A lot has been said about the 2016 US Presidential election. Some have called it low brow and vicious, yet they don’t remember the 1800 election when Thomas Jefferson called John Adams a hermaphrodite, and Adams called Jefferson “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”.
Why yes, negative campaigning is a mainstay in American politics.
So if we get past the name calling, and silly accusations, there are still some major policy issues that everyone seems to care about. But do those really matter? Are they just red herrings? A lot has been said about Trumps plan to build a wall on the southern US boarder, but Hillary has long supported the same thing. Many people say that Hillary supports gay marriage, but Trump was very supportive of his friends same sex marriage in 2005. But what about the “major issues”?
If you ask a democrat what they don’t like about the republican platform, 2 things tend to come up more then anything.
First, democrats like to call republicans war mongers. After all, George W Bush started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. According to the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the US had troops deployed in 60 countries when Bush left office. That sure sounds like those republicans are war mongers, doesn’t it?
Well the truth is, 8 years after Bush left office, we still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And according to SOCOM, we now have troops deployed in 135 countries (that is nearly 70% of all the countries on the planet). The democrats don’t seem to be any less of war mongers.
The second policy issue most democrats raise against the republicans is abortion. The republicans want to ban abortion.
Let’s be serious about this one. Yes, many republicans like to get on their high horse and claim that they are opposed to abortion, but let’s be serious, most abortions are being done by low income people. Not the type of people the political elite are to supportive of reproducing anyway. Even republican nominee Donald Trump has said that even though he is personally against abortion, it is all about choice and you can’t take that choice away from a woman.
So realistically, all republicans will ever do with regards to abortion is limit public funds going toward it. And if that happens, liberal charities will fill in the missing funds. Nothing will change.
Of course, republicans have their gripes about democrats. You can’t talk to a republican without them telling you how the democrats want to raise taxes. Although there is some merit to this (depending on your income), the truth is, congress will always fight over taxes, and sometimes some peoples taxes will go up and others down, and other times other peoples taxes will go up and other peoples will go down. The president has less to do with this then the other branches of government.
The second thing any republican will bring up is gun control. This is a hot button political issue for a few reasons. The first reason is location. most urban areas are more liberal. They also have larger police forces, faster police response times, high crime and less wild life. These tend to make liberal people see guns as something only criminals have.
Rural areas tend to have more conservative people. They also have less police presence, slower police response times, less crime, and more wild life. These tend to make the conservative people living there want to be armed.
But will democrats try to “take our guns”? It is true that democrats want to push gun restrictions, but they will never ban firearms. The 2 main reasons why they can not are the power of pro weapon groups, and the needs of the government. Pro weapon groups, like the NRA, are extremely well funded by the millions of Americans who own weapons (I, as well as almost everyone I know, am an NRA member).
The governments needs tend to be an often overlooked player in the gun control issue. Many people do not know that television was first created as a way to offset the cost of cathode ray tubes used in the militaries radar. Also, petroleum based plastics were first used in nuclear weapons. To bring manufacturing costs down for these items, the government needed a way to increase production drastically. They did this by creating ways for everyday Americans to need those products. If you think the popularity of todays AR-15 rifles has nothing to do with the governments need to lower prices by mass producing those parts, you are fooling yourselves. At most, the government will only allow restrictions on some components. A democrat in office will never ban AR-15’s but may ban 30 round magazines for AR-15’s. However, this is a useless gesture. Advances in 3d printing make banning a plastic high capacity magazine unenforceable.
So if these issues are nothing but a red herring, what is the election really about? Well usually, nothing. The same thing happens no matter what party is in charge. Obama didn’t even close down Guantanamo Bay.
However, maybe this time, someone who isn’t part of that political elite, that government machine that tries to fool us with partisan politics, has the nomination of one of our 2 parties. Maybe this time someone can be elected that can take the country back for the rest of us.
But they wouldn’t let that happen… would they?
