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Come Back HA!, All Is Forgiven

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Salon has dug up yet another random hack to get in on the “if you’re an affluent white guy, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Clinton and Trump” racket:

Anecdote: There is a little lunch club in my village, guys who gather for soup and BLTs once a week just to get out of the house during our nine-month winters. It is a mixed bag. Yesterday a kindly, confirmed Republican of the old school brought me up short with this: “I’m sitting this one out. I’m not getting my hands dirty with either of them. I don’t want to have to say I helped make the mess.” This from an ex-State Department official with a long record of service.

I have long considered not voting a legitimate position—whether for the sake of clean hands or for any number of other reasons—but the stance now grows defensible among people who might have cursed it even an election or two back. Not voting is one form of political participation among countless others—an argument I have made scores of times. Look, we applaud people in other countries when they boycott elections that present no substantive choices. Low turnouts, depriving those contesting high office legitimacy, are viewed as honorable in such cases. They are political assertions, verdicts.

1)Clean hands is a particularly dumb argument for not voting; 2)the idea that Clinton v. Trump does not provide voters with a “substantive choice” is insane; 3)his sample of former Republican State Department officials is such a wonderfully self-refuting touch I’d assume it was parody at a different publication. Hopefully his next column will feature someone who used to be a liberal but was insulted at an apocryphal cocktail party and now favors ruling the Clean Air Act unconstitutional.

And now the punchline:

What about Téa Leone for president, on the other hand? Reagan cut the trail for entertainment stars and they named airports and parks after him when he was done. Téa has a lot of experience, given her show consults with State regularly. (Oh, yes. The long arm of official propaganda has many fingers.) And Téa, Madame Secretary, has far better hair than The Great Communicator’s. It deserves a casting credit all its own, in my view.

What a wit! I’m not sure if Salon doesn’t just doesn’t have editors anymore, or if an editor decided to let him keep misspelling Leoni’s name because there was certainly no chance anything else in the article was going to be funny.

So who is this guy?

Patrick Smith is Salon’s foreign affairs columnist.

Seems about right. And give him this: at least he’s not Paglia.

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