Though like a lot of other people, most of my attention over the last couple of months was largely absorbed by the election in the United States (a topic I’ll probably be addressing again soon), a number of other notable events occurred around the world in this period. Among them was the deaths of two very different individuals who nevertheless had a number of things in common. Both died at a very advanced age, both had served as head of state in their respective nations for a very, very long time, and both, as highly influential individuals, inevitably had mixed records, though one of them was considerably more controversial than the other. I am referring, of course, to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died on October 13 two months short of his 89th birthday, was the ninth king of Thailand’s Chakri dynasty, reigning as Rama IX. At the time of his death, he was the longest-reigning monarch in the world (a title which has now passed to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom), having reigned for an amazing 70 years, making his reigns one of the longest of all time (there are only about three dozen rulers in history whose reigns are claimed to be as long or longer; many of these were from ancient times and so the dates are of disputable accuracy, and many of the rulers with verifiable dates were monarchs of tiny states, not major kingdoms like Thailand). The vast majority of people in Thailand had never known another ruler. Bhumibol was also the only monarch born in the United States, as his father was studying there at the time.
Bhumibol became king upon the mysterious shooting death of his older brother in 1946. While he was a constitutional monarch who wielded little formal power, he was respected almost to the point of worship by most Thais, and at several key points in history he quietly intervened in politics, affecting the course of events. In 1973, he pushed the military dictator of the time to resign in the face of student protests, but just three years later, disturbed by the spread of communism in Indochina (including the overthrow of the monarchy in neighboring Laos), he gave tacit approval to a massacre of student protestors and the re-imposition of military dictatorship. In 1992, the selection of the leader of a coup from the previous year as prime minister led to mass protests which the government tried to violently suppress. The king ordered the prime minister and the chief protest leader to meet with him, a meeting that was televised. This led to the resignation of the prime minister and the restoration of democracy. It is less clear what role, if any, the king played in the 2006 coup that overthrew the popular (though somewhat authoritarian) prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. So over the years Bhumibol at different times intervened both for and against democracy. Another indication of his somewhat conservative outlook was his support for Thaksin’s “war on drugs”, despite the numerous extrajudicial killings that resulted. On the plus side, he dedicated a great deal of time to numerous development projects aimed at improving the lives of ordinary Thais.
Bhumibol was a skilled sailor and held several patents, for a waste water aerator and for rainmaking techniques. He was a writer, painter and photographer, with published works in all these fields. He was also notable for being an accomplished jazz musician and composer. He was best known for playing the saxophone but also played clarinet, trumpet, guitar and piano. He played with jazz notables such as Benny Goodman and Stan Getz and performed publically with a jazz band he had formed. He composed many songs in his youth and wrote anthems for several Thai universities. I have a couple of CDs of his compositions that I bought in Thailand, though regrettably I couldn’t find any on which he himself played. Here I might note that though of course I never saw Bhumibol in person, I went to Thailand many times in the last couple of decades of his reign. His image, naturally, appeared on all Thai money and in many places in public, including along major avenues, his portrait could be seen along with portraits of other members of the royal family, particularly of his wife and his second daughter, the most popular of his children. I also recall seeing portraits of his mother, who was still alive at the time of my first trip to Thailand (she died in 1995 at well over 94 years of age).
While much of the respect Bhumibol received from his subjects was deserved, the degree to which he and the royal family were protected from criticism were unhealthy and a violation of freedom of expression. The current military government has been particularly zealous in enforcing the overly strict lese majesty laws, with people sentenced to long prison terms for Facebook posts. People have even been prosecuted for actions such as wearing black on the king’s birthday. Academics have been arrested merely for suggesting proposing reforms of the monarchy. Ironically, in 2005 the king himself said that it should be okay to criticize him, stating that saying the king could do no wrong was akin to saying he was not human. But either he was either unable or unwilling to impel the government to stop prosecuting people for lese majesty (indeed, there were far more cases after 2005 than before). The truth is Bhumibol was correct. He was indeed human and as such not perfect, though as a stabilizing force in Thailand probably he did more good than harm over the course of his life, with regrettable exceptions at certain points.
Like Bhumibol, Fidel Castro of Cuba, who died just a few days ago, was the leader of his nation for many decades and by far the most influential figure in the country over the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Castro was actually older than Bhumibol, having been born a year and several months earlier, and he was a few months past his 90th birthday when he died. While he wasn’t the titular leader of his country for quite so long as Bhumibol, serving as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and as president from 1976 to 2008 (though he was on medical leave beginning in 2006 due to illness, with his brother Raul Castro taking over as acting president and eventually as his formal successor), Castro wielded far more actual power. He also had much greater influence outside his own country, particularly in Latin America and Africa. He also was a far more controversial figure, particularly in the United States, a country which maintained a decades-long embargo against Cuba with the explicit aim of forcing Castro from power.
I’m not going to try to go over Castro’s long career in any detail, as many others have done so over the past few days. Rather, I want to repeat an observation made by some of the more sensible commentators following Castro’s death and that is if one is attempting to pass judgement on his career, neither unadulterated praise nor unadulterated condemnation is appropriate. There is no question that Castro’s rule in Cuba was very repressive. Dissent was fully suppressed and many were imprisoned or killed by his regime. Even Cuba’s vibrant culture was stifled for most of his time in power. His imposition of a totalitarian system also led to economic rigidity which left Cuba impoverished, though the US blockade also contributed to the country’s economic difficulties. On the other hand, he did greatly improve education and medical care in Cuba, to the point where its level of literacy and the quality of its health care was far superior to that of most countries in the developing world and comparable to that in much wealthier nations. Cuba even sent doctors to many other countries in Latin America and Africa to provide medical help. He also improved the lot of Afro-Cubans, greatly reducing the inequality that had existed prior to his seizure of power. He also supported the fight against apartheid in South Africa. His regime had a poor record on gay rights for most of his time in power, but towards the end of his life he urged the acceptance of homosexuality and took responsibility for earlier repression in a rare admission of error. His niece, the daughter of his brother and successor Raul, is Cuba’s most prominent activist for LGBT rights.
Basically, the good Castro did does not in any way excuse the evil he did, but neither does the evil he did negate the good. One can conclude that overall he did more harm than good, or one can conclude the opposite, but unquestionably he did plenty of both. He was intelligent and charismatic but also inflexible and ruthless. Many Cuban-Americans celebrated his death and condemned him as a bloody tyrant. He certainly was that, but it is worth remembering that the Batista regime he and his followers overthrew was just as repressive and also lacked many of the Castro regime’s virtues. Conservative Cuban-Americans and right-wingers in the US opposed US President Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba in recent years on the grounds that the government headed by the Castro brothers is still regularly violating human rights. This is definitely true, but many other governments with worse human rights records are treated with much less hostility (e.g., China) or even regarded as allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia), so the US treatment of Cuba makes little sense. On the other hand, those who in response to Castro’s death have lauded him as a great revolutionary without condemning his repression are just as wrong as those who have called him a bloody dictator without acknowledging that he did in at least a few ways improve the lives of ordinary Cubans. In the end, he was both a great revolutionary and a bloody tyrant. Like Bhumibol and virtually every other person who ever lived, he did both good and bad, though in Castro’s case he did a lot more of both than most people could even dream of doing.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Angry Rant Time: The Stupid, the Ignorant, and the Deplorable
So pretty much everyone now knows about the disastrous results of the presidential election in the US. And it was clearly a disaster: it is no coincidence that voices of reason and sense from all over the world and from all walks of life have bemoaned it, while it has been celebrated by Russia (which also admitted to both regular contact with the Pumpkin Hitler campaign and to having a hand in the Wikileaks releases aimed at harming Hillary Clinton), the KKK, white nationalists in general, rightwing extremists in Europe, authoritarian leaders like Orban in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey, genocide-promoting Islamophobic Buddhist monks in Myanmar, and ISIS. There is a great deal that can be said about this election, from how it is yet another incentive for ditching the outdated Electoral College and instituting a direct popular vote for president (Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial if not overwhelming margin) to what it means for the future (with a utterly unqualified, completely self-centered and generally unpredictable president-elect, it’s hard to tell – but it’s almost certainly going to be bad). However, I am going to focus my attention on – or to put it more bluntly, direct my rant at – those who brought about this result, starting with the millions of people who voted for this unqualified, bigoted, narcissistic, lying buffoon.
Basically, I long ago concluded that those who support Pumpkin Hitler (we’ll call him DT for short) have to be either stupid, ignorant, what Hillary Clinton rather generously called “deplorable”, or some combination of the three. My brother argues that the ignorant have to be considered a subset of the stupid, as he doesn’t see how any intelligent person could remain ignorant of either how awful DT was or how portrayals of the two major candidates as equally bad were clearly egregious examples of false equivalence, but while I also find it hard to fathom, I’m also aware that people, even otherwise intelligent people, have an amazing capacity to tune out information that they aren’t interested in listening to, whether because of a dislike of the subject in general (“I don’t like politics”) or because it contradicts their previously held beliefs and opinions (“all politicians are bad and dishonest, so it doesn’t really matter who I choose”). Of course one could argue that this sort of willful ignorance could just as easily be called willful stupidity, and I’ll admit the line is a bit fuzzy.
I should note here that when I talk about “stupidity”, it is not necessarily aimed at people with low IQs or diminished mental capacity. As the line in Forrest Gump goes, “stupid is as stupid does”. A lot of people with low IQs were perfectly capable of identifying DT as a terrible person and HRC as a good one. On the other hand, there were evidentially also lots of people of average or even above average intelligence who managed to ignore or rationalize all the signs that DT was a bully, a bigot, a racist, a pathological liar, and a complete narcissist, that he was an incompetent businessman who engaged in highly questionable business practices, that he was utterly unqualified to be president (you could hardly do worse if you picked someone at random off the street), and that there was very good reason to think he has committed sexual assault on multiple occasions, or who accepted the widely repeated but unfounded assertions that HRC was particularly dishonest or corrupt, that her handling of her emails was not only criminal but as morally questionable as DT’s behavior, or just that both were somehow equally bad. Exit polls indicate that a substantial number of people didn’t even decide who they were going to vote for until the last few weeks before the election. A majority of these, particularly those who decided a week before (in the days just after the FBI director took the unethical and possibly illegal step of releasing a letter containing vague insinuations against HRC, but just before he came out and admitted there was no new evidence of wrongdoing on her part) ended up voting for DT. How can anyone have still remained undecided so late in the campaign, and even more incredibly how can they have picked the obviously worse choice? Were they really so low information as to not know which was better, or was it a complete lack of critical thinking ability that made them incapable of determining who was better even with all the information that was available? In either case, it is appalling that so many people, when faced with such a huge disparity in options, could pick the terrible one. Exit polls indicated that a small majority of voters thought Clinton was qualified, while about 60% (including, evidentially, many who voted for him) thought DT was unqualified. When asked what candidate quality mattered most, voters answered “can bring change” (39%), “right experience” (21%), “good judgment” (20%) and “cares about me” (15%). Voters who picked the latter three qualities voted heavily for Clinton, particularly those who picked “good judgment” (66% for HRC) and “right experience” (an overwhelming 90% for HRC). But those who picked the first option voted overwhelmingly for DT (83%). Certainly he was the candidate most likely to bring drastic change. But why on earth would these people think that the change he was likely to bring was going to be good? It is astonishing that people could be so…well, so stupid. Unless, of course, we are talking about those people who belonged to the third (or second, if we lump the stupid and ignorant together) category of DT voters.
It was clear throughout the campaign that DT was attracting unprecedented levels of support from the people that Hillary Clinton somewhat charitably referred to as “deplorables”. These included white supremacists, extreme xenophobes, virulent Islamophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites and more. But even among supporters who were not outspoken in their hate for one or more groups of “others”, there was clearly an undercurrent of racism, even if it was couched in less blatant language (“make America great again”, with the implication that it was last great back when men were men, women stayed at home, and minorities knew their place or simply weren’t around). It was no coincidence that after a campaign in which he blamed all of the US’s problems on outsiders and minority groups (e.g., the “certain groups” that he claimed would engage in vote fraud in order to steal the election), white people voted heavily in his favor. He won almost two thirds of the white male vote, a fact that makes me ashamed to be in the same demographic. He even won a more narrow majority of white women, despite all the sexist remarks he made and the credible accusations of sexual assault (supported by his own taped remarks). While among these voters it’s impossible to be sure where the stupidity and ignorance (see above) ends and the racism and bigotry begins, the latter surely played a role for a substantial number of voters, just as has been the case for right wing parties in Europe and elsewhere. An interesting side note: some time back I saw a poll of British citizens regarding their preferences in the US election. A large majority picked HRC, men by almost as much as women. The poll was also broken down by UK party, and majorities of Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters and even Conservative voters preferred Clinton. The one group that preferred DT? Supporters of the right-wing, xenophobic, anti-Europe UKIP. It’s also surely no coincidence that DT is the preferred candidate of nearly all of the most foul-mouthed of the Internet trolls. In fact, he is practically the king of the Internet trolls. What does it say about the US that it would elect an Internet troll to lead the country?
But aside from the outright racists, white supremacists and trolls on the one hand and the subconscious or semi-conscious racism and xenophobia of many others who voted for DT, there is one other group of voters who supported him even though they were by no means ignorant of his flaws. This group was the fairly large contingent of Republicans and conservatives who claimed to strongly disapprove of DT’s character and at least some of his remarks and actions. A number of these people no doubt retained sufficient principle to follow through with their claims that they couldn’t support him and either voted for someone else, left the top of their ballots blank or didn’t vote at all. But exit polls indicate the vast majority of self-described Republicans did vote for him in the end. In fact, some who condemned him still openly declared they’d vote for him. I saw one rightwing evangelical make the argument that because DT was running on a platform of policies he supported, he’d vote for him even though he thought he was morally speaking highly flawed. In essence, these people voted for a candidate that they knew was both extremely unqualified and morally unsound just because he (mostly) supported the policies they supported. Even leaving aside the problem of whether the policies they want are good or bad, this begs the question: exactly how morally depraved would a person have to be to lose their vote? If Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot rose from the grave to run on the Republican platform, would they vote for them? Perhaps they figure that since DT appears to be rather uninterested in the actual work of governing, he will just run around making self-aggrandizing statements and grabbing the crotches of any women who aren’t able successfully avoid him and will leave it up to Pence, Gingrich, Priebus, McConnell, Ryan, Giuliani et al to run the country. Perhaps, but that still amounts to condoning both his personal flaws and his outrageous rhetoric. By voting for him despite knowing what he was, they said that they didn’t care if minorities and women were going to suffer under his administration, or that seeing a person who bullies, insults and even sexually assaults others could still get elected president set a horrible example for children. Either you condemn a character like DT or you are condoning him, and by voting for him, they picked the latter. In other words, those who voted open-eyed for a candidate they knew was terrible because he’d cut taxes, reduce regulations, ban abortion, end gay marriage, or whatever else it is they support are just as deplorable as the outright racists and bigots.
Of course, if we’re apportioning blame, there are plenty of other people who should get some share, even if they didn’t go so far as to vote for him. While we can’t blame the conspiracy theory pandering, “HRC would be worse than DT” nonsense peddling Jill Stein and her voters for the final result, we can blame them at least in part for DT’s victories in Michigan and to a lesser extent Wisconsin, as his margin of victory was less than the number of votes Stein received. Whether it was Stein voters or self-proclaimed progressives who left the top of the ballot blank, they also are responsible for DT’s election. As I noted above and many times in the past, only the frankly stupid or ignorant could possibly think that HRC was even close to as bad as DT or that a HRC presidency would be nearly the disaster for minorities, marginalized groups, or the entire country (and even the world) that a DT presidency is likely to be. As one left-wing writer obviously leery of HRC noted, sometimes the lesser of two evils is a lot less evil. This was clearly the case here, and anyone living in a swing state (or even one where the polls were within single digits) who claims to be a progressive but did not vote for HRC shares the blame for the disaster that occurred. This also applies to anyone who was registered to vote, didn’t want DT to win, and yet didn’t bother to help make sure he didn’t. Unfortunately, the left wing also has its share of stubborn-to-the-point-of-idiocy idealists and even conspiracy theorists, such as those who were constantly claiming the DNC or even Hillary herself had “rigged” the primaries (for example, the comments on articles on The Nation are often full such claims). This claim was as nonsensical as the various conspiracy theories fomented by the right, and yet it’s possible that enough left-leaning voters bought into it (through ignorance, extreme bias or lack of critical thinking skills) to refuse to vote for HRC, despite the risks – though of course the risks most of these voters face pale in comparison with the groups who will be the first targets of this administration of extremists. Incidentally, while it is possible that another Democrat would have done better, especially given the absurd slant in media coverage (see below), there is no way to be sure. Bernie Sanders would not have been able to keep his high approval ratings in a long general election campaign, and even if Michael Bloomberg had not followed through on his threat to enter the race if Sanders was the Democratic nominee, there’s no guarantee Sanders would have won, and the same is true of other possibilities, such as Joe Biden. Ironically, even when it was clear that Clinton was going to win the primary, you’d see a few Sanders supporting calling on the party to ignore the primary results and pick Sanders as the stronger candidate, which would have been a far more serious case of the DNC interfering in the process than actually occurred. Now, of course, some are back to insisting that Sanders would have won. But when the other option was someone like DT, it shouldn’t have mattered whether the Democratic nominee was Clinton, Sanders or Biden – for any progressive, Democratic-leaning, or just intelligent centrist voter the choice should have been a no-brainer. And yet here we are.
Then there was the media. There were certainly some journalists out there doing their jobs and investigating DT’s deeds and misdeeds, and even the major media entities showed flashes of real journalism. But overall the media as an institution was a colossal failure and bears a very large share of the responsibility for the results of the election. Much has already been said about all the free coverage they gave him early in the race, completely ignoring other candidates in order to cover his rallies. While you’d think that all that exposure should have helped people see how inane and lacking in substance (not to mention occasionally offensive) everything he said was, apparently not. But the media is too attached to spectacle to pay any attention to substance. And though in the general election the media did start to give him some negative attention, all sorts of incredibly scandalous things in his record were virtually ignored or at best talked about for a day or two and then forgotten. But just as big a problem was their coverage of Hillary Clinton. The media spent a vast amount of time talking about her emails and almost none talking about her proposed policies. This in spite of the fact that the emails were a complete non-issue that were hardly worth a day of coverage. But by repeating ad nauseam vague insinuations that there was something scandalous about her emails and spending relatively little time on things in DT’s record that were a hundred times worse, they created an image of false equivalence in many people’s minds, such that they really thought the two were equally bad. To be sure, it still seems that just a bit of critical thinking ability would allow voters to tell that there was a vast difference, but if the media had done its job properly it wouldn’t even have been an issue.
All this is not to ignore other factors that amounted to cheating by the other side. Voter suppression by the Republicans may well have made the difference in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida. FBI director James Comey’s interference, already mentioned above, may have swung enough last minute undecideds away from HRC to make a difference. The Russia-Wikileaks alliance helped to damage HRC as well. But none of these things, especially the latter two, should have mattered if enough voters had the basic analytical skills to distinguish between black and white, which is really what the choice amounted to. Even before the election, I said that it was disgraceful that the electoral vote wasn’t going to be 538 to 0 in HRC’s favor, and I might have added that it was a disgrace the popular vote wasn’t going to be something like 75% to 25%. Surely the number of racists, unrepentant misogynists, xenophobes and other deplorables isn’t more than a quarter of the population. But if so, what’s wrong with all those other people? In any case, this election (despite good results in some local and state-level votes) didn’t do much for my already shaky faith in humanity. Yes, I know I should be looking forward and starting to think about how to win over – or more accurately educate – some of these people, but at this point I’m not in the mood.
Basically, I long ago concluded that those who support Pumpkin Hitler (we’ll call him DT for short) have to be either stupid, ignorant, what Hillary Clinton rather generously called “deplorable”, or some combination of the three. My brother argues that the ignorant have to be considered a subset of the stupid, as he doesn’t see how any intelligent person could remain ignorant of either how awful DT was or how portrayals of the two major candidates as equally bad were clearly egregious examples of false equivalence, but while I also find it hard to fathom, I’m also aware that people, even otherwise intelligent people, have an amazing capacity to tune out information that they aren’t interested in listening to, whether because of a dislike of the subject in general (“I don’t like politics”) or because it contradicts their previously held beliefs and opinions (“all politicians are bad and dishonest, so it doesn’t really matter who I choose”). Of course one could argue that this sort of willful ignorance could just as easily be called willful stupidity, and I’ll admit the line is a bit fuzzy.
I should note here that when I talk about “stupidity”, it is not necessarily aimed at people with low IQs or diminished mental capacity. As the line in Forrest Gump goes, “stupid is as stupid does”. A lot of people with low IQs were perfectly capable of identifying DT as a terrible person and HRC as a good one. On the other hand, there were evidentially also lots of people of average or even above average intelligence who managed to ignore or rationalize all the signs that DT was a bully, a bigot, a racist, a pathological liar, and a complete narcissist, that he was an incompetent businessman who engaged in highly questionable business practices, that he was utterly unqualified to be president (you could hardly do worse if you picked someone at random off the street), and that there was very good reason to think he has committed sexual assault on multiple occasions, or who accepted the widely repeated but unfounded assertions that HRC was particularly dishonest or corrupt, that her handling of her emails was not only criminal but as morally questionable as DT’s behavior, or just that both were somehow equally bad. Exit polls indicate that a substantial number of people didn’t even decide who they were going to vote for until the last few weeks before the election. A majority of these, particularly those who decided a week before (in the days just after the FBI director took the unethical and possibly illegal step of releasing a letter containing vague insinuations against HRC, but just before he came out and admitted there was no new evidence of wrongdoing on her part) ended up voting for DT. How can anyone have still remained undecided so late in the campaign, and even more incredibly how can they have picked the obviously worse choice? Were they really so low information as to not know which was better, or was it a complete lack of critical thinking ability that made them incapable of determining who was better even with all the information that was available? In either case, it is appalling that so many people, when faced with such a huge disparity in options, could pick the terrible one. Exit polls indicated that a small majority of voters thought Clinton was qualified, while about 60% (including, evidentially, many who voted for him) thought DT was unqualified. When asked what candidate quality mattered most, voters answered “can bring change” (39%), “right experience” (21%), “good judgment” (20%) and “cares about me” (15%). Voters who picked the latter three qualities voted heavily for Clinton, particularly those who picked “good judgment” (66% for HRC) and “right experience” (an overwhelming 90% for HRC). But those who picked the first option voted overwhelmingly for DT (83%). Certainly he was the candidate most likely to bring drastic change. But why on earth would these people think that the change he was likely to bring was going to be good? It is astonishing that people could be so…well, so stupid. Unless, of course, we are talking about those people who belonged to the third (or second, if we lump the stupid and ignorant together) category of DT voters.
It was clear throughout the campaign that DT was attracting unprecedented levels of support from the people that Hillary Clinton somewhat charitably referred to as “deplorables”. These included white supremacists, extreme xenophobes, virulent Islamophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites and more. But even among supporters who were not outspoken in their hate for one or more groups of “others”, there was clearly an undercurrent of racism, even if it was couched in less blatant language (“make America great again”, with the implication that it was last great back when men were men, women stayed at home, and minorities knew their place or simply weren’t around). It was no coincidence that after a campaign in which he blamed all of the US’s problems on outsiders and minority groups (e.g., the “certain groups” that he claimed would engage in vote fraud in order to steal the election), white people voted heavily in his favor. He won almost two thirds of the white male vote, a fact that makes me ashamed to be in the same demographic. He even won a more narrow majority of white women, despite all the sexist remarks he made and the credible accusations of sexual assault (supported by his own taped remarks). While among these voters it’s impossible to be sure where the stupidity and ignorance (see above) ends and the racism and bigotry begins, the latter surely played a role for a substantial number of voters, just as has been the case for right wing parties in Europe and elsewhere. An interesting side note: some time back I saw a poll of British citizens regarding their preferences in the US election. A large majority picked HRC, men by almost as much as women. The poll was also broken down by UK party, and majorities of Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters and even Conservative voters preferred Clinton. The one group that preferred DT? Supporters of the right-wing, xenophobic, anti-Europe UKIP. It’s also surely no coincidence that DT is the preferred candidate of nearly all of the most foul-mouthed of the Internet trolls. In fact, he is practically the king of the Internet trolls. What does it say about the US that it would elect an Internet troll to lead the country?
But aside from the outright racists, white supremacists and trolls on the one hand and the subconscious or semi-conscious racism and xenophobia of many others who voted for DT, there is one other group of voters who supported him even though they were by no means ignorant of his flaws. This group was the fairly large contingent of Republicans and conservatives who claimed to strongly disapprove of DT’s character and at least some of his remarks and actions. A number of these people no doubt retained sufficient principle to follow through with their claims that they couldn’t support him and either voted for someone else, left the top of their ballots blank or didn’t vote at all. But exit polls indicate the vast majority of self-described Republicans did vote for him in the end. In fact, some who condemned him still openly declared they’d vote for him. I saw one rightwing evangelical make the argument that because DT was running on a platform of policies he supported, he’d vote for him even though he thought he was morally speaking highly flawed. In essence, these people voted for a candidate that they knew was both extremely unqualified and morally unsound just because he (mostly) supported the policies they supported. Even leaving aside the problem of whether the policies they want are good or bad, this begs the question: exactly how morally depraved would a person have to be to lose their vote? If Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot rose from the grave to run on the Republican platform, would they vote for them? Perhaps they figure that since DT appears to be rather uninterested in the actual work of governing, he will just run around making self-aggrandizing statements and grabbing the crotches of any women who aren’t able successfully avoid him and will leave it up to Pence, Gingrich, Priebus, McConnell, Ryan, Giuliani et al to run the country. Perhaps, but that still amounts to condoning both his personal flaws and his outrageous rhetoric. By voting for him despite knowing what he was, they said that they didn’t care if minorities and women were going to suffer under his administration, or that seeing a person who bullies, insults and even sexually assaults others could still get elected president set a horrible example for children. Either you condemn a character like DT or you are condoning him, and by voting for him, they picked the latter. In other words, those who voted open-eyed for a candidate they knew was terrible because he’d cut taxes, reduce regulations, ban abortion, end gay marriage, or whatever else it is they support are just as deplorable as the outright racists and bigots.
Of course, if we’re apportioning blame, there are plenty of other people who should get some share, even if they didn’t go so far as to vote for him. While we can’t blame the conspiracy theory pandering, “HRC would be worse than DT” nonsense peddling Jill Stein and her voters for the final result, we can blame them at least in part for DT’s victories in Michigan and to a lesser extent Wisconsin, as his margin of victory was less than the number of votes Stein received. Whether it was Stein voters or self-proclaimed progressives who left the top of the ballot blank, they also are responsible for DT’s election. As I noted above and many times in the past, only the frankly stupid or ignorant could possibly think that HRC was even close to as bad as DT or that a HRC presidency would be nearly the disaster for minorities, marginalized groups, or the entire country (and even the world) that a DT presidency is likely to be. As one left-wing writer obviously leery of HRC noted, sometimes the lesser of two evils is a lot less evil. This was clearly the case here, and anyone living in a swing state (or even one where the polls were within single digits) who claims to be a progressive but did not vote for HRC shares the blame for the disaster that occurred. This also applies to anyone who was registered to vote, didn’t want DT to win, and yet didn’t bother to help make sure he didn’t. Unfortunately, the left wing also has its share of stubborn-to-the-point-of-idiocy idealists and even conspiracy theorists, such as those who were constantly claiming the DNC or even Hillary herself had “rigged” the primaries (for example, the comments on articles on The Nation are often full such claims). This claim was as nonsensical as the various conspiracy theories fomented by the right, and yet it’s possible that enough left-leaning voters bought into it (through ignorance, extreme bias or lack of critical thinking skills) to refuse to vote for HRC, despite the risks – though of course the risks most of these voters face pale in comparison with the groups who will be the first targets of this administration of extremists. Incidentally, while it is possible that another Democrat would have done better, especially given the absurd slant in media coverage (see below), there is no way to be sure. Bernie Sanders would not have been able to keep his high approval ratings in a long general election campaign, and even if Michael Bloomberg had not followed through on his threat to enter the race if Sanders was the Democratic nominee, there’s no guarantee Sanders would have won, and the same is true of other possibilities, such as Joe Biden. Ironically, even when it was clear that Clinton was going to win the primary, you’d see a few Sanders supporting calling on the party to ignore the primary results and pick Sanders as the stronger candidate, which would have been a far more serious case of the DNC interfering in the process than actually occurred. Now, of course, some are back to insisting that Sanders would have won. But when the other option was someone like DT, it shouldn’t have mattered whether the Democratic nominee was Clinton, Sanders or Biden – for any progressive, Democratic-leaning, or just intelligent centrist voter the choice should have been a no-brainer. And yet here we are.
Then there was the media. There were certainly some journalists out there doing their jobs and investigating DT’s deeds and misdeeds, and even the major media entities showed flashes of real journalism. But overall the media as an institution was a colossal failure and bears a very large share of the responsibility for the results of the election. Much has already been said about all the free coverage they gave him early in the race, completely ignoring other candidates in order to cover his rallies. While you’d think that all that exposure should have helped people see how inane and lacking in substance (not to mention occasionally offensive) everything he said was, apparently not. But the media is too attached to spectacle to pay any attention to substance. And though in the general election the media did start to give him some negative attention, all sorts of incredibly scandalous things in his record were virtually ignored or at best talked about for a day or two and then forgotten. But just as big a problem was their coverage of Hillary Clinton. The media spent a vast amount of time talking about her emails and almost none talking about her proposed policies. This in spite of the fact that the emails were a complete non-issue that were hardly worth a day of coverage. But by repeating ad nauseam vague insinuations that there was something scandalous about her emails and spending relatively little time on things in DT’s record that were a hundred times worse, they created an image of false equivalence in many people’s minds, such that they really thought the two were equally bad. To be sure, it still seems that just a bit of critical thinking ability would allow voters to tell that there was a vast difference, but if the media had done its job properly it wouldn’t even have been an issue.
All this is not to ignore other factors that amounted to cheating by the other side. Voter suppression by the Republicans may well have made the difference in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida. FBI director James Comey’s interference, already mentioned above, may have swung enough last minute undecideds away from HRC to make a difference. The Russia-Wikileaks alliance helped to damage HRC as well. But none of these things, especially the latter two, should have mattered if enough voters had the basic analytical skills to distinguish between black and white, which is really what the choice amounted to. Even before the election, I said that it was disgraceful that the electoral vote wasn’t going to be 538 to 0 in HRC’s favor, and I might have added that it was a disgrace the popular vote wasn’t going to be something like 75% to 25%. Surely the number of racists, unrepentant misogynists, xenophobes and other deplorables isn’t more than a quarter of the population. But if so, what’s wrong with all those other people? In any case, this election (despite good results in some local and state-level votes) didn’t do much for my already shaky faith in humanity. Yes, I know I should be looking forward and starting to think about how to win over – or more accurately educate – some of these people, but at this point I’m not in the mood.
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
2016 US Elections (Texas Edition)
So here we are, finally. After months of interminable campaigning and media sensationalism, Election Day in the United States has finally arrived. I am reasonably confident that the only decent candidate will win the presidential election [Late Update: to everyone's great misfortune, I was wrong, but then I was hardly the only one], but it is frankly disgraceful that the Republican candidate will win any support at all. Anything other than a complete electoral shutout, which of course won't happen, reflects poorly on Americans (though having said that, many other countries have elected or come close to electing some pretty awful people). The outcome for Congress is less certain. I think the Democrats will probably win the Senate, though maybe not by more than a seat or two, which is all the more unfortunate because even some of the Democrats are not all I might want them to be (for example, several of the candidates running this year took the morally indefensible position of supporting a temporary halt on bringing Syrian refugees into the US in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, even though, one, the Paris attacks were not perpetrated by refugees, and, two, refugees are already very well vetted and there has not been a single terrorist attack launched in the US by a refugee since 2001). Nevertheless, even Democrats like that will be an improvement over the Republicans. Unfortunately, the House probably will remain in Republican hands thanks to gerrymandering, absent a late surge by the Democrats, but at least their majority should be reduced. Of course, if the majority of American voters were well-informed, rational, and at least somewhat empathetic to others, the vast majority of the current crop of Republicans wouldn't stand a chance and even some of the more conservative Democrats would be in danger of being replaced. But I digress.... On to my overview of the major races on my ballot for this year. Unfortunately, I'm registered in Texas, which still leans heavily to the Republicans, though that is changing slowly but surely. While the Republicans will probably still win even with such an appalling nominee on the top of the ticket, it'd be nice if it was close, and even better if the Democrats actually managed to pull off a win or two in the statewide races (not likely, but not totally impossible).
I only received my ballot only a week prior to the election (by email), so my time for both researching the candidates and writing about the results of my research was quite limited (though my ballot should get counted even if it arrives after Election Day, as long as I’ve mailed it before polls close in Texas, I’d prefer to get it there sooner). Fortunately, in most races the choices are fairly obvious. Of course I’ve already written many times about the presidential race. I didn’t know much about the local candidates, but as with the previous election and the one before that, I used the candidate questionnaires prepared by the Dallas News and Vote 411 as my main sources (though the latter is rather short). Also, many of the minor party candidates (the Greens and Libertarians) are the same as in the last race. Due to time constraints, I didn’t always take time to search for additional information on candidates who failed to respond to the questionnaires, though I did in some cases. As I noted last time, if you’re a third party candidate with no money (or even a major party candidate who wants to let voters know where you stand), you should be trying to fill out all the questionnaires you can to get your message out. While someone might have an legitimate excuse for failing to fill out one (e.g., if they simply didn’t receive it on time), it’s a bit harder to accept missing out on two, and a few of the candidates didn’t even have any blogs or Facebook pages with any information about their campaigns in the last race, though in cases where one of them was running again I didn’t always bother to check if they’ve rectified that this time around.
More generally, while in theory a lot of my own political opinions align most closely with the Green Party’s theoretical positions, I was less inclined than in the past to seriously consider their candidates, except in races where the Democrat seemed particularly weak. As noted below, Jill Stein has looked worse and worse as this year’s race has gone on (I now regret doing a vote swap with one of her supporters in 2012, even if it won Obama a vote in a swing state), and a lot of the Green candidates in Texas are weak or just odd. I still think there’s a place in the US for a serious Green Party, if only to push the Democrats to wholeheartedly embrace all the steps we need to be taking to protect our environment, but if they simply play the role of spoilers who throw the election to the anti-environmental Republicans, they are doing absolutely nothing for the cause of the environment; in fact they are hurting it (and if, like Stein, they can’t or won’t recognize this, then they are not even worthy of consideration). If they run in local races in Democratic areas where the local Democrats are weak on the environment (whether due to ties to fossil fuel interests or for other reasons), then they might accomplish something. But in most Texan races, or for that matter in a presidential race like the one this year, they are worse than useless. So while I did look at the Green candidates, if the Democrat looked halfway decent I chose them. Only in races where the Democrat looked pretty bad and the Green pretty good did I seriously consider a Green. As for the other parties, even the best possible Republican can be dismissed from consideration simply because they are still members of that party, which has come to represent the absolute worst in every way (perhaps 30 years ago it would have been different, though they were going downhill even then) – after all, not only is it the party of their current awful presidential candidate, but also of Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Mike Pence, Scott Walker, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Mitch McConnell and a whole lot of other awful people. As for the Libertarians, while a few of them have good positions on a few issues, all share to some degree the basic selfish, me first, anti-government outlook of their party and many are even more extreme on some issues than the Republicans, so I couldn’t vote for any of them either.
President
Hillary Clinton (D)
Pumpkin Hitler/aka Hair Furor/aka Cheeto Mussolini/aka Donnie Drumpf (R)
Jill Stein (G)
Gary Johnson (L)
My Vote – Hillary Clinton
I’ve discussed the presidential race extensively on this blog, most recently in my previous post, but to summarize: the Republican is a terrible candidate in every way, as he is a narcissist, a bigot, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, a cheapskate, a tax dodger, an admirer of authoritarians, and a probable sexual predator, and he clearly has none of the knowledge needed for the job and shows a complete inability to learn or even listen to anyone who does anything other than flatter his absurdly overinflated ego. Another point that anyone with a brain should care about is that he doesn't even have coherent policy ideas. It should be no surprise that newspaper and magazine endorsements in this race have been unprecedentedly lopsided, with almost none of them (even the conservative ones) endorsing Hair Drumpf. As for the main third party candidates, as I noted at length in my previous post, Stein shows little real grasp of the mechanics of governing, she (like the GOP con man) is overly friendly with Russia, she panders to conspiracy theorists (she even appeared on InfoWars, which sensible people avoid like the plague), she picked a running mate who has claimed the bloodthirsty Assad regime is a democratic government, and contrary to all reason she claimed that a Clinton presidency would be worse than one under the orange menace. Johnson is an idiot and would be terrible on issues like climate change, economic inequality, and getting money out of politics. And even if the other candidates weren’t so awful, Hillary Clinton is extremely well qualified, intelligent, experienced, and articulate, and she has an excellent grasp of the issues and detailed plans for governing. Her policies aren’t perfect, but she can usually be pushed to do the right thing even where she isn’t initially so inclined. She will make at worst a decent president, and possibly an excellent one.
US Representative, District 24
Jan McDowell (D)
Kenny Marchant (R)
Kevin McCormick (G)
Mike Kolls (L)
My Vote – Jan McDowell
This was another easy choice. The incumbent Marchant is terrible on virtually every issue (this time he avoids outright climate denial, but his position amounts to the same thing), and Kolls is even worse than the average Libertarian, as he is a climate change denier, a pro-gun extremist, and only moderate on immigration, where a true libertarian would be against restrictions on migration. His only virtue is being in favor of relaxing restrictions on marijuana (despite his supposed “small government” philosophy, the hypocritical Marchant is not), but McDowell and McCormick are too, and they are superior to Kolls on everything else. McDowell’s answers to the questionnaires were impressive all around. She supports admitting refugees, immigration reform with a path to citizenship, raising the minimum wage, reforming tax policies that favor the rich, addressing climate change, background checks for gun purchases, and other eminently sensible policies. McCormick sounds good on most issues, but shows flashes of ideological rigidity, and rather bizarrely punted on the gun question, so even independent of my current reservations about the Greens, McDowell would be my choice. It’s unfortunate she has little chance of winning, but perhaps if we can get rid of the pro-Republican gerrymandering after 2020, she’ll have a real shot.
Railroad Commissioner
Grady Yarbrough (D)
Wayne Christian (R)
Martina Salinas (G)
Mark A. Miller (L)
My Vote – Grady Yarbrough
This one was a slightly more difficult one than most of the others. Yarbrough’s answers didn’t really impress me – at the very least he needs an editor to polish his writing. Salinas failed to respond to the Dallas News questionnaire, but she did answer the other one, and in the last election I was favorably impressed by her responses to both questionnaires. The Democratic candidate in that race also impressed me favorably, though since two years ago I was less turned off by the Greens (despite the obvious weakness of some of their candidates), I had a hard time deciding, though I believe I went with the Democrat in the end. If the Democrat was as good this time, it would be an easy choice, even though Salinas is one of the Greens’ better candidates. As it is, I finally went with Yarborough, because as a Democrat he stands at least a slight chance of winning, and despite his somewhat unclear writing he managed to convey basically pro-environmental positions, such as cooperating with the federal government on climate issues, opposition to fossil fuel subsidies and opposition to fracking. The misnamed Railroad Commission is in charge of managing the state’s oil and gas industry, so it is important to take it out of the hands of idiotic anti-environmental, pro-fossil fuel nuts like Christian (or Miller, though at least he has reservations about fracking).
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 3
Mike Westergren (D)
Debra Lehrmann (R)
Rodolfo Rivera Munoz (G)
Kathie Glass (L)
My Vote – Mike Westergren
The questions for judicial candidates were rather general, so they weren’t as revealing about the candidates’ stances on specific issues, but Westergren had mostly good answers (with the exception of his response on arbitration, which failed to mention its many problems). Munoz would be better off working as an activist on Native American issues: all his responses revolved around the idea that US rule in Texas is illegitimate because the land was stolen from his people. While there is something to this argument, Munoz’s obsession with it is more appropriate to an advocate than a judge (and in any case, as noted above, I’d only consider even a good Green candidate if the Democrat were particularly weak). Glass ran as the Libertarian candidate for governor in the last election, and though these questions don’t make it apparent, she espoused some crazy things in that race, and I have no reason to believe she’s changed. Interestingly, Lehrmann was accused by her primary opponent of being the court’s most “liberal” justice because she frequently dissented from majority opinions. But even if the accusation is true, she would only be the most liberal in a relative sense; after all, she’s still a Republican. So in the interest of ending the Republican lock on the court, I went with Westergren.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 5
Dori Contreras Garza (D)
Paul Green (R)
Charles E. Waterbury (G)
Tom Oxford (L)
My Vote – Dori Contreras Garza
This was a relatively easy choice. Though as noted above the questions for judicial candidates were pretty general, Garza’s answers were good as well as articulate. She seems to be far the strongest Democratic candidate for Supreme Court this year. Waterbury had some decent answers (though many seemed overly brief), but his references to the “Democrat party” were off-putting, and anyway, as discussed above, I’d only pick a Green if the Democrat were particularly weak. Oxford might be okay for a Libertarian, but he’s still a Libertarian, and Green, aside from being a Republican, didn’t even respond to the questionnaires.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 9
Savannah Robinson (D)
Eva Guzman (R)
Jim Chisholm (G)
Don Fulton (L)
My Vote – None
I would really have preferred to vote in this race, but none of the candidates seemed worth voting for. I wasn’t about to vote for a Republican or a Libertarian for the reasons mentioned above. Chisolm has run before, and like before he didn’t even bother to respond to the questionnaires. Robinson would normally have been my choice, but her answers to the questions were very unimpressive. I don’t have any problem with concise, simple English – in fact I consider it far superior to the verbose jargon-ridden nonsense that some lawyers spew – but Robinson didn’t even seem to be taking the questions seriously, and her frequent typos and misspellings didn’t look good (also, while there may be many good reasons for admiring retired judge James Klager, “Has a Glock at his bench” doesn’t sound like a good one to me). Furthermore, in her case I did look for a campaign site, and her official Facebook page didn’t have any entries after January, so it doesn’t look like she’s a serious candidate. While I hate the idea of leaving this seat on the court in Republican hands, I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for Robinson, so I just left this one blank.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 2
Lawrence "Larry" Meyers (D)
Mary Lou Keel (R)
Adam "Bulletproof" King Blackwell Reposa (G)
Mark Ash (L)
My Vote – Larry Meyers
Reposa, who calls himself a “pizza lawyer” (as he’s a “criminal defense attorney and pizza restauranteur”, seems like as much of a character as that and his name itself suggest, but that doesn’t mean he’d be a good judge. He admits that he’s running as a Green just because they asked him to (his reasons for saying yes are even more candidly self-interested). His answers on the Vote411 site are more serious, but then there’s the attached video… (I didn’t actually look up the unscrambled version, but just the thumbnail looked pretty out there). Meyers is the incumbent, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide office, though this is because after many years on the bench as a Republican, Meyers switched parties a few years ago. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to respond to either questionnaire, but I did find a report which mentioned how he and several other candidates agree that people with drug and mental issues don’t belong in the court system (in the same article, Keel expressed little sympathy for this view, even though Republicans in other races did). In another article, one which mentioned his opposition to overly harsh sentences, he gave some good reasons for his 2013 switch in party affiliation, and in a third article focusing on him personally, he called himself a progressive and said the Republicans have become too conservative. Keel and Ash are a Republican and a Libertarian, which is enough to rule them out. If they were running for prom king, Reposa might well get my vote, but in this case Meyers seemed like the obvious choice.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5
Betsy Johnson (D)
Judith Sanders-Castro (G)
William Bryan Strange III (L)
Scott Walker (R)
My Vote – Judith Sanders-Castro
Sanders-Castro gave decent responses to the questionnaires (though oddly where last time she sometimes used all caps in her Dallas News, this time she hardly capitalized at all; she could also use more proofreading). Johnson, Strange and Walker (who shares a name and party affiliation with the governor of Wisconsin, though that’s hardly a recommendation) didn’t respond at all. Oddly, I came across an article about the Republican primary for this race, and it stated that Walker didn’t have a campaign site or respond to requests for comment (all three other candidates did). It’s strange that Republican primary voters seemed to have picked the least serious of the Republican candidates; maybe they actually thought he was the Wisconsin governor. Walker did respond to a more recent article on the race, one which noted that Johnson was not actively campaigning. So, despite my issues with the Green Party in general, I decided to vote for Sanders-Castro in this race, mainly to send a message to the Democratic Party to run serious candidates.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6
Robert Burns (D)
Michael E. Keasler (R)
Mark W. Bennett (L)
My Vote – Robert Burns
Keasler’s responses to the somewhat general questions aren’t too bad for a Republican, but he still is one. Burns isn’t obviously much better (though in one of the news articles mentioned above, he also spoke out on the problems drug addicts face in the legal system), but he seems okay, so I gave him my vote.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 4
Gena Slaughter (D)
Lana Myers (R)
My Vote – Gena Slaughter
Though most of the questions reveal little about the two candidates’ thinking except in vague terms, Slaughter’s given reasons for running as a Democrat were a point in her favor and the fact that Myers is a Republican was a strike against her, so Slaughter was my choice.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 7
Dennise Garcia (D)
David John Schenck (R)
My Vote – Dennise Garcia
Not a lot of obvious difference here, so since both seemed to have the basic qualifications, it came down to party affiliation.
State Representative, District 103
Rafael Anchia (D)
My Vote – Rafael Anchia
Though Anchia, the incumbent, was unopposed, I decided to vote for him, as he got a 100% grade (and an endorsement) from the Texas League of Conservation Voters.
Dallas County Sheriff
Lupe Valdez (D)
Kirk Launius (R)
J.C. Osborne (G)
David Geoffrey Morris (L)
My Vote – Lupe Valdez
I originally intended to skip the local races, as I don’t feel I know about the sort of local matters the candidates might be expected to address. However, I decided to make an exception for this race. Not only are the Republican and Libertarian unacceptable for the usual reasons, but Osbourne, the Green candidate, seems more than a little wacky, and among a number of over-the-top remarks in his responses there were some that were homophobic and xenophobic, so he also is not by any means an acceptable choice. I admittedly don’t know much about the incumbent Valdez’s record, including on controversial policing issues, but I read part of her speech to the Democratic National Convention, and it sounded pretty good, especially since she noted that members of her own family had had run-ins with bad police officers, and that she’s taken specific steps to encourage her officers to improve community relations. The fact that she has had disputes with the governor over treatment of undocumented people is a point in her favor as well. As for the local judgeships, I did cast votes in a few of them, voting for the Democrat in races where the Republican revealed from their responses that they were a right-wing ideologue (for instance, two named Scalia as the judge they most admired, and another emphasized his support for the Second Amendment).
I only received my ballot only a week prior to the election (by email), so my time for both researching the candidates and writing about the results of my research was quite limited (though my ballot should get counted even if it arrives after Election Day, as long as I’ve mailed it before polls close in Texas, I’d prefer to get it there sooner). Fortunately, in most races the choices are fairly obvious. Of course I’ve already written many times about the presidential race. I didn’t know much about the local candidates, but as with the previous election and the one before that, I used the candidate questionnaires prepared by the Dallas News and Vote 411 as my main sources (though the latter is rather short). Also, many of the minor party candidates (the Greens and Libertarians) are the same as in the last race. Due to time constraints, I didn’t always take time to search for additional information on candidates who failed to respond to the questionnaires, though I did in some cases. As I noted last time, if you’re a third party candidate with no money (or even a major party candidate who wants to let voters know where you stand), you should be trying to fill out all the questionnaires you can to get your message out. While someone might have an legitimate excuse for failing to fill out one (e.g., if they simply didn’t receive it on time), it’s a bit harder to accept missing out on two, and a few of the candidates didn’t even have any blogs or Facebook pages with any information about their campaigns in the last race, though in cases where one of them was running again I didn’t always bother to check if they’ve rectified that this time around.
More generally, while in theory a lot of my own political opinions align most closely with the Green Party’s theoretical positions, I was less inclined than in the past to seriously consider their candidates, except in races where the Democrat seemed particularly weak. As noted below, Jill Stein has looked worse and worse as this year’s race has gone on (I now regret doing a vote swap with one of her supporters in 2012, even if it won Obama a vote in a swing state), and a lot of the Green candidates in Texas are weak or just odd. I still think there’s a place in the US for a serious Green Party, if only to push the Democrats to wholeheartedly embrace all the steps we need to be taking to protect our environment, but if they simply play the role of spoilers who throw the election to the anti-environmental Republicans, they are doing absolutely nothing for the cause of the environment; in fact they are hurting it (and if, like Stein, they can’t or won’t recognize this, then they are not even worthy of consideration). If they run in local races in Democratic areas where the local Democrats are weak on the environment (whether due to ties to fossil fuel interests or for other reasons), then they might accomplish something. But in most Texan races, or for that matter in a presidential race like the one this year, they are worse than useless. So while I did look at the Green candidates, if the Democrat looked halfway decent I chose them. Only in races where the Democrat looked pretty bad and the Green pretty good did I seriously consider a Green. As for the other parties, even the best possible Republican can be dismissed from consideration simply because they are still members of that party, which has come to represent the absolute worst in every way (perhaps 30 years ago it would have been different, though they were going downhill even then) – after all, not only is it the party of their current awful presidential candidate, but also of Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Mike Pence, Scott Walker, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Mitch McConnell and a whole lot of other awful people. As for the Libertarians, while a few of them have good positions on a few issues, all share to some degree the basic selfish, me first, anti-government outlook of their party and many are even more extreme on some issues than the Republicans, so I couldn’t vote for any of them either.
President
Hillary Clinton (D)
Pumpkin Hitler/aka Hair Furor/aka Cheeto Mussolini/aka Donnie Drumpf (R)
Jill Stein (G)
Gary Johnson (L)
My Vote – Hillary Clinton
I’ve discussed the presidential race extensively on this blog, most recently in my previous post, but to summarize: the Republican is a terrible candidate in every way, as he is a narcissist, a bigot, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, a cheapskate, a tax dodger, an admirer of authoritarians, and a probable sexual predator, and he clearly has none of the knowledge needed for the job and shows a complete inability to learn or even listen to anyone who does anything other than flatter his absurdly overinflated ego. Another point that anyone with a brain should care about is that he doesn't even have coherent policy ideas. It should be no surprise that newspaper and magazine endorsements in this race have been unprecedentedly lopsided, with almost none of them (even the conservative ones) endorsing Hair Drumpf. As for the main third party candidates, as I noted at length in my previous post, Stein shows little real grasp of the mechanics of governing, she (like the GOP con man) is overly friendly with Russia, she panders to conspiracy theorists (she even appeared on InfoWars, which sensible people avoid like the plague), she picked a running mate who has claimed the bloodthirsty Assad regime is a democratic government, and contrary to all reason she claimed that a Clinton presidency would be worse than one under the orange menace. Johnson is an idiot and would be terrible on issues like climate change, economic inequality, and getting money out of politics. And even if the other candidates weren’t so awful, Hillary Clinton is extremely well qualified, intelligent, experienced, and articulate, and she has an excellent grasp of the issues and detailed plans for governing. Her policies aren’t perfect, but she can usually be pushed to do the right thing even where she isn’t initially so inclined. She will make at worst a decent president, and possibly an excellent one.
US Representative, District 24
Jan McDowell (D)
Kenny Marchant (R)
Kevin McCormick (G)
Mike Kolls (L)
My Vote – Jan McDowell
This was another easy choice. The incumbent Marchant is terrible on virtually every issue (this time he avoids outright climate denial, but his position amounts to the same thing), and Kolls is even worse than the average Libertarian, as he is a climate change denier, a pro-gun extremist, and only moderate on immigration, where a true libertarian would be against restrictions on migration. His only virtue is being in favor of relaxing restrictions on marijuana (despite his supposed “small government” philosophy, the hypocritical Marchant is not), but McDowell and McCormick are too, and they are superior to Kolls on everything else. McDowell’s answers to the questionnaires were impressive all around. She supports admitting refugees, immigration reform with a path to citizenship, raising the minimum wage, reforming tax policies that favor the rich, addressing climate change, background checks for gun purchases, and other eminently sensible policies. McCormick sounds good on most issues, but shows flashes of ideological rigidity, and rather bizarrely punted on the gun question, so even independent of my current reservations about the Greens, McDowell would be my choice. It’s unfortunate she has little chance of winning, but perhaps if we can get rid of the pro-Republican gerrymandering after 2020, she’ll have a real shot.
Railroad Commissioner
Grady Yarbrough (D)
Wayne Christian (R)
Martina Salinas (G)
Mark A. Miller (L)
My Vote – Grady Yarbrough
This one was a slightly more difficult one than most of the others. Yarbrough’s answers didn’t really impress me – at the very least he needs an editor to polish his writing. Salinas failed to respond to the Dallas News questionnaire, but she did answer the other one, and in the last election I was favorably impressed by her responses to both questionnaires. The Democratic candidate in that race also impressed me favorably, though since two years ago I was less turned off by the Greens (despite the obvious weakness of some of their candidates), I had a hard time deciding, though I believe I went with the Democrat in the end. If the Democrat was as good this time, it would be an easy choice, even though Salinas is one of the Greens’ better candidates. As it is, I finally went with Yarborough, because as a Democrat he stands at least a slight chance of winning, and despite his somewhat unclear writing he managed to convey basically pro-environmental positions, such as cooperating with the federal government on climate issues, opposition to fossil fuel subsidies and opposition to fracking. The misnamed Railroad Commission is in charge of managing the state’s oil and gas industry, so it is important to take it out of the hands of idiotic anti-environmental, pro-fossil fuel nuts like Christian (or Miller, though at least he has reservations about fracking).
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 3
Mike Westergren (D)
Debra Lehrmann (R)
Rodolfo Rivera Munoz (G)
Kathie Glass (L)
My Vote – Mike Westergren
The questions for judicial candidates were rather general, so they weren’t as revealing about the candidates’ stances on specific issues, but Westergren had mostly good answers (with the exception of his response on arbitration, which failed to mention its many problems). Munoz would be better off working as an activist on Native American issues: all his responses revolved around the idea that US rule in Texas is illegitimate because the land was stolen from his people. While there is something to this argument, Munoz’s obsession with it is more appropriate to an advocate than a judge (and in any case, as noted above, I’d only consider even a good Green candidate if the Democrat were particularly weak). Glass ran as the Libertarian candidate for governor in the last election, and though these questions don’t make it apparent, she espoused some crazy things in that race, and I have no reason to believe she’s changed. Interestingly, Lehrmann was accused by her primary opponent of being the court’s most “liberal” justice because she frequently dissented from majority opinions. But even if the accusation is true, she would only be the most liberal in a relative sense; after all, she’s still a Republican. So in the interest of ending the Republican lock on the court, I went with Westergren.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 5
Dori Contreras Garza (D)
Paul Green (R)
Charles E. Waterbury (G)
Tom Oxford (L)
My Vote – Dori Contreras Garza
This was a relatively easy choice. Though as noted above the questions for judicial candidates were pretty general, Garza’s answers were good as well as articulate. She seems to be far the strongest Democratic candidate for Supreme Court this year. Waterbury had some decent answers (though many seemed overly brief), but his references to the “Democrat party” were off-putting, and anyway, as discussed above, I’d only pick a Green if the Democrat were particularly weak. Oxford might be okay for a Libertarian, but he’s still a Libertarian, and Green, aside from being a Republican, didn’t even respond to the questionnaires.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 9
Savannah Robinson (D)
Eva Guzman (R)
Jim Chisholm (G)
Don Fulton (L)
My Vote – None
I would really have preferred to vote in this race, but none of the candidates seemed worth voting for. I wasn’t about to vote for a Republican or a Libertarian for the reasons mentioned above. Chisolm has run before, and like before he didn’t even bother to respond to the questionnaires. Robinson would normally have been my choice, but her answers to the questions were very unimpressive. I don’t have any problem with concise, simple English – in fact I consider it far superior to the verbose jargon-ridden nonsense that some lawyers spew – but Robinson didn’t even seem to be taking the questions seriously, and her frequent typos and misspellings didn’t look good (also, while there may be many good reasons for admiring retired judge James Klager, “Has a Glock at his bench” doesn’t sound like a good one to me). Furthermore, in her case I did look for a campaign site, and her official Facebook page didn’t have any entries after January, so it doesn’t look like she’s a serious candidate. While I hate the idea of leaving this seat on the court in Republican hands, I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for Robinson, so I just left this one blank.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 2
Lawrence "Larry" Meyers (D)
Mary Lou Keel (R)
Adam "Bulletproof" King Blackwell Reposa (G)
Mark Ash (L)
My Vote – Larry Meyers
Reposa, who calls himself a “pizza lawyer” (as he’s a “criminal defense attorney and pizza restauranteur”, seems like as much of a character as that and his name itself suggest, but that doesn’t mean he’d be a good judge. He admits that he’s running as a Green just because they asked him to (his reasons for saying yes are even more candidly self-interested). His answers on the Vote411 site are more serious, but then there’s the attached video… (I didn’t actually look up the unscrambled version, but just the thumbnail looked pretty out there). Meyers is the incumbent, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide office, though this is because after many years on the bench as a Republican, Meyers switched parties a few years ago. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to respond to either questionnaire, but I did find a report which mentioned how he and several other candidates agree that people with drug and mental issues don’t belong in the court system (in the same article, Keel expressed little sympathy for this view, even though Republicans in other races did). In another article, one which mentioned his opposition to overly harsh sentences, he gave some good reasons for his 2013 switch in party affiliation, and in a third article focusing on him personally, he called himself a progressive and said the Republicans have become too conservative. Keel and Ash are a Republican and a Libertarian, which is enough to rule them out. If they were running for prom king, Reposa might well get my vote, but in this case Meyers seemed like the obvious choice.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5
Betsy Johnson (D)
Judith Sanders-Castro (G)
William Bryan Strange III (L)
Scott Walker (R)
My Vote – Judith Sanders-Castro
Sanders-Castro gave decent responses to the questionnaires (though oddly where last time she sometimes used all caps in her Dallas News, this time she hardly capitalized at all; she could also use more proofreading). Johnson, Strange and Walker (who shares a name and party affiliation with the governor of Wisconsin, though that’s hardly a recommendation) didn’t respond at all. Oddly, I came across an article about the Republican primary for this race, and it stated that Walker didn’t have a campaign site or respond to requests for comment (all three other candidates did). It’s strange that Republican primary voters seemed to have picked the least serious of the Republican candidates; maybe they actually thought he was the Wisconsin governor. Walker did respond to a more recent article on the race, one which noted that Johnson was not actively campaigning. So, despite my issues with the Green Party in general, I decided to vote for Sanders-Castro in this race, mainly to send a message to the Democratic Party to run serious candidates.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6
Robert Burns (D)
Michael E. Keasler (R)
Mark W. Bennett (L)
My Vote – Robert Burns
Keasler’s responses to the somewhat general questions aren’t too bad for a Republican, but he still is one. Burns isn’t obviously much better (though in one of the news articles mentioned above, he also spoke out on the problems drug addicts face in the legal system), but he seems okay, so I gave him my vote.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 4
Gena Slaughter (D)
Lana Myers (R)
My Vote – Gena Slaughter
Though most of the questions reveal little about the two candidates’ thinking except in vague terms, Slaughter’s given reasons for running as a Democrat were a point in her favor and the fact that Myers is a Republican was a strike against her, so Slaughter was my choice.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 7
Dennise Garcia (D)
David John Schenck (R)
My Vote – Dennise Garcia
Not a lot of obvious difference here, so since both seemed to have the basic qualifications, it came down to party affiliation.
State Representative, District 103
Rafael Anchia (D)
My Vote – Rafael Anchia
Though Anchia, the incumbent, was unopposed, I decided to vote for him, as he got a 100% grade (and an endorsement) from the Texas League of Conservation Voters.
Dallas County Sheriff
Lupe Valdez (D)
Kirk Launius (R)
J.C. Osborne (G)
David Geoffrey Morris (L)
My Vote – Lupe Valdez
I originally intended to skip the local races, as I don’t feel I know about the sort of local matters the candidates might be expected to address. However, I decided to make an exception for this race. Not only are the Republican and Libertarian unacceptable for the usual reasons, but Osbourne, the Green candidate, seems more than a little wacky, and among a number of over-the-top remarks in his responses there were some that were homophobic and xenophobic, so he also is not by any means an acceptable choice. I admittedly don’t know much about the incumbent Valdez’s record, including on controversial policing issues, but I read part of her speech to the Democratic National Convention, and it sounded pretty good, especially since she noted that members of her own family had had run-ins with bad police officers, and that she’s taken specific steps to encourage her officers to improve community relations. The fact that she has had disputes with the governor over treatment of undocumented people is a point in her favor as well. As for the local judgeships, I did cast votes in a few of them, voting for the Democrat in races where the Republican revealed from their responses that they were a right-wing ideologue (for instance, two named Scalia as the judge they most admired, and another emphasized his support for the Second Amendment).
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