Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump will get my vote come November. While each espouses certain positions I share, both score epic fails on my personal litmus tests.
Instead of penalizing or deporting 10 or 20 million illegal aliens (or more) who scoffed at U.S. sovereignty, Hillary intends to reward them with another “shamnesty.” And Hillary doesn’t just want to open the gates wider, she wants to delete the border altogether and allow tens of millions more undocumented Democrats to stampede across.
Corrupt Clinton ---- like virtually every other demagogic Democrat ---- is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real, long-term civilizational threat posed by jihadist terrorism, and more generally, the infiltration of intolerant, anti-Western, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-science sharia law into well-meaning, but guilt-ridden, gullible and clueless Western societies.
Like Bush and Obama before her, Hillary continues bleating the vacuous slogan that Islam means peace, when, in reality, it means submission to the will of Allah. “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” Hillary told the Council on Foreign Relations. Like Obama, she blamed the recent Orlando massacre on guns more than rampant homophobia among many Muslims.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the lunatic asylum, megalomaniac Donald Trump says he wants to criminalize certain women’s rights and waffles in his support for Planned Parenthood. He also stated, “I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change,” calling climate science a “hoax.” Trump seems absolutely dismissive of the environmental concerns that are so dear to me. Among other outrages, he has called for dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, created by none other than Republican President Richard M. Nixon.
How I long for the days when at least some conspicuous conservatives supported action to combat anthropogenic climate change, protect the environment generally and defend a woman’s right to make her healthcare choices. It was President Nixon who in the late 1960s actually gave a speech to Congress on the need to confront overpopulation and established the landmark, but now nearly forgotten Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (the Rockefeller Commission), and directed the National Security Council to study rapid population growth as a national security issue.
Similarly, I pine for those times when at least some leading liberals supported reducing excessive legal immigration, enforcing our laws against illegal immigration and could utter the words “Islamic terrorist” or “jihadi” instead of the mealy mouthed, politically correct “violent extremist.”
Alas, those days are gone. Their last gasp was in the 1990s. American politics have succumbed to polarizing paralysis in this new century.
On each of the above issues, I daresay my views are shared by a majority of Americans. Yet I feel so alienated by the positions and rhetoric of both major political parties that I will vote for neither of their candidates in this race for the White House.
I have become so desperate for genuine leadership that I have almost been reduced to proclaiming “Frank Underwood for President!” (Master Machiavellian manipulator from the Netflix series, House of Cards).
Actually, the last candidate for our nation’s highest office for whom I was really enthusiastic was former Democratic Gov. of Colorado Richard D. Lamm. He ran for the Reform Party’s nomination in 1996, but was upended by party founder Ross Perot.
As noted above, it was in the 1990s that the nation’s political center ceased to hold. That was when President Bill Clinton denounced out-of-control illegal immigration as harmful to America and established a commission chaired by the former African-American Democratic congresswoman from Texas, the distinguished Barbara Jordan, to do something about it. The Jordan Commission recommended tough measures to control illegal immigration, and even a one-third cut in legal immigration, policies that are all but unthinkable in today’s toxic, dysfunctional political climate.
Were the estimable Jordan alive today, the contemptible Southern Policy Law Center would surely tar her as a racist and nativist for her views on immigration, just as they have done with the distinguished Frank L. Morris, Ph.D., former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Leon Kolankiewicz is an environmental scientist and wildlife biologist and can be reached at info@CAPSweb.org