If you think Americans are anxious about today’s election, imagine how people around the world feel. Prisoners in secret CIA prisons, torture victims at Guantánamo Bay, people in Pakistan and elsewhere who are getting blown up by drones, people who are terrified of being killed by rogue police officers. America literally decides what happened to the lives of millions of people all over the place. Yet both choices are terrible for them.
They tell us we live in a country that serves as a shining beacon on a hill, a model for democracies around the world. If that’s true, how the hell did we end up with two candidates who are the #1 and #2 most unpopular candidates in the history of polling, either one of which could lead to disaster?
Donald Trump wants to keep Muslims out of the United States. Between her votes to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and her pushes to destabilize Syria and Libya, and her laughing about watching Gaddafi being disemboweled, and bragging about assassinating Osama bin Laden, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton would rather kill them.
Earlier this summer, the FBI dropped its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her alleged mishandling of classified information. But then, shortly before the election, the FBI discovered hundreds of thousands of emails, some of which might be pertinent to that investigation, on a laptop shared by top Clintion aide Huma Abedin and her now estranged husband Anthony Weiner, the latter of whom is accused of sexting a 15-year-old girl. It’s 2016. Even among married people, who shares a laptop with their spouse?
No matter how you look at it, your individual vote isn’t nearly as important as the candidates would you have us believe. We vote individually, not in the aggregate. So why are we driving ourselves crazy by trying to strategize between two candidates, neither of whom spend time worrying about us?
Transgender people often report having felt trapped in a different body gender than their actual identity. There was a “trans racial” NAACP official who identified as African-American though she had no black ancestry. Can transclassism be next in the battle for self identity and the right to live as we feel inside?
As we’re learning via the John Podesta emails being released via WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton has a voracious appetite for fundraising, often by selling speeches for six figures. That’s a pretty addictive revenue stream. How will she channel her lust for cash if she’s elected president?
They say American democracy is a shining beacon to the world. But this year perhaps more than ever, friends and family members aren’t talking to each other because of their choice of a presidential candidate. Surely there must be some way to disagree and discuss and argue without hating one another.
Remember the run up to the Iraq war? The Bush Administration made the case to invade based on a bunch of what ifs. Now the Democratic Party and its standardbearer Hillary Clinton is theorizing that Russia may have been behind hacks of the Democratic National Committee and seems willing to provoke a possible new cold war with our former rival. The logic seems very familiar.
Donald Trump keeps saying that the election might be stolen from his supporters. The main reason that he cites â voter fraud â is nonsense. But election fraud is a real problem. From Florida in 2000 to Ohio in 2004 to the Democratic primaries this last year, there have been very troubling examples of presidential elections that have been corrupted. But media gatekeepers don’t want you to think about that.
