I’m not going to suggest how you should vote. I try to avoid that, as a rule (a rule which I probably break pretty frequently, I suppose, but whatever), but I would suggest that you might want to pay more attention to what the candidates have said and done over time (not just a single campaign speech, for example) to be able to compare “what he/she said, vs. what he/she has done”, and “what he/she is saying now vs. what he/she has said with equal conviction fairly recently”.
Since you opened the thread, I will share an essay I posted to my FB wall recently, if you care to see it:
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As nearly any voter in the USA can attest these days – any voter with a shred of actual thought and concern as to who will be elected as our next President, and regardless of how they plan to vote – this election is a travesty. It’s an electoral fraud without comparison in my lifetime – and I’ve never seen a “good” election yet. Nor a good president, for that matter.
Without naming names or appearing to favor one of the current major party candidates over the other, because I truly do not favor either one the least bit (and don’t particularly care much for any of the minor party candidates, either), both candidates can be aptly described as vile, despicable, incompetent, manipulative and pandering. And those are just the overlapping adjectives. There are plenty more that can be applied to either candidate, perhaps more to one than another, but again, I don’t want to appear to play favorites. Hah! As if. It doesn’t matter which one is elected; either one will be worse than the current President, and he’s no bargain – nor was his predecessor.
No, this election is going to be a disaster, and that’s just at the Presidential level. Who knows how badly it will turn out at the Congressional level, but I don’t have a lot of hope there, either. There are a few candidates – none from my state (or even my region of the country), sad to say – whom I hope will survive re-election to keep up the rear guard action they have fought for so well and gallantly against long odds to preserve a form of “small-r” republican constituational democracy alive. But whether they do or not, they’re still fighting a losing battle.
Voters keep looking around and asking (rhetorically) “How did this happen?” They look around (for someone to point the finger of blame at) and wonder “Who could have allowed things to get to this?” And “How did we manage to get the worst possible candidates to ‘represent’ us as President?”
It’s a collective failure. It’s our own damn fault, and I do not absolve myself. I certainly don’t absolve you.
It’s the fault of any and all of us who claim to want “constitutional” government – and only want to stand up for selected parts of it, or who want to assign new meanings to words, or assign whole new duties to the government to which it has no claim. A hint: “to promote the general welfare” does not mean what “Welfare” has come to mean. Another hint: There isn’t a single word in the Constitution about “the economy”; it’s not about the economy, stupid. It’s never supposed to be about the economy. (The word “job” doesn’t appear, either. It’s not about jobs, either.) It’s not even about immigration, illegal or otherwise; that word also is absent from the document. Ditto “border”. It’s the fault of all of us who vote for whatever representation seems to serve our interests of the moment, whether that’s “improved borders” or “jobs in the district” or “strong defense” (which has precious little to do with defense, and a lot more to do with increasing power for its own sake). It’s the fault of all of us who choose from time to time (or all of the time, for some) to overlook “what is allowed” by the Constitution to “what can be got away with”.
It has gotten to the point where, if one watches various Congressional hearings – or pays attention to nearly any Executive Order – the various “rules of order” in the House and Senate (or polls to the Executive) matter more than any words in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court goes along with nearly anything that can be gone along with because of judicial deference and other forms of “well, it’s been part of our history, so… that must make it okay.”
We have, each of us who has failed to insist, to complain, to demand that our representatives and government executives understand, live by and follow the Constitution, led us to this. And we’ve failed to understand the Constitution ourselves. How can we expect to hold politicians to constitutional promises if we don’t know the Constitution – at all! – ourselves? What expectation of constitutional government can we have if we cover our ears and eyes to what is right before us, every day in newspapers and on television and all over the internet and pretend that we don’t know we’re being lied to, played for fools and manipulated in every way that we can be, sometimes because it serves our interests? People who have never even been to the United States seem to understand better than our own registered voters – and elected politicians – how badly it has been violated, and how often, and for how long.
It’s time for another Revolution, I think. we shouldn’t need to fight a war, and I don’t want us to kill each other, and we certainly don’t need to reinvent government. We’ve got the framework of a good government – a minimal government, the government that too many of us, apparently, didn’t care to learn about in high school Civics classes – and it worked pretty well for a long time. I think it could still work. I’m revolted enough about our current situation to advocate publicly for the new revolution.
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I’m also not suggesting that you shouldn’t vote at all, though. Just that you should do it with your eyes open as much as possible, and maybe that you do it with some determination to follow through and make reasonable constitutional demands upon whoever “wins” that job.
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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