Happy Labor Day to everybody out there who labors. It’s very kind of those who exploit labor for their own greedy and nefarious purposes to let us have the day off. Unless you work for one of those greedy exploiters who aren’t closed today, in which case it sucks to be you (and I hope you’re at least getting double pay). I know Costco is closed today, and while I haven’t checked, I’m betting Walmart’s open. I mean, hell, they even force their employees to work on Thanksgiving, right? I can’t imagine they’d celebrate “labor” (except to have a sale).

Today is also the final day of the Great NY State Fair. As of yesterday, they had over 999,000 people attend (I was not one of them, though I really would have liked to go see Robert Cray there yesterday), meaning they not only will top the million mark, but are almost assured of record attendance this year (they’re about 12,000 away, and with yet another beautiful day weather-wise, dollar admission, and dollar rides, that shouldn’t be a problem).

Yes, this is what passes for news around here.

Even though we have more hot weather coming up this week, this pretty much means that summer is over. It’s getting dark mighty early now (I hate the thought of going back to “Standard” time), and the election is a mere 64 days away (seems like it’s been going on forever). If you believe the polls, the race is tightening up now. Whether that’s wishful thinking on the part of a media that’s desperate to sell advertising, I don’t know. But I can’t say it surprises me. As utterly absurd as the thought of President Trump is (to me, anyway – is there something appealing about him that I just don’t get?), an awful lot of people seem to despise Hillary Clinton and her husband (who last I saw wasn’t actually running, but, whatever).

Even many of the people who don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to the word “Clinton” seem to have a lack of trust in Hillary. Much of this is of course baseless (Bill and Hillary have had any number of people assassinated, Hillary is so ill she’s basically a dead woman walking, Hillary is mentally unstable, Hillary personally restrained a platoon of marines to prevent them from rescuing the folks at the US Embassy in Libya, Hillary wants to take your fucking guns away…). Some things she kind of brought on herself – the whole e-mail thing comes to mind. I understand her not wanting to give the crazy Clinton haters more shit to use against her, but it just doesn’t look good. And if this was, say, Secretary of State Donald J. Trump, Democrats would be howling about it. You can say that Colin Powell did it too, but he didn’t set up his own server and he didn’t use e-mail to the same extent that Hillary did.

The only personal experience I have with Powell and e-mail come from my time running a website for the families of the Lockerbie bombing. Before the UN announced the deal where Libya would accept responsibility for the bombing and pay off the victims’ families in exchange for lifting UN sanctions, the State Department wanted to issue a statement to the families ahead of time. So I had to sit around at work late one night waiting for an e-mail from Colin Powell. It was taking a long time, because his official e-mail couldn’t connect to the outside world. So he had to e-mail the statement to his aide, who then had to type it back into a different system that he could then send to me. And I guess he was a slow typist, ‘cuz it took forever.

It always comes back to Libya, doesn’t it? My advice – stay the hell away from Libya.

And of course people don’t like Hillary because she comes across as something less than Miss Congeniality and isn’t a good speechifier (whereas Trump comes across as an ignorant fat loudmouth conman), or they don’t like her voice. Hillary admits that she’s no Bill (or Barack). Should this matter? No. I enjoy a good speech as much as the next guy, but I prefer somebody who’s smart and, ideally, not insane (and say what you want about Hillary, I don’t think there’s anybody who wouldn’t say she’s pretty damn smart). But unfortunately, it does matter to at least some extent – gotta have a marketable product. As Jackson Browne said…

They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us everything from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars

I think one reason we got Dubya twice was because Al Gore was “wooden” (and smart – there are a lot of people out there who don’t like smart people. I refer to these people as “dumb”), and watching John Kerry speak was like listening to an Ent. And then there was Mike Dukakis, who basically lost because he looked stupid in a helmet (I thought he looked like Snoopy, personally).

I never could understand why they called Reagan the “Great Communicator.” He wasn’t much of an actor, and he stuttered and stammered and had these pregnant pauses in the middle of his sentences where you thought the sound dropped out for a minute. I guess for some people he came across as a kindly old grandfather type. Not to me. I was kinda concerned about a nuclear war back then, and I didn’t find him the least bit endearing.

But, anyway, back to Hillary. Even though I find the hatred of her to be ridiculous, and even though I, personally, think it’s a no-brainer that she’s at the very least capable of actually being in charge of the government (and am hopeful – though doubtful – that she’ll turn out to be this closet radical socialist the wingnuts make her out to be) without fucking things up, I know a lot of people don’t seem to like her.

And the dangerous thing about Trump is that the longer he hangs out, the more “use” to him people are gonna get. They become numb to his crazy conman bullshit, and the idea of him winning gets less and less outrageous as time goes on. Add to that the media desire to cover the “horse race,” the gullibility of the all the Archie Bunker types out there (to quote the Donald, “I love the poorly educated!”), and the relentlessness of the vast right wing conspiracy, and who knows what may happen in November.

The thought of Trump and Mike Pence (because you know he’ll be doing all the work) appointing Supreme Court justices, representing the US on the world stage, controlling the military, trashing the economy (and screwing me out of my Social Security), and having the nuclear launch codes terrifies me.

But, anyway, have a happy Labor Day. Hopefully there’ll be another one next year.