While I pay attention to politics, I usually don’t weigh in, preferring to just go vote and have my voice heard that way. As an independent, I feel mostly free to vote for the person I consider to be the best candidate. I don’t agree with any party’s full platform, so it’s easy to tally up the pros and cons of each candidate and vote accordingly. That said, I try not to throw my vote away on a candidate that is unlikely to win. I don’t like our current two-party system, but usually it is one of their nominees who is going to get the job. So I pay particularly close attention to those two.
I like roads, bridges, education, police, firemen, the military, and all the other infrastructure that makes life in the U.S.A. good. I like the laws and regulations that attempt to keep our food healthy, our economy fair and growing, our water and air clean, and our lives and property safe. Yes, there can be too much regulation, but there can also be too little. These issues are the ones where we need to find common ground and manage things together. That means compromise and working together and that few are likely to be perfectly happy. It means together we need to decide what we want and how we’re going to pay for it. It means the politicians we elect have to do the work to keep things functioning reasonably well, from local to national and international levels.
Lately we’ve been seeing too much abdication of these duties, often with petulance and blockage on things that we as a people need to keep society running. This pisses me off. Breaking government or making it run very poorly is not a legitimate form of governing. We rely on too many government services (see initial list above) to be able to afford much of this pseudo-governance that these days seems more about what’s important for one party rather than what’s important for the state or country. Any politician who puts their party ahead of their state or country should not be in the job. Yet we seem to be seeing a lot of that these days. Politics is not a national sport, and we collectively need to distance ourselves from the “my party versus your party” mentality that is polarizing the country and preventing government from working.
Politicians, like the rest of us, are imperfect people. But we are paying them to do a job for all of us. When they don’t do that job, or do it particularly badly, please vote to not send them back. If they are untested and do not make credible claims about what they will do in office, don’t elect them to that office.
No Trump
Part of why I am writing this, for me, atypical post, is that I find it reprehensible that one of our major parties has nominated someone totally unsuited for the job to be president. Where were the adults in the room? And then to carry on as though this were somehow normal? Party over country? Party over principles? Many of those who back Donald Trump seem to have gone down this dark alley. I have tremendous respect for the many Republicans who have denounced him as unfit for the office, despite obtaining the party’s nomination. The guy is a national disgrace. How many of us share his values? Racism, sexism, bigotry, egotism, lying—just to name some of the most painfully obvious. These are not my values, and I am very troubled by those who, through supporting him, infer that they support his values. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he would be a disaster as president. In addition to lacking the personal temperament to lead our country, he utterly lacks credible policies to do so.
That leaves only one person standing. I don’t particularly like her, but I share most of her values and she is well qualified. I look forward to having the first female president in Hillary Clinton; I think we’ll be able to sleep at night and not see the government crash in the ditch or start a nuclear war. We’ll even probably see the economy continuing to grow, and maybe even less anemically. But I’d much rather have had a wider array of choices and not seen one of our major political parties effectively chop its own head off. Republican National Committee and Republican leaders (Ryan, McConnell), when you eventually pull that head out of the sewer, take a long look in the mirror and figure out where you lost your way. As a man of no party I depend on the parties to do their jobs credibly and responsibly. This is a massive fail.
Below is a list of articles I’ve found interesting enough to read as the presidential elections approach. (Yes, I actually do read pretty broadly, from the Drudge Report to the Huffington Post; there’s something not to like in all of them, and that helps keep me out of an echo chamber. Not sure why WordPress is loading some of the links into the body of the post… The list ends with an interesting music video, which came to me through Twitter and has definitely expanded my music listening repertoire.)
5 Oct update: I will keep adding links when I find ones I enjoy reading, mostly in reverse chronological order (but more in the reverse order in which I read them).
8 Oct update: The reactions caused by the recently released 2005 recording of Trump being Trump (yet again) is generating so much good material that I’ll have to put up another post. He’s crossed so many lines that one wonders whether there are any more left on his list. Yet he still has his defenders, publicly humiliating themselves more than they know.
9 November update: That didn’t go well.
http://joshuafoust.com/this-is-not-normal/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-is-mired-in-crisis-after-crisis/2016/11/14/0dc20df4-aaa0-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html?utm_term=.6b69d4777fb1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-told-conservatives-to-work-for-trump-one-talk-with-his-team-changed-my-mind/2016/11/15/f02e1fac-ab7c-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html?utm_term=.c31498612349
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/donald-trumps-great-bait-and-switch
Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
Both:
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709540-why-we-would-cast-our-hypothetical-vote-hillary-clinton-americas-best-hope?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/americasbesthope
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/04/opinions/impeach-hillary-clinton-talk-is-wacky-opinion-amar/index.html
http://www.stonekettle.com/2016/10/pragmatism.html
data.huffingtonpost.com/2016/we-the-tweeple
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-fury-and-failure-of-donald-trump-w444943
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2016/09/07/recommend-hillary-clinton-us-president
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-hillary-clinton-endorsement-for-president-20160929-story.html
http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/editorial/2016/09/27/hillary-clinton-endorsement/91198668/
http://sciencedebate.org/20answers
http://www.stonekettle.com/2016/07/the-decider.html
http://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/election-test/
Clinton:
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/hillary-clinton-for-president.html?_r=2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/isaac-saul/i-wrote-that-i-despised-hillary-clinton-i-take-it-back_b_12220124.html?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-womack/stop-pretending-you-dont-_b_12191766.html?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/indifference-and-ignorance-delving-deep-into-the-clinton-e-mail-saga/
http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/08/03/the-most-flawed-female-president-ever/
Trump:
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/10/26/13408060/aba-libel-law-trump-abuse-times
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-not-the-locker-room-talk-its-the-lock-her-up-talk/2016/10/13/9dd5fbea-9172-11e6-9c85-ac42097b8cc0_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.7199f6f653f8
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-vile-candidacy-is-chemotherapy-for-the-gop/2016/10/10/73e40f30-8f05-11e6-9c85-ac42097b8cc0_story.html?tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.db4d104e070e
“Trump is the worst major-party candidate this republic has ever produced.” http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/09/foreign-policy-endorses-hillary-clinton-for-president-of-the-united-states/
“we are mainly concerned with the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-case-for-hillary-clinton-and-against-donald-trump/501161/
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/08/politics/republican-national-security-letter-donald-trump-election-2016/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/29/us/politics/100000004612887.mobile.html
Click to access trumpletter.pdf
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/08/politics/republican-national-security-letter-donald-trump-election-2016/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-wrecking-ball-in-the-white-house-the-damage-trump-could-do-from-day-one/2016/09/30/1c69e9cc-85b5-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html?postshare=9291475285169008&tid=ss_fb
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/1/13130396/trump-machado-clinton
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/28/12904136/donald-trump-corrupt
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/9/28/13081298/conservative-trump-apocalyptic-america-optimism
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-national-security-498081.html
http://25logicalreasonstovotefordonaldtrump.com/
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-s-blood-libel-press-failure
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/09/donald-trump-will-gut-republican-party-494306.html?google_editors_picks=true
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-a-unique-threat-to-american-democracy/2016/07/22/a6d823cc-4f4f-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html?tid=pm_pop_b
A final response to the “Tell me why Trump is a fascist”.
byu/marisam7 inEnoughTrumpSpam
http://www.vox.com/2016/7/21/12218136/donald-trump-nomination-afraid
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/30/donald-trump-paul-manafort-ukraine-russia-putin-ties
http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/heres-a-list-of-all-the-science-that-donald-trump-denies/all/
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/understanding-the-trump-khan-war
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-facts-dont-matter-to-trumps-supporters/2016/08/04/924ece4a-5a78-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
http://www.drudge.com/news/201983/video-trump-exposes-trump
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/donald-trump-s-real-ambition/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/conservative-legal-scholars-prefer-a-liberal-supreme-court-to-a-president-trump_us_57ade55fe4b069e7e504d4d3?section=&
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Thank you for this outside-your-norm post. I like your other stories and posts, but sometimes these things need to be broadcast far and wide, especially by trusted sources.
That was my thinking. If I might just sway a few people to really vote in their own best interest (whether they see it clearly or not), then it’s important to write it down and post it.