With just two months remaining until the general election, what choices have we really been left with this cycle?
As we count down the final two months until Election Day 2016, we have officially been left with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as our primary choices for president in November. Technically, we also have Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson vying for the position, but I think we can all safely assume they are going to go virtually nowhere.
The fact that these are now our two main choices leaves myself and many other Americans exhausted and exasperated. Even though we are down to the final two months of the campaign, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have exhibited ratings of untrustworthiness as high as 60%. Which begs the question: If over half of the American voting population feels that neither of our choices for president can be trusted, then can we even choose a "lesser of evils" this time around? That's the question the rest of this article will attempt to answer.
Dissecting Donald's Dream
Where do I even begin with Donald Trump? I could probably spend the rest of this blog -- and maybe several others -- listing all of the problems with his campaign, his views, his goals for America, his rhetoric, and really just about everything he says and does. But if I am going to select just one thing which defines Donald Trump more than practically anything else, I would choose his penchant for discriminating against virtually everyone who is not a white male voter.
Do we start with his overt sexism against women? Do we begin with his desire to ban Muslims from the United States --on which he has recently doubled down? Or to build a border wall with Mexico to keep out the rapists and criminals? How about making fun of the disabled? Or attacking the Black Lives Matter movement and suggesting he would have it investigated once he becomes president?
In fact, Donald Trump has committed so many offenses against so many Americans that it's almost impossible to believe he hasn't been drummed completely out of the race -- or out of the country. And yet some recent polls show Trump either ahead of, or within striking distance of, his Democratic challenger in some states.
The fact that Donald Trump can make so many offensive statements and tout so many policies which many would perceive as un-American, is a testament to the anger which has permeated our country. There is a level of disgust with minorities we have not seen at least in the last few decades, if not since the days of slavery. We see more and more attacks against women with the litany of anti-abortion laws and continuing income inequality, attacks against the LGBT community with the expansion of religious freedom laws, murders of black Americans in droves by police which are supposed to protect all Americans. Donald Trump didn't create this situation, but with his rhetoric and the selection of someone like Mike Pence as his running-mate, he is continuing to fuel these flames.
And just as another example of how enraged the American public has become: On MSNBC's The Last Word recently, Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Glenn Beck, who told of possibly the most disturbing phone call from a listener he had ever received. The subject was on Donald Trump seemingly rolling back his aggressive immigration stance somewhat. The caller suggested that if Trump breaks his campaign promise to clamp down on illegal immigration and build the border wall with Mexico, then he and others like him would personally go after Trump. Many have taken Trump's recent comments about Second Amendment supporters going after Hillary Clinton should she select judges which uphold tighter gun control regulation as a veiled assassination threat; the caller on Glenn Beck's program has now basically issued a much less veiled threat against Donald Trump should he roll back his campaign promises on illegal immigration.
Keep in mind that this is someone threatening a potential Republican president. And this is one of the more disturbing examples I have seen of the animosity and rage which now seemingly drives American politics, especially in 2016. It also shows that, no matter who ultimately wins the Oval Office in November, there is a faction of American citizens who are willing to directly go after a sitting president. This should chill every decent American to the bone.
My Final Take on Voting for Donald Trump: Voting for Donald Trump is potentially a vote for misogyny, racism, and anti-Americanism, and a sound rejection of many of the things which have helped America to maintain itself over the course of nearly two-and-a-half centuries. There is little doubt that Trump would enact an agenda which would block many types of immigration, possibly inflaming tensions with the broader Muslim community to the point it could help to bolster ISIS' influence within the mainstream Muslim community. Trump's propensity for bravado and just saying whatever comes to his mind at any given time also has the potential to begin new international conflicts, reduce respect for America around the rest of the world, and create new national security problems. In short, a vote for Donald Trump would potentially destabilize the very fabric of our nation, potentially decimating our economy, our standing in the world, and our ability to negotiate our way out of conflict.
In Hillary We Do Not Trust
We've already discussed a little bit through poll numbers the problems Hillary Clinton has with credibility. One thing that I personally have found amusing this cycle is that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters keep accusing the media of focusing on negative stories for their chosen candidate, and not enough negative attention on their respective opponent. Whenever I watch or read the news, however, it seems that Donald Trump is dominating virtually all of the coverage. Unless there is something new regarding Hillary's E-mail scandal (or a Wikileaks remark), or I'm watching CBSN and see coverage of a Hillary Clinton rally, I hear next to nothing about her. This election is seemingly all Trump, all the time.
Which makes the possibility of a Clinton victory all the more galling for more hard-core Democrats (admittedly, like myself) who will always feel that Bernie Sanders was simply cheated by the DNC. Hillary Clinton seemingly does not even have to run a campaign to have a chance to defeat Donald Trump, because that candidate's campaign is so rooted in hatred and discrimination that unless she does something to truly screw up within the next roughly 60 days, she is likely going to win.
That simple fact is one of the most disturbing aspects about this entire election: The campaign is no longer even about debating issues. It is simply about America figuring out which candidate they hate the least, and which candidate will screw up the least before Election Day. I'm still reasonably young, but I still can't remember a time when a presidential election came down to two almost universally-hated candidates, with the choice being down to which one voters hated just a tiny bit less than the other.
So it's up to blogs and independent journalists to shine light on the potential pitfalls of a Hillary Clinton presidency, in order for the electorate to make the most informed decision possible. And, just as with Donald Trump, there is a whole litany of controversies surrounding our first female nominee for President of the United States.
But we'll get to the E-mail scandal here shortly. First, I want to talk about my top reason for refusing to support Hillary Clinton: Her unwavering support of Israel. Time has posted a full transcript of her AIPAC speech from March of this year. In it, Clinton declared:
The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our shared values.
This is especially true at a time when Israel faces brutal terrorist stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home. Parents worry about letting their children walk down the street. Families live in fear. Just a few weeks ago, a young American veteran and West Point graduate named Taylor Force was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist near the Jaffa Port. These attacks must end immediately...
And Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence, stop celebrating terrorists as martyrs and stop paying rewards to their families.
But what "shared values" is Clinton referring to here? An agenda which involves the state-sanctioned massacre of an entire population? Israel's torture and murder of the Palestinian population has become so extreme that earlier this year, the State Department released a 124-page report on the subject. Make no mistake: Israel is committing human rights atrocities against Palestinian civilians. From the article:
Citing NGO reports, it acknowledges that "impunity among Israeli security forces remained a problem, in part because mechanisms for investigating allegations were not effective," and that "authorities systematically disregarded abuse allegations."
In 2015, Israeli forces killed 149 Palestinians, roughly half (72) of whom were not attempting to attack Israelis.
Israeli forces killed 22 Palestinian civilians before Oct. 1, when the wave of violence increased. Another 127 Palestinian civilians were killed after Oct. 1. (The State Department does not mention a U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report that found that Palestinians were injured 14,000 times in 2015.)
Some of those killed or injured were children. The report cites an example in March 2015, in which an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was shot in the stomach during a weekly protest.
What is equally galling, though, is that to date, the United States has taken no action to curb Israel's genocide of the Palestinian population (this is a failure on the part of every presidential administration). Under a Hillary Clinton administration, expect to see the United States grant even more latitude to Israel, and more support in the form of supplying advanced weapon systems to the Israeli government. In short, Hillary will continue sanctioning Israel's mass eradication of the Palestinians.
Let's take a couple more significant issues which will dictate the future of America. We'll start with fracking. The BBC provides a good primer on just what fracking -- formally known as "hydraulic fracturing" -- is and how it is accomplished. One area in which it is controversial, however, is in its possible creation of man-made earthquakes. More specifically, the injection of wastewater into the ground may reduce friction between tectonic plates, making them more likely to slip and cause an earthquake. In fact, it is possible that a strong, 5.6 magnitude Oklahoma earthquake which struck this past Saturday morning may have been created by such practices.
Hillary Clinton supports the practice of fracking. In fact, as Secretary of State, she launched the Global Shale Gas Initiative to sell European countries on fracking, attempting to push the Obama administration into devoting resources towards finding new shale reserves and securing agreements with other nations to fund further fracking projects. Specifically, Poland was to be used as a guinea pig to determine if American advances in fracking could be replicated in other countries; however, this experiment was a failure:
The State Department's hopes for establishing Poland as a fracking success have so far been dashed. In addition to underperforming wells, local activists rose to fight Chevron's fracking development. In January, the company announced it was abandoning its fracking operations in Poland.
In fact, the prospects of establishing a shale gas boom across Europe as a bulwark against the increasing energy influence of Russia -- whose exports supply a quarter of Europe's energy consumption -- are fading. In addition to the false start in Poland, Romania's wells have not produced to expectations. Fracking deals in Ukraine collapsed in 2013, as potential sites were identified in conflict zones. The Netherlands, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have enacted fracking bans. France has had a fracking moratorium in place since 2011.
Bernie Sanders, in a claim rated Mostly True by PolitiFact, criticized Hillary Clinton for her support of fracking during the primary. While she may have evolved on the issue -- she allegedly is against it whenever local governments oppose or forbid it -- it's yet another in a long list of examples of Clinton's questionable judgment on a whole slew of issues.
Clinton also has a questionable record on our government's use of widespread domestic surveillance to effectively spy on most Americans. In an interview with technologist Kara Swisher, Clinton was extremely evasive on the subject of the NSA and determining limits for its vast surveillance powers. She has also called for more surveillance, in particular on social media, to help in the fight against ISIS, and has also effectively demanded that Edward Snowden face American justice for revealing details about the NSA's surveillance programs, suggesting that he should have sought status as a whistle-blower even as the Obama administration sought to shut down government whistle-blowing:
As secretary of state in an administration that has charged three times as many Americans with violations of the draconian Espionage Act as all preceding presidents combined, Clinton must know that the Obama Justice Department has effectively moved to silence whistle-blowers from stating their case in court.
It even tried to prevent Thomas Drake, an honored NSA employee charged under the Espionage Act, from using the words "whistle-blower" or "First Amendment" in his defense. Drake had taken his concerns over the NSA's violation of the law to the Defense Department Inspector General and the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress, but that did not stop the Obama administration, when Clinton was in the Cabinet, from prosecuting him under the Espionage Act for talking to the press. The government's case collapsed, with a federal judge calling it "unconscionable" that Drake had been put through "four years of hell."
We can only assume, then, that Hillary Clinton would likely continue the practice of stifling anyone who tries to expose the types of government activities, such as unlimited domestic spying, which should make every American fear their government. Her ambiguity over the NSA, calls for more surveillance in the wake of ISIS attacks, and unabashed criticism of Edward Snowden suggest that she could potentially work to expand government surveillance powers, thus further putting our private lives at risk.
So we now come full circle to Hillary Clinton's E-mail scandal. On Friday, the FBI released a report on its findings on whether or not her use of a private E-mail server led to the improper handling of classified information. The report finds her actions to be "extremely careless"; they also note that Clinton may have used as many as 13 different devices to access that server -- none of which, they say, Clinton's team could find for their investigation. She allegedly also did not understand that the notation of "(C)" meant that information was classified.
Clinton also apparently mishandled federal records, violating relevant laws numerous times. From CNN's analysis of the report:
The FBI report references, for example, the earlier finding of the State Department Inspector General that Clinton violated the federal records laws by failing to surrender her work-related emails to the State Department when she left office in 2013.
The FBI investigation further reveals the highly questionable decision-making of both Clinton and her attorneys in how they reviewed Clinton's emails when the State Department subsequently requested their return in 2014.
Clinton has repeatedly justified not having an impartial review of her emails to determine which constituted federal records by pointing to the fact that government employees routinely make such determinations given that they are best placed to assess the relevance and significance of such records.
Yet Clinton revealed to the FBI that when she directed her private attorneys to locate work-related emails, she "did not participate in the development of the specific process to be used" and that she was never "consulted on specific emails in order to determine if they were work-related."
And finally, just for good measure: Soon after The New York Times published a report of their own on Clinton's use of her private E-mail server, many of her private E-mails were securely deleted and rendered unrecoverable.
My final take on voting for Hillary Clinton: Casting a vote for Hillary Clinton means supporting a president who will continue enabling Israel to slaughter an entire population on the Gaza Strip. It also means supporting a candidate who clearly does not have the judgment to be a good Commander-in-Chief, one who continuously has to evolve on critical issues facing our nation and, quite simply, cannot be trusted to get anything right the first time. Clinton has been called a "flawed candidate" numerous times. Flawed is one thing; outright untrustworthy and of questionable judgment and moral character are quite another. Whether or not Clinton will be or can be charged for her actions in the E-mail scandal is almost irrelevant; what is relevant is that the allegations illustrate a continuing pattern of questionable, dishonest, and reckless behavior unbecoming of a future president in separate-yet-similar ways to how Donald Trump's nascent racism and sexism disqualify him from becoming our president. In the corporate world, it doesn't take outright illegal behavior to be disqualified from a position; why should this be any different for Hillary Clinton?
Who Should the American People Vote for? Is There a Lesser of Evils This Time?
For many people, the last few presidential elections have come down to one crucial, fundamental question: Which candidate is the lesser of two evils for which I can hold my nose and vote? We were luckier in 2008 and 2012 with Barack Obama, someone who, while flawed, has the charisma, compassion, and love of country to serve in the Oval Office. I don't agree with a lot of the choices he has made and wish he would have stood up to the Republicans many years ago, but I am still glad to call him my president. He is an example of a "flawed candidate" who is still worthy of the title.
Now, look at Hillary Clinton. The nomination of the first female candidate for President of the United States should be one of the proudest moments in our history, just as the nomination of the first black presidential candidate was for us in 2008. But it's not the historical significance of the candidate which ultimately matters; it's her ability to lead, to be able to make good, sound decisions, and her ability to inspire confidence in the American people that yes, she is the most qualified choice to lead our nation.
Hillary Clinton is none of these things. She has had scandal after scandal plague her, and even if there isn't absolute proof that she is guilty of many of the things she has been accused of, there is enough doubt about her decision-making that we should all be questioning if she is truly the best person to work in the Oval Office. The fact that she is not being prosecuted is of far less importance than the fact that she has repeatedly shown an inability to make the right decisions in a lot of her day-to-day handling of her government responsibilities. Combine this with her constant need to change her positions on the issues with time and the high numbers of Americans who deem her untrustworthy, and you have no good reason to vote for her, unless voting for the first female president in history is your only consideration -- or if you just want to beat Donald Trump, no matter the cost. Hillary Clinton has permanently tainted one of the most significant moments in American history.
As for Donald Trump...what more can I say? He is an arrogant, racist, misogynistic, self-absorbed blowhard, with seemingly no compassion or respect for anyone but himself, a candidate who has already pledged to do everything he can to isolate America from the rest of the world, including the Muslim community we so desperately need to finally take down the likes of ISIS. That he has even gotten this far into the campaign is as much a testament to where the people of America stand as it is to Trump himself, but either way, he is no more fit to be our president than Hillary Clinton.
In the final analysis, my conclusion is that we do not have a lesser of two evils to even pick from this time around. Whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is elected to the presidency, either one has the capability to inflict tremendous harm upon the United States. Their sole difference lies in the form that damage will take. For Donald Trump, the type of damage is fairly obvious; he will inevitably harm our ability to negotiate agreements with other nations, alienate minority groups within the United States, damage our economy in the aftermath, and likely bolster ISIS' position within the Muslim community by validating their claims that the Western world opposes Islam. This will no doubt feed into their recruitment, leading to a growing terror threat that very well may finally hit us again here at home.
With Clinton, on the other hand, I expect slower, more subtle damage to our country. Clinton is no doubt able to talk a good game and win the support of many. This means she will have the trust of a good many Americans should she indeed propose things like more government surveillance, expanding our war presence throughout the Middle East, and providing more support to Israel in their fight against Palestinian "terrorists." Given the money she has accepted from Wall Street, we have no reason to believe she will actually do anything to clamp down on the banks or to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour (remember that she originally only supported $12 until Sanders pressured her). We may not see the full effects of a Hillary Clinton administration for a few years, until her questionable decisions come back to haunt America -- except that it will likely be too late for the lives of those who will be affected by those decisions. (For more on my concerns about Hillary Clinton, see my previous article, written just before the New York Democratic primary.)
In short, neither candidate is a good choice. We simply do not have a decent choice this time. Our country will be in grave danger from whomever wins. I would urge the country in the strongest possible terms to stage a massive write-in campaign to try and sweep Bernie Sanders into the White House. This, too, has never happened in American history. Election 2016, no matter what happens, will be a history-making election; let's try to make the right kind of history, and say "no" to both Trump and Hillary.