Thursday, March 03, 2016

What the Hell is going on? A few comments on politics.

It's usually pretty easy to ignore the primaries for both major parties, but beginning with the announcement by Donald Trump that he would run for the GOP nomination it became impossible.  What started out as comedy, for who among us thought he would actually get as far as the debates before growing bored, became anything but as The Donald actually began to be taken seriously by a large part of the Republican base.  We're not laughing anymore.

To me the most frightening part is that people whom I like and consider friends, are actually saying that they might vote for Trump.   They agree that he is over the top on much that he says, but they are rightly angered at politics as usual as we are seeing it performed in Washington and around the country.  If Trump were running on some minor Third party ticket we could still find his quest somewhat amusing, but the fact that the U.S. is for the most part a two-party country he might very well be the Republican nominee.  By the way, if you sit down and read the Constitution you won't find Political Parties mentioned in there, this might come as a surprise to a great many people who just accept the Democrats and Republicans as a natural part of our system.  I don't believe I realized this until I was in high school and one of my history teachers spoke about just that.

Anybody who knows me can pretty well guess where I stand on the political scale.  The fact that I support Bernie Sanders, certainly shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.  Sadly, I expect that by the time the primaries get around to California the choice will pretty much have been made, which seems to be the case and frankly makes no sense.  Why do two very important and populace states like New York and California get in rather late, with NY voting in April and California sitting it out until June?  In the case of this election both major parties might already be made in a choice terms of delegates.  How do places like Iowa, South Carolina and the rest get to make the decisions?  Call it bias, I guess, having lived in both of the states I mentioned.

It's still early, but the GOP seems to be in the midst of self-destructing and many Democrats appear to be happy with things remaining status quo.  This old Progressive/Liberal may be about to bail finally. Voting the lesser of two evils really doesn't seem to me what democracy is all about.