This is a dumb election.  It's not because the opponents are the same and it's definitely not Hillary Clinton's fault. It's a dumb election because Donald Trump suffers from the insane delusion that years of high ratings playing a celebrity billionaire villain on reality TV shows means that people like and respect him and so he tried to turn the election into one about the likability of his persona versus the likability of his opponent.

Photo credit: AP/Fortune

Every woman alive knows personally or knows about those puffy-chested, foul-mouthed, egotistical bullies who hike up their big, bad britches and talk trash about having loads of fun with our private parts.  Until now, not a single one of them ended up being a major party's candidate for President of the United States.  That's a new one.

You can't spin sexual assault. You can spin sex. You can spin assault. You can spin talking about sexual assault (Locker room talk!) But sexual assault can't be spun.

Donald Trump's only option is to deny, to call these women liars, which he will do tomorrow.

And then all the Republicans walking that tightrope between endorsing and denouncing will be forced to choose: Trump or his victims.

I've been an Edward Snowden fan because I believe, without much doubt at this point, that anything he's done that his critics call out as "bad' such as releasing information about legitimate U.S. intelligence operations against overseas targets or seeking refuge with Vladimir Putin are either forgivable or understandable within the context of him giving the American people the knowledge they needed in order to give consent to their own government.

Blue Ridge Mountains (n.) A place where many of the same parents who forbade their children from hearing a 2009 back to school address by President Obama now decorate their bodies, cars, and yards with campaign paraphernalia from the most vulgar candidate who's run for office in modern history.

So, Camp Trump has decided, again, that the smart thing to do is to go after Hillary Clinton because her husband was unfaithful to her. When you're facing an opponent who has had trouble being taken as human and sympathetic, what better way to go?

Six months ago, I wrote:

Trump's biggest mistake during the primary was to feud with people who were not running against him...Clinton can exploit Trump's propensity to retaliate against anyone who crosses him by deploying surrogates to batter him with a fusillade of insults. If Trump were smart, he would ignore them and focus on Clinton, but his reaction to Elizabeth Warren's tweets suggests he cannot resist the urge to counterpunch, even when it doesn't serve his interests. With every over-the-top smackdown, he will distract voters from his message and deflate whatever presidential gravitas he manages to muster.

Since then, we have seen this scenario play out repeatedly, most remarkably in the case of Trump's feud with the parents of Humayun Khan.

Now it's happening again, and I believe that this feud with former Ms. Universe Alicia Machado will finally spell the end of his campaign.

President Obama had vetoed a bill passed by Congress that allows U.S. citizens who are victims of state sponsored terrorism to sue the governments who sponsor that terrorism in U.S. courts. This has sparked some outrage overseas even as it gives families of 9/11 victims some shot at holding the Saudi Royal family accountable in U.S. courts, if the families can prove their case (and if they get that far). Obama opposed the law on the grounds of sovereign immunity, which generally immunizes recognized states from civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution.

The first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is behind us now and, except for the usual tiresome trolls, the racists, the bigots, the misogynists, and a few souls who genuinely want to believe a cruel, crass billionaire will be their saving Messiah, the consensus is that Hillary whomped The Donald, slammed him to the ground, and wiped the floor with him. Like a rag mop.

The pundits handicapping tonight's Trump-Clinton debate were slowly driving me insane, and now they've speeded up. The debate is not a fair fight, and should not be. A guy who doesn't know anything is supposed to lose a debate against a smart person who knows a lot. Anything that makes those people an "even" match is a fix. But the craven attempts to frame Trump v. Clinton as an even-money proposition has finally put my finger on something that's been bugging me for a long time: the insistence that being smart is elitist.

Inquiring minds want to know, which Donald Trump will show up to the debate tonight? The name-calling bully? The xenophobic scaremonger? The misogynist jerk? The entertaining clown? The pathological liar? The dog-whistling bigot? The reckless lunatic? The shallow narcissist? Or some new incarnation of softer, smarter Trump who uses big words.

Chris Matthews doesn't know. Mark Halperin doesn't know.  Ed Kilgore doesn't know. Some editor at the Atlantic doesn't know. Hillary Clinton doesn't know.

She literally said, "I do not know which Donald Trump will show up."

Well, she better figure it out, quick. Because if she hopes to triumph at the debate tonight, she can't wait and see which Trump shows up at the lectern. She must choose her Trump.

I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday looking at this National Enquirer cover, trying to convince myself I'm too old to be horrified by these things anymore. It made me queasy and a little breathless but I managed to get past it and move my groceries from my cart to the belt.
 

"Breaking News," tweeted the New York Times yesterday, "Trump backed off birther claims: 'President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.'"

Typical of the Times' election reporting, the tweet made no mention of Trump's lies or his dishonest attempt to shift the blame onto Hillary Clinton. (By contrast, the Washington Post called it straight: "Breaking: Trump admits Obama born in U.S. but falsely blames Clinton for starting rumors.")

But today, the Grey Lady took her gloves off. The headline for the lead story on the front page provocatively declares, "Trump Gives Up Lie But Refuses to Repent."

Everyone wants someone to blame for the election of 2016. It's the media's fault that Donald Trump is running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton. No, it's Hillary's secretiveness and her Wall Street connections. No, it's the bankers. No, it's the economy, stupid. No, it's sexism, racism, reality television. And so on.

Many of these factors do affect the race, but none of them really explains the Trump phenomenon. Sure, Hillary would be further ahead if she were more charismatic or if the press were easier on her, but the real mystery is how a man like Donald Trump is in the race at all.

I've been thinking for a long time about the ways Hillary Clinton might possibly appease the press and get them to look at her as a living, breathing whole person and not just Bad Hillary. I think I've finally got it.

Today, Richard Cohen visits Hazard, Kentucky to profile Trump supporters.  The long and short of it seems to be that eight years of Obama's Environmental Protection Agency pushing the country away from coal asn an energy source has destroyed Eastern Kentucky's economy.  No doubt that, along with low oil and natural gas prices, have taken their toll on the region.

So today, Paul Krugman told it like it is about the newspaper that employs him and its strange "balance via bias" coverage of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, in which the Grey Lady tries to give both candidates equivalent amounts of negative coverage.

Every Labor Day I feel more and more like I'm at a labor union wake and all I can do is pay tribute to what once was a living, breathing, cherished part of so many of our lives.

The media has been puzzling for months over Donald Trump's so-called medical record in which his doctor declared, "If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

According to Josh Marshall's theory of Trump's Razor, we should conclude "the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts."

The stupidest possible scenario is so stupid that it did not even occur to me until now: Trump wrote his own doctor's note and then got his doctor to sign it.

Trump again. I know. I'm obsessed with who he is, how he got here, where he's going, and who's going down with him. Day by day, in every way, it's as if the planet has tilted and those of us still upright are experiencing an existential vertigo.  (In other words, "What the hell is happening??")

In a matter of a precious few months Donald Trump vanquished more than a dozen barely worthy but infinitely better opponents and now he's as astonished as anyone that it's looking less like a political coup and more like a damned junta!