Now that the Apocalypse has come and gone and the guy who is by all accounts the scariest contender for the US presidency...
Jefferson--er Adams--er Hayes--er Wilson--er Hoover--er Kennedy--er Nixon--why can't I remember... Goldwater?...oh McGovern! No, Carter...or Reagan, oh YEAH ! especially Reagan!!! He's gonna nuke us all...oops, not him, he's dead already....now who IS the scariest person to run for president? I know I'll get it, give me a minute...GHW Bush with his racist commercials...no not him...er, Ross Perot? ....er, W, right? Wasn't he Bushitler? But wait, he's retired from the White House. So it must be Hilary Clinton, right?
All of the people named above were scorned and pretty much slandered as they ran, with the same type of propoganda (albeit more tame) that our enemies get when we're at war. And they gave as good as they got. John Adams spread rumors that were the equivalent of Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of NICUs and killing them....if Jefferson won the presidency, the heads of children would be mounted on stakes throughout the land.
I bring this up in part because I heard a clip of Bill Maher telling people, "You know how we told you that George W. Bush was bad? He was not. He's a really nice guy! And he wasn't such a bad president! We were just exagerating! But Donald Trump is REALLY bad"....going on to say that we should believe whatever media darling says that.
I also bring it up becaused Donald Trump is on my twitter feed, and he says and does some of the most obnoxious things I've seen or heard of. Criticizing Alec Baldwin for a not-very-nasty send up of him on Saturday Night live? REally? Is dude gonna have this thin of a skin throughout the next 4 years? Or God forbid, 8? Diarrhea of the Tweet from 3 am to 6 am as he defends himself against a beauty queen who had some complaint against him that really was not that big a deal?
Let's get one thing straight. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't like pols in general (and he's always been a pol, and lobbyist for his own firm, using the government to force people to get out of his way and shield him from competition or the natural consequences of capitalist failure), but Trump annoys me the way Obama annoys me: every time I hear him speak, he makes me mad. I hear him equivocate and I hear him say the opposite of what he said 2 weeks before and I hear him say he's a Christian but that he treats the Bible like some kind of sacred thing not to be touched (if you don't have a warrn out, scribbled all over Bible, I question your knowledge of Judaism or Christianity). And he says he has never done anything that he needs forgiveness for. Which is a clear sign he's never gone to or paid attention to a single Sunday School lesson or sermon.
He's a liar, he's a bully, he's a hypocrite. But Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, LBJ and Nixon were bullies. No one who has occupied the White House and no one who has run for that office has been truthful about who supports them, Obama is not the worst, but "If you like yoiur doctor, you can keep your doctor" might be the first example that comes to mind. But remember "No more regime change", "No new taxes," "I am not a crook", "My programs will shorten the depression [paraphrase]", "A chicken in every pot", "Wilson will keep us out of the war"? I don't know that any POTUS is innocent of telling lies that screwed peoples' lives up and even led to the death of thousands of young men.
I was depressed before the election. My sentiments were a little like P.J. O'Rourke, who told someone on NPR that "Hilary is awful, but she's awful within a normal range of awful". But for a variety of reasons, I don't vote. And the reasons I don't vote helped me swallow the fact that someone I have no respect for will occupy the White House for four to eight years hence.
I don't vote because I don't believe we should have presidents. Maybe there are other forms of government that work better, but the idea of some smooth looking, smooth talking celeberity will represent me and help the rest of the government screw me over is nauseating, to say the least. I also hate the tendency people around me have gotten to refer to the president as if he is the boss of us. What?
George Washington wasn't any better than any of these goofballs, but at least he knew he didn't want to be king and handed over his sword to the representatives at Philledelphia immediately after the war was won. If he hadn't lived a life demonstrating his belief that people with more color in their skin were less deserving of respect than others I might think fondly of him.
I don't vote because if we have 2 people running that no one likes (such as this year), I don't want to vote for my rapist. If Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump had shown up at my door at the same time during the campaign, and said "One of us is going to beat you up and rob you, but you have to decide which" I'd tell them to go to hell.
And I don't vote for individuals to "lead me" because I'm an adult. I don't need a leader. I don't need anyone to tell me it's wrong to harm someone else and it's wrong to take something that belongs to someone else. Those ideas were written in my heart in the womb. And I am not a better person than Barack Obama, or a worse person than Jimmy Carter. Remember the phrase, "All menn are created equal"? I doubt all the founders believed that since they held people in bondage, but I do believe it. Sincerely. I believe in a God who created every person on this planet to resemble him in our thoughts, creativity, and impression we can make on the world, albeit scaled down in all these areas. The poorest child born to a starving mother in Ethiopia is just as important and precious as children of kings or queens, or any of the presidents we've had. And we've gone from believing that to worshiping our head of state as an idol, reading in tabloids what his children are up to, fawning over him, telling our children what great men each of them were.
That is too much power for one person.
I'm reading a book called "Our Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America" by FH Buckley, to which I was attracted because the author has told people in interviews that it is a diatribe against the monarchichal presidency we've created. I'm disappointed to find out it's just an argument for a British/Canadian system of parliamentary government instead of a 3 part government warring against each other through checks and balances. In a parliamentary election, of course, one votes for a party, for the platform of that party, not for one particular person; the party then selects the prime minister who is so accountable to the people that he has to stand in front of both chambers of legilators and have spitwads thrown at him and get sworn at and all the stuff that you can see anytime CSpan airs the Prime Ministers Questions.
I was disappointed not to hear examples of haughty presidents that I could give others, but maybe this guy is onto something.
The bottom line is, people have always expressed fear, often a lot of it, regarding the potential of someone getting the presidency and the harm that will cause (think of cries that JFK would only do what the Pope wanted in terms of decisions of state), and the more different a contender is from an individual voter, I would guess that the more "scary" the person is she or he who runs against that person's beliefs. And yet life goes on. Even though some of those politicians were as bad as many of us thought they were. There has been no Apocalypse.
My biggest hope in the face of this new presidency is that maybe now people will realize that if a thin-skinned, bullyish clown succeeds at the job of president, maybe it's not really an important job after all, and we can do without it.
Jefferson--er Adams--er Hayes--er Wilson--er Hoover--er Kennedy--er Nixon--why can't I remember... Goldwater?...oh McGovern! No, Carter...or Reagan, oh YEAH ! especially Reagan!!! He's gonna nuke us all...oops, not him, he's dead already....now who IS the scariest person to run for president? I know I'll get it, give me a minute...GHW Bush with his racist commercials...no not him...er, Ross Perot? ....er, W, right? Wasn't he Bushitler? But wait, he's retired from the White House. So it must be Hilary Clinton, right?
All of the people named above were scorned and pretty much slandered as they ran, with the same type of propoganda (albeit more tame) that our enemies get when we're at war. And they gave as good as they got. John Adams spread rumors that were the equivalent of Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of NICUs and killing them....if Jefferson won the presidency, the heads of children would be mounted on stakes throughout the land.
I bring this up in part because I heard a clip of Bill Maher telling people, "You know how we told you that George W. Bush was bad? He was not. He's a really nice guy! And he wasn't such a bad president! We were just exagerating! But Donald Trump is REALLY bad"....going on to say that we should believe whatever media darling says that.
I also bring it up becaused Donald Trump is on my twitter feed, and he says and does some of the most obnoxious things I've seen or heard of. Criticizing Alec Baldwin for a not-very-nasty send up of him on Saturday Night live? REally? Is dude gonna have this thin of a skin throughout the next 4 years? Or God forbid, 8? Diarrhea of the Tweet from 3 am to 6 am as he defends himself against a beauty queen who had some complaint against him that really was not that big a deal?
Let's get one thing straight. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't like pols in general (and he's always been a pol, and lobbyist for his own firm, using the government to force people to get out of his way and shield him from competition or the natural consequences of capitalist failure), but Trump annoys me the way Obama annoys me: every time I hear him speak, he makes me mad. I hear him equivocate and I hear him say the opposite of what he said 2 weeks before and I hear him say he's a Christian but that he treats the Bible like some kind of sacred thing not to be touched (if you don't have a warrn out, scribbled all over Bible, I question your knowledge of Judaism or Christianity). And he says he has never done anything that he needs forgiveness for. Which is a clear sign he's never gone to or paid attention to a single Sunday School lesson or sermon.
He's a liar, he's a bully, he's a hypocrite. But Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, LBJ and Nixon were bullies. No one who has occupied the White House and no one who has run for that office has been truthful about who supports them, Obama is not the worst, but "If you like yoiur doctor, you can keep your doctor" might be the first example that comes to mind. But remember "No more regime change", "No new taxes," "I am not a crook", "My programs will shorten the depression [paraphrase]", "A chicken in every pot", "Wilson will keep us out of the war"? I don't know that any POTUS is innocent of telling lies that screwed peoples' lives up and even led to the death of thousands of young men.
I was depressed before the election. My sentiments were a little like P.J. O'Rourke, who told someone on NPR that "Hilary is awful, but she's awful within a normal range of awful". But for a variety of reasons, I don't vote. And the reasons I don't vote helped me swallow the fact that someone I have no respect for will occupy the White House for four to eight years hence.
I don't vote because I don't believe we should have presidents. Maybe there are other forms of government that work better, but the idea of some smooth looking, smooth talking celeberity will represent me and help the rest of the government screw me over is nauseating, to say the least. I also hate the tendency people around me have gotten to refer to the president as if he is the boss of us. What?
George Washington wasn't any better than any of these goofballs, but at least he knew he didn't want to be king and handed over his sword to the representatives at Philledelphia immediately after the war was won. If he hadn't lived a life demonstrating his belief that people with more color in their skin were less deserving of respect than others I might think fondly of him.
I don't vote because if we have 2 people running that no one likes (such as this year), I don't want to vote for my rapist. If Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump had shown up at my door at the same time during the campaign, and said "One of us is going to beat you up and rob you, but you have to decide which" I'd tell them to go to hell.
And I don't vote for individuals to "lead me" because I'm an adult. I don't need a leader. I don't need anyone to tell me it's wrong to harm someone else and it's wrong to take something that belongs to someone else. Those ideas were written in my heart in the womb. And I am not a better person than Barack Obama, or a worse person than Jimmy Carter. Remember the phrase, "All menn are created equal"? I doubt all the founders believed that since they held people in bondage, but I do believe it. Sincerely. I believe in a God who created every person on this planet to resemble him in our thoughts, creativity, and impression we can make on the world, albeit scaled down in all these areas. The poorest child born to a starving mother in Ethiopia is just as important and precious as children of kings or queens, or any of the presidents we've had. And we've gone from believing that to worshiping our head of state as an idol, reading in tabloids what his children are up to, fawning over him, telling our children what great men each of them were.
That is too much power for one person.
I'm reading a book called "Our Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America" by FH Buckley, to which I was attracted because the author has told people in interviews that it is a diatribe against the monarchichal presidency we've created. I'm disappointed to find out it's just an argument for a British/Canadian system of parliamentary government instead of a 3 part government warring against each other through checks and balances. In a parliamentary election, of course, one votes for a party, for the platform of that party, not for one particular person; the party then selects the prime minister who is so accountable to the people that he has to stand in front of both chambers of legilators and have spitwads thrown at him and get sworn at and all the stuff that you can see anytime CSpan airs the Prime Ministers Questions.
I was disappointed not to hear examples of haughty presidents that I could give others, but maybe this guy is onto something.
The bottom line is, people have always expressed fear, often a lot of it, regarding the potential of someone getting the presidency and the harm that will cause (think of cries that JFK would only do what the Pope wanted in terms of decisions of state), and the more different a contender is from an individual voter, I would guess that the more "scary" the person is she or he who runs against that person's beliefs. And yet life goes on. Even though some of those politicians were as bad as many of us thought they were. There has been no Apocalypse.
My biggest hope in the face of this new presidency is that maybe now people will realize that if a thin-skinned, bullyish clown succeeds at the job of president, maybe it's not really an important job after all, and we can do without it.
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