Drought and Trump

First off, this is from Monday's drought monitor:

Keep an eye on the Adirondacks of NY, as well as upper New England. Those areas are sometimes referred to as "the fireproof mountains", because the climate is wet enough that there isn't the same sort of fire risk as there often is out west. If they dry out, there will be a lot of fuel and the fires may be epic.

Now to Donald Trump. As you've probably noticed, Hillary Clinton has been keeping a low profile. Part of that is from the old adage of "never prevent an enemy from making mistakes" and, YDAFL knows, he's been campaigning as though he enjoyed stomping on Bouncing Bettys.

But it seems that she has been campaigning: Among the rich.

At a private fund-raiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to “Hey Jude.”

“I stand between you and the apocalypse,” a confident Mrs. Clinton declared to laughs, exhibiting a flash of self-awareness and humor to a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein and for whom the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency is dire.

Mr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.

If Clinton wants to lose this election, I can see no better way, right now, than making the argument for Trump that she is a willing tool of the Oligarchy, that she will look out for the interests of the very people whose interests the politicians have been putting first for the last forty years.

This issue has been driven home, at least to me, by some conversations with some bright people who I would have never pegged for Trump voters, but who are voting for him. They all despise Trump's racism and xenophobia. They think that he is a despicable narcissist. They think that it is an absolute horror that he won the nomination. Frankly, they despise him.

But they despise the system more. They have said, in varying words, that the system is rigged against everyone but the ultra-rich. As one person told me, "if you don't have a billion dollars, they won't do shit for you." St. Louis was going to build a football palace for Stan Kroenke, who is worth several billion dollars, but good fucking luck finding the money to fix the inner-city schools, for reasons that border on the nefarious.

The system is rotten. The only person on the political horizon who even remotely promises to rip it down is Trump.

And yes, a goodly number of them would have voted for Bernie Sanders, for the same reason that they'll now vote for Trump.

If the Trump campaign had any smarts, they'd now be blaring that Hillary is the candidate of the rich. Because nobody who is not already a Trumpanzee is going to give a fuck about Benghazi or her email server. But tar her with being a tool of the billionaires, and maybe Trump might gain some traction.

Fortunately for Clinton, there're are few signs that the Trump campaign has any smarts.