We’re So Screwed!

January 28, 2016

We’re so screwed! Totally, effing screwed!!!

Presently, three people are running for POTUS on the D side, while the Rs still have 11 active candidates. It’s a sorry lot, frankly. I’ll be voting for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without second thoughts, for I think she’s the only candidate with the experience and core competencies to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Am I totally comfortable with the notion of President Hillary Clinton? Not at all. There’s her ambition thing—I have done a real gut check on the ambition / woman thing, and have satisfied myself that gender has nothing to do with my feelings—and there are credibility issues. On the other hand, looking at others with a chance explains my decision easily. Donald Trump is crazy old Uncle Albert, shooting off his mouth about anything and everything, with nary a concern about facts. Ted Cruz is a liar extraordinaire. And Jeb Bush? If he mattered in this race—and he may, if recent polls from New Hampshire mean anything—the national media would have bothered with Swamped by Dexter Filkins for the New Yorker on January 4, 2016. Jebbie looks less worthy than we’d wish for him to look, and I’ll leave it there.

Facebooks provides opportunities to have casual friends / Friends. Andrei Cherny is one such fellow. He’s a nice guy—that matters most—and a big deal in the Clinton / Gore world. He’s the author of The Candy Bombers, a book which is always on my Top 10 Ever Book Lists. (He’s also the son-in-law of old friends Shelley Heyman and Racquel and Larry Fleischman.) And Andrei’s really big deal? Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the publication he co-founded.

The Winter 2016 issue of Democracy has for its lead article 16 for ’16. The journal had lots of smart people submit pieces about what our country ought to be doing. The best 16 were published. They include ideas like: A new Morrill Act, an update to a 150+ year old effort to ready our population for the future; handling disaster management better; limiting maximum prison sentences to 20 years; and making our flight paths serve air travelers, not air traffic controllers.

I’ll be sharing more ideas from 16 for ’16 in the coming days. In the meantime, however, what’s so depressing is the lack of evident interest in government—Congress, especially, but I fault the Obama Administration, too—for “out of the box” thinking. Out of the box is a cliché, but it started with the notion that we ought to consider “different” and give “different” its due for at least a moment or two, just cuz!

16 for ’16 was a wake-up call for me. We have no meaningful dialogue about matters that really matter. Just a ton of blather, passing for something meaningful, along with lots of reporting about how people feel. Frankly, while feelings matter, we have to live in the reality-based world, which is at one and the same tiem better than many think it is, and in need of some 21st century ideas.

I’m not going to quote Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd in The American President here. Find the speech yourself! 🙂 But jeepers, can we not recognize the fact that the same old “honor the market, pay tribute to the Constitution” BS ain’t working? We’ve been fucking up as a country for my entire adult life, and for a not insignificant portion of my early years. Being angry a la Cruz, Trump, and even Sanders, won’t get the job done. We all need to step it up, get serious, and start demanding real solutions.

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