The US Election – The Bar Room Busting Brawl (#20)

It’s almost closing time for the 2016 US Election (we hope). Barring legal or lunatic challenges, or downright refusal to accept voting results by the fringe elements, on November the 8th, this “Mad Mad World” of electing the next US President, 2016, would be over. But just as closing time in a very rowdy bar, and this one was particularly rowdy, there may be some fireworks still left as some patrons have obviously had too much partisanship divide, and political incorrectness, ingested for their own good. The pettiness, the mudslinging, the insulting name calling, and low body blows have been worthy of the raunchiest of bars on the wrong side of town, and there are a lot of badly bruised people and a lot of furniture smashed during its long run. And it ain’t quite over yet.

The scourge of irrational partisanship (prime brewers being primarily the Republicans) has been brewing in the good old United States for the past many decades, and the mixture has been getting increasingly potent every single year. This year master brewer, Mr. Donald Trump, was inducted into the brewery by the Republicans to brew a particularly toxic batch, and he didn’t disappoint. The first victims to feel the potency of his brew of dirty politics were his Republican opponents in the Primaries, all of whom he left devastated and much diminished, after his focused ministrations.

His masterful brew of low swinging attacks, with no personal or professional area being off bounds, stripped of all pretense of civility, dragging his opponent in the mud pit where he gleefully messed up generations of eroding dignity of US politics, brought everyone to a new and hereto unknown low in political campaign behavior.

In one single season of no holds barred political dirty fighting, he left even the radicals of the Tea Party movement amongst the Republicans shell shocked, and the rest not knowing whether to laugh or cry, celebrate or mourn for a Party, and an identity, that is no more the “Republicans” they knew and loved.

Mr. Trump will surely will be inducted into the “Extreme Republican Hall of Fame” for this particularly potent brew, for this batch has the potential of doing America, its political and governing system, its cohesiveness, its international reputation, and the Republican Party itself, some significant lasting damage.

The other side, the Democrats, the Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, have gallantly tried to rise above the mud pit by slogans such as “Stronger Together”, “When they go low we go high”, and such, to no avail.

They collectively have been dragged kicking and screaming helplessly into the slime by the irrepressibly politically incorrect Donald Trump, who does not know any another way, and has them gasping for fresh political air, even now, as they are barely able to keep their collective noses above the foul smelling dirty water of “Trump Swamp”, wherein they fear drowning forever.

The Democrats seem like a bunch of not too clean priests that have inadvertently gate crashed into the nether world of the raunchiest of all biker parties – like the very rowdy Mexican bar in the movie "From Dusk to Dawn". Everything about this feels wrong but they have no ideas on how to, desperately, get out of it, and end up by resorting to singing from the same old hymn book of former rules of engagement, of old US elections won and lost, which has proven severely and sadly inadequate, and so far quite ineffective.

The Democrats and in particular Hillary Clinton have been savagely attacked by Trump’s biker gang type of supporters who have embraced his penchant for political incorrectness, and know no limits of impropriety.

The problem is - the old ways of doing things are making the other side all the more irrationally insane. The “Trump Swamp” bikers are having none of the “play nice” and are baying for anarchical change of the “rigged system”, pure mayhem of upending all international alliances, tearing up of all Trade Agreements, shutting everyone out, and nothing less than the very blood of their America destroying socialist enemies, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

During the last 8 years, the crazed bundles of suppressed bigotry amongst the Republicans, could barely contain their fury of being led by the first African American President in history (in some way Donald Trump was at the forefront of that Republican un-accepting ‘will of the people’ fight, bringing into question the very question of Obama being American born, the very fundamental requirement of being an American President. He was forced to recant his false but obstinate assertions only recently in this race). Such is the hatred of the Republican side towards the other that Trump seemed to them the much awaited Messiah who would allow them to unleash all the suppressed hatred, bigotry, and political correctness that has disallowed them to express that which they have been dying to express. And then arrived Trump; and all the hate came welling up in his pumped-up rallies, and it came up in spades.

To a horrified World the thin covering of American civility just blew away, exposing a hateful, festering, divided society that can barely stand each other, let alone suspicious foreigners; so much for the American version of “All for one and one for all”.

As the campaign progressed over the months, Trump stirred in ever greater portions of toxicity and personal attacks, name calling the other potential American Presidential Candidate as if it was a race of some low level backwoods local election with candidates that nobody knew, or would ever know after the race, and not the run for the most powerful leader of the World, that the whole World had to accept and respect.

In doing so, he shredded all dignity from the position and the process of electing the President of the United States. This election and its results, and the manner of its conduct, will reverberate throughout the World for a very long time, forever changing the perception and dignity of the US in other people’s eyes.

The question on the lips of the World at this time is, how is this type of behavior even possible from the top contenders of the top job, particularly Mr. Trump, and what are we collectively to think of America from here on out as a “Leader of the Free World”.

The “Not-So-Free-World” has already made up its mind and made hay from this debacle by panning the virtues of democracy with their own people, and assuring them of the virtues of their own authoritarian systems compared to this unseemly public political food-fight in the World’s most famous democracy.

After all, as one of the most powerful, wealthiest and advanced nations on earth, America is looked upon to set an example in everything, and in this case it certainly did, albeit not the one everyone expected, or will likely forget anytime soon.

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