Roy Cohn's Spirit infuses the Trump Campaign

Like Jacob Marley in Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Roy Cohn is dead and gone. Now his ghost is paying us a visit in the context of Donald Trump's candidacy for President. There are some differences. Marley's spirit sought to warn Scrooge to mend his ways; Cohn's spirit, in the form of his protégé Roger Stone, is the apparent advocate of the worst of Trump's rhetoric including his claim that the November election is rigged and threatening a revolution if Trump loses the rigged election. See https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/05/trump-confidante-roger-stone-pushes-clinton-aide-911-conspiracy-claims-trump-views-rnc-chairman/212214

Roy Cohn is immortal. In Angels in America, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg tells us so.

ETHEL ROSENBERG: You're immortal.
 ROY: I'm immortal. Ethel. (He forces himself to stand) 
I have forced my way into history. I ain't never gonna die.

Angels' America is a bleak surreal plain, where lost souls teeter on the brink of apocalypse. Cohn is a metaphor for the seductive, dark side of the American dream. Awash in intransigent denial, the playwright limns Cohn's audacious ego, cunning seductiveness, brutal transcendent power and helplessness against ravages of AIDS. It is a chilling, provocative portrait. 

As black as the playwright's perception may be, the reality of Cohn's life is darker still. His career embodies the confluence of two primeval forces of our day, organized crime and rabid anti-communism, into a single, swift current. Those forces manifested themselves in Las Vegas casinos, Havana gambling palaces, the Bay of Pigs, Dealey Plaza, Watergate and beyond. While Roy Cohn was not solely responsible for these events, or clearly a direct participant in all of them, so much of the current of his life runs through each of them, that the study of his life and power enlightens the causes and effects of many of the most significant events of our times.

There is an excellent posting this week which relate Stone's involvement with Trump's campaign. 
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/08/jacob_weisberg_s_classic_new_republic_profile_of_trump_adviser_roger_stone.html 

Another posting warns of Russian interference in our election process on Trump's behalf.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/07/an_interview_with_anne_applebaum_on_the_russian_hack_of_the_dnc.html

I would also recommend Wayne Barrett's Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention which has been updated and reissued for this campaign year. It's available in E-Book format or paperback on all major internet bookseller pages.

As Bob Dylan sang:

"You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."

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This is not a promo for my book Quantum Christ but you can find out about it at:

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-coming-of-quantum-christ-has-arrived.html

The Plot Against America

There is an old saying among loan sharks: I loan you $10 you owe me $10. I loan you $100,000, I own you.

Donald Trump and his various enterprises are indebted to the Russian oligarchy for millions of dollars. Donald Trump Jr. has remarked that they are disproportionately reliant on Russian money. That's because US banks won't deal with him after all Trump's bankruptcies. There is no question but that Putin is the "boss" of the oligarchs and gets a cut of their profits. The simple point is that Putin owns Trump.

Russian intelligence agencies have hacked into the databases of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. They have released through WikiLeaks items that embarrass the Democrats and Clinton with more to come.

What bothers me is not the embarrassing stuff. Trump can try to take all the advantage he wants from the Russian leaks. It's the potential for election day result tampering that bothers me.

Sometime ago when I was active as a Vice-Chair of NYS New Democratic Coalition (NDC) I ran across Dick Morris who was then a young Democrat Turk who master minded a takeover of the NDC on the Westside of Manhattan. They weren’t all bad and actually some of them were quite good. However, Morris became bipartisan and sold his talents to both Republicans and Democrats. He was a member of the Clinton administration until he became involved in a sex scandal, sharing state secrets with a prostitute.

Among his activities as I recall was helping to monitor the fairness of elections in the Third World. One of the checks they utilized was election day exit polls. If there were significant deviations between the polls and the announced results it was an indicia of fraud.

By the 2000 election, Morris having left the Clinton administration had become a straight Fox News expert. When there was a disparity between the Florida exit polls and the announced results, he attacked the accuracy of exit polls. We later learned that in just one area, West Palm Beach which was strongly liberal there was a butterfly ballot which confused voter and many more votes were counted for Pat Buchanan than might be expected - far more than Bush's margin of victory.

What really bothers me, is given the fact Trump is in Putin's pocket, and given the expertise of Putin's intelligence services in hacking, those areas of the United States where there is electronic voting with no printed ballot in the process, this election may very well be stolen iin those areas.

In NYS, we vote by marking a printed ballot and then having it scanned and the results recorded electronically. The printed ballots are a protection against fraud.

This weekend, Trump has acted very unusually. He made an appearance in Colorado on Friday but then cancelled an event scheduled for Florida on Tuesday. The odd thing about Colorado is that Clinton has scaled back some activities in Colorado, because her internal polls place her 10 points ahead and the resources may be better spent elsewhere. She and Kaine (and Bill and Ann) are busing through through battleground states PA and Ohio,

The Russian oligarchs own Trump. Trump has undercut US policy in the Ukraine and the Baltic states. He favors a virtual break-up of NATO. He has become Putin's puppet. I am afraid. I am very afraid.

On the other hand there is also FDR. "We have nothing to fear but fear itsel" - as long as we have the courage to act,
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This is not a promo for my book Quantum Christ but you can find out about it at:

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-coming-of-quantum-christ-has-arrived.html