Fear And Loathing In A Presidential Election
Listening to the news and then to people who have been following the election for the last few months, I have the sense that people are depressed and worried. I have friends and family who are both staunch Republicans and Democrats and they are each rather upset about this years’ crop of candidates and machinations. Of course, some are assured their side is going to win, but then some are looking at the candidates they have and thinking there is no way in hell they can defeat the other team’s eventual fanatic.
My Democratic friends who support Bernie Sanders are beginning to feel they have been betrayed. At the start of the campaign, the news media virtually ignored him and other viable candidates to cover Trump and Hillary. Now when they do mention him, it seems they can’t keep from having to say Socialist at every turn without adding Democratic.
It’s bad enough that when the right-wing brings him up, they are making references that the country will turn into Venezuela or some other third world country if he takes over, or worse Soviet Russia. Sanders isn’t that type of Socialist, and everyone in the media and the right-wing knows it. Besides if any of them have a brain, do they really think Congress and the Supreme Court are that damn powerless?
Then, of course, there is the latest statement from Debbie Wasserman Schultz that super delegates are there to keep party leaders and elected officials from running against ‘grassroots’ activists. So, they are there to thwart the will of the people? You tell them that you want your candidate to win or that one to lose and how they should vote? Is that how it works? Sounds pretty undemocratic. I know that isn’t exactly how it works, but it sure as hell sounds that way from your half-assed explanation.
If you are a Hillary supporter, you are beginning to feel that your candidate might actually lose again. If she doesn’t, her candidacy will be irreparably tarnished by this primary’s allegations and the smear campaign being put on by the Republicans in the background. Add in how much she is disliked by the right-wing and how few Democrats may vote if they feel their candidate was cheated, and she may be crushed even against a crazy like Ted Cruz, let alone a supposed moderate like John Kasich.
Republicans should feel like they are in the driver’s seat, but they don’t. Sure, the extreme right is happy; they have a zealot Evangelical who wants to create a Theocratic America in Ted Cruz and the Fascist America in Donald Trump. And let’s face it; the three supposed moderates are anything but. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich have all swallowed the Kool-Aid of supply-side economics where if we remove taxes on the rich it will create jobs and pay for itself.
Most Americans are really tired of this same old crap. We know it doesn’t work, that’s exactly why Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are so popular. Prominent Republicans have been leaving the party over the last few years because they say it has lost its way. I think most of these people are just complaining because it isn’t extreme enough, especially since some Republicans in Congress are sometimes still working with the opposition to get things done instead of killing them.
In this year of political upheaval the outsiders would seem to have the best chance of winning it all. However, the media is doing everything they can to blackball Sanders, and yet the Republican establishment still thinks that Trump will fall eventually. Or they think he will comply with what they want. After all, he is a businessman. He should be amenable and play ball with them, and really, that’s all they want in the long run. They would be happy if he would just tone down the incendiary rhetoric to appeal to a larger crowd so they have a better chance of beating Hillary Clinton when the establishment derails Bernie in the Democratic primaries.
