When Donald Trump loses the presidential election next month—-and at this point that is the most likely outcome—he can look in the mirror to find the biggest reason why he lost and why he pulled down the Grand Old Party, the Republicans, with him. The possibility is now good that a Hillary Clinton landslide could bring in a Democrat Congress.
Belligerent, often uninformed and hollering, Trump fell into every trap laid for him by the devious Hillary Clinton in the last debate, which conveniently excluded the third parties candidates (Why not? A self-righteous group called the Presidential Debate Commission, staffed exclusively by Democrats and Republicans and sans Libertarians and Greens, said third parties were not invited. That’s even though millions of people will possibly be voting for third parties this time, despite mainstream media and the political establishment’s attempts to keep them out of the campaign as though unconventional thinking was a crime against humanity).
I Want the Presidency So I Will Promise the Stars and All the Planets
Clinton’s debate performance shows how she lusts for office. She promised almost anything to anyone. Few people seem interested in how she will pay for all this, other than her dubious promises only to raise taxes on the rich. Unless she is stopped by a Congress, a President Clinton would take more money out of the pockets of everyone, including the middle class, to fund her dreams of the United States going further down the road toward an American democratic socialism.
Although unethical and a political junkie who would do almost anything to win office, she certainly scored repeatedly in her last debate with Trump. He failed, again and again, to call her to account on her promises of an incredible expansion of the federal government, which is already spending and regulating America to death. It is doing so while ineffectively dealing with a problem many Americans can, or will certainly agree in the near future, is becoming a problem that confronts us almost every day: The threat of Islamic jihad.
Both candidates booted on that issue because they were more concerned with destroying each other’s reputation. Neither offered any substantial set of policies. Hillary says we need to work with our NATO allies, most of whom have famously let their armed forces run down since the end of the Cold War.
NATO and US Dependency
In their relationships with the United States, many of our NATO allies have the dependence problem of almost anyone or nation that becomes dependent on others: They are contemptuous of the people or institutions that provide help while at the same time insisting the same countries or institutions must continue to help even though they are certainly capable of helping themselves. Many Europeans expect the Americans to do the heavy lifting in the war against terrorism.
Here’s a tip for them: The United States, the same as the overextended British Empire of the late 1930s—a British Empire that shamefully gave in to Nazi Germany in 1938 because Prime Minister Chamberlain was told by her service chiefs that Britain wasn’t ready for war—doesn’t have the capabilities to be everywhere in the year 2016. That is unless the West starts to think in different ways. That is unless the U.S. starts to come together with traditional enemies Russia and China in the battle to rid the world of terrorism.
We should do it not because the Chinese and Russians regimes are commendable. They’re not. But then again we’re not beer and skittles; the democratic model for everyone, everytime, everywhere. We should do it because we have a common interest in wiping out a plague called Islamic terrorism, but not those who want to peacefully practice the Islam religion. The latter, with skillful diplomacy, could become effective allies of the West. But that would take a skill and intelligence that neither Clinton nor Trump have exhibited on the hustings.
At the same time, the Europeans should be told that it is their job to live up to their obligations. The NATO pact requires nations to spend a certain amount of their GDP on defense. Many have not for decades with the result that the armed forces of many NATO countries are a joke. They not only are doing little about ripping out the roots of terrorism, they have little capacity to do so, even if they had the will to do so.
Thinking about a Global Problem
Did Trump and Hillary discuss these life and death issues in detail?
They did not. Both would rather hold rallies with their true believers, rallies with the credibility of idiotic high school pep rallies dominated by baying sophomores.
Trump, who sometimes has actually seemed a bit interested in some of these national security issues, merely howls that he’ll bomb ISIS out of existence as though the problem of global terrorism was as simple as a president ordering some bombing runs to settle everything. This is a form of voodoo strategy practiced for years by president Lyndon Johnson, whose Vietnam War drove him from the White House in 1968.
And voodoo is what it seems our two leading presidential candidates have been practicing on the campaign trail for months. Actually, these two have provided a Big Top show in which the clowns are the star attactions. Yet, in less than a month, the main event can begin—the still further extension of a welfare/warfare state that tries to do everything and fails at almost everything, most especially eliminating the scourge of terrorism, a hideous problem that is directly and indirectly hurting tens of millions across the globe.
In the next four years, likely loser Trump may turn out to be the lucky one.
