……And The Winner Is….
Back in September of 2015, I published “Crisis Under The Big Top”, my take on the upcoming election season. My main point was that we were about to be subjected to a relentless onslaught of “endless hype from all manner of supposed journalists vying for the day’s most extreme dose of sensationalism”. Although this prediction appears to have been right on the money, I didn’t foresee the battle for the White House coming down to the most disgusting presidential contest ever in my lifetime between two of the most disliked candidates in history.
How can this happen? Why in a nation of so many talented people do we essentially end up with a choice between two such seriously objectionable individuals? In a moment, I’ll have a bit more to say about my personal impression of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. However, I’m far more interested in probing the question of why our process for selecting candidates seems to be so seriously flawed.
I suspect the answer is “Big Money”. A news media that is corrupted by the lust for profits, politicians of all stripes whose primary objective is enhancing personal wealth, and the powerful ultra rich like billionaire George Soros and a curious mix of other billionaires who have grandiose ideas of global control.
In order to bring about reform of such a flawed system, I believe three things are needed. The candidate selection process should be shortened thus limiting the endless financial bonanza sought by the media. Serious term limits for elected officials need to be implemented and, perhaps most important, the amount of money allowed to be spent by all involved in the political system should be severely slashed.
While one of the two major party candidates will win the White House, the big winners this time around are the media and the billionaires whose selfish interests will be enhanced. The big losers, The American people, who in the end will pay the bill and suffer the consequences of continued sub-optimal leadership.
Now a few words about my personal assessment of the candidates. But first, I need to clarify why I believe our current leadership has been sub-optimal. The position I took on Barack Obama several years ago at the earliest stage of his presidency was that he should be judged by what he does not by what he says. He is obviously a gifted orator but, in my opinion, excellent speeches are the best that can be said of his performance as president. Three issues that I was particularly interested in having addressed were our enormous national debt, our lax security at the border and resulting serious problem with illegal immigration and, of particular importance, strong bipartisan government leadership. In my opinion, he has failed at all three. Our national debt has grown more under his watch than ever before and now approaches the unimaginable figure of $20 trillion.The Illegal immigration situation has grown to such an extent that benefits and rights for the illegals has nearly gained the ridiculous state of legitimacy. Our government is and has been in disarray. For a congress to be effective and able to deal with difficult issue, presidential leadership is needed to bring the parties together for win - win decision making. The “my way or the highway” attitude is doomed to failure.
Now, to get to the two major candidates for president in 2016, my opinion of Donald Trump is that, although he is seriously inexperienced, it would have been theoretically possible for him to remedy that situation by gathering the right group of advisors in a new administration. However, he quickly disqualified himself, in my view, by demonstrating an overwhelmingly large and dangerously fragile ego. His publicly visible treatment and statements about others, especially women was the final straw in my personal rejection of him as a candidate. In the case of Hillary Clinton, there is a vast library on attitudes and actions that I, personally, find particularly objectionable. Much of this is secondhand information that, if true, suggests serious dangers ahead if she is elected president. Her associations with and support from the far-left is very troubling. One of her biggest financial supporters is George Soros, an individual who has personally crushed weaker nations by his financial manipulations thus, converting modest resources of masses of relatively poor people to great wealth in his own pocket and a man who in his youth took great pleasure in assisting the nazis in robbing from his fellow jews and rounding them up for transportation to death camps. Hillary has been implicated in a long list of scandals from her time in Arkansas (Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster) to the current e-mail situation. Yes, much of this is secondhand information but there is so much of it, it’s hard to ignore. What I do know is that, at the very least, she was extremely careless and irresponsible in allowing sensitive government information to be stored on a personal, unsecured, server. There have been others, even in her own State Department, who claim they would have ended up in jail for similar actions. If that wasn’t enough, the other action that disqualified Hillary for me was her bungling of the Benghazi situation. Failure to provide adequate security for her embassy in Benghazi upon repeated pleas from her ambassador was bad enough but lying to the grieving family members about the cause of the attack for political reasons was the last straw and why I could never vote for Hillary Clinton.
I am quickly reaching the level of cynicism where I view the entire Washington scene as corrupt. In my view, it has reached a level of corruption never before seen in this country. Scandals implying misdeeds by such venerable institutions as the IRS and the FBI are especially troubling. However, when we hear of the U.S. Attorney General effectively resorting to the fifth amendment to avoid self incrimination and have seen documented proof that the President himself has lied to cover up misdeeds by his administration, we have reached the bottom of the barrel of corruption and a level of stench that I have never previously witnessed in my lifetime.
The above is strictly my personal opinion and I only speak for myself but I truly believe that to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would be to allow myself to be conned by a corrupt system and two seriously flawed candidates. I would rather vote for neither than to try to assess which one of two deplorable choices would be less harmful to our country, a basis for choice that I fear many are accepting.
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