THIS & THAT #9

Donald Personally Called Me!

How Can I Not Vote for Him?

The voice message light was urgently blinking when I returned home the other day, so I pressed the “play” button, and was surprised to hear, “This is Donald Trump, and I need your help to make America great again.” Donald directly told me that “Time is short and every vote counts,” and he implored me to change my party affiliation to be able to vote for him in the Republican primary on June 7. He concluded his convincing plea with, “I want your vote and I want to make America great again.”

I wondered why the presumptive Republican nominee personally dialed my number. Perhaps he knew that when I attended his December rally at the Las Vegas Westgate Hotel, I had purchased five of his buttons. I had bought them from vendors standing outside of the rally room, and did so I could mail them to some of my far-left leaning, progressive friends on their birthdays. I put a white sticker on the back of each gift button, and wrote their name on it, followed by “Together we can make America great again,” and signed it “Donald J.”

On further discovery, I found that Donald had not called me because I attended his rally, but because my wife is registered as an “independent,” and the “Donald J. Trump for President, Incorporated 6467361779” campaign, sent Robocalls to nearly one million independents in California.

Use to Confuse

I kept a few buttons for myself, and when I visited my tax accountant, I wore my black, Johnny Cash shirt. On the left side was my “Bernie 2016” button, and the right side had a red, white and blue “TRUMP” button. The accountant seemed confused looking to the left and then the right, as he went through my financial papers.

It seems that he is not the only one confused by this election.

Bill Did It for Hillary

In one of the earlier primaries, a CNN television reporter asked a White woman in her fifties whom she planned to vote for, and she replied, “Hillary.”  When she was asked “Why?” she quickly answered, “Because Bill did so much good.”

A Black woman was asked the same initial question, and when asked why she would vote for Hillary, she said, “Because Bill personally called me and asked me to support his wife.”

Was that person so naïve to not realize that she was the recipient of a robocall, sent en masse to many potential voters? However, I know for certain that Donald J. had personally called me because I attended his rally in Las Vegas, but since I hadn’t filled out the form his campaign had handed to me, I wonder how he knew my phone number?

Trying to Out-Fox CNN

In the midst of the Indiana primary, Ted Cruz and John Kasich announced that they would work together to defeat Trump. A Fox News anchor asked the network’s reporter in Columbus, Indiana to follow Cruz, looking for a unique angle to this unusual story. With cameras following Cruz as he entered an ice cream parlor, the anchor asked the reporter the most critical question she could imagine in light of Cruz and Kasich planning to work together against Trump.  “What flavor is Cruz ordering?”

They Also Ran

Do you remember when there were seventeen Republican candidates running for their party’s Presidential nomination?

Aside from the few that stayed in the running for far too long, including John, Ted, Mario, Carly, Ben, Jeb, Jim, Chris, Rick, Rand, Mike and Donald J., name the other pretenders in the order of their withdrawal.

You might not have even remembered who Jim was, but you will find out about him and the five other semi-serious candidates by looking at the closing paragraphs below entitled, “They Threw Their Hats Into the Ring.”

They Threw Their

Hats Into the Ring**

The headline’s expression comes from the early 19^th century, when boxing was popular. Anyone who wanted to challenge a fighter would throw his hat into the boxing ring, which was square and not round. The phrase came to be used first to mean to “enter a contest,” and then a political contest, when in 1912 Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt uttered, “My hat’s in the ring,” when he entered that Presidential race.

Apparently Teddy’s hat was too small, for while he received more votes that Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene Debs and his running mate Emil Seidel, and more than Republican Presidential candidate William Howard Taft and his running mate Nicholas M. Butler, Teddy finished with only 88 electoral votes as the Progressive Party candidate, far behind the electoral 435 votes garnered by the Democratic Party candidate Woodrow Wilson and his running mate Thomas R. Marshall. Teddy’s downfall may have been his party’s selection for vice-president of Hiram Johnson, whose mother was Annie DeMontfredy, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
** Feel free to use the expression in simplified Chinese 宣布参赛, 宣布参选

What About This Year?

The other 2016 GOP candidates who withdrew earlier were George Pataki, Lindsay Graham, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry. All but Lindsay had been a governor of their state, and the missing “Jim” was Governor Gilmore, who led Virginia from 1998 to 2002.