This is what things have come to.
The Greatest Democracy In the World™ is subjecting its people, and the world, to an election campaign to determine who gets to order new crimes against humanity, in which one candidate is a far-right, racist, woman-hating, tax-avoiding failed property mogul, reality TV star and serial sex offender, and the other is, by all available evidence, a robot built by Goldman Sachs.
Clinton looks on track for an easy win, to go by the polls. Of course she is, when the powerful forces allied against Donald Trump are so huge, according to the reliable source of Donald Trump.
Never has there been a more put-upon sector of any society than that of Donald Trump. The media is against him. The electoral system is against him. The Establishment is determined to squash the popular insurgency of this strangely orange modern-day Che Guevara.
When we think of the oppressed in the so-called Land of the Free, the first thing that comes to mind is a billionaire who is literally on record boasting he is so powerful he can sexually assault women with impunity.
Clinton, for her part, has been working hard on all the needed skills to defeat Trump — mostly standing upright, calling him “Donald” in an ironic tone and not dying.
Conspiracy theories of a fatal illness notwithstanding, Clinton looks like she should just about manage all of that and is well on her way to being the US’s first female Commander in Chief to drone strike a Pakistani village. And they say progress is finished.
Sure, Clinton is in the pay of fossil fuel corporations whose practices are destroying the capacity of the planet to sustain human civilisation and WikiLeaks has exposed the extent to which she is a puppet of Wall Street. But her opponent is a psychopathic likely rapist who can’t complete a sentence without threatening to commit some atrocity against one minority or another and is just one popular vote away from accessing nuclear weapons. So for many, a corporate greed-fuelled ecoholocaust starts seeming like the least of our problems.
Of course, there is also Jill Stein, the Greens candidate who advocates extreme and unpopular policies like free education, not committing war crimes and shifting away from practices condemning the planet to destruction. Many who actually support Stein’s polices are likely to back Clinton nonetheless because, the argument goes, it is a two-horse race so it is important to back the lesser evil — even when the “evil” in question is a probable dead planet.
Stein is not included in any of the debates and largely ignored in media coverage, because the US is a democracy and that clearly means the people get to choose between two candidates whose policies will mean their common ruin, one of whom is Donald Trump.
It is really hard to imagine why all those countries the US has invaded don’t ever seem too keen on the US’s brand of freedom.
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