Did you ever see those t-shirts that say "my parents went to ______, and all they brought me back was this lousy t-shirt"? There are many variations on that inscription. The person who went on the trip changes as does the destination. What stays constant is the thought that from fabulous place, all that was obtained was a lousy t-shirt. I've come to view this year's presidential contest in much the same way. Last summer, there were a plethora of great candidates vying for the office. Now, all we got from it is the proverbial lousy t-shirt. Think about it. It looks like our choice is going to be between (1) a woman who cannot tell the truth about anything, who will do anything for power and money, whose prospective policies are unknown because we cannot believe anything she says, and whose past performance in government has been a disaster, and (2) a man who acts as if he knows everything (which he clearly does not), who shoots from the hip when discussing policy, who lashes out in anger whenever things don't go his way or if someone disagrees with him, whose prospective policies are uncertain in part because he doesn't tell us what they will be, and who has no experience in government. Presidents in the past have not all been wonderful people but at least they had some positives to go with the negatives. Bill Clinton may have had a pathological need to stray from his marriage over and over and over and over. Even so, he was able to get much done as president until the Lewinsky mess overtook him. Richard Nixon clearly had his faults, but he was brilliant at foreign policy and put us on the course to end the war in Vietnam and break apart the monolithic world Communist movement. It's hard to imagine Hillary or the Donald doing anything like that.
Then there's the second place people. Bernie Sanders is a remnant of 1930's style American Communists. He's big on slogans but very short on substance. He wants to take money out of politics, but he refuses to use public financing for his own campaign. He wants to break up the big banks, but he admits that he has no idea which banks would be involved, how he would determine the correct ones to break up, what method would be used to accomplish his goal, etc. In other words, he just has a slogan but not idea about how to achieve it. He wants to spend nearly twenty trillion dollars, but his plan to pay for the expenditures would raise at most two trillion dollars. He never even tries to explain how he would make that work. Ted Cruz is clearly way above Sanders. Actually, he's also way above Hillary and Trump. Even so, is he really the first choice for president of many Americans? I doubt it.
Can we just start over?
Then there's the second place people. Bernie Sanders is a remnant of 1930's style American Communists. He's big on slogans but very short on substance. He wants to take money out of politics, but he refuses to use public financing for his own campaign. He wants to break up the big banks, but he admits that he has no idea which banks would be involved, how he would determine the correct ones to break up, what method would be used to accomplish his goal, etc. In other words, he just has a slogan but not idea about how to achieve it. He wants to spend nearly twenty trillion dollars, but his plan to pay for the expenditures would raise at most two trillion dollars. He never even tries to explain how he would make that work. Ted Cruz is clearly way above Sanders. Actually, he's also way above Hillary and Trump. Even so, is he really the first choice for president of many Americans? I doubt it.
Can we just start over?
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