Post debate musings of a policially-mixed couple

Post debate musings of a policially-mixed couple September 27, 2016

democrat republican politics-crop

First, this article sums it all up: The world is still almost irredeemably sexist. Anything Hillary has done, or even has been accused of doing, would have been celebrated or ignored if she had been male.

It’s time to stop pretending that this is about substance. This is about an eagerness to believe that a woman who seeks power will say or do anything to get it. This is about a Lady MacBeth stereotype that, frankly, should never have existed in the first place.

Second: I think Donald is showing signs of brain damage.

Thoughts of my father kept coming back to me after the debate last night. As he grew older, my dad suffered some tiny strokes in his front temporal lobe. His normally cultured, highly intelligent and thoughtful self turned mean, paranoid, unable to remember things he had said or done, incapable of taking in new information.

I see much of this with Donald except he didn’t have my father’s history of culture and inbred politeness as a foundation, exacerbating the problem. I wondering now if his consistent lying has much more to do with brain damage than with the fact that he is, at his core, a fundamentally dishonest person.

Don’t get me wrong: I still think he’s fundamentally dishonest. But consider just a few factors:

  • The extraordinary paranoia (The mic didn’t work right, the debate was rigged).
  • The almost immediate insistence he didn’t say some things he did (like how smart if was for him not to have paid income taxes for so long).
  • His inability to take in new information (consistently re-visiting the same, tired message of how awful America is without acknowledging the amazing progress that has taken place here, especially the long-awaited recovery from the financial crisis of 2008).
Donald, the wind-up doll. Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Donald, the wind-up doll. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

He’s like a wind-up doll with only a few phrases he can access.

All these sure look like signs of real issues within the neural synapses.

Hillary, however, blew me away. She was calm, competent, in control, knowledgeable, and unruffled in the face of Donald’s endless attempts to interrupt, dominate and bully her.

So it looks like the electoral public face these choices.

One: elect a person moving into dementia who has no fear of using nuclear weapons and shows fewer and fewer restraints upon his impulses. However, he MIGHT appoint conservative Supreme Court justices and maybe would do something  . . . OK, I’m thinking of something good he might do, but can’t come up with it.

OR

Two: elect a person who is seasoned on the world stage and knows how fragile the world actually is, understands the complexity of our governmental system, has practice in getting things done in Washington, continually studies and learns and seeks to understand but who will more than likely appoint Supreme Court judges that could scare the bejesus out of conservatives.

It really comes down to the justices. That’s the big push behind the sick, compromised Evangelical bloc voting for Donald. They are scared to their core that they may not get their way in the court and that their message will have to stand on its own merits, not on some special privilege within the US. (I’m not talking here about the racist white supremacist who are solidly behind Donald. Nothing to be done about that. He’s their man.)

As I mentioned yesterday, my “anyone but Hillary” husband and his “anyone but Donald” wife agreed to watch the debate on separate TV’s, breaking our normal pattern of never having the two of watch TV in different rooms.

I went upstairs to our library and shut the door. What I didn’t know was gone by 30 minutes in and went to bed.

Besides the separate TV’s, we agreed that we would not talk with each other on this subject. But he appeared clearly unhappy about it this morning making, at one point, a comment that suggested to me he thinkgs that Hillary will probably win the general election.

I stuck closely to my side of the bargain and chose not to wade in. He is too important to me as husband, lover, friend, and life-companion to even go there.

We did talk further about the nature of so many political appointees enriching their pockets at the expense of the American people. I completely understand why he wants this cleaned up and why, at this point, the idea of another career politician at the helm frustrates him no end.

I’ve seen the issues up close by learning what he has to deal with as a business owner. He’s got my sympathy. I just wish there were a better answer than Donald. For that, I blame the disgusting dysfunction in the Republican party.

They are darn close to succeeding in bringing this country down by their unbridled ambition and unwillingness to deal with the extremist elements in the party. But Donald is their chosen candidate. He’s their guy. How sick. How sad.


Reader, I married him
Reader, I married him

This is a series of the ongoing saga of a newly married couple with radically different political views. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part four is here. Part five is here. Part six is here. Part seven is here. Part eight is here.


Browse Our Archives