With Or Without

Of course Donald Trump will not debate against Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton would merely laugh at him. But Sanders would mix that with going very, very hard. It would be glorious to watch.

With Clinton, Trump just intends to bloviate about the menopause or what have you. But what would he say to Sanders, who has been arguing against neoliberalism and neoconservatism in great detail forever? 

This is a Presidential Election without a Republican candidate, as such. Trump is effectively an Independent, as of course he can afford to be. The party refuses to have anything to do with him.

Likewise, his only connection to it is that he is going to take down numerous of its candidates for other offices, and not least for both Houses of Congress, along with him in November.

Of course, unlike Clinton, Sanders beats him in every national and state poll. If Sanders won the California primary, or even came close, then all bets would be off.

Trump would have been on the ballot with or without the Republican Party, and is, for all practical purposes, on the ballot without it.

Likewise, it is looking more and more as if Sanders is going to be on the ballot with or without the Democratic Party.

But quite conceivably with it.

Countenance The Spectacle

The Electoral Commission knew what it was doing when it recognised as the official Leave campaign a star vehicle created for a sinister buffoon who had been expressing exactly the opposite view into the present calendar year.

Huge numbers of people would be unable to countenance the spectacle of Boris Johnson's victory, and would either stay at home, or else vote the other way.

Of course, the same thing would have been true of Nigel Farage. But that never happened.

Get ready to thank Boris Johnson for the thumping Remain victory that he has always wanted, even as he attempts to use his fronting of the Leave campaign as the basis of his bid for the Premiership.

Making It Official

In Official Opposition, the Ulster Unionist Party will presumably be adopting what is now the time-honoured position of whichever major Unionist party is not providing the First Minister at the given time.

That position is one of ever-so-slight scepticism about the whole arrangement, but nowhere near enough as might call it into question in principle.

Even Traditional Unionist Voice is like that, albeit to a more intense degree. Outright Unionist opposition is simply no longer a factor in the place where people would have to live with the consequences.

Meanwhile, what of the SDLP in Official Opposition?

The rising force in, for the time being, Nationalist areas is the People Before Profit Alliance, in reaction against the austerity programme of Sinn Féin.

There are clearly votes to be had there.

That Was The Weak That Was

Last night, I watched Have I Got News for You? for the first time in several months.

It is utterly exhausted.

A picture of a woman with the doll's cushions that she had bought because she had thought that they were full size, provided the only laugh in the whole half-hour.

The latest Private Eye is equally weak, and seems to think that the #toryelectionfraud hashtag is all about the polling day cock-up in Barnet.

In failing to report the real story behind that hashtag, Private Eye is as bad as the BBC, and is in fact indistinguishable from it.

The Donald Feels The Bern

I intend to emulate Bernie Sanders in Lancaster, California, by entering an election rally in Lanchester, County Durham to the strains of Where The Hood At?, by DMX.

After all, I am a lot younger than Bernie Sanders. Come to that, I am several years younger than DMX. And unlike him, I never quite did get ordained.

So much for Donald Trump. He is running scared of a debate with Sanders, who articulates the politically informed versions the positions on which of Trump's relative good points are half-baked and amateur variations.

The outright refusal of that debate ought to be absolutely disqualifying of Trump, and may yet turn out to be so.

A Dangerous Experiment

I am banned for life from the Labour Party, and, like George Galloway, I am loving every second of it.

Rod Liddle is "suspended", apparently forever. I hope that he enjoys being out of it as much as we do.

For, you see, Tony Blair remains a member in good standing.

What is the party waiting for? The Chilcot Report?

Well, I for one am honoured and delighted to be barred from any club that has Blair in it.

Crisis In Venezuela?

Venezuela has always been like that for most people.

But only when the champagne stops flowing at the country clubs do the American and the wannabe American Right and pseudo-Left suddenly sit up and take notice.

What would replace the present Government? What has replaced overthrown left-wing governments in Latin America and the Caribbean in the past?

At whose instigation? And to whose benefit?