Before the primaries, the family was pretty much divided poltically speaking. I have changed over to the anti-Capitalist Left side while the family remained somewhat independently politically Conservative. Things remained that way until this year when the presidential campaign began in ernest. Because of the primaries, it looks like both Trump and Clinton are most likely to become their parties' nominee for President. And that has caused at least a couple of us to start pushing the envelope in order to check out our alternatives.
What is there to like about either candidate? Hardly anything if anything at all. Let's start with Hillary. First, she isn't an upfront person. While claiming that she had to fight against the health insurance industry while trying to pass Hillarycare, she neglected to mention how what she supports now for national healthcare insurance is riddled with support from the same group she claimed to have fought. In addition, her support for regime change has devastated Libya and destabilized it making it a haven for terrorist groups.
There are also questions about her support or role in the Honduran coup a few years back which made Honduras one of the leading sources for immigrants entering the US because of its violence. Here we should note that the only reason Sanders could not criticize her much on this point of regime change was that he signed on to support the proposed regime change in Libya. We could also go to the persecution of whistleblower Bradly Manning. While he/she sits in jail, those who were caught killing civilians in Iraq were never punished.
And while she brags that Obama took money from Wall Street and was never influenced by it, we need to remember that the only Wall Street participant who was convicted and sent to jail was a guy who confessed to his crimes. Other than that, no Wall Street excutives have been criminally prosecuted for their roles in causing the biggest economic collapse since 1929.
Now besides her lapse in judgment when she supported the Iraq War, we should note what her husband had been doing during the 1990s. There were the sanctions on Iraq that contributed to or caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Or there is his participation in the repeal of Glass-Steagall or his signing of NAFTA which created an environment where banks could grow to be too big to fail and contributed to a significant loss of jobs respectviely speaking. And Black prison population spiked under his presidency (click here). So how is it that we need Hillary to be president?
On the other hand, there is Trump. He has demonstrated in the debates that he has little control over his behavior as well he lacks the ability to even listen to criticism, let alone learn from it. He makes unrealistic claims and acts like the believability of his claims depends on the volume of his voice. His denial of the obvious that he filed for bankruptcy and his dismissive behavior during the debates show a authoritarian side that we often see in abusive dictators.
His declarations that he would prohibit Muslims from entering the nation to his promise to build a wall between the US and Mexico and guarantees that Mexico will pay for it is not just unbelievable, it borders on losing contact with reality. The same applies to his claims that nobody would challenge the US military under his presidency.
BTW, according to FactCheck.org, there is no real evidence supporting Trump's claim that he opposed the war in Iraq. In fact, an interview with Howard Stern points to the opposite (click here). We could also add that when Trump brags about mentioning Osama Bin Laden and how he, unlike most others, seemingly clairvoyantly warned people about Bin Laden, his warning occurred after Bin Laded had attacked US embassies and declared war on our country.
He claims that his campaign is completely self-funded while FactCheck.org declares that around 50% of his campaign is financially supported by others. And while denying that he has used derogatory terms on female adversaries, he did use them (click here).
What is scary about both leading candidates is that, in their own unique ways, they seem to be lusting for power more than most other candidates have in the past. And this is how the primaries have at least partially united my family. While the daughter says that she plans to move to Europe should the Presidential election turn into a showdown/sideshow between Trump and Clinton, because of connections, I hope the wife and I would move to Chile. Moving out of the country should Clinton or Trump become President is something that the daughter and I could agree on. And if the daughter moves, the wife would be more amenable to moving. Then all we would have to do to include everyone is to convince the son to move.
However, should we leave, which the wife, being the realist that she is, knows is unlikely, there will be a tremendous mess for our fellow Americans whom we will have left behind. With Clinton and Trump being the candidates of choice, we could only expect our fellow Americans to either be sharply divided between these two candidates or suffer from PTSD from trying to determine which candidate is really the lesser of two evils only to give up and ask for such a sharp increase in prescription medication that it could never be fully covered even under Obamacare.
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