To be with Her
author: nick giokas | contributor
Credit: Edalisse Hirst via Flickr
The 2016 US election is coming to a close, and I’ve got to say it’s been a depressing ride. On the one hand, you have a candidate that’s blowing enough dog-whistles that Stormfronters are saying, “Okay, you could be a tad more subtle.” This candidate has ties to America’s largest geopolitical foe (Russia). He praises more dictators than an edgy middle-schooler, is a straight-up sexual predator, and is the closest thing to a bona fide fascist running for president since George Wallace. He has probably never paid taxes, is a documented scam artist, and is verifiably ignorant when it comes to the issues. He has a terrifying nonchalance vis-a-vis nuclear war, and far from lastly (I have a word limit) he seems to have the temperament and sentence structure of a second grader.
Oh, but I forgot, Clinton did something dumb with her emails.
Obviously, Sanders was the better choice. Y’know, the guy who wanted to break up the banks, but didn’t have a plan on how to do it. The guy that walked into an interview about foreign policy, and then berated the interviewer when they asked foreign policy questions because he had zero answers. The genius that wanted to put farmers on the Federal Reserve board. The guy who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, only to then say that breadlines were a good thing. The hypocrite that rants about corruption but helped screw over a church so that his wife could buy its land for the college she was running. Oh right, his wife, who bankrupted said college and funnelled hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer and tuition money to their daughter, which he used his political position to facilitate; but, he’s the nice guy right? Which is why he streamlined sending toxic waste to a small, majority Latino, town in Nevada. Oh, and did I mention that he then proceeded to call the people who he dumped toxic waste on “entitled?” This is the guy who berates anyone who even slightly disagrees with him and is openly advocating for starting the left-wing equivalent of the Tea Party. The guy who lost by 3.7 million votes in the Democratic Primary, but said it was somehow rigged; or the guy who said that Clinton is “unqualified to be President.” The guy with no policies beyond “let’s tank the economy so we can hand out free stuff.” That’s who should have been the nominee?
Oh, right, e-mails.
On the topic of Iraq, it’s ridiculous to think that Clinton would know about the attack before the CIA, the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. Oh, and she should have known that George W. Bush would put Paul Bremer in charge of the Iraqi transition. Bremer, who suspended elections in Iraq and committed the single stupidest foreign policy blunder in history: De-Ba’athification (the fire that lit the powderkeg and started the first insurgency). She knew all of that when she gave her conditional vote on Iraq. Right.
Oh, I almost forgot, I’m supposed to think she’s a war hawk, because wanting to do something to stop the wanton slaughter of civilians in Eastern Aleppo or the genocide being waged by ISIS is somehow morally wrong. One sec, I’ve gotta phone the nineties and tell them that we were right to do nothing in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, because genocide’s fine as long as America doesn’t stop it because once that happens it’s imperialism. Oh, I almost forgot, I’m supposed to ignore the fact that the entire foreign policy community (that’s Democrat and Republican) is backing her.
That reminds me, I’ve been frankly confused by the fact that one of the most statistically liberal Senators is being called a conservative by the left. I’m a conservative. She’s not. You know how I know that? Because I’m centre-right, and she’s way to the left of me.
If this campaign has taught me anything, it’s that as much as I may disagree with Clinton on certain issues, she’s got the perfect temperament for the presidency because I have come this close to having an aneurysm at times listening to the biased garbage spewed about her, yet she’s remained calm the whole way through. I’m even more impressed by the fact that she has legitimately attempted to focus on policy even while the two troglodytes she’s faced ran around spewing populist garbage with zero policy. That takes patience. And even though I’m conservative Canadian, and apparently caring about policy doesn’t matter anymore, damn it all, I’m with her.
