So it's the wee hours of the morning and dawn sunlight is peeking through the blinds in our NNW-facing home. The livestock are calm, Watson up on the leather sectional and MacGuyver curled up on the rug beneath, and senile Ruby on her carefully folded towel in the platform of her cat-condo. She's incontinent and we're making her comfortable in her dotage and limiting the daily clean-ups to the floor of her toney cat cage and litter box, which she misses with consistency.
I'm thinking about the election, and I'm thinking about what's right and what's wrong. I'm not really going to enumerate the issues here because you're hearing it, seeing it, and reading it everywhere you turn these days. But I do want to muse a bit.
With Hillary, who has been successfully demonized by well-meaning (and, yes, often self-rightous) Bernie supporters, it would seem that the throngs of BernieorBust and NeverHillary folks are settled in against her. If you've spent time in that camp, as have I, you've seen enough to convince you that she has profited enormously from her position(s) in life and that anything she says about income inequality or oppression is at best second-hand and at worst, political pandering.
She supported Goldwater, for God's sake. She's jingoist and hawkish and has been knee-jerk Military Industrial Complex candy. She's married to a man I once respected, but this primary campaign has lost that to him. Was his unraveling of Dodd-Frank Consumer Protection legislation a simple mistake? No, it was a complex one, and his teflon-like avoidance of consequences for this and for his personal behavioral choices is uncanny. He has lied straight faced to us, apologized for it, and then he slid into his incredibly lucrative foundation work like none of it ever happened.
It's a sad and scary day when
anything The Donald says scans like the truth to me, but some of Drumpf's criticisms of the Clintons approach that, e.g. this from politico.com,
"The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an
art form for themselves," Trump said during his remarks Tuesday evening.
"They've made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling
favors, selling government contracts, and I mean hundreds of millions of
dollars."
They "turned the State Department into her
private hedge fund. The Russians, the Saudis, the Chinese all gave money
to Bill and Hillary and got favorable treatment in return. It's a sad
day in America when foreign governments with deep pockets have more
influence in our own country than our great citizens."
The generous (and possibly naive) part of me wants to hope that no matter how despicable Hillary's actions have been in the past, this campaign has made her a better person. Once in office her charge will be to make good on her recently refined declarations of intent. Bernie has brought out the progressive in her. Can she follow up for positive change? Well, if she is as persistent in that as she has been so, historically, in her self-promotion and self-enriching efforts, the answer would be yes.
Here's what she should do if she wants my vote:
- Apologize for all the bad stuff she's done. Does she need a list of that? Have a staff member browse the Book of the Face for anti-Hillary memes. They are abundant.
- Promise to make good on the positions her progressive persona has stated over the course of the primaries.
- Promise to clean house at the DNC.
- Promise to reform the fuzzy logic of the Democratic primary process.
- Promise Bernie Sanders an important position in her cabinet. VP would be good, but there may be some where his political positions and experience would be more valuable and meaningful, perhaps State, but perhaps a new Department of Citizen Equality or Department of What is Right. I like that--Secretary of Citizen Equality.
The Bottom Line:
I'm on the fence about whether voting for a third party candidate who is honest, capable, and dedicated to reclaiming democracy from oligarchy would be tossing the POTUS throne to The Donald or if it could actually happen that Bernie Sanders might sweep into office on the votes of young people and us older adults who still care about fairness and equality. Given what seem to be rampant irregularities in primary voting systems this year, I am leaning toward the former. On the surface, it appears that Bernie supporters would rather rally than vote. Is that true? Or are his losses mostly the result of a broad voter suppression strategy on the part of the DNC and Hillary? That's the stickler, and I am withholding my decision, most likely, until I press the button in the voting booth.
Of course, with substantial legal challenges facing both presumptive (and presumptuous) candidates of our broken two-party system, things may change completely by November and one or both of them may be in jail.
And that's that with that. For now.
