A Vanity Fair writer assesses various scenarios that could tip the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump. Number Five:

5. CLINTON TURNS OUT TO BE A HOLOGRAM OF ONCE-LIVING CLINTON, À LA TUPAC AT COACHELLA
Projected odds of occurrence: below 0.01%
Disruptive power: medium

Clinton has not held any press conferences in a long time, and she normally seems programmed. But the odds of her being a hologram are still low, as she has repeatedly proven able to meet with donors this week. Also, it wouldn’t be a slam-dunk for Trump either way, because election law would come into play and Hillary’s hologram would have to be replaced by a flesh-and-blood candidate, something that might actually lower Trump’s chances.

So many full veiling bans have taken place – and will take place – in Europe that you can now discern at least one telling pattern in the process. Noise is made among political parties and leaders about introducing partial or full bans. IMMENSE numbers of opinion pieces appear in newspapers all over Europe, and in the United States, and in the Middle East. Almost all of these pieces oppose bans; the only difference among them involves the degree of anger and self-righteousness with which the author expresses her incredulity that anyone could fail to see the obvious degeneracy and threat to democracy such bans represent.

Next up are the national polls, which virtually always reveal that strong to overwhelming majorities in the country in question support a ban. Since taking seriously results like these is also a feature of democracy, and since disturbingly and very visually annihilated female minorities on your streets doesn’t, when you think about it, smack very powerfully of democracy at all, ban-opposers are in a bit of a fix. Always they write with the confidence that all decent-minded people perceive the evil of forcing women, via fines, not to be annihilated, and then it turns out that their confidence is badly misplaced.

*******************

If they are honest, they ponder the disconnect between their sense of the world and what the world really is. Are virtually all of their fellow French citizens vile Islamophobes? Has everybody turned into Marine Le Pen? And what the hell happened to the goddamn European Court of Human Rights? The world’s gone mad!

*******************

But it is now really the intellectual responsibility of people who defend a cultural status quo in which women are visually annihilated to examine with honesty and humility how it is that they came to be so out of step with the instinct of vast majorities in almost all of the European countries where the status of fully veiled women begins to become a matter of law.

Quite the flub.

Trump so far merely exhibits mental confusion; little by little, he’s letting us in on why – perhaps – he’s confused.

My Secret Vote

(sing it with me)

Once I had a secret vote.
It needed utmost privacy.
The fact that I’m a masochist
Should stay unknown to all but me.

I’d shout my secret from the highest hill!
Sadistic Donald Trump gives me a thrill!
But these words I cannot say
Until I’m in a booth on ballot day.

Clinton also provided insight into how she’s preparing to handle Donald Trump’s freewheeling, improvisational style in their upcoming general election debates.

“I am drawing on my experience in elementary school,” she said before imitating a boy pulling on a girl’s pigtails.

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When orange hairs, or none, or few, do hang
Upon this brow which lately raged against the polls.
But now bare silent Tweets! where late my Twitter sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such ire
That on the ashes of my pride doth lie,
The reality-show whereon it must expire
Consumes that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes my spite more strong,
To love that well which I must leave ere long.

Ken Starr to Leave Baylor Law School Post

*****************

This latest news allows me to update Trump administration appointments/personnel:

Chief Advisor, Women’s Issues: KENNETH STARR
Inaugural Poet: FREDERICK SEIDEL
Treasury: MARTIN SHKRELI
Fitness Czar: RYAN LOCHTE
Czarina: HOPE SOLO
Office of Ethics: ISHMAEL ZAMORA
Health and Welfare: MIKE LEACH

I ranted to the knave and fool,
I acted the obscenest tool,
To transform the polls.
Fit audience I found, but Clinton rules
The voter rolls.

I sought my betters: though in each
Fine manners, liberal speech,
Turn hatred into sport.
Nothing said or done can reach
My sadistic heart.

From a penthouse have I come.
Great pride, great rooms,
Maimed me at the start.
I carry to my bronzéd tomb
A sadistic heart.

Donald Trump’s doctor confuses the American College of Gastroenterologists with Trump University.

A lot of people are saying that this confusion on his part (coupled with multiple verbal anomalies in his letter about Donald Trump’s fitness for the presidency) suggests Dr. Bornstein has serious medical issues which could put into question his official endorsement of the candidate’s physical condition.

Who knows if Trump’s new Don’t-Suck-Putin’s-Cock approach will work? Time will tell.

Conservatives allied with Chancellor Angela Merkel are seeking a ban on Muslim women wearing full-face veils or burqas in schools and universities and while driving in Germany…

Merkel herself has criticized the burqa as incompatible with integration into Germany.

The pedagogical absurdity of faceless people trying to teach faceless people makes schools the obvious first place for a ban (as does the equally obvious danger of people driving around with seriously impaired vision), so it’s no surprise that the German effort to get rid of the hideous burqa starts there.

***************

UD‘s thoughts on the burqa.

Donald Trump statues hit below the belt.

************

Bravo, Washington Post. Very delicately put.

Unlike monuments of most political figures in cities across the globe, the Trump statues are far from flattering. They’re oddly shaped, lack one key element of the male reproductive system and dramatically play down another.

Former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer says she suffered a “stumble of the tongue” on Tuesday when she seemed to call Hillary Clinton a “lying killer” …

“People want a fighter. They’re tired of the lying killer, uh, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clintons of the world,” Brewer told [an interviewer].

When reached by phone by BuzzFeed News on Wednesday, Brewer said she just mispronounced Clinton’s name.

“I was trying to say Hillary Clinton,” Brewer said. “It was a stumble of the tongue.”

****************

(Act Two is here)

Characters

Loose Bannon
Manthefort
Miss Kissy
Pa Trubu
Secessions
Tense Rictus
Watch Their Tails

Location

A room in Trubu Tower.

Tense Rictus, Miss Kissy, Manthefort, Secessions, and Watch Their Tails seated at a splendid table. Excitedly talk over one another as they eat and drink.

Secessions: A toast! To the latest poll! It has us up by twenty points in northern Idaho.

Manthefort, Miss Kissy: A toast! A toast! We’re killing her!

Watch Their Tails: It’s the beginning of the end for that epileptic.

Tense Rictus: I thought we were going with Alzheimer’s.

[Laughter. Shouts of Whatever! Okay!]

[A sudden hush.]

Tense Rictus: Here he comes.

[Enter Pa Trubu with Loose Bannon. The men at the table eye Bannon warily.]

Tense Rictus: Uh, hi, Bannon. What brings you by this lovely afternoon?

Pa Trubu: Gentlemen, I give you my new campaign manager. Manthefort, give Bannon your seat.

[Manthefort’s face flushes. He abandons his seat.]

Manthefort: So where do I sit now?

Pa Trubu: How about… KIEV?

[All laugh except for Manthefort.]

Pa Trubu: My friends, change as we know is a part of life, it’s a part of life, change, change, part of life, and although we’re doing great in Hayden we’re doing unbelievable in Hayden, we’re winning so much in Hayden they’re begging us to do less winning, there’s always room for improvement. Loose Bannon is the attack dog we need at this point in the election cycle.

Loose Bannon [on all fours]: Rrrrrrfff! Rrrrrrrffff!

Pa Trubu: Manthefort – you and Miss Kissy go to the wine cellar and get us another bottle. Tense Rictus, Secessions – walk my dog. [All four leave.] So – Loose Bannon, Watch Their Tails – it’s time for the three of us to get to work.

Well then. You must be in one hell of a sour mood.