(Aug. 21) It is with great dejection that I watched the Democratic National Convention, just as it will surely be with great dejection that I watch the Republican alternative next week. For the second straight election, I see not even a halfway decent choice for president. Indeed, I see awful prospects no matter who wins.
I write in the first person, but I believe there are millions of others who feel as I do. And I, we, just don’t know what to do to change things.
To be clear, this isn’t one of those situations where the choices merely fail to inspire me fully or where I’m sore that my first- or second-choice candidates didn’t win the nomination. This is far worse than that. I see both choices not just as uninspiring but as disastrous.
For all of his empathy and his decency in personal relationships, Joe Biden is nobody I want in the Oval Office, especially at his advanced age while pinned to a hard-left running mate.
A serial plagiarist and prevaricator, a deliberate enabler of his son’s sleazy foreign profiteering, a career-long member of the Democratic left wing, an advocate of notoriously wrongheaded foreign policy at almost every turn for 40 years, Biden should inspire not a lick of confidence from centrists, much less conservatives….
President Trump is, in different ways, equally horrendous. He is destroying U.S. diplomacy, thoroughly corrupting its conduct while virtually abandoning the cause of human rights. He is deliberately divisive, deeply dishonest, terrifyingly unstable and inhumane, appallingly cavalier with national security, and pathetically inept at actually getting initiatives passed as legislation.
he damage Trump has done to civic discourse, to norms of behavior, and to basic political decency is incalculably huge. The aid and comfort he has given to rank bigotry is appalling. And his predilections toward authoritarianism are alarming.
I think Trump is a menace and getting steadily worse….
[The full column is at this link.]
