Joel S. Hirschhorn

Here we go again. Millions of Americans will soon vote for either the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate not because they deeply believe that he is absolutely the best possible president the country needs and can have. No, they will know that they are compromising and choosing the lesser of two evils, mainly because most people know that both major parties and their candidates stink. The lesser evil is still a loser.

This is the only way to accurately understand the American electorate. Americans overwhelmingly are a combination of three awful characteristics. The vast majority are dumb, distracted and delusional, whether they see themselves on the left or right, or as independent.

I have always spent an enormous amount of time following politics and for about twenty years worked within the political system at the state and federal levels. I have a totally negative view of the US political system because American democracy has become something worse than a joke, it is mostly a massive, country-wide delusion based on a refusal to see the terribly painful and ugly truth that the nation like so many world powers before it has been in decline. The Democrats and Republicans share control of a two-party plutocracy and want Americans to adopt the delusional belief that the US is still a great democracy and nation, as if they can vote and elect their way out of the total mess the country is in.

All the evidence I see tells me that President Obama has been, at best, a mediocre president and that candidate Romney is even more unqualified to be president than I thought George W. Bush was. Both of them lie compulsively, endlessly and persuasively. Politics these days is all about money and lies because both work on a population that is dumb, distracted and delusional. As a nation we get the politics we deserve. Rich, white and older Americans are drawn to Romney. Poor, younger and minority people are drawn to Obama. True conservatives and liberals/progressives should vomit at the thought of voting for Romney or Obama, respectively, because neither candidate is truly committed at their core to either camp.

No intelligent, informed American should vote for either Obama or Romney. The two better, more moral and noble choices are either to not vote for president at all and help to delegitimize the busted, corrupt and dysfunctional political system, or to vote for the Libertarian Party president candidate that will be on nearly all state ballots. But Gary Johnson is nearly totally ignored by the media and most likely will not be included in the televised presidential debates because they are controlled by the two major parties. This, despite the fact that “The most recent CNN/ORC International poll shows that 3% of likely voters and 4% of registered voters say they'd vote for Johnson.” He is not the lesser of three evils, but a terrific way to send a clear message to both major parties that most of us are fed up with both of them.

Third party presidential candidates are often described as “spoilers” because they are viewed as spoiling the election of one of the major party candidates. In truth, it is smart to see voting for the Libertarian Party candidate as spoiling the oppressive grip of the two major parties on our political system. When a candidate wins that you oppose the only people to blame are those who funded his campaign and voted for him. Democrats and Republicans have succeeded at spoiling our democracy. We have far too little genuine political competition.

This much is certain. Whether you vote for Romney or Obama, if your choice wins you will eventually be painfully disappointed. All our elections do now is sustain a corrupt, dysfunctional status quo. I keep waiting for a presidential candidate who tells the public that we need some reform constitutional amendments, like getting all private money out of politics, that Congress will never propose and that only an Article V convention will propose. Give me a presidential candidate that supports having the first Article V convention and I will see the possibility of fixing the US.

If you truly believe that electing Romney or Obama will put the nation on the right track and a path to renewed shared prosperity, fiscal sanity, greatly reduced unemployment and an end to too-big-to-fail crony capitalism, then you have been brainwashed by the right or left or are well into Alzheimer’s disease.

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[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]