On the need for better judgment in US politics—A Devil’s Advocate Speaks

By Richard John Stapleton

Trump came across better in the second presidential debate (Sunday, October 9, 2016), Hillary not as well, in my judgment.

Hillary admitted she made a mistake with her email server and 33,000 emails, and Trump clobbered her for having bad judgment, something most people probably suspected.

Hillary clearly came out on top in the third debate.

What is judgment?

According to Google on the Internet, judgment is “the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions,” “an error of judgment.”

synonyms: discernment, acumen, shrewdness, astuteness, sense, common sense, perception, perspicacity, percipience, acuity, discrimination, reckoning, wisdom, wit, judiciousness, prudence, canniness, sharpness, sharp-wittedness, powers of reasoning, reason, logic; More

savvy, horse sense, street smarts, gumption

“his temper could affect his judgment”

One can build the case any woman who would marry an out-of-control sexual person like Bill Clinton and stay married to him decades has bad judgment.

But maybe Hillary’s marital decision reflected good judgment, given her goals and ambitions.  It seems to me her being married to Bill Clinton enabled her to achieve her personal political ambitions, regardless of what he did sexually with other women, or how many times he embarrassed her, assuming his escapades and scandals did embarrass her. She may have found them entertaining.

Not many women have goals and objectives like Hillary’s, including seriously becoming the first woman president of the US.

Hillary has also been accused of being an out-of-control sexual person, as shown by a post on Facebook at http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/webb-hubbell-no-comment-on-fathering-chelsea-clinton/ asserting with compelling evidence her daughter’s biological father is not Bill Clinton but one of her law partners from her days with a law firm in Arkansas. Tit-for-tat a Facebook post at http://www.infowars.com/banished-the-untold-story-of-danney-williams-search-for-his-father/ asserts with compelling evidence Bill Clinton has a son he fathered with an African American sex worker from his days as governor of Arkansas.

Apparently it’s not embarrassing to millions of voters to think we US citizens shall once again have this Clinton couple in the White House, with Hillary overseeing and theoretically managing millions of employees in the US federal bureaucracy as chief executive, directing the activities of millions of employees in the US military as commander in chief, and supposedly psychologically leading all of us—morally, ethically, economically, and politically . . . to god knows where.

Bill Clinton’s bizarre sexual behavior and subsequent scandals enabled Hillary to automatically get millions of dollars worth of free political advertising in mainstream media, enabling her to develop her political brand, while acting in the leading lady role in one of the most successful real life soap operas of all time, The Clintons, watched by billions of people around Earth over twenty-five years—an experience that may enable her to take control of the White House Oval Office, and the White House bedrooms, come February of next year.

Trump said Hillary never gives up pursuing her goals and dreams, which he saw as a good thing about her.  She has perseverance, for sure.

And no doubt about it, Hillary Clinton is an abnormally clever, attractive, and sophisticated person, with a good education, Yale and all that, as is her charming husband Bill, also a Yale law school graduate. Starting from scratch, they are now wealthy, having made their money after Bill left the US presidency on January 20, 2000, primarily by selling books and giving speeches to large corporations and the elite rich.

Regardless of Hillary’s abilities and proclivities, bad judgment, assuming she indeed has bad judgment, is not a good thing to have when a president sleeps with a red telephone by her bed in the White House giving her the power to destroy the world with a nuclear bomb, or start WWIII, with one telephone call in the middle of the night.   Nor is bad judgment a good thing to have dealing with greedy aggressive bought and paid for US senators and representatives, banksters, and various types of oligarchs gradually but inexorably undermining the functioning of the US government from the inside seeking and gaining tax concessions and other favors.

Trump may have better judgment for foreign policy issues than Hillary, and for dealing with banksters and fellow oligarchs, however flawed his judgment is. Trump said he thought Antonin Scalia was a great Supreme Court judge, showing the kind of Supreme Court judges he would appoint, showing what poor judgment Trump has regarding the judgment of Antonin Scalia, especially Scalia’s judgment in the Citizens United case of 2010, an oxymoronic insulting name for the case, a case that dis-united citizens, a case that turned corporations into first class citizens with super power to influence elections in their favor, a case that turned people into second class citizens with diminished power. Scalia was one of the worst Supreme Court judges in US history, in my judgment.

Trump and his cronies and minions in the Oval Office, if Trump gets elected, could appoint a thousand or more judges, cabinet members, ambassadors, bureaucrats, etc., giving Trump power to do untold evil—exercising his flawed judgment.

Trump’s family life is about as strange as Hillary’s, hopefully also not a new normal for the US. Hopefully it’s nothing more than a bizarre dysfunctional rich family copying a TV reality show or soap opera, just for the fun of it, having nothing better to do to stave off boredom.

Both Trump and Hillary are potentially very evil presidents.

Woe be unto the land one of them shall probably wind up president of the US, thanks hugely to the mostly intellectually-challenged voters who selected Trump and Hillary in the primaries, and the corrupt rigging of the US primary system, designed to implement the will of the deep state, not the will of we the people.

Polls and posts still show Bernie Sanders could win in a landslide if he were on the ballot in November, as shown on my Facebook page, indicating a large majority of US possible voters are moderate sensible people, however apathetic many of them were in the primaries, if they could have voted and did not.  Many registered Independents who supported Bernie could not vote for him, thanks to the nefarious rigging of the Democratic National Committee.

We ought to do in the US what they do in Australia:  Require all possible voters to vote, and fine them if they don’t.

Hillary and Trump were selected in the primaries by about thirty-five percent of possible US presidential voters, about seventeen percent of possible voters each, who were mostly credulous poorly-informed ideological extremists on the left and right, who could care less about the facts of foreign and domestic policy issues. They are mostly people who don’t want to be confused by facts, who believe memorizing a few simple dogmas, doctrines, or beliefs one time is all you need to live a successful and proper life.

We are being ruled by a tyranny of the minority.

Hopefully the collective judgment of US voters once all the November votes are tallied, announced, and accepted will be good enough to enable us in the US and all people around Earth to continue muddling through somehow, for a long time, regardless of who “wins” the election. It’s amazing to me we have done as well as we have collectively given the political incompetence and malfeasance we have seen in the US and worldwide in the last fifty-six years. The environment up to now has been very forgiving. How much longer it can tolerate human folly remains to be seen.

It’s grandiose for anyone to think that her or his personal vote in the November election will make one whit’s worth of difference in the overall outcome for the US and the world following the election. One vote in a secret ballot presidential vote is like a limb falling from a tree in a forest with no human around to see or hear it. Forget about making America great again with your vote, magically, as Trump mouths to the masses, or keeping America great, as it is, as Hillary mouths to the masses.

On the other hand, if you could somehow magically convince a majority of sensible moderate possible presidential voters to vote on Tuesday, November 8 that might make a difference. This is just as true for this presidential election as it has been for those of the past. Nothing will change if moderate sensible voters keep voting for the lesser evil selected by the evil Democratic and Republican Parties, in my judgment.

Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, is the best choice on the November presidential ballot. Vote for her, shake the dust off your feet as you walk away from the voting booth, don’t look back lest you get turned into a pillar of salt, pray for the best, and let the chips fall where they may.

As that great American stripper Mae West said, in her judgment, “Confronted with choosing the lesser of evils, always choose the evil you’ve never tried.”

One can build the case that no feeling, thought, decision, action, article, book, constitution, person, family, group, organization, religion, or nation is all good or all evil, and never has been.

One can build the case that all humans since time immemorial have done what they were caused to do in dog-eat-dog competitions in their environments in which there are always winners and losers, that all humans are inevitable evolutionary accidents, that free will does not exist, that all effects, including feelings, thoughts, and decisions are caused, and all causes and effects are linked in cause-effect chains in infinite regressions; and therefore no human is to be blamed or praised.

I have covered the issue of free will and determinism in some detail in my books. If you ask Google—Does free will exist?—you will find 10,400,000 results. Some of the posts say free will exists, and others say it does not. Most likely there is no proof either way. It’s possible I guess one of the 10,400,000 results might prove it one way or the other, but I have no illusions about reading all of them to find out.

If you click on my Business Voyages Archives option on our Effective Learning Company website at www.effectivelearning.net, and peruse some of my posts in the last ten years you will see I have a decent track record making political calls, for a Monday morning quarterback, and if you click on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397 you will see I have assembled here lately some posts from my Facebook Home selections that support the recommendation made in this essay factually and statistically, assuming you can believe the posts.

There is a lot at stake in this election, and I am aware that two of the wisest and most successful essayists of our generation, Noam Chomsky and Henry Giroux, have publicly stated voting for Hillary, as evil as she is, is the ethical choice under the circumstances, given the horrendous evilness of Trump.

But, having almost never done anything just because a wise person told me to, having always been somewhat of a devil’s advocate, it seems to me there is some chance, however low its probability, that if enough wiser folks advocate Jill Stein between now and November 8 she might get elected; and in my judgment, the probability of Jill Stein leading the US to an improvement, and not leading the US to a disaster, is much higher than for Trump or Hillary.

Yes, it’s a long shot, but why not take it, given the evilness of the overall situation we are in?  What do you have to lose?