As election day nears, the politics of fear are on the rise. Speaking in Missouri on Wednesday, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton interrupted a speech by announcing to the crowd. “Folks, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but my advisers tell me that one of you has accidentally left your baby, in its baby carrier, on top of your car.”
In the swing state of Pennsylvania, GOP nominee Donald Trump addressed factory workers near Harrisburg. He talked about bringing jobs back to America. Then he said, “and now I’d like to introduce a woman who has been very important to me during my years in business.” He grabbed the arm of a rocking chair and pulled it around the platform. Upon it sat a horrifying skeleton in ladies’ clothing.
Hillary and Bill Clinton later tried to terrify West Virginia voters with the unsettling water-tank-escape trick. Hillary was tied at the ankles and wrists and submerged upside down, in an upright tank of water, transparent on all sides. “The average human can hold his or her breath underwater for 49 seconds,” Bill announced to the audience of likely voters, showing the crowd his wristwatch, as Hillary wriggled in the tank behind him. At the 40 second point, the former secretary of state didn’t even have her hands loose — it seemed there was something wrong.
Bill motioned to his wife through the glass as if to say, urgently, “do you need to come out now? Do you want to end the trick?” But Hillary shook him off, even as she flailed in apparent desperation. A minute elapsed, then 70, then 80 seconds. The crowd began to murmur. It suddenly swelled into a roar. Hillary finally freed her hands but was visibly disoriented in the tank. Bill ran offstage and returned with a sledgehammer. As he reared back to swing it, Hillary stopped moving, hanging lifeless in the water.
“You have to admire a candidate willing to die for the campaign,” Bill announced to the horrified audience, feigning sorrow. But Hillary was fine; she followed the performance with a speech about American values.
At a rally later, the Trump campaign labeled the Clinton effort “deceptive,” before a knife-wielding circus clown began dashing through the crowd, spreading unrest and prompting the candidate to announce, “Only I can stop him, folks.”
The following day, desperate to gain traction in the polls, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson began a speech in Kentucky announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, our nation is at a crossroads. We have too much regulation. We have too much involvement in international affairs. And we have four or five adult tarantulas loose somewhere in this auditorium.”
This is bad.
http://tinyurl.com/p7mmo9f
David Kent
