Larry Rosen Didn't Save Jazz, But He & Dave Grusin Gave It A New Lease On Life

Larry Rosen and Dave Grusin in Studio B, Electric Lady (1977)

Jazz has a dirty little secret.  From the outside looking in, the only musical genre that America can claim to be its very own appears to be healthy, and it indeed seems there has never been a more dazzling constellation of greats ranging from old cats like Horace Silver and Chick Corea to newcomers like Gregory Porter and Joey Alexander.  But from the inside, jazz is struggling to survive.   There are more empty seats than full ones at jazz clubs -- the ones that manage to survive, that is -- and few jazz musicians are able to make the big leap by quitting their day jobs, and many of those who do are struggling to survive by living a gig-to-gig existence. 

This is not new.  Indeed, playing jazz has been as much about living on the edge as cutting edge since Buddy Bolden started his first band in New Orleans in 1895.  But the situation was especially parlous in 1978.  That was when drummer Larry Rosen teamed up with keyboard player Dave Grusin to start GRP Records. 

GRP did not "save" jazz, as some people would have it, but Rosen and Grusin did provide a safe harbor for many jazz musicians who had been dumped by their record labels as disco, funk and punk rock dominated the charts.  Those artists came to include the bands Spyro Gyra, the Yellowjackets and Brecker Brothers, musicians Corea, Ramsey Lewis, David Sanborn, Lee Ritenour, Kenny Kirkland and Dave Valentin, and singers Angela Bonfill, Diane Schuur, Patti Austin and Diana Krall.  And of course Grusin.   

Hazel Rosen and Deborah at the NJPAC tribute.

Larry -- and we're on a first-name basis here because my companion Deborah and he and wife Hazel and their kids were close friends for many years -- died in October 2015 at the much-too-young age of 75.  There has been a round of tributes in his honor this month, including a blockbuster at NJPAC last week starring Grusin, Rittenour and Sanborn.  At 82, Grusin not only has not slowed down, but the multiple Grammy and Oscar winner is playing better than ever.   

Where Larry and Grusin were true pioneers was in introducing digital recording to jazz, which in the early 1980s was confined to classical music.  The entire GRP catalogue was digital, and Larry and Grusin went on to embrace MP3s years before they became the coin of the realm.  They sold GRP for a cool $60 million in 1990 and launched N2K, an early online music site at a time when artists of all stripes were especially struggling because free downloads were robbing them of their precious recording royalties and reliably greedy record companies were struck deaf and dumb as the world passed them by.   

When rocker David Bowie, ever the improvisor, defied Virgin, his label, by insisting on releasing a single digitally without a parent album to promote, he approached Larry for help. 

"Technology is going in one direction, consumers are going in that direction, and you are a total ass if you are trying to stop it," Larry famously said. "But that's what they tried to do.  And you can see what happened.  They killed themselves." 

Cioppino Is A Perfectly Delicious Cure For The Post-Election Thanksgiving Blues

Out of necessity -- as in one of us has had to work the next day or it was too far to travel to be with family -- we have bagged the traditional turkey or ham Thanksgiving dinner for the last several years and made a big pot of cioppino seafood stew.  We will be doing the same this year and additionally recommend it as a perfectly delicious cure for the post-election blues, as well as a great excuse to avoid having to pass the cranberries to that gloating uncle you just know will be wearing his Make America Great Again baseball cap. 

First some background: Cioppino is an Italian-American dish originally made in the late 1800s on fishing boats sailing back to San Francisco, often from Bodega Bay, with the catch of the day, typically scallops, shrimp, mussels, clams and Dungeness crabs with fresh tomatoes in a wine sauce.  The dish came ashore around the turn of the last century and became a staple in the Italian restaurants in the North Beach neighborhood where I lived in the mid-1970s. 

The trick to a great cioppino is to cook the seafood in the broth in the shell, which means you'll need crab forks, crab crackers and a dish for shells.  And bibs, because this is a very messy dish.   

INGREDIENTS 

3 tablespoons olive oil 

1 large sweet onion, chopped 

3 cloves garlic, sliced 

2 28-ounce cans diced tomatoes with juice 

1/2 cup dry white wine 

1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped 

2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped (1 tablespoon if dried)

Salt and cracked black pepper to taste 

1 bay leaf 

2 pounds mussels 

1 pound scallops 

1 1/2 pounds crab legs 

1 pound large fresh shrimp, unpeeled

PREPARATION

Heat olive oil in a very large, heavy pot over medium-high heat. 

Add onion and garlic and cook until soft, stirring frequently. 

Pour in tomatoes and white wine. 

Season with parsley, basil, salt and pepper and bay leaf. 

Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until liquid is reduced significantly.  (How much is "significantly"?  Enough to give the stew body but not too much that you can't dip bread in it.)  If you're concerned that there isn't enough liquid, add a half cup to a cup of water when no one is looking. 

Add mussels, scallops, crab legs and shrimp.  Quarter or halve crab legs, if necessary. 

Cover pot and cook over medium heat until mussels open. 

Scoop portions into large bowls and serve with lightly toasted Tuscan or sourdough bread (Rosemary sourdough is our preference) on the side.

This recipe serves eight, but we typically have a big bowl each, or about two servings apiece, and refrigerate the rest for leftovers. 

'Everybody's Crying Peace on Earth. Just As Soon As We Win This War'

STEPHANO PALTERA

EVERYBODY’S CRYING MERCY

By Mose Allison (1927 ~ 2016)

I can't believe the things I'm seeing

I wonder 'bout some things I've heard

Everybody's Crying Mercy

When they don't know the meaning of the word

A bad enough situation

It's sure enough getting worse

Everybody's Crying Justice

Just as long as it's business first

Toe to toe

Touch and go

Give a cheer

Get your souvenir

People running 'round in circles

Don't know what they're headed for

Everybody's Crying Peace on Earth

Just as soon as we win this war

Straight ahead

Knock 'em dead

Pack your kit

Choose your hypocrite

Well you don't have to go to off-Broadway

To see something plain absurd

Everybody's Crying Mercy

A Meal At A Strange Restaurant That Left America With A Bit Of Indigestion

That sound you hear is Establishment America -- most especially the mainstream media -- adjusting its bustle as it returns to good old normal.   

One week after we -- yes, you and I -- elected as our president one Donald Trump, a pathetically borish boy-man who believes only white people should be in charge, openly loathes people of color, disparages and assaults women and uses hate like it was styling gel, what was initially described as a national nightmare is quickly taking on the gravity of . . . well, a meal at a strange restaurant that left America with a bit of indigestion. 

With nary a whimper, albeit a fair amount of Maalox chugging and a few spoiled brat kids acting out in street protests for the nightly news, the establishment is adjusting its capacious bustle for a four, or perhaps eight, year interregnum with the fickle resignation of parents who have given the keys to the national car to a wayward son with plutocratic tendencies who of course will total it and take out some Mexican day laborers in the process.  Never mind that this almost certainly will mean war, terrorist attacks on the homeland, mass deportations of adults and children, a newly recidivist Supreme Court, decimating the environmental agenda, women's wombs as preexisting medical conditions and shredding of the social safety net.   

Meanwhile, the "leaders" of the Democratic Party are making a strong case that the center-left is clueless when it comes to understanding what voters want, let alone reaching out to them, as they fight over control of the post-Hillary Clinton sandbox and Bernie Sanders screams "Me! Me! Me!" Oh, and that James Comey is a very bad man. 

This is not resilience, it's excuse making ("We've been through far worse"), group myopia and normalizing the most obscene of our societal phobias -- racism -- and the justly reviled news media leads the pack on all counts. 

After 15 minutes of mea culpas and we'll do better next times, it's back to business as usual for the boys and girls on the bus as they cover the transition of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago from open and unashamed racist to a kinder and gentler leader who in the words of more than one mainstream media shill has made "an astonishing journey" to the White House.  Then there is the revisionist bilge peddled by the likes of CBS News's Leslie Stahl, who said of Trump after interviewing him for "60 Minutes" that he "was much more subdued, much more serious."   

And why was the Huffington Post the only news outlet of consequence to state the obvious with the headline

 WHITE NATIONALIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE

over a story on the selection of Steve Bannon as senior counselor and chief strategist?  Or why the selection of the lighter-than-air Reince Priebus as chief of staff is being greeted with relief.  Because the president-elect could have chosen Gary Busey?  

Most extraordinary in the mad scramble for normalcy was a letter to readers from The New York Times publisher and executive editor chockablock with vows to recommit to the cause of "the independent, original journalism for which we are known" that was so freighted with liberal guilt that I felt myself being embarrassed for Sulzberger and Baquet after I had finished puking.  

The fearless Times is now four for four on the big stories of the millennium: Negligent in reporting government malfeasance before and after the 9/11 attacks, tardy in recognizing the inherent wrongness of the Iraq War, too late to acknowledge and challenge the Bush Torture Regime, let alone use the word torture (ew!), and just as irresponsible in failing to take Trump seriously when it might have mattered.  The Times took Dubya's lies at face value, so why should we suppose it will be any different with Cheeto Jesus since Job One will not be to ferret out the truth, but begin anew the mutual backscratching dance essential to establishing those all-important news sources in the new administration. 

Having gotten the election utterly and absolutely wrong, I should have retired from the prediction business, but here I am making three more:

* Trumpkins will end up much worse off under his policies.  Even people who love assault weapons sometimes need food stamps and health insurance.

* Washington society will view Trump and his family as 5th Avenue trailer trash.  Which they are.  What D.C. did to the Clintons in 1993 was child's play.   

* Six-times bankrupt Trump has way too many skeletons for at least a few not to catch up to him.  He will be impeached, provoking a constitutional crisis.

And as noted in my post-election riff on America being the new Rome, I also believe that things will have to get much worse before they get better.  And that compromise will be even worse than capitulation because it is the express lane to conflating the catastrophic with the good old normal.  

No word yet on when the national pussy grabbing tour begins.

Cartoon du Jour

MARIAN KAMENSKY

'We Are Not Living For Ourselves Anymore . . . Now We Are Living For History'

BILL CLARK / CQ-ROLL CALL

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame. 

FROM W.H. AUDEN’S “SEPTEMBER 1, 1939” / HEADLINE QUOTE BY NEIL GABLER

The Townie Bar Vietnam Vets Tontine: I Suppose Six Out Of 12 Ain't Bad

AURENCE

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I'm sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called 'possession of my soul.' There are times since, I've felt like a child, born of those two fathers. But be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To teach to others what we know, and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life. ~ CHRIS TAYLOR in "Platoon"

Tontine is a French word for a last man's club.  Such clubs became popular after World War I, which was believed at the time to be the war to end all wars. 

The tontine was based on a simple premise: A bottle of liquor, usually cognac, was acquired and the last man alive among a group of veterans would drink it in honor of the others.  

All of the World War I clubs have drunk their liquor (the last U.S. veteran died in 2011) and it won't be long before the same can be said of World War II clubs.  In fact, there are fewer Americans alive today who are veterans than at any time in the last century. 

Sad to say, the Vietnam veterans tontine of which I was a member, which would meet at the townie bar of the old Deer Park Tavern in Newark, Delaware, is a shadow of its former self on this Veterans Day. 

Its original members included:

NICK, a Navy river boat skipper who suffered from severe post traumatic stress. He died in 2005.

DENNIS, an Army attack helicopter pilot. I wish I knew where he was. 

BOB, such a lousy mess cook that he became an Army ammo truck driver. Today he is a heavy equipment operator.

DOUGLAS, an Air Force cryptographer.  Cancer got him in 2011 before drugs and alcohol could.

MACK, a Marine Corps mortarman. Today he is an over-the-road trucker.

BIG ED, an Army chairborne ranger. He died of a heart attack in 1998.

CHUCK, an Army combat infantryman. He died of brain cancer from the effects of Agent Orange in 2005.

TOM, an Army helicopter mechanic.  Was in a VFW honor guard before moving out West several years ago.

SARGE, an Air Force supply sergeant. He died of a stroke in 2003.

DOCTOR DOC, a Marine Corps medic. He teaches entymology at a big midwestern university

DOCTOR DUCK, who stayed statewide after a bad head injury. He died of acoholism in 1996.

I suppose that six out of 12 ain't bad.

Looking Into The Abyss & Realizing I May Not Live To See A Woman President

PETICOR PHOTOGRAPHY

It's the same story the crow told me; it's the only one he knows. / Like the morning sun you come and like the wind you go. / Ain't no time to hate, barely time to wait, / Wo, oh, what I want to know, where does the time go? ~ UNCLE JOHN'S BAND

It was November 8, 2000.  The sun was just breaking over the Delaware River as I pulled out of the parking lot behind the Philadelphia Daily News after a grueling night during which I had rewritten the primary presidential election story five times as the lead in Florida seesawed between Al Gore and George W. Bush.  But that election was a mere fender bender compared to what happened on Tuesday night.   

The sun was just breaking over the Kittatinny Ridge when I stood up from my laptop, stretched my aching back and swallowed the dregs of a cold cup of coffee following another grueling all-night slog some 16 years on, this time to rewrite an election analysis that had started out as a valedictory to Hillary Clinton.   

I had briefly considered chucking the whole thing when the lead between Clinton and Donald Trump stopped seesawing in Florida, Trump's lead opened to a couple of percentage points and a few clicks on my pocket calculator confirmed something that had been insinuating itself into the recesses of my mind a few minutes before it dawned on the teevee talking heads: Cheeto Jesus would eek out a "stunning" upset win if Clinton lost any more swing states.   

In the next 90 minutes she was to lose all of them. 

§  

A steady if light rain was falling when a sound stirred me  from sleep after what seemed like hours but actually was only a few minutes since I had finished retooling my analysis, which had shed its valedictory skin and become as bitter as that last swallow of coffee.  One of the dogs was snoring at the foot of the bed.  The sun had vanished and the ridge was now obscured in mist.  I soon became aware of another sound -- the grinding of gears in my mind in a sort of involuntary spasmosis as it searched among the cobwebs for something positive to focus on in the face of disaster.   

This is what I came up with: 

I have long believed that America is the new Rome, and the moment when it forswore faith in its leaders and morality for greed and decadence was when Bill Clinton swore on national television in 1998 that he "never had sex with that woman . . . Monica Lewinsky."  Beyond setting off a fierce debate on whether blowjobs are in fact sex, Clinton in one fell swoop undermined the credibility of the presidency as not even Richard Nixon had been able.  The Oval Office has never been the same.   

I have long believed that the Democratic Party is nearly as awful as the Republican Party, that our system of government -- thoroughly undermined by that greed and decadence -- has been on a downward spiral that even eight years of the inherent positivity of Barack Obama has been unable to check. 

I also have long believed that things will have to get much worse before they get better, and a fraught, unexpected but welcome if perverse test of that view will be the ascendancy to the presidency -- the freaking presidency! -- of a vile and pathetically borish boy-man incapable of growth, comprehension or compassion who believes he is giving voice to the angst of white people who want to turn back the national clock.   

This will mean four or perhaps even eight years of unmitigated hell.  It probably will mean a war or two, as well as terrorist attacks on the homeland, shredding of the social safety net and a newly recidivist Supreme Court.  The idea of the feckless Democrats becoming a loyal opposition is laughable as I stare into the abyss, although I may be wrong (as I was about the election) and out of the ashes of this catastrophe will grow a better Democratic Party, one that is committed to what it says and not merely saying what it thinks will raise buckets of campaign cash.   

I will not play the recrimination game with two exceptions:  

I would like to thank all of the people who couldn't get their lazy asses off the couch to vote.   Turns out only slightly more people did vote than did not.  How Rome-like.   

I also would like to thank all of the people, some of whom I consider to be friends, for their ceaseless libels of Hillary Clinton and for helping to elect Donald Trump even if that may not have not been their intention.  Clinton was and remains an eminently decent person and her so-called negatives had less to do with Benghazi, private email servers, Wall Street speeches, family foundations and the toxic tandem of Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner than good old sexism.   

If there is one certainty on the bitter morning I am writing these words, it is that I may not live to see a woman president. 

An American Tragedy Starring Phony Populism, Lying Hillary & Those Deplorables

DonkeyHotey / Kiko's House

The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency is tragedy.  This is because beyond Trump himself -- a vile and pathetically borish boy-man incapable of growth, comprehension or compassion -- were people who believed he would not only give voice to their angst, he would be able to act on it as president by turning back the national clock. 

But lest we forget, lurking behind Trump's pitchfork posse was a visceral racism, hatred of our black president and misogynistic loathing of the Democratic nominee, as well as a deep anger over the demographic tide going out on the white American hegemony; in fact, anger over change of any kind.   

There also were genuine grievances, not the least of which were income disparity and offshoring jobs in an increasingly globalized world.  Trump, it seemed, was that rarest of Republicans who understood.  He spoke the language of the disaffected.  But all his supporters got in return for their unquestioning support was a phony populism, more fear and the ravings of a paranoiac who will have great difficulty fulfilling his campaign promises even with a Republican Congress. 

Supporters kept filling the seats at Make America Great rallies and cheered Trump wildly to the end. They didn't care about the facts any more than Trump did.  In a deeply depressing climax to a campaign that began in June 2015 when Trump descended deus ex machina from the escalator of his 5th Avenue penthouse to announce his biggest celebrity stunt ever, Trump did not purge America; America purged Clinton.

Hillary Clinton's loss is one for the history books, and not just because she was the first woman major party candidate for president an overdue 96 years after women were given the right to vote and fell short despite expectations she would prevail.  

While Clinton was unsuccessfully trying to shatter the biggest glass ceiling, Trump was shattering a few barriers of his own, and the yuge-ness of his support, which had seemed illusory from the outset of the general election campaign because he had won a mere 13 or so million votes in the primaries, was just enough to get him over the line.  

DonkeyHotey / Kiko's House

Donald Trump's campaign at times seemed to be more like a comedy act, but it was unambiguously a proto-fascistic message of hate-drenched white nationalism that galvanized, yes, a basket full of deplorables.

When it came to domestic and foreign policy, Trump could barely manage the jumble of policy positions ginned up by his advisers and further muddled by his lack of discipline --   which is a deeply frightening trait since he is now president-elect -- and a never ending series of unforced errors.  This despite Come to Jesus interventions where his family, aides and Republican National Committee leaders repeatedly pleaded with him to stick to the teleprompter and not wander into the weeds where he invariably got himself into trouble.  

But Trump was no Pygmalion, and he only cared about Trump.  His supporters were merely stage props in a bad soap opera.   

A drearily predictable pattern emerged after Trump had vanquished a field of lightweights in the Republican primaries by preaching a raw wall-building nativism and then faced only Clinton and a suddenly hostile news media (well, some of it, anyway) that belatedly rediscovered fact checking and drilled deeper and deeper through the layers of a seamy past that revealed a man who may never have done an honest thing in his life in inflicting decades of balance-sheet carnage, including cushioning nearly $1 billion in business losses by not paying federal income taxes, ran a shell game disguised as a charitable family foundation, and repeatedly forced himself on women.   

If there was a day that best typified the sheer depravity of Trump's campaign, it may have been September 16. 

It had been just another ho-hum week for Trump, who had boasted about his testosterone levels on a television celebrity doctor's show, accused the Fed chairwoman of corruption, mocked an African-American pastor, again referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas," again hinted his supporters should shoot his opponent, and again refused to release his tax returns.    

Then on the morning of September 16, Trump summoned journalists for a "major news announcement" that turned out to be an infomercial for his new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. and yet another opportunity to punk compliant cable news channels that had breathlessly gone live.  

But before the morning was out, there was much bigger news than that even if it took Trump a mere 31 seconds to deliver it: He grudgingly and unapologetically disavowed his self-made lie that Barack Obama was not American born, but immediately jump started yet another false conspiracy by blaming Hillary Clinton for creating the birther controversy that he himself had ignited and fanned for the last five years in a sick effort to undermine the legitimacy of the nation's first black president. 

And then there was October 7, the day the Access Hollywood hot-mic video surfaced.  Trump boasted in vulgar terms about how his celebrity status allowed him to sexually assault women with impunity, and that led to revelations by 12 women that they had been victimized by Trump, an exodus of backers and an announcement by House Speaker Paul Ryan, perhaps the most powerful Republican, that he would no longer defend or campaign for Trump, in effect prematurely conceding defeat for Trump and the party.      

To the horror of the party elites, Trump happened to be the very kind of presidential candidate the party's restive base had been clamoring for after years of being repeatedly stiffed by Bushes, Roves, Ryans and McConnells adept at mobilizing right-wing populist anger while coddling Wall Street and the super rich.  And the elites, when confronted with the horrifying reality that their beloved party had become a victim of its own hubris, putting the White House even further out of reach, rolled over and allowed him to diddle them like extras in a bad porn flick.   

The down-ticket fallout from Trump's candidacy was virtually nonexistent.  Democrats did pick up a Senate seat,  electing the first Latina senator, while Republicans kept a substantial majority in the House and did well in state races.  

DonkeyHotey / Kiko's House

As Donald Trump misplaced and then tried to regain his primary season swagger, he invariably took the bait dangled in front of him by Clinton and her surrogates. 

Chief among them was Barack Obama, who delighted in messing with Trump's febrile mind as the president's popularity plateaued in sync with the campaign, and his wife Michelle, who may have delivered the best speeches of the campaign in scolding Trump and beseeching blacks and women to come home to the formidable voter coalition her husband galvanized in 2008 and called on again in 2012.  Then there was Bernie Sanders, who belatedly if never completely convincingly supported the nominee. 

Taken together, the three presidential debates were the most complete evisceration of a candidate in modern history, not that it mattered. 

By the first debate on September 26, the polls seemed to be too close for comfort, but Clinton was dominating where it would matter most -- the states with the most electoral votes --  and Trump began cratering in many swing states as undecided voters began coming off the fence and opting for her.   

That first debate was a catastrophe for Trump because it was his last best opportunity to prove that he was more than an intemperate windbag.  But Trump made a fool of himself, falling into the trap Clinton set for him over former beauty pageant winner Alicia Machado while she cooly made the case that her worldview and three decades of public service made her best qualified to lead America over the next four years. 

The second debate on October 9 was a tawdry street fight in which Trump wobbled between conspiracy theories, threats, glowering and rage while Clinton struggled to keep her dignity. 

That debate was bookended by release of the Access Hollywood video and Ryan's withdrawal of support and the candidate's increasingly desperate claims that the election had been rigged by "crooked Hillary" as he crashed in the polls, and then the emergence of his biggest and baddest conspiracy theory of all -- there was "a global power structure" of corporate interests, the media and, of course, Clinton herself that was conspiring to doom him.   

By the third and final debate on October 19, it seemed to be all over bar the shouting, of which there was plenty.   

Clinton was the clear winner, but in a pulse-stopping moment that will go down in history, he thumbed his nose at the American tradition of a peaceful transition of power by refusing to say that he would concede defeat although it was increasingly appearing he would lose.  

It did not help that Trump's shambolic campaign organization became a revolving door as he kept shedding campaign bosses, but in the end that didn't matter either.   

Sane didn't work, so the campaign tried crazy.  When that didn't work, it went back to sane, and then crazy again as Trump settled on Steve Bannon, an "alt-right" warrior from the Breitbart school of scorched earth politics as his navigator. Bannon was comfortable in Trump's parallel universe of dystopian true believers and vowed to let Trump be himself. Which he was.  Perhaps Trump would have fooled more people if he had listened listened to his saner advisers.   

Ever the hypocrite, Trump's most effective weapon against Clinton was her deletion of 30,000 emails from when she was secretary of state.  She asserted those emails were personal, while the FBI concluded no crime was committed and grudgingly reasserted that after FBI Director James Comey's outrageous 11th hour announcement of the discovery of new emails in a clumsy move reminiscent of the tactics of J. Edgar Hoover.  Trump, meanwhile, had destroyed thousands of emails, digital records and documents demanded in official proceedings over the years, often in defiance of court orders.

Trump's policy panels were filled with right-wing cranks. His spokeswoman was an encyclopedia of false information.  His campaign manager clashed with him with mind-numbing frequency, often publicly disagreed with her boss.  His inner circle was dominated by ice-cold spalpeens, some with troubling ties to Trump's favorite dictator, Russian President Vladimir Putin.  His ill-fated transition team leader was a disgraced governor who faces possible criminal indictment for the Bridgegate scandal.  His war chest was woefully inadequate as major Republican donors turned off the spigot.  He further muddled his interests by mixing his business interests with his campaign.   

And his ground game virtually nonexistent even if that ended up not mattering.   

DonkeyHotey / Kiko's House

Hillary Clinton was not a great candidate and seemed to have a predilection for bad judgment, but she ran a disciplined, stay-on-message campaign underwritten by an immense, billion dollar-plus war chest.   

Clinton was "historically disliked," but she never was accused of lacking Trump's basic decency.  Her negatives also had less to do with Benghazi, private email servers, Wall Street speeches, family foundations and the toxic tandem of Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner than good old sexism.    

Clinton has lived a life antithetical to what a lot of us expect of a woman.  While she did not make us feel cuddly like women are "supposed to do," she did not try to hide her ambition while never being boastful about a long career that focused on the needs of the disadvantaged.  

Shortly before the polls began closing last night, I reread my post-mortem on the 2012 Romney-Ryan flameout.  Although I expected there would be differences between that race and this year's race, I was blown away by the sheer meanness of the Trump campaign, although I have covered it for the last 16 months.    

The complicity of the news media in creating the Trump monster cannot be understated.  The media's most grievous of many sins was to swallow whole the bloviations of the right-ring noise machine that Clinton was corrupt, and by the perverse calculus of this election season that somehow cancelled out the media having to note that Trump was not only unqualified to be president, he was dangerous. 

And how a political party could have allowed someone as profoundly toxic as Trump to get so close to the presidency needs to be seriously examined after the last scrap of confetti is swept up.  John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate in 2008 is a distant second, although that extraordinarily cynical decision did pave the way for Trump.   

The Republican Party, of course, pretended that Trump was somebody else even when repeatedly confronted with his repugnant behavior.   

It is bad enough that he will haunt the country as president and wreak god knows how much damage even if his border wall is never built and the U.S. does not leave NATO.  Party leaders -- and Mike Pence, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in particular -- should be horse whipped not just for their support of a man who threatens to undermine the very foundations of our democracy, but stood idly by while he consolidated power as did Der Führer in the 1930s, which is one Hitler analogy that is appropriate. 

Now that Hillary Clinton has failed to save the country from Donald Trump and America finds itself looking into the abyss, we will have to pray that the republic can save itself.   

§  

This is the 163rd and final Politix Update column.  I would like to say that it's been real, but Campaign 2016 was unreal, and in too many respects surreal.   

Journalists aspire to live in interesting times, but that can be a curse as this campaign has proven. I'm cooked, but I sincerely thank you for your input, patience and good cheer.   

POLITIX UPDATE HAS BEEN WRITTEN BY SHAUN MULLEN, A VETERAN JOURNALIST AND BLOGGER FOR WHOM THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN WAS HIS 12th SINCE 1968.  CLICK HERE FOR AN INDEX OF PREVIOUS COLUMNS.  

© 2015-2016 SHAUN D. MULLEN

DonkeyHotey was commissioned to create the images for this post.
THESE SOURCES WERE USED FOR HIS IMAGES: Donald Trump caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0),
 Trump body (Paul Delaroche / Wikimedia), Melania Trump caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0), Melania body (The Heart 
Truth, Flickr 1 and 2, Hillary Clinton caricature DonkeyHotey / Flickr -- CC BY 2.0, Hillary body  (US Department of State / Flickr), 
Blimp (Dan Dickinson / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), Paul Ryan caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0),  Ryan body 
(Quincena Musical / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), Ryan chair (US Department of State / Flickr),  Vladimir Putin caricature 
(DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0), Lion (Tom Head / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), Chris Christie caricature
 (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), Limousine Keoni Cabral / Flickr – CC BY 2.0),  Plane (Bill Abbott / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0), 
Helicopter (Phil Roeder / Flickr – CC BY 2.0) Doll (RomitaGirl67 / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), Room (Bruce Turner / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), 
Lights (Husond / Wikimedia - CC BY-SA 3.0), Pillars (Pierre / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), 
Ceiling (Michelangelo / Wikimedia), Central Park (Alan Light / Flickr – CC BY 2.0).