OXFORD, Miss. – I drove back from my 50th high
school reunion (yep, I’ve been around that long) in Sanford, North Carolina, Oct.
9, leaving behind the flooded creeks, downed power lines, and punishing rain
Hurricane Matthew inflicted while my old school mates and I traded laughs and
half-century-old memories.
The second presidential debate came on the radio somewhere
near the Alabama-Mississippi state line, and my wife Suzanne looked at me as if
to say, “Out of one storm into another!”
Listening to the debate--rather than seeing it--we missed
Republican contender Donald Trump’s menacing stalk as Democrat Hillary Clinton
tried to deflect her opponent’s charges regarding the 33,000 missing emails
from her time as secretary of state.
Actually, the number jumped to 39,000 a few minutes later,
as Trump borrowed a leaf from ‘50s-era communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy,
who would waive a list of “known communists” in the Department of State ranging
in number from 10 to 205. It depended on which speech as to whether there were
10, 57, 81 or 205.
Clinton’s responses to Trump’s attacks weren’t always
encouraging. Regarding WikiLeaks revelations about her secret speeches to Wall
Street executives, she essentially resorted to an ad hominem charge against the
Russians for “directing the attacks, the hacking on American accounts to
influence our election.” She did the same in the third debate on Oct. 19.
Certainly the United States would never try to interfere in
the elections of another sovereign state, right? Well, there was Honduras and
the brutal coup there in 2009 that had the implicit blessing of Secretary of
State Clinton. And, of course, there was Libya and the overthrow of Muammar
Gaddafi in 2011 that Secretary of State Clinton convinced President Obama to
support.
Clinton’s frequent evocation of Trump’s alleged ties to
Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a little unsettling. “Clinton wants an air war
with Russia,” Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein told hundreds of
students and local citizens in Oxford earlier this month.
If Trump indeed is too buddy-buddy with Vladimir Putin, he’s
also more than willing to go to war with Iran, vowing in a speech last month in
Pensacola, Florida, that Iranian ships would be “shot out of the water” if they
so much as inappropriately approach U.S. vessels. He also took aim at Iran in
the third debate.
Chalk up another reason many American voters are profoundly
unhappy with the candidates from both major parties this election. Fifteen
years of war are enough, you two! Americans are sick of war.
Over the years, I have aimed my pen many times at the
Clintons. I think President Bill Clinton’s so-called “triangulation” of
politics was an effort to neuter any passion for social justice that might
remain from the old Democratic Party that brought us the New Deal and the Great
Society. His subsequent repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act deregulating Wall
Street set the stage for the 2007-8 financial disaster. His wife has done
little to distance herself from these policies of her husband.
Yet I’m going to hold my nose election day and vote for a
Clinton, something I once vowed I would never do.
Donald Trump, for all his anti-system appeal and legitimate
criticism of Clinton-pushed trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership agreement (Hillary Clinton now says she opposes TPP), is a
reckless, dangerous demagogue, the crowning achievement of Fox News’
years-long, 24-7 intravenous injection of poison into American minds. Just like
Fox News, Trump is perpetually factually challenged, hysterically biased,
contemptuous of others’ ideas, so asphalted into his own mythos that he no
longer can know what he doesn’t know.
Remember, it was Fox News that helped promote Trump’s
ridiculous “birther” campaign to try and discredit President Obama by saying he
wasn’t born in the United States.
It’s no accident that accused sexual predator and former Fox
News CEO Roger Ailes has been in Trump’s camp, advising him in his debates with
Clinton. For Ailes, Trump is a dream come true.
Not for me. Trump is so bad I’m going to vote for Hillary
Clinton. I’m hoping pressure from her primary opponent Bernie Sanders and the
millennials who are forcing the Democratic Party establishment to shift away
from the Bill Clinton model are going to keep Hillary Clinton from breaking the
progressive promises she has made on the 2016 campaign trail.
At my recent high school reunion, I thought a lot about my
own youth and youthful idealism. I like to think I’ve held on to a little of
it. Maybe that’s why I’m hopeful the
United States is going to survive this political storm, just like my wife and I
escaped Hurricane Matthew--with a lot of war stories but no serious bruises.
This column, which appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, is a folo-up to an earlier posting on Labor South.
No comments:
Post a Comment