Without a doubt in my mind I understand Donald Trump to be unfit for any public office.  One does not have to collect new evidence of this though Trump engages regularly in acts that support disqualification.  Simply put, he is not a very thoughtful person.  He cannot engage with complexity or detect nuisance.  What understanding of the world he does have he uses for nefarious purposes, his business dealing that are his claim to fame are not very helpful to the world beyond his own constricted world—his towers and his family, the family part probably a pretense anyway, for show to put some tenderness on mean spirit.  If he is in anyway representative of who we are as a nation, then we, as a nation, need to search deeply to find out how we got to be so rotten.

I will vote against him and that will be the nature of my vote, a vote against and not for a candidate.  The only competition this time around is only good because she is better and not because she is really good, at least in terms of being the kind of person who I can have confidence in to do what is right and necessary to make things better in a country where democracy has been co-opted by an economy that allows a very few to accumulate very much and then use it to buy off the political system that should be the people’s.

The election began with hope, not the Obama kind of hope that was hope for stability rather than change, stability that would keep in place the rules that have allowed predatory capitalism to have its way with a public too often too ill-informed to understand what is happening and why what is happening to members is happening.  That people have not gotten any smarter since the current president took office, that the schools that should prepare a people for self-governance, the essence of a viable democracy, have not improved—have gotten worse in ever so many ways—signifies continued rot.  The current best candidate, though supported by some of my favorite educators, some of my favorite people in government and the agencies that do serve the people—Planned Parenthood and the NAACP, for example—are advocates for Ms. Clinton.  I am too, because she is the best available now, but I with a great amount of trepidation; too many others with too much glee, too much because she is as much a part of the problem as she is of the cure.

I do not want to repeat what has already been said (but not so well heard) about telling dealings and relationships that put Ms. Clinton too close to the very people and institutions that are destroying democracy to favor the desires of plutocrats.  She has even been known to be on friendly terms with her asshole of an opponent and an ally of the Walmart family (I believe she served on that company’s board of directors).  And most know about those speeches to the wealthy and their corporations that earned her more money in an hour than the average teacher can earn four years.

But what is really troubling to me something other than what Hillary Clinton does and what she says and how what she says reflects what she actually does.  It is how libel so many of those who identify as liberals and progressive are willing to ignore that bad stuff that does make Hillary Clinton look bad because there is a good possibility that she had done bad, acted in ways that I would think would be heavily criticized by true liberals and real progressives.

An example of the behavior was the subject of a recent Democracy Now segment, a link to the piece provided below.  I know that liberals and progressives do not—for good reason—subscribe often to the way the Wall Street Journal tells it.  But there is good reason, I think, to believe that Wall Street Journal writers sometimes do damned good research and use it to make points that deserve to be given consideration.  The author interviewed has won the Pulitzer Prize and, as the interview shows, he is a knowledgeable and thoughtful person.  His reporting is worth the attention of those trying to get to the truth of matters and to ignore what he reports out of loyalty to a particular candidate for office because what he has to say places her in a negative light would mark disloyalty to the truth.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/12/did_companies_countries_buy_state_dept