By Richard John Stapleton
“Say it ain’t so, Joe,” was a headline in the Chicago Daily News written by Charley Owens after “Shoeless Joe” Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox players were indicted for rigging the 1920 World Series. The headline was inspired by a boy who asked Shoeless Joe, his hero, one of the best baseball players of all time, who once batted over .500 in a season, if he really did it, saying, “It ain’t so, is it Joe?”.
Joe replied, “I’m afraid it is, kid.”
Joe was subsequently banished from baseball for life along with the other miscreants. See the full story at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoeless_Joe_Jackson.
During this 2016 US presidential race, the world series of US politics every four years, a costly charade as usual has been played out in mainstream and social media, making it seem we have a real democracy for we the people in this country when we really have an oligarchy for the deep state.
Hillary has raised and presumably spent about $700 million in campaign financing, mainly financed by the elite rich; Trump raised about $300 million; Jill Stein raised about $2 million from we the people, to get elected.
This year, as usual, the establishment political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, were cheered on and rooted for by about thirty-five percent of possible US voters. The other sixty-five percent of possible US voters have been mostly silent, disillusioned, depressed, dismayed, and disgusted, if not horrified, by the performances of the establishment presidential candidate winners, Trump and Hillary.
There are no real heroes still in this race. Bernie Sanders was a hero in the early running, but he dropped out and supported Hillary.
Trump got where he is today because of being born rich and doing what made him feel good buying and building buildings, spending money, hiring and firing people, and renting his buildings out. Hillary got where she is because of being born poor but reasonably bright, and because of making good grades in school, getting admitted to good universities, and because of marrying Bill Clinton, and not divorcing him because of his out-of-control sexual and manipulative behavior. She leveraged her experience into getting where she is today, on the verge of getting elected the first woman president of the US.
Neither Trump nor Hillary ever achieved anything in their fields comparable to what Shoeless Joe Jackson did in his. Joe batted over .500 in a professional baseball season, and led his league with doubles and triples almost every year, something only a handful of professional baseball players ever did and can do.
Thousands of politicians have done as well as Hillary and Trump playing as politicians, in terms of actual achievement. Both of them were able to get their hands on a lot of money to run for president, a lot more than most people could ever dream of, assuming this is an achievement. Hillary got elected a US senator and got appointed US Secretary of State, achievements I suppose; but Hillary’s record as a senator was mediocre at best, and her record as Secretary of State was poor, in my judgment. She came across as a blood-thirsty warmonger and a truly incompetent writer, receiver, and keeper of emails, with innumerable observers making allegations her behavior was unethical, and probably illegal, regardless of what Comey and the FBI finally said about the matter. There were after all 113 emails marked as classified that she let out, which was against the law.
Hillary and Trump have produced the standard political bullshooting, kissing-up, smoozing, brown-nosing, and criticizing to go along and get along playing the game of politics, fighting political enemies with words and speeches, and so forth. Neither one of them, to my knowledge, produced an original book of analysis, ideas, concepts, or strategies on how to improve the US or the world. Yes, they produced memory books of their lives, mostly written by ghost writers, that made them some money; but so what.
Unlike Shoeless Joe, unable to read or write, neither Trump nor Hillary, nor their spouses, have ever had to pay a serious price for their unethical behavior, since they were able to pay serious money to the best lawyers to defend them; although most people would probably think the $978,000 that had to be paid to settle Hillary’s husband’s lawsuit with Paula Jones for his philandering was a serious price to be paid for immoral behavior.
Bill Clinton is not the first president to have sexual relations with women not his wife. John F. Kennedy may have been the world champion in this league. I saw an Internet that asserted he screwed every single one of his female secretaries and interns when he was in office. I have read he had a quickie with a famous stripper standing up. On road trips, according to folklore, groups of women would be arranged to meet him, secret service men would take him to meet them, he would socialize a bit and then make his decision for the night. The man apparently was a sexual super stud.
But it never came out in mainstream media when he was in office to my knowledge. I never knew about it until years after the fact, assuming it’s actually true, having picked up information in bits and pieces here and yon over time, sometimes scanning the tabloids checking out at the grocery store.
Jack Kennedy and the other womanizing presidents never got enmeshed in the problems Bill Clinton did because of womanizing. It appears what Kennedy did was consensual, mostly one night stands, or thirty minute stands, or whatever; and apparently his partners were pleased and satisfied with the experience, having gotten their money’s worth in a sexual deal that was clear from the git-go. Jack Kennedy and other sexually promiscuous presidents did not wind up sued or impeached because of enjoying themselves sexually with women not their wives. Not so with Bill Clinton.
On the other hand, one can build the case Bill and Hillary Clinton have excelled all other US and international presidents and dictators and their spouses, excluding perhaps such international husband and wife teams as the Marcoses of the Phillipines and the Perons of Argentina, in terms of being able to set up husband-wife dynasties manipulating and exploiting their countries for decades. Certainly no other US husband-wife team has done this. At the same time, the Clinton Foundation, in which the Clintons have installed their daughter, Chelsea, as a director may be a world-class political family business, unprecedented in corruption of a government, as history will let us know ere long.
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, despite Trump hammering her again for her poor judgment and “poor instincts.”
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; Moresavvy, 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, ambitions, and proclivities. It seems to me Hillary being married to Bill Clinton enabled her to achieve her personal political ambitions, regardless how many times he embarrassed her, assuming his escapades and scandals did embarrass her. She may have found them exhilarating.
Not many women have goals and objectives as lofty as Hillary’s, including, seriously, becoming the first woman president of the US.
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 who knows where.
Bill Clinton’s bizarre sexual behavior and subsequent scandals in mainstream media enabled Hillary to automatically get millions of dollars worth of free political advertising, 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 in the debates Hillary never gives up pursuing her goals and dreams, which he saw as a good thing about her. She has perseverance, for sure, and tremendous energy.
And no doubt about it, Hillary Clinton is abnormally clever, attractive, and sophisticated, with a good education, Yale and all that, as is handsome charming Bill, also a Yale law school graduate. They are an attractive couple, having movie-star calibre good looks bequeathed by nature, and this alone enabled them to garner millions of votes from gullible adoring fans.
Starting from scratch, they are now fabulously wealthy by most people’s standards, seventy-five or so million dollars 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, which were mostly payments made for services rendered while Bill was in office or down payments for future services to be rendered by Hillary after she becomes president.
Regardless of Hillary’s abilities and proclivities, 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 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.
Come to think of it, this red telephone system is not good for any president. Our founding fathers made a serious mistake in my judgment making it possible for any president of either sex to acquire this sort of potency.
Given the problems, conflicts, uncertainties, worries, criticisms, ethical problems, evilness, and unending troubles campaigning for president and doing the job presidents have to do if elected, why would anyone, including Donald Trump, want to be president of the US after they have become as rich as the Clinton’s have become?
One can build the case making more and more money and gaining more and more power becomes an addiction for successful high-energy entrepreneurs. If they don’t keep it up they get depressed. More and more money and more and more risks are necessary to generate enough excitement to stave off serious psychological depression. I covered this in my book Business Voyages, using some of the conceptualizations and models of Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist and a transactional analysis colleague and mentor of mine at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Trump may have better judgment for foreign policy issues than Hillary, and for dealing with banksters and fellow oligarchs, however flawed his judgment is. We have no way of knowing. But, 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 oxymoron, 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 had to have been 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 bizarre as Bill and Hillary’s, an extended family entailing three marriages and several children creating their own TV reality show or soap opera, apparently just for the fun of it. Daddy Trump as you know if you have read, watched, or listened to any sort of media lately is also an out-of-control sexual person, considering the sexual controls most intelligent people accept.
Both Trump and Hillary are potentially evil presidents.
Unfortunately one of them will probably wind up president of the US, thanks 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 NationalCommittee.
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, as pointed out above. This is 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.
It seems to me we are now being ruled by a tyranny of the minority composed of lower and middle class ideological sheeple on the right and left and their oligarchic puppet-masters. Jimmy Carter, the most ethical president of my lifetime, agrees we no longer have a functioning democracy, that we now have an oligarchy. See the full story regarding President Carter’s judgement in this matter in the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/jimmy-carter-is-correct-t_b_7922788.html.
Hopefully the collective judgment of US voters once all the November votes are tallied, announced, and hopefully 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.
Some say it really does not make any difference who is elected president anymore in the US, since the country is run by a shadow government of elite bankers, oligarchs, generals, and bureaucrats who actually call the shots, who tell the president what to do. It sure looks this way in the case of President Obama, who has been a much better president than Reagan and Bush II, and Bill Clinton, but who has not accomplished much, nowhere near as much as he promised in his campaign. He seems to have caved in to the military-industrial complex, and the banksters in too big to fail banks. Obama did not lead us into another major war, but he did not significantly reduce our military expenses, activities, and plans. Using drones to kill people has been an ethical disaster under his watch. So has spying on we the people of the US.
Hillary has promised US citizens she will cure most of their problems if only they vote for her. It appears enough possible voters have believed her to get elected president. It only takes about twenty-five percent of possible votes to get elected president, which has been true for decades now. The US needs a parliamentary democracy that requires at least a majority of voters for a ruling party to take over a country. Not only are parliamentary democracies faster and cheaper they are better for electing a top leader of the country. Our democracy is obsolete as well as corrupted.
The environment, not talked about in the debates, 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 US 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 that did not vote for Hillary or Trump in the primaries to vote on Tuesday, November 8 for Jill Stein, that might make a difference.
Nothing will change if moderate sensible voters keep voting for the lesser evil selected by the evil Democratic and Republican Parties who started needless wars and squandered for the last fifty-six years a significant portion of our federal tax dollars, borrowed dollars, and digital dollars created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve System.
Enough is enough.
Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, is the best choice on the November presidential ballot, in my judgment. 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, if you want to vote for or write in someone that might produce significant structural changes as president.
Jill Stein is a highly intelligent woman with a MD degree from Harvard Medical School, with years of political experience leading the Green Party, which is now on the ballot in forty-four states, with write-in permission in three of the remaining six states, including Georgia.
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 posted by people here and yon that support the recommendations made in this essay factually and statistically.
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, and the evilness of the overall situation in which we are enmeshed, faced with threats of nuclear war, a catastrophic economic depression, and a possible environmental collapse.
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 and recommend Jill Stein she might get elected.
In my judgment, the probability of Jill Stein as president leading the US to structural improvements, and not leading the US to another disaster, such as the Iraq War, is much higher than for Trump or Hillary.
Voting for Jill Stein most likely will not put you on the “winning” team in this presidential race, there being probably at most a .20 probability voting for Stein might result in a “victory”. But there is some chance voting for Stein will hasten the demise of the evil two-party voting system we have now, a system that rigs our government in favor of large corporations and the elite rich, enabling the elite rich to “win” the world series of US politics every time, enabling them to keep getting richer and richer while the poor and the middle class get poorer, or stay the same, if they are lucky. Jill needs five percent of the vote to get the Green Party on the ballot in all states in the next presidential election.
No matter how much money the elite rich acquire in the form of tax reductions or other favors from politicians they will always require more and more money to achieve psychological satisfaction. It’s just the way the the neoliberal/conservative US economic/political system–oligopolistic oligarchic capitalism–one step away from fascism–works.
Unlike Shoeless Joe Jackson, the elite rich of the US, the one percent, will never admit they rigged the game.
The US is being ruled by miscreants.
Nothing will change if voters keep voting for the lesser evil selected by the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Yes, it’s a long shot, but why not take it? Vote for Jill Stein. What do you have to lose?
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