Wednesday, September 21, 2016

What to think of the U.S. presidential election?

Over the course of the last six months or so, I've spent a lot of time following the presidential election in the United States. Pretty much every day I've paid attention to what's going on and who's the favorite to win the election.

Like so many others, I started with the democratic presidential primary, where Bernie Sanders was running against Hillary Clinton. I hoped that Bernie would end up being the democratic nominee, since I did not trust Hillary at all.

Even though I'm a liberal, I also paid attention to the republican presidential primary, where Donald Trump was competing against a dozen republican candidates. I wanted to see who was the least bad of those candidates on the republican side.

As it happened, Bernie Sanders unfortunately did not prevail against Clinton's establishment machine. He lost, whereas Donald Trump managed to win over the rest over the field, that included crazies like Ted 'nukem all' Cruz.  

In any case, now that we're only six weeks away from the general election and there are only two 'major' candidates left, what should you do as a voter? Should you be voting for Trump, Hillary, or perhaps for someone else?

As a progressive Scandinavian, who has paid a lot of attention to what's going on this election cycle, I can say with relative high confidence, that of all the candidates, I would not vote for Hillary Clinton - under any circumstance.

I would not vote for her, because in my view, she's an unindicted criminal, who through her 'extreme carelessness' and 'negligence' during her tenure as a secretary of state, repeatedly violated the espionage act.

Working as secretary of state from 2009 until 2013, she mishandled classified information using her private server. She had hundreds of emails on her server containing top secret information and even information above that classification.

The fact that she wasn't and hasn't been prosecuted for these crimes just goes to show how well the Clintons are connected in the U.S. Any other person would already be either fired or in jail for her actions, as the FBI director James Comey himself stated.

This, of course is not the only reason why I wouldn't vote for her this election season. Besides of repeatedly violating the espionage act, there are multiple other crucial reasons why one shouldn't vote for her.

For instance, over the decades it has become obvious that she's a fraud as a person who only cares about herself. She doesn't have a moral compass and only will back things like gay marriage when it's politically expedient to do so.

When it comes to the economy, she took hundreds of millions in bribes from special interests and Wall Street. No wonder she's now diametrically opposed to regulating the big banks or having a single payer health care system in the U.S.

When it comes to military interventions, Hillary has been for every war there is and she's backed by all the prominent neoconservatives. There's very little doubt that 'madame secretary' would be a warmonger in the oval office too.

Even when it comes to simple things like telling truth about mundane things, she can't help but to make up stuff. Her preposterous claim of having been under sniper fire in Bosnia makes her a pathological liar that you cannot trust.

Also, let's not forget what happened during the democratic primaries earlier this year. Clinton and the disgraced former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Shultz rigged the democratic primary, so that Bernie Sanders wouldn't stand a chance against her.

The DNC didn't stay neutral and instead kept pushing smears and false narratives about Bernie in the media. They even made sure that the televised debates were held when as few people as possible would be able to watch them.

So knowing this all, should it really surprise anyone that independents and people on the left are having problems supporting Hillary? It seems that only those inside the beltway bubble can't seem to understand that she's in trouble.

All in all, I'm obviously not saying that voting for Trump is an easy decision and that you should definitely vote for him. I'm not saying that he's even a remotely good candidate or that he would be able to 'make America great again'.

At the same time, Hillary Clinton is such a failure as a candidate and as a person, that even though this is an important presidential election, as a progressive, I just don't see how I would be able to vote for her.

At least in my view, since she hasn't reached out to liberals and independents this season and since she hasn't managed to explain why she's even running, she doesn't deserve to become the next president of the United States.

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