O Tempora!

The Republican and Democrat processes to nominate candidates for President are an embarrassment. The leading candidates for the major parties are absolutely terrible and terrifying.

Let’s begin with the Republicans. Donald Trump, the leading candidate, has made a lot of news. He is a caricature of a businessman, a caricature sketched as if by a leftist cartoonist. He’s a loud, foul-mouthed, insulting, bullying braggart. He has literally tried to turn a widow out of her home by using government cronies. Trump says nothing of substance in his rants. He may be rich, but he clearly doesn’t know anything about economics. Trump thinks that free trade makes our country “lose”. He promotes protectionism. He thinks he can build an impenetrable wall on our southern border and make Mexico pay for it. Trump wants to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS and torture people. If Donald Trump is elected president, the country and its economy will suffer greatly.

Ted Cruz, who appears to be catching up to Trump, seemed at one time to be a fairly reasonable candidate. But he has adopted a lot of Trumpism and saber-rattling. Furthermore, he has probably written off New York with his remark about “New York Values”.

Republicans embarrassing? You bet! But the left-leaning majority of media outlets don’t seem embarrassed about the Democrats. They should be, and so should you.

On the Democrat side, former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the leading Democrat, used a private email server to store classified messages. She blamed the Benghazi attack on an obscure anti-Muslim video, something even her emails have shown to be false. She told of coming under fire in Bosnia as she got off a plane – but there was video to show that this was incorrect. Clinton said that she “misspoke”, of course. It’s no wonder that polls show more than half of respondents think that she’s not trustworthy.

Clinton is partly trading on her name. Bill Clinton was a popular president, who, despite his rather unsavory character, did or proposed several good things. Bill signed NAFTA and welfare reform into law. He also proposed the reforming Social Security – partially privatizing it – following the very successful Chilean model. Hillary Clinton opposes free trade, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership – something she pushed as secretary of state. She now says that she does not like her husband’s welfare reform. And she frequently states that privatizing Social Security is “off the table”.

Now to Bernie Sanders. Sanders is a self-described socialist. In the United States, where the Constitution protects individual liberty, Sanders’ popularity should really be embarrassing. His supporters are mostly young people, who don’t remember the 70-year experiment known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This experiment in totalitarianism and collectivism cost hundreds of millions their liberty and tens of millions their lives. However, just a taste of capitalism in socialist countries like India has lifted a couple of billion people out of extreme poverty. Sanders wants a “revolution”. Somebody needs to ask him how the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions turned out.

We have a two-party system in the U.S. – a system concocted by the two major parties to prevent other choices. Minor parties, such as the Libertarian Party (of which I am a member), have to jump through all kinds of hoops just to get onto state ballots. “Campaign finance reform” also requires a daunting load of paperwork to run for office. If you think that minor parties are just a nuisance, remember that a two-party system is just one party away from a one-party system.

It’s time to dissolve the DemoPublican duopoly and let minor parties flourish and grow. Only then will the voting public have a real choice in elections. Only then can we cease to be embarrassed by politicos such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.