Rogues, Insults, Sexual Assault, FBI Investigations & Treason
There are a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle who are celebrating the end to this tumultuously outrageous bedlam that has been the 2016 presidential campaign. I am not one of them. In fact, I am bummed. Truly and completely.
For a political junkie, and someone who has either obsessed over and/or covered these things for decades, the past 19 months have been a glorious ride. The very core of our nation’s grand experiment has been revealed and it is all the things it should be—ugly, petty, furious, passionate, covered in bullshit and innuendo and propped up by shameless greed and the kind of illusions and denial that make this nation the finest example of the human condition known to civilization.
No matter what you say about or think of Citizen Donald J. Trump, he has revealed us. Since the first horde of European land-grabbers stormed the Eastern shores of what would come to be known as North America under the flimsy guise of religious freedom, no one, at least in my lifetime, has embodied our spirit more. What beats inside us is the essence of horror. Its black, soulless innards transformed a minor colonial invasion into a world power, and it bubbles inside the very foundation of a Trump candidacy. He is our Columbus, our John Smith, our genocide and our Manifest Destiny. He is confederacy and Oklahoma City.
And no matter where you fall on the side of Hillary Rodham Clinton, she has revealed our system as a gorging monolith of corruption and hubris. She has shown us, well, WikiLeaks, the Russian government and the NY Times has shown us that there are indeed two Americas, and a great many of us are not privy to the more affluent, powerful and sustainable one. The one we inhabit has never known a candidate. This candidate does not exist on this side of the tracks. We are led to believe it does, but it is a fantasy and we live in that fantasy as any J.R.R. Tolkien character.
It is this ghastly kind of pure, honest beauty that I will miss when everything more or less settles back in and the money takes over and the machine of government grinds again undeterred by what transpired here.
But this has been some ride, huh?
Right now we choose the leader of the free world from a sexual predator with a shadowy business past and the most incoherent ideology possible and a lifer politician with more secrets and shenanigans up her sleeve than even the most rancid of her kind. There have been worse candidates, only, I dare say, no more blatantly flawed ones on Election Day.
It is hard to believe that Madam Shoo-In has survived two FBI probes, possible treasonous secret servers that could well have compromised national security and a weird conflict of interest between her state department and a private multi-million dollar foundation in her name. Then again, her opponent has bragged about and been accused of sexual assault over a dozen times, has treasonous ties to the Russian government that has hacked into our political system, not to mention openly questioning the structural integrity of our democracy while simultaneously undermining a crucial strategic U.S. led battle conducted in Iraq by erroneously pointing out the country he hopes to lead is losing and stupid and wrong.
All the while the Democratic National Committee systemically swayed the primary vote away from what they deemed an unelectable elderly socialist Jew, leading to the firing of its chairman and formidable accusations of rigging. The Trump campaign has fired two of its managers, one for assaulting a woman reporter and the other for his ties to the aforementioned hostile Russian despot that the candidate not only heralds but repeatedly denies national security findings of wrongdoing in influencing the election in his favor.
Trump says Clinton is being secretive, but, despite telling us how much of an economic wizard he is, refuses to release his tax returns. Clinton accuses Trump of being unfit for the presidency, when she could easily be impeached within her first 100 days. Trump calls Clinton corrupt, while he is being sued for two wildly fraudulent “foundations” and some sham university that have all been run like a racketeering mob front. Meanwhile Clinton, whose cash-rich machine hammers her opponent relentlessly in a phalanx of TV ads that paints Trump as a negative hate monger. Trump calls Clinton a liar, when nearly everything he says is at best an unintelligible falsehood and worse still, blatant lies.
Former Democratic President Bill Clinton has called his party’s Affordable Care Act “the craziest thing” and one-third of the Republican Party, including many of its most powerful players, has called Trump everything from a con artist to a mentally unstable megalomaniac.
The press had gone off the rails. Cable news networks have turned into de facto fronts for both campaigns—MSNBC airs stories on whatever Clinton needs to win, as in lately the barrage of anti-African American concerns about voter suppression and the dismissal of Black Lives Matters by Trump, and FOX News continues to be an absolute joke with one of its night-time hosts directly advising the Trump campaign behind the scenes while transforming an hour of news time every evening into infomercials for him. CNN has gone completely nuts hiring former aides from both campaigns and putting half-mad debris you’ve never heard of on its channel to literally scream at each other about jailing opponents and having the others deported.
How am I not going to miss this?
I have to trade this in for threats to shut down the government over some nonsense you can barely pinpoint and veiled attempts to curry the favor of the Latino vote with bad plans on overhauling immigration?
Could we just let both of these lunatics lead us into the 21st century?
Please.
We promise to eat our vegetables, burn our books, salute some cloth and continue to believe we have a damn say in any of it.
But please don’t let this end.
Please.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud—The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
