The endorsement is easy: Gary Johnson for President. It’s the second choice and swing state possibilities that draw all the “ink” in this piece.
Hilary Clinton is a High Dean of the interventionist school of thought on foreign affairs that’s been (for everyone involved) a singular, six trillion dollar, failure; more than the Marshall plan, and a third of the National debt (for those few of us still counting). Not that I approve of throwing money around like that, but if we were to toss six trillion into a hole, can anyone doubt that we would have been better off if we tossed it to, say, Elon Musk for technological alternatives leading to more energy independence? HRC seems to have no introspection on how wrong this school as been, after a decade and a half of failure. You don’t get to run on expertise if your hand has made a ruin of things. GJ’s finally articulated position on Aleppo Is the same position he’s held for that same decade and a half: our interventionist approach causes more harm than good. And he does not want to confront Russia to establish a no fly zone, for the privilege of bombing Isis (as if some more bombing might somehow change all of our previous experience). Russia is a dangerous adversary, and the last time we confronted them a great many people lost their lives. HRC seems loony in this light.
Gary Johnson’s positions on criminal justice reform would place him in the mainstream of European politics. They would regard Hilary Clinton as the unhinged one. GJ is the only candidate to try to break the sleepy spell of the notion that we have unlimited amounts of money to spray on every voter’s bribable whim.
I’ve written before about how perceptions of corruption are important. So, here are just the most basic and uncontroversially legal facts of the Clinton dung heap: they claimed they were poor as church mice when they left the White House. And now they are somehow worth 140 million dollars, earned in speaking fees. But HRC is not a once-in-a-lifetime voice like Luciano Pavarotti. Nor is she a raconteur like Mark Twain. My favorite (with a PT Barnum touch) engagement: the House of Saud paid her to give talks on “Women’s issues”. She made more for one day of that than I make in a years’ salary. Jimmy Carter made houses for the poor. Drill down a little deeper and we have to contend with the Qatari Wikileaks revelations. A cynic would say that our incoherent approach to human rights abuses in the Middle East is so much clearer in the light of bribery (The Saudis never forced to cough up their Royal players in 09/11/01; no condemnation of their Russia-esque savagery in Yemen; their illegal, media blacked-out invasion of Bahrain; no pressure on the United Arab Emirates to reduce ISIS financing; no pressure on Turkey to cut off ISIS oil sales and etc, etc.).
If perceptions of corruption are considered, it seems that the Clintons are on the take to a rapacious degree, and this should disqualify any of them from coming near the public trust again.
“Should.” If HRC is continued slow national cancer, Donald Trump is a national brain bleed. Medical logic has, for two millenia, held that the first law is” “First, do no harm.” When confronted with multiple bad problems, you concentrate on harm reduction. And Donald Trump’s threatened blow-up of the Washington establishment will certainly make things worse. Americans should have learned, from the invasion of Iraq to the War on Drugs, blowing things up for their own good is a stupid way to solve problems.
I must admit: to a small degree I relish the irony for top-down expertise in government believer types: Trump being a complete outsider and ignoramus to the ways of the Constitution and the political system is no less arrogant than their belief that a complete ignoramus to healthcare can run that. I love to ask liberal democrats what aspect of their job might a politician come in and change for the better. I have never gotten a straight honest answer. So Trump is a fun roosting chicken. But the harm that will come of it will be to us, so I’ll have to contain my cackling.
Not one newspaper in the country has endorsed Donald Trump. Several have endorsed Gary Johnson. The argument that Donald Trump is a successful businessman should give people hives: Trump’s main business success came in manipulating debt and bankruptcy laws. This may be his only Presidential qualification: the ability to bloviate when broke, which the USA has been doing for many years now. Most Americans are reduced to a pitiful state when they go bankrupt. Six bankruptcies would be inconceivable. Trump’s “success” tells us a lot about the nature of American capitalism today and why so many people reasonably hate it, concluding it is rigged for the rule-maze maneuvering, lawyered-up and plugged-in. The Mongols had a great approach to bankruptcy: a free pass on the first, anyone taking a risk can get unlucky. A free pass on the second; anyone taking a risk can be really unlucky. The death penalty for the third: anyone unlucky three times must be very crooked, or so unlucky that they should not live. They would bind them up in a carpet and trample them with horses. I do not want to see Donald Trump trampled to death, twice over, but it would not ruin my day either. For those of us, on “the quaint level:” I have sat in Human Resources encounter classes to listen to their Kindergarten-level definitions of correct, un-risky girl-and-boy interactions because our institutions face ruinous, hair trigger, sexual harassment lawsuits. Yet somehow Trump seems to be able to have a long history of ladies he has seized by the genitals with no repercussions. But what woman in her right mind would go against Trump’s murderers row of lawyers backed by his bottomless wallet? Sexual harassment laws seem not to be applicable to the lawyered up, or the plugged in. Of course, this lawyered-up-arms-race injustice applies just as much to HRC. Look at what the Navy did to this poor quaint shmo. We have had several riots over the blind and ruthless inflicting of zero tolerance, “broken windows,” policing on our quainter, poorer, people. Our legal system is looking little more just or wise than having a strongest champions trail by combat.
As for the Supreme Court: Donald Trump has given no indication he has a conception of, let alone a respect for, the traditional privileges of freedom enjoyed by Americans for the last two centuries.
Donald Trump is no better on pointless, expensive, whimsical bombing.
Which brings me to the main reason Trump, uniquely, should be disqualified from American public service: he is the closest any American politician has ever come to being a full-on fascist. And I don’t use that word hyperbolically. See this must-read by Umberto Eco. Trump won the primaries by using Hitler’s “Big Lie” technique, like claiming Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. Trump has indicated that he wants to curtail free speech (the keystone freedom) by “opening up” slander laws. He has called for political violence at his meetings, mirroring European style political demagoguery to an eery degree. He is an egregious crony capitalist and unabashed eminent domain abuser.
Granted, GJ ran a terrible campaign and reinforced all of the goofy egg-head, impractical-libertarian tropes with his waggly tongue mugging. His gaffe on Aleppo was bad, his not being able to name a single world leader he admired was inexcusable. Still, if we tally up things about the candidates that are inexcusable, we find Gary Johnson looks pretty clean. A clean lightweight is better than these two candidates, both of whom represent a dangerous national trend of legalistically opaque untouchability (among other deal-breakers). The American experiment, the longest uninterrupted such in mankind’s history, has always found strength in restricting power and in the rule of law. Both candidates are an anathema to that, for different reasons.
This author’s hope, barring an unlikely Johnson resurrection, is for a Clinton victory, (a lightning rod, please). with both parties getting a well-deserved mauling from insurgent third parties. And I hope my libertarians, or at least some reincarnation of the American limited government approach, will take a big, and permanent, bite.
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