It is Tuesday, January 7th at 6:11 AM in the morning. I’ve got my coffee, TV fireplace and birds singing through my Bose speaker using YouTube.
It is also the day of California’s presidential primary and I thought you might be interested 50 – 100 years from now to read my thoughts on the matter. Hillary Clinton has just secured the Democratic nomination; Trump has the Republican nomination. Even though Hillary has already won I’m still going to go vote for Bernie Sanders.
It isn’t that I have anything against Hillary per se nor am I opposed to the status quo which she represents. What I do not like is the fact that she is the wife of a former president. Growing up I had bought into the idea that the USA was special unlike those basket cases of countries in Latin America such as Peru where Keiko Fujimori is fighting for the presidency once held by her father. Surely we are more advanced and our system is the ideal for every other country to look up to?
No. This presidential primary shows that our system is no better, the citizenry are no smarter and we are just as corrupt as any other country out there; the USA just puts a better face on things and talks about itself being ‘exceptional.’ Just as Eva Peron did in Argentina long ago, Hillary Clinton does now. I expect Chelsea to eventually run for Senator or other high government post somewhere and we can continue the dynastic status quo that has always been.
I ask myself, how is this better than a monarchy? We wouldn’t have to go through all this nonsense with a King or Queen and passing down power through a heredity line is how things work instead of the farce we have here in the USA where we think we have a choice but it is all an illusion.
Now that I think about it, perhaps that is Trump’s appeal to so many. He is a demagogue and those that vote for him are idiots but it is a little refreshing to mix things up just for the sake of mixing things up.
The fact is, this is a major turning point politically. The old way of doing things in a presidential primary has failed on the Republican side and a showman, a reality TV star, a businessman and demagogue won. He won by putting on a show and the American public (on the Republican side for sure) is so dumb that they’ve bought into it. So I wonder if henceforth candidates that win will employ the same tactics – just tell people anything they want to here. The majority of voters are not astute enough to really understand issues/implications in any substantial way so lets just dumb it down and promise them circuses? It worked for television news, so why not politics. They do it to an extent now telling their base what they want to hear in the primary then “pivoting” in the general election to tell everyone something different.
The Republicans for their part are shattered. They have a candidate they do not like but have no choice but to support them. Eight years of inciting their party against anything and everything has come back to bite them. What a sad time for the GOP.
It will be interesting to look back on this post many years from now to see how things turned out? If Trump wins things will have gotten worse for sure and what I think only a few people realize is with him things could get very bad with real war, death, economic collapse and so on. It makes me think of the Jews not knowing/realizing when it was time to get the hell out of Nazi Germany; if Trump is elected things could go south very quickly and we would have to be cognizant/brave enough to get the hell out of the USA. If course if things went that bad in a major power/stabilizing force such as the USA things are going to go bad everywhere. China would grab more power and destabilizing things in Asia; Russia would go on offense even more-so then they have already done and WWIII could actually break out.
Reading this people might say, oh wow, this guy is crazy. Well, looking back at history things seemed good then WWI. Ok, glad we got that over with, so many dead, surely things are better now, WWII. This was in the past 100 years and many make the mistake of thinking things are more stable now just because we have incredible weapons WMD and stronger economic ties. I would venture to say that two hundred years from now the children are going to be reading in their history books about WWIII and just as we wonder why our ancestors couldn’t see WWI and WWII about to happen we do not see the chain of events that will lead to WWIII.
And that is all I have to say this morning. I need to go refresh myself on the other issues we have to vote on today.
