Okay, so the speech by Melania Trump was apparently lifted from Michelle Obama's 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention. I get it, and it was indeed embarrassing for the Republicans, and for the Trumps in particular, surely. It serves as just one more thing - the latest in a long strong of reminders - of just how lacking in ideas, originality, and class that Trump and his people have, and how he is not fit to be President.
Here's the thing: I have never in my life seen a major candidate screw up quite as much as this. I mean, it literally seems like every single day, Donald Trump finds himself in some sort of major controversy, either directly or indirectly.
Not surprisingly, this stands to benefit Hillary Clinton. It seems that everything during this unconventional election season has served to benefit Hillary. Even when she appeared to be losing, when Bernie Sanders was drawing thousands (and sometimes) even more than ten thousand people during his rallies, while Hillary was struggling to draw a few hundred people at her events, she still managed to win primaries, although often with the help of closed primaries, or with strange things occurring on election day (take a look at some of the investigations into voting irregularities in Arizona, New York, Nevada, and California, for example). The evidence suggests that the party establishment helped her enormously, and of course, it is no secret that her funding came largely from the infamous Wall Street big banks and corporations, and not from the people, as was the case with Sanders.
Ultimately, the powers that be wanted her, and she won.
Now, she is winning against Trump, and in large part, it is because he keeps stumbling. Things always seem to go wrong with his campaign, to an extent not seen before. At least not in my lifetime. Not by a major candidate who actually won his party's nomination.
Frankly, I am not even all that convinced that Trump wants to win the White House. Perhaps he does, perhaps this is truly heartfelt. But given how much Hillary seems to have benefited thus far from Trump, particularly from those people who fear a Trump presidency more than an apocalypse, seemingly, the fact that he seems to bend over backwards to accommodate these fears and fuel them gives me cause for alarm.
I understand that he is a buffoon. Personally, I have always believed that he was an arrogant schmuck who certainly did not deserve the unbelievable media attention that seems to follow his every move. He seemed like the unfeeling and arrogant rich tycoon back in the eighties, and I sincerely believed that Gordon Gekko was modeled after him exclusively, although he was not.
Still, Trump came across like an arrogant schmuck, and I never really could understand his popularity. People seemed to love him, especially when he had his show, with the supposedly brilliant line, "You're fired!" He became associated with it, and eventually, it seemed as if he owned it, as if nobody had ever uttered those words before Trump's reality show.
Such utter nonsense!
And now, of course, he has looked like an unbelievable buffoon throughout this presidential campaign, and no longer looks like the slimy but polished billionaire tycoon.
However, despite all of the ridiculous incidents that keep happening to Trump, that does not somehow candidate Hillary Clinton. Let us remember, she has been in the middle of a ton of controversies and official inquiries as well. Some of them were staged or exaggerated, such as Bengazi, which modern day conservatives harped on relentlessly, shamelessly using a tragedy to score political points. However, the email controversy was not a joke, and neither were the election frauds that seemed to be a running theme in the Democratic primary - and she always seemed to win these controversial elections, with the blessing of the party establishment! Things always seemed to go her way, like when she promised there was no chance of her being indicted for those emails, and then her husband just happened to be on the same tarmac at the same time as the Attorney General, who is in charge of the Justice Department responsible for the investigations, and he happened to decide to meet with her, supposedly just to talk about golf and grandchildren for half an hour, surely inconveniencing thousands of people at a huge airport. Plus, she never did release the transcripts of those speeches to Wall Street firms and big banks. And let us not forget that she ultimately voted for the Iraq War, no matter how her supporters try to distort that reality nowadays, or that she contributed in designing the Trans Pacific Partnership (which she officially opposes, for now). And let us not forget that she seems to take a lot of money and gifts from lobbyists, particularly the healthcare industry that she used to fight, and that this constitutes a conflict of interest.
I short, she is a Clinton, and controversy follows the Clintons like a trail of slime from a snail or slug. It can be no other way.
As Bernie Sanders suggested, Hillary Clinton has the qualifications to be president, although her judgment has proven to be a liability. She is not trusted, and for good reason. Again, that just goes with the territory of being a Clinton.
Of course, her supporters remain blind to all of this. Months ago, many of them argued that anyone who did not support Hillary was automatically a sexist, which is an outrageous and absolutely ridiculous, patently false claim. They only see her words and her own self-aggrandizement, and take the words at face value, rather than as political propaganda. Much like her husband (and perhaps because of her husband), some people will like her, no matter what.
Then, there are other people - and I know quite a few people like this - who are so scared of a Trump presidency, that they put down any and all skepticism of Hillary, and that is wrong, too. Voting for the lesser of two evils still means voting for evil. And let us face one glaring fact: Hillary's "experience" has more than a small streak of corruption to it. She's a Washington insider, which means she knows people, has influence, and can do things. Trump does not have that same access. If anything, he's an outsider. And that means that ironically, despite the conventional wisdom being that Clinton would be the lesser of two evils, she might actually have a more detrimental impact than Trump ever could, simply because a lot of people would not allow him to get away with anything. By comparison, Hillary Clinton got a pass. After all, if she was a man, with her corruption and her ties to the big Wall Street firms and her issues with a lack of trust and people simply not liking her, she likely would never have gotten within sniffing distance of the Democratic nomination.
So, let us recognize what really is a glaring truth: that neither of the two major party candidates is fit to be the Commander-in-Chief. We need someone with ethics, someone who we know will be working for the American people, and not acting like an irresponsible buffoon like Trump surely will, or someone who is working behind the scenes for all of the wrong reasons, making sure to secure profit for all of her friends and the insiders at the expense of the American people, like Hillary surely will. Whether you opt for Jill Stein, or are thinking about writing in a candidate, such as Bernie Sanders, it seems clearer to me than ever before that this country needs better options, rather than systematically settling on evil.
Some people suggest that voting for other than the Democrat or the Republic is throwing away your vote. I would counter that voting for one of them is throwing away your vote. It's time for a real change.
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