Corrupt-ilicious or tyrant-tastic?
As I write these words, the FBI is reportedly investigating, after an aborted earlier attempt, Hillary Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to, essentially, peddle access and government positions to generous donors. The revelations are actually just the culmination of a long-festering pattern of behavior that has seen suspicious favors done for individuals and companies including UBS, Uranium One, and the Saudi government.
Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is busy trying to shrug off reports that his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, pocketed millions of illegal dollars in payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Trump, famously, has a man-crush on the thuggish Russian strongman and has even gone so far as to deny Russian military designs on Ukraine after Putin seized Crimea. Or maybe the money is unrelated–after all, he praised North Korea’s ruthless dictator, Kim Jong Un and the Chinese government’s brutal suppression of protests at Tiananmen Square without obvious compensation. This is independent of Trump’s attack just yesterday on freedom of the press.
Oh, and both Trump and Clinton have very serious problems with free speech in general.
Let’s face it: These are two of the shittiest creatures to ever to crawl out from under a rock and scurry into American politics, which is saying something, considering that it’s not an industry that brings out the best in people. But even compared to the control freaks, Klansmen, and grifters who have long made their livings by seeking government office, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton bring an unprecedented degree of overt grasping corruption and explicit contempt for the rest of the human race to their quests for the vast powers of the U.S. presidency. It’s no stretch to say that they embody evil in a way that we rarely have so openly rubbed in our faces.
Choose the form of the destructor, indeed.
To their credit, a good many Americans have glanced at what the Republican and Democratic parties left on the carpet and immediately gagged at what they’d stepped in. Clinton and Trump have consistently scored record high unfavorable ratings with voters. But they went on to win the nominations of their respective political parties anyway, testifying to the sad shape of these two senile and creaky organizations. Since then, “a full 13 percent of Americans would rather have a meteor hit Earth than vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton,” according to pollsters.
And yet…I’m still hearing people say that we have to choose between the psychopath and the sociopath. We must choose the form of the destructor, because it’s irresponsible to vote third party/refuse to vote. They insist that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein can’t win the election (because you shouldn’t vote for them, I guess) and not voting makes you responsible for the the destructor who ultimately triumphs. We must embrace evil, or else the other evil will win.
I think Julian Assange of Wikileaks had it right when he said, “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?” Neither for me, please.
Look, you can talk the inevitability of the two-party system all you like, but that doesn’t mean it has to be these two parties. In healthy democracies, political parties rise and fall. In recent years, Canada’s Reform Party competed with and then supplanted the Progressive Conservative Party before changing its name to “Conservative.” Before that, Britain’s Labour Party bumped the Liberal Party out of the ranks of the two dominant parties (though the displaced entity, now known as Liberal Democrats, hung on and is part of the current government as a junior partner to the Conservative Party). Even in the U.S. the Republican Party croaked the Whig Party in the 1850s and took its place. Political parties are private organizations. They live only so long as people see a need for them, and can be replaced when they do awful things like nominating evil people as their candidates for president.
Did I mention that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both horrible human beings and that to pick between them is to choose different brands of malevolence?
Look, if you really just can’t get enough of corrupt-ilicious Hillary or find the Donald just tyrant-tastic, knock yourself out with your chosen destructor. Just don’t act astonished when the rest of us back away with a frozen look of horror on our faces.
Because we’re better than that. And we’re still trying to scrape your candidate off our shoes.
Henry
September 5, 2016 at 6:32 pmI wish you had spent a few sentences on the irony of the national Libertarian Party choosing this election cyle to offer us its own evil candidate: Bill Weld.
Have you heard of the jihad recently embarked upon by the Massachusetts AG, Maura Healy? She’s “reinterpreted” the state’s so-called “Assault Weapon” ban to apply to pretty much anything hollow and cylindrical. Well, the law she’s “reinterpreting” was created and passed with the active connivance of Bill Weld — a RINO who campaigned as a friend of Second Amendment Rights, then turned around and slid the shiv into his supporters as soon as he won his seat.
It’s a damn shame, because if the LP had nominated actual libertarian candidates this year, they would have gotten my vote, as they almost exclusively do. But now, I am faced with the choice of THREE evils, one of them being a man who betrayed me personally, and whom I explicitly promised I would never again cast any vote for… never dreaming I would actually be afforded that chance in any possible future.
I’m not voting for Weld, and I’m not voting for a man who was desperate to ensure that Weld was selected as his running mate. The Libertarian Party offerings this cycle are simply not libertarian.
Too bad, LP. You coulda been a contenda.
My choice this cycle appears to be between two sets of statists who know how the system works and have a chance of seeing portions of their agendas enacted; or a loose cannon whose agenda will be impeded at every turn by the other two branches of government. Gridlock and the actual failure of one or more federal agencies are a istinct possibility, which is batter than either of the other two options.
J.D. Tuccille
September 5, 2016 at 7:29 pmWeld was a bad choice as a libertarian since he’s not a libertarian. He is a classical liberal, though, and better than 90% of our government officials. He’s also walked back his elitist East Coast stupidity on guns after being schooled by Johnson’s people (http://www.redstate.com/williamweld/2016/08/31/op-ed-defending-constitution-semi-automatic-firearms/). Truthfully,in a political context, I’d vote for Weld for president against Trump or Clinton,because he’s much better in the realistic context of what democratic systems deliver. But I don’t have to make that hold-the-nose-vote because Johnson is at the top of the ticket, not Weld. We sometimes forget how radical libertarian ideas sound to the masses,but they do. I’m happy to see Johnson making a (very) moderate case and pulling real votes. That’s better than an unknown hardliner keeping the faith and scaring the rubes.