Sunday, June 5, 2016

American Politics at the crossroads.

For the first time in US history there seems a probability to elect either a woman, a Jew or an idiot as the President of United States of America. This puts the country at the crossroad of choices that are not going to be easy. Hilary Clinton carries the advantage of holding official roles in Government, even though some of her record may be open to judgmental issues, she does bring a higher degree of acceptability for being in the White House than Bernie Sanders or indeed Donald Trump.

Bernie Sanders, to me, is more an egalitarian than a 'communist' or 'socialist', appealing to the young voters who carry strong feelings of having been disfranchised by the political machinery that runs Washington. Sanders scores favorably for his passionate sense of care over the others in the race, but in reality his political ethos is a few decades before its time for an electorate that misunderstands him more than bothers to be patient about his politics. 

Donald Trump started out as the joker in the race; few bothered to take him seriously enough to even imagine he would survive the scrutiny of the political process. His appeal is, in the words of Stephen Hawkings, to the 'lowest common denominator' of US society. This does not speak volumes for the large number of people who form the platform of his support amongst the rank and file of the Republican Party. His somersaults on various issues where he has made forceful statements are not political sidesteps but outright lying; at times even insisting he never made the statements. While one may find his remarks and sparing with the press funny, underlying all this are symptoms of a seriously bipolar man. Add a large dose of intolerance to criticism and a garnish of arrogance and you get a man with an unstable character that is frightening. So far one can sit back and say "Okay this is all fine but he will become Presidential once elected."

Sadly the streak that is most worrying about the man is his position on Muslims, Mexicans, and most of all foreign policy. His knowledge of the world is limited to the size of a postage stamp, which is surprising for a man who has travelled to many countries but still says he knows Russia very well because he held a beauty pageant there is just one testimony of his idiocy. He wants to bar Muslims from entering the US, (now trying to tone down his position) ignoring that he endorsed a real estate project in Dubai bearing his name and charged a nice hefty fee for lending his name to the project. So Mr. Trump you can take Muslim money but you can't let the people who paid you into the country? 

The crossroads that we stand at are clearly such that by default Trump being close to a fascist alternate to democracy makes both Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all the more suitable. He wants South Korea and Japan to have nuclear weapons opening the door to perhaps another 20 odd countries saying well if they can have them then why not us. He wants to build a wall, expel people and close borders to Muslims. He wants an all out trade war with most of the world not realizing that wars, whether through the barrel of a gun or through trade tariffs have the same result of chaos of the common man in the street. 

Does this make him an idiot? Yes and more, it makes him a fascist idiot who is on an overdose of xenophobia and laced with a propensity to be a pathological liar. The simple test of this is position of mine is that you watch a speech by President Obama, then close your eyes and imagine Donald Trump in the same situation making a speech; yes a nightmare. Mr. Trump being Presidential does not mean you use words like 'loser' or say 'get him out of here' (to a heckler) or calling people names based on their physical appearance (comments about Rubio). While I may not know much of the domestic politics in the US, I know that Mr. Trump does not know much about the world outside (perhaps he did not enroll in his own scam university), and to prove this Mr. Donald Trump I challenge you to a debate of Foreign Policy and specifically on why Muslims should be banned from the US? Anytime, anywhere!




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