Grenoble This presidential election season seems like a nightmare that just will not end! The whole season feels like Halloween with all tricks and no treats. It feels like the whole country is not living in suspense, but something more along the lines of a feeling of constant dread. What will Trump say next and who and how many millions will he offend? What will be revealed next in the Clinton staffers’ emails, and now, unbelievably, what in the world is the FBI doing in the middle of the election, jumping into the middle of the mess days before the voting, like we are living in Egypt, Turkey, or Russia, rather than the good ol’ USA.
Looking back over the last year is not a highlights, but a low-lights, reel.
Trump is like an abusive comic in a bad reality show. He’s attacked Muslims, Mexicans, all manner of immigrants, African-Americans, other candidates and their wives, parents of soldiers, and of course women by the tens of millions. And, no doubt, I’m forgetting others by the score. We’ve heard him on tape flaunting sexual abuse as he’s established a new standard for crudity and crassness in electioneering, and, yes, that includes comments on the size of hands and sex organs. We’ve heard him take pride in tax dodging and pat his own back for not paying taxes, while he’s running for the job of spending everyone else’s tax dollars and clearly not paying any of his own. Commentators have expressed concerns about allowing younger children to even watch Presidential debates for goodness sakes! Is there no end to this?
Meanwhile, we have this email train wreck that won’t stop running over in the Clinton wheelhouse. It starts with a terribly bad decision when she was Secretary of State to use a private server rather than the department’s email system. Anyone can make a bad call, but then the tendency towards secrecy without much of a mea culpa just exacerbates the trust issues, and can’t be put to bed and tucked in for the night. The FBI finally puts an endless investigation to rest with a couple of hand slaps, which are mistakenly called exonerations, and then, darned if they don’t reopen the whole mess, breaking their own internal policies by doing so, and offering hardly a smidgen of information. Worse, it seems to involve a former Congressman and estranged husband of one of Clinton’s closest advisors who once again is caught in a sexting scandal and unbelievably shared some electronic devices with his ex-wife that may have contained secret information. Talk about crass and crude, and stupid as a rock. What the frick!
Can any of us believe we are living through any of this at the highest levels of our political life?
And, that’s not all. Thanks to WikiLeaks and likely help from the Russians we also are treated to a daily dose of email drops from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta with way too much tacky talk and inside baseball play-by-play of the functions and dysfunctions of the Clinton campaign. We thought we had drama inside the Trump campaign, well, hold on, here comes the Clintonistas, too! Oh, and sure, video drops of dirty tricks to boot.
I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but I can’t take anymore.
Tuesday, November 8th, can’t come quickly enough for any of us. In some countries and in union elections there’s a quiet period before the vote for campaigning to stop. Can we get some of that now?!?