The Horror… the horror…

Well here we are again...    Why is it every four years Americans lose their shit and charge to the polls to elect complete nut cases to our highest public offices?  Unqualified people who know nothing of policy, foreign relations, but are very good at assigning blame and telling us what the other side is doing wrong?   

Are the Dems doing things “wrong”?   Of course they are – but nothing on the scale of a) Invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a move that effectively destabilized the middle east for generations to come and may lead to the final all-incinerating conflict that WWIII promises to be or b) deregulation of banks that lead to the fiscal crash of 2007; a crisis from which the entire world is still struggling to survive.  Just a reminder these two cataclysmic events are what happened the last time we threw the car keys to the GOP and let them drive for eight years.  (Oh yeah – and never mind about 9/11!)

So now in 2016 people are rallying behind a petty, tyrannical, sociopathic madman – a huckster whose single greatest appeal lies in his push to blame all our problems on savage brown hordes allegedly flooding our borders from the south… a scenario that simply is not borne out by facts.   What percentage of crimes in the US are perpetrated by Syrian refugees or “illegals” from Mexico?   Most immigrants don’t enter the country by scooting across the border – there’s already a fence there now (a border fence built by “W” Bush in 2006?  Hello? http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-mexico-fence-idUSN1524259520100915 ).   Most of them they come through the established entries with legally granted VISA’s to work or attend school in the U.S.   After their VISA’s expire many of them don’t leave.   Many of them do pay into the system, however – which ostensibly helps strengthen the working class in the US – while being unable to receive those benefits themselves.    

How many of these people are rapists and murderers?  Not very many.   The tendency of immigrants whose VISA status is shaky is to not do anything to draw attention to themselves and this includes NOT COMMITTING CRIMES.  Even more interesting is the fact that a lot of the anger about “illegals” is coming from towns and cities all across the US that are mostly white and actually don’t have a big problem with illegal aliens.  Where is the hysteria coming from?    http://mediamattersaction.org/reports/fearandloathing/online_version

So why is all this rhetoric about savage illegal immigrants so popular?   Well it beats hell out of trying to solve the problems you really have, doesn’t it?    We could use better trade deals that’s true.   Is Trump the guy to renegotiate them?  The guy whose campaign gear is “made in China”?  Somehow I doubt it.

People – ordinarily rational, thinking people – are now recoil from voting for Hillary because “she 

lied”.  About what exactly?    She never ran a scam “university” that defrauded potential students.  http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432010/trump-university-scam

She never used money from charitable donations to pay for a portrait of herself.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html

And Hillary Clinton sure as hell was not responsible for the bombing of the embassy in Benghazi although, inexplicably, this seems to be what I’m expected to believe.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/10/30/is-hllary-clinton-a-liar-on-benghazi/

She also doesn’t invent (completely fictional) racially charged events to diddle angry crowds.  Remember all the “Muslims” Trump insisted were celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11?   Then when no evidence was found that this took place he actually defended his own lies by saying “Why wouldn’t it have taken place?”   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-911_us_565b1950e4b08e945feb7326

Trump denies saying things – after he says them - but wants to take credit for the things he “never said” that were “right”.   http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/06/15/Trump-I-Never-Said-I-Was-Right

But in all the fog of lies from the Right about all the bad things Hillary Clinton actually has NOT done is the important work she might be able to do once elected.  

Perhaps most important of all, Clinton has said she will appoint a Supreme Court judge who would help overturn “Citizen’s United” – one of the worst Supreme Court decisions since Dred Scott.  Dred Scott famously denied the human rights of African Americans and lead to the Civil War and “Citizens” pretty much guaranteed that only wealthy “elites”, friendly to corporate interests, could run for public office in the US.  (Ever wonder why we wound up with such a lame line-up for the election? Look no further.)   Money scraped together by grassroots groups are chump change compared to the billions filling the coffers of the super PACs – particularly those of GOP candidates.  If your campaign isn't funded by some billionaire like Sheldon Adelson, chances are no one's ever heard of you.

Trump has dodged the subject of “Citizen’s United” by simply stating he wants to nominate another justice like Scalia – one of the guys responsible for “Citizen’s United”.    Indeed the decision itself was pushed through by a cabal of justices appointed by Republican Presidents; Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.   Justices appointed by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama wrote the dissenting opinions.  How much clearer could the choice be?  

In the field where Trump is seen as the “fuck you” vote – the vote for people tired of the establishment – nothing could be more “establishment” than Trump himself; a rich man (spoiled son of another rich man) who wants to keep the power in the US restricted to wealthy “elites” like himself.    (A real protest vote would be for Jill Stein.)

Probably the worst failure of the Obama administration was not to go after the big banks after the crash of ’07 – or regulate Wall Street.   The people who created legal loopholes so mortgages could be sold for profit should never have been rewarded with jobs and buyouts.   Larry Summers should have gone to jail instead of DC.   Disappointingly, Clinton has a lot of the same friends – but then so does Trump.  Does anyone really believe Trump is interested in going after big banks?    In all his reckless hyperbolic attacks on “nasty women” has he said anything about this?

Trump claims Hillary wants to “attack” the Second Amendment.  Really?   Haven’t we been through this twice already with Barack Obama?   Did Barack Obama ever take any kind of action to attack or undermine our right to bear arms?  (Free answer: NO!)   But every time an election comes around the NRA raises this same tired mantra – and Americans run out and buy more guns (before it’s too late!) and maybe someone can try to regulate the ownership of assault rifles – which is about the level of gun control we’re looking at and what, after years of mass shootings, is exactly what we need.   Does anyone need an assault rifle to hunt deer?   Sadly they’re really handy taking down large numbers of people by lone gunmen.  

Trump also isn’t interested in doing anything to whip the healthcare industry into shape or improving on what Obama laid out.  He just wants to “repeal” Obamacare.  Then what?   “Obamacare” was a temporary solution to the healthcare crisis but a very clever one in that it opened the door to Medicaid expansion (and then Republican governors refused to accept the Medicaid money that their states were entitled to – but that’s a whole other story).    Obamacare also brought about some very badly needed regulations on the out of control health insurance industry – pre-existing conditions could no longer exclude you from coverage and women could not be charged more for healthcare.   But it wasn’t enough of course.  For all those millions of people who can’t afford to pay for health insurance – and whom the plans don’t want to insure anyway because they’re “too sick” and can’t afford the big premiums – a public option would have been best.  Now commercial managed plans complain that insuring all these poor people will make them go out of business.  So why block a public option that might be a real option for these folks in the first place?   

And then of course there’s Wikileaks (thanks so very much Julian Assange for waiting until Bernie Sanders was out of the picture before you started in on Clinton – good show!) disclosing private emails of John Podesta which prove that (gasp) politicians sometimes change their minds on policy and (double gasp) don’t always fill in the public on all their private thought processes.   Oh horrors!     As Clinton astutely pointed out in the second debate the movie “Lincoln” was less a bio-pic than a focused study on the shell-games one of our greatest Presidents played to get the 13^th amendment passed and abolish slavery in the US.   If we had had Wikileaks revelations about the motives of our officials back in 1865 – would it have even happened?

And now the news is breaking – they have to look at Clinton’s “damn emails” again because the FBI needs to proceed in the (gasp) case against tweet happy Anthony Weiner; a former public official whose only link to Clinton is that his wife, Huma Abedin has worked for many years as Clinton’s aide.

Right now I want nothing more than anesthesia – Ether, Propofol, Morphine, something, anything to put me under until November 8^th when I can finally vote.  Nothing can change my mind that Hillary Clinton, flawed as she may be, is the only rational choice for the Presidency.  This is not a drill, folks.  We need all hands on deck!   Trump is the most dangerous “protest vote” to come down the pike yet.    It’s not “fuck you” as much as “fuck me” and “fuck my life”.