Monday, October 31, 2016

Endorsement: Gary Johnson for president

In an election year where the main issue is character, there are only two choices, and neither of them has an R or D after their name. Between Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein, I have to endorse Johnson based on ideology. But let us look at the whole picture.


First, Republican-in-name-only Donald Trump is an unacceptable candidate on so many levels. For example, how does a businessman who was on the brink of bankruptcy get elected based on his business acumen? And even if you assume the women are lying who have alleged sexual misconduct from Trump, his "locker room" tapes that have been brought forward show he is at the least somewhat perverse. While I don't consider him to be racist, he is clearly a sexist. And his political views, with the exception of his border control policy and other protectionist views, have shifted between Right and Left, sometimes more than once?

Trump is a little boy chasing his father's legacy, and failing miserably. But Trump covers for his failure by talking big. He is a master of marketing, but that is all.

At his worst, Trump might be a closet fascist. But at his best, he may "only" be a Democrat with a Republican label. There is a teeny chance he may be a Reaganite, but that is a longshot, at best.


And then there is Democrat Hillary Clinton, the most crooked politician to ever run for the presidency. Her scandals make Richard Nixon look downright honest. I have been forced to cover her ad nauseam since this blog started, because she has been proven to have broken the law. FBI Director James Comey said as much last July when he said he wasn't pressing charges against her. Bill Clinton may lay claim to the Clinton family's sex scandals, but her fingers were all over every other scandal.

Even if you ignore her scandals, her political views are statist, supporting big government solutions for every problem, even as she ignores how big government created the problems in the first place.

At her worst, Clinton could be the first communist dictator in America. At her best, she may turn out to be a pragmatic president, like her husband. The chance of her reducing the size of government? Somewhere between slim and none, and slim just left town. Most likely possibility is she will be taken down by a scandal in her first term, assuming her health doesn't do it first.

Thirdly, there is the Green Party's Jill Stein. She is a Leftist's dream, without Hillary's scandal baggage. If you want the government to solve all of America's problems, then Stein is the only credible candidate. Of course, Santa Claus government has a price tag. Get ready to pay, with all your money and your job and anything else the government can take from you. Welcome to the USSA.

(hat tip to MemeAddicts for the pic)

This leaves Libertarian Gary Johnson. Feel free to look over his views here, but the one area where he excels is the recognition that government is too big. That is one area where both Republicans and Democrats fail every presidential election, while the Green Party takes the exact opposite approach. At what point of our crushing $20 trillion debt burden will we realize that government isn't solving our problems any more?

While Johnson does have an annoying tendency to shoot from the hip when he isn't pandering, he at least has a positive record of being a good governor in New Mexico. Trump's leadership is questionable at best, Hillary's is non-existent (senators and secretaries of state are not executive leadership positions), and Stein is a doctor.

If you happen to be a political binary who refuses to vote for anything without an R or D after its name, then I will have to recommend Trump, only because he is a clear anti-establishment vote. Our establishment elites deserve a good repudiation for screwing up the economy and ignoring the will of the people with the Obamacare fiasco, not to mention our silly war on Islam which has been going on for the age of a high schooler, without making even the slightest dent in Islamic terrorism. But Trump won't fix these problems, only send a message. To elect someone to fix the problems, America needs Gary Johnson.

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