If ever there was a time to give thanks for being born Canadian, this past holiday weekend was it.
Just in case you didn’t get enough turkey on your plate, your television and computer screen were surely filled with turkeys from south of the border either clinging to, or leaping off, the Donald Trump bandwagon.
Whenever it seems impossible to imagine the gong show election underway in the U.S. taking any stranger turns, the Trump campaign finds a way. This time it was Trump’s response to the discovery of a 2005 recording of comments indicating he felt entitled to grope women who would be unable to reject his advances because of his celebrity status.
Repeatedly dismissing the recording as “locker room talk” during a televised presidential debate, the Republican standard-bearer tried to deflect attention to his opponent’s failings. While Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has many a blemish on her record, repeated probes and investigations into her various scandals have failed to produce anything but massive piles of paper – no legal indictments. Despite this, Trump asserted that if he were president, she would “be in jail.”
Perhaps the biggest controversy to come, were Trump to defy current odds and make to the White House, would be over the need to change the words to America’s national anthem.
After all, you could hardly proclaim yourself “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” while electing as your leader someone who advocates jailing political opponents and indicates he feels entitled to sexually assault women.
Perhaps the scariest thought for those who hope that Trump will simply lose and fade off into the sunset after the election is what might happen next time around. What if the Republican base were to decide the only reason they didn’t win this time is because they’d didn’t find the right combination of radicalism and reality television?
Right wing radio ranter Rush Limbaugh for president, with Kim Kardashian as running mate – perhaps that’s the ticket?
Oh Canada. You’ve never looked better.
