-free summers will ever arrive again. How little did we know, back in the day, that care-free summers of our youth would become momentary, fleeting and illusory.

With the passage of Labor Day, so too has the respective, post-convention bounces to the candidacies of Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. Voters are settling in and solidifying their choices, roughly speaking. Forty percent have decided to vote for Clinton, or have decided to vote for her in opposition to Trump, and will not be swayed away from doing otherwise. Another forty percent have decided to vote for Trump, or have decided to vote for him in opposition to Clinton, and also will not be swayed away from doing otherwise. The remaining twenty percent will either decide to stay home on Election Day, be swayed one way or the other, waste their votes on quixotic third-party candidacies, and yet, will inevitably and inexorably determine who will be the next president of the United States.

It is said that presidential campaigns in the United States do not really come into their own, until after Labor Day, when people start “paying attention.” At one time, this was probably truer than it is today, given the plethora of cable news networks, social media and on-line sources of information to our avail. We have been forcibly immersed into this election for the last eighteen months, and have come to the conclusion that Election Day cannot arrive soon enough if, for no other reason, to see an end to the monotony and cacophony that is political coverage in the mainstream media. We long for the time which will arrive soon enough, when all of the bickering between the candidates, their campaigns, with our friends and our family members, will become moot.

While candidates and candidacies come and go, just as the leaves of deciduous trees fall onto the ground beneath, there is nevertheless an equally true maxim that political movements tend to last beyond the balloting that decides winners and losers. Such was true in the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in the era of big government, and such was true in the 1980s, when Ronald Wilson Reagan ushered in the era of supply-side economics. In both cases, the relative legacies of these political movements have continued to this very day and, often and ironically, are found to be in direct conflict with one another.

Yet, this election of 2016 somehow finds less than the subordinated and stubborn struggles between liberalism and conservativism, less than the predictable and partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans, less than the tenacious and treacherous tugs-of-war between left and right. No, this election of 2016 transcends the norms of the old and tired teeter-totter of leaning one way and then the other. This election is about a movement- a real and very palpable difference between the inside and the outside, between the forces of the entrenched and the forces of the disillusioned, between the powers that be and the powers that seek to upend and upheave the old and the stale and, in the end, the ineffective. This explains why many of the mainstream and inside-the-beltway conventional Republicans refuse to support their party’s nominee, even if this lack of support results in the dreaded election of one Hillary Clinton. These recalcitrant Republicans find common cause with the mainstream media, the political pundits and pollsters, and ultimately, the Democrats whose very survival depends upon the continuation of the status quo ante.  Simply speaking, Donald Trump’s election will realize all of their worst fears, and will result in their own loss of power, prestige and influence- and this, they cannot and will not abide.

Yet, beyond the beltway, beyond the prosperous and toady suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, and beyond the festooned watering holes of Georgetown where insiders gather and deride the people they supposedly serve, there is a movement- a real movement of people- just plain people- who have had quite enough of their egomaniacal and elitist “expertise,” who have grown weary of shrinking paychecks and cultural disdain from the empowered who believe they know better, who want the country they once knew to return to the days when opportunity and promise were very real, and where anything and everything was possible, if only we seek it with all of our might and determination.

This is why an outsider like Donald Trump can win in November, and this is why an outsider like Donald Trump must win in November, for his is a movement that cannot and will not be refused, at long last.

Simply stated, the people want their country back, and such is the force majeure beyond Labor Day.

-Drew Nickell, 6 September 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

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