SCREWED

We, the voters of the United States of America, who are expected to vote for and support a new administration in Washington on November 8, 2016, are being screwed.

Let us count the ways:

Both nominees for the office of president are deeply flawed (which is a nice way of saying they’re both trouble.)

There are twenty-four Senate Republican seats at stake.   Republicans for the past six years have made progress and growth impossible by saying “No” to everything the current administration has proposed.  Which is to say, gridlock is now common, standard, and to be expected from another Republican-dominated Senate should the Democrats come up with a winning presidential personality.

All 435 seats in the House are also up for grabs.   The House appears to be as divided and troubled as the Senate, as the entire country is.   Our currently incumbent representatives seem to believe that, but for an appearance on our doorsteps every two years, they can ignore the people who put them in Congress to begin with.   So they do.

There are two choices (major ones) for president and two choices more (minor).   Not only is this insufficient given our current cast of characters, but the public knows this.

Both major candidates are poisonous.    One is a joke, who began his campaign as a joke and was surprised to find himself being taken seriously.  He himself thinks so little of the public that he has never troubled to learn anything about his nation, its foreign policy, its history, its system of law and order, economics (despite the pie-in-the-sky claims he makes for being better at deal-making than anyone in the world), its role and importance in the eyes of other nations and peoples.    The other is a long-time civil servant who married an ambitious and definitely shady guy and who, as the saying goes, woke up with fleas.   She seems not to have known that fleas can jump from ankle to knee.   Which explains how her husband infected so many otherwise healthy people.