Election 2016: Let's All Vote Third-Party This Year

With a respectful nod in Mr. Sanders' direction, it looks like, when November 2, 2016 comes around, we will be faced with a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Not necessarily.

I have some alternative proposals for you to consider. The first one is too easy, it's the one that most people will do, and it may backfire. Don't do it - think a little harder. The last proposal is the greatest idea ever. But to work, requires an open mind, a bit of daring, and a lot of cooperation - like millions of people combining to do it.

The cool thing about voting in the United States of America, exit polls notwithstanding, is that it's a secret ballot. You don't have to tell anybody how you voted. Remember that.

1. Vote not-Clinton or not-Trump. Choose the one you hate the least, the proverbial Lesser of Two Really Bad Evils.

(Maybe you are one of the rare Americans who really does support Clinton or Trump. Good for you. Vote your convictions.)

2. Vote for Dictator, not for President. Decide which one you would be most willing to live under as a dictator, because that may happen. Vote for the dictator of your choice.

3. Vote for the Vice-President. Look carefully at the candidates for vice-president. Vote for the vice-president who will make the best president, on the assumption that the elected president is likely to get impeached or otherwise removed from office before his or her term is up.

4. THIS IS MY FAVORITE: Vote for somebody else - anybody else. We tend to forget that the Democrats and the Republicans are NOT the only political parties in the nation, and are definitely NOT the only parties with candidates for president. And while the conventional wisdom has always been that (1) third-party candidates cannot win a presidential election  and that (2) a strong third-party candidate unnecessarily muddies the waters, this year they may be very useful. Stay with me here. Read on.

WARNING: There is some math in the second paragraph following this one.

It is common in modern politics for the winning candidate to claim a "clear mandate from the people." The word "mandate" implies that, through the popular vote, the people overwhelmingly chose this candidate to rule. The mandate is claimed even when margin of victory is laughably slim. This year, let's deny the winner any mandate.

It's inevitable that one of the two major candidates will win the election. But if enough people vote for a minor-party candidate, then the winner will be denied a majority of the popular vote. If the winner gets less than one-third (33%) of all the votes cast, and the loser gets even less than that, then more than one-third of the votes (more than the winner got!) will go for the bloc of third-party candidates. We will have demonstrated to both major candidates, and both major parties, that we don't like them and that We The People are supremely dissatisfied with the way this election turned out. We will show them that they do not have a mandate to rule, and that we prefer anybody else to them.

So vote Libertarian. Or Green. Or United States Pirate Party (arrr!).

Or vote for comedian Ron White - yes, he's a registered presidential candidate this year. It doesn't matter who you vote for. Your candidate will not win, but your vote will be counted, and if enough of us do this, we will deny the major parties their so-called mandate, and somebody important will finally Get It. We will send a message to Washington D.C. that they won't dare to ignore.

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Picture credits:
 "Giant Meteor 2016" appeared on the Nihilist Memes FB page as a reader submission. 
"Alien Invasion 2016" was created by Randy Cassingham at This Is True, the Internet's oldest and most successful news-and-commentary newsletter. It appeared on True's FB page.
"None of the Above 2016" and the pie chart are my own creations. © 2016 Ray Depew. Go ahead and spread them around, free of charge. Just remember where you got 'em.

Everything else I found on Google. 
And the United States Pirate Party is a real thing. Arrr, matey.

Oh, great. The idiot is running again.

While the spotlight has been shining on Hillary Rodham Clinton and her remarkable lack of Democratic contenders, Republicans have been quietly walking up to the Goblet of Fire and slipping their names into it.

The latest Republican to announce his candidacy for the presidency was our own Billionaire Clown, Donald Trump. He can't stand it when the news isn't about him. And he just can't stand to stay out of his own spotlight. I guess that's his right. He bought the spotlight, and paid for it, so he might as well shine it on himself. It's a pity he couldn't spend the money on a better hairpiece.

Clearly, he didn't learn his lesson from the "birther" beating he inflicted upon himself in 2011.

Anyway, in the latest installment in the comedy-cum-soap-opera that is his life, Trump invoked God Himself in promising:

I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.

I remind you that in 2011, all of the Republican candidates, except for Mitt Romney, announced that God had told them to run for President. This statement sounds like Trump is telling God what to do, and not the other way around. Ladies and gentlemen, the Clown is back, and he's about to eat his clown shoes.

Reuters reporter Alana Wise wasn't too impressed with his announcement, as she makes clear in this report of the press conference announcing his candidacy.

Everytime I read or hear about Donald Trump saying something, I get this mental image of a donkey in a pasture, braying loudly because he loves to hear the sound of his voice, while all of the other animals grazing in the field ignore him or silently wish he would be abducted by aliens.

UPDATE, JUNE 17: Most of the news media didn't take Trump's announcement very seriously. One of them even accused him of "throwing his rubber nose into the GOP ring." This jesting at his expense, and lack of respect, hasn't sat well with Trump, who fired back in a fit of petulance: "Well, I'm rich and you're not, so nyah. Jerks." Now we can really take him seriously.

The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win

One of my friends (a real one, not a FB one) saw an article on Reason.com and suggested that I read it. In today's political climate, which is at turns divisive, extremist, absolute and contrarian, the author of this article channels Jonathan Swift to warn us about something really important. The article is called The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win . I'm not going to post the text of the entire article here, because I'm hoping that after November 2, nobody will need to read it again. But it's really important, right now.

A government that really works: is that too much to ask for?

Today I'm reprinting an article from ABC News. I was going to write a blog entry like this anyway, but I found this article by Amy Walter while I was doing research for my entry, and she says it so much better than I would have. Excerpting it wouldn't have done it justice.

If ABC or Ms. Walter asks me to take it down, I will, but I wanted to post a copy of it here because I've noticed that articles like this on the mainstream news outlets have a tendency to expire. They disappear after some length of time. This one deserves an extended life. It's something that all politicians need to keep in mind, both before and especially after an election. And as Ms. Walter points out, the rebuke applies to all political parties.

An Ideological Battle that Voters Don't Want

In picking Rep. Paul Ryan, whose eponymous budget plan has become synonymous with political polarization, Mitt Romney assured an ideological campaign where a debate over the role of government will be front and center. It is a debate the Obama campaign and partisans on both sides are also eager to have. But it’s not a debate that swing voters want.

They aren’t as interested in choosing whether government should be more active or less. They are more interested in simply having it work.

BLAME IT ON THE WAVE

This debate is the culmination of four consecutive wave elections — elections where each side (wrongly) assumed a mandate from the American public.

It started in 2006 when, fed up with one party control, voters tossed Congressional Republicans out of power. Once, the party of “outsider” Republicans had turned into creatures of Washington. Voters saw them as gluttonous, self-absorbed and more interested in retaining power than using their power to help the little guy.

Two years later, voters elected a president who promised to break the partisan gridlock and to focus on an agenda that transcended party and special interest groups.

Yet, elected as a counter-weight to previous GOP rule, Democrats turned out to act much like them. They passed legislation on party-line only votes. They pushed a health care law through Congress, but failed to make the case for how it was going to help people survive a flailing economy.

Fueled by this frustration, voters put Republicans back in control of the House in 2010. But like the Democrats before them, Republicans mistook the election as a mandate for their own ideology — an ideology that saw compromise as a dirty word. And, less than two years after providing the energy for the 2010 sweep of Congress, the tea party is an unpopular than ever.

Six years after voters sent a message to Republicans that they were sick and tired of a government that was polarized and self-absorbed, they find a political system that is as polarized and ineffective as ever.

Each wave election has ultimately produced a class of politicians who are convinced that their victory was about them rather than a repudiation of the tactics and behavior of the other party. They were convinced that voters were choosing an ideology, when in reality they were simply trying to punish the folks who put ideology over accomplishment and compromise.

PHILOSOPHY FOLLOWS FUNCTION

Which brings us to today. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney argue that this election provides voters with a very stark choice between two competing ideologies. One that says that government can be part of the solution (Obama) and one that says that government is getting in the way of the solution (Romney).

But there are plenty of voters out there who are more concerned about function than ideology. They aren’t spending their evenings debating the benefits of Hayek or Keynesian economic models. They are just trying to figure out which candidate is capable of getting something done. They will reward the politician who succeeds in getting things moving again. But that shouldn’t be taken as proof that voters are endorsing the philosophical underpinnings of that success.

In other words, voters are looking less at ideology and more at competency. And that’s not something that either side has been able to show that can deliver.

"Never had a real job" - Karma, round two

Loose-cannon Democrats have not cornered the stupidity market in this election year. Republicans are now taking their turn in the arena.

Remember back in April, when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said (in an interview on CNN) that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life," and then Rosen got buried in the blowback, and abandoned by her fellow Democrats?

Well now, Republican House Speaker John Boehner said (in an interview on Fox News, yesterday) that Barack Obama has "never even had a real job, for [God's] sake."

Huh. According to celebritynetworth.com, Barack Obama is worth $11.8 million. He didn't inherit that money from his father. According to his résumé, he worked hard for at least part of that money. I think that working hard for your money is what constitutes a "real job," don't you?

I guess it depends on how you define a "real job." If Speaker Boehner means that Obama never had to punch a time clock, then he may have a point. (Then again, he may not. Maybe Obama worked at McDonald's when he was a teen. Surely, that would qualify as a "real job.")

What's makes Boehner's statement really stupid is that, only a few sentences earlier, he said "Sometimes I have to catch my breath and slow down because the rhetoric in this campaign is just so over the top."

Watch for the blowback.

On Polls, Politicking, and Super PACs

About super PACs:

They're not fooling anybody, you know. They're a blatant move by the classic men-behind-the-scenes to control the political landscape and the political discourse like they used to do. They're not about free speech. They're about money and power. We all know that.

But they're frighteningly effective, and so are their tactics. Most voters in a given election will vote based on emotion, not logic or facts, and the super PACs' tactics are focused on manipulating voters' emotions.

About politicking:


You know, since we stopped subscribing to cable TV and watching network TV, we have missed all of the political ads. And when I say "missed," I mean "not seen" or "not been subject to."

When we listen to the radio, we change stations every time we hear a political ad. (In fact, we frequently change stations for any kind of advertisement.) In radio parlance, political ads are an automatic tune-out.

When we read the newspaper, we read the political ads for local issues or candidates, and then go to the Internet to find detailed, impartial facts and to read both sides of the issue.

We get most of our news today from the Internet. We read from a variety of news outlets, analysts, and opinion leaders. We assume that everybody has a bias, and so we make sure to take our news from across the political spectrum. Some of the most detached, unbiased reporting comes from overseas, from outside looking in, but even then we are careful to watch for hidden biases.

We've noticed a lot more political advertising on the Internet. We ignore all of it. (However, we are intrigued by which political ads AdSense chooses to serve up on places like Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters.)

We listen to speeches, or read transcripts of speeches, on the Internet. Sometimes we will find multiple versions of the speech. Sometimes it takes a little work to find an accurate video of the speech, unedited and uncut. We listen to some of the after-speech commentary, but not much. After 5 or 10 minutes, the commentators go into talking-head mode, and then it's time to move on.

About polls:


I used to participate in telephone polls and surveys, thinking that I was fulfilling my civic duty in making my voice heard. Boy, was I mistaken. It took me a while, but I finally caught on to the fact that a "poll" is not really a "poll": the pollster is pushing a specific agenda, and is politicking (or selling, if it's a consumer poll and not a voter poll) just like everybody else.

Caller ID is a wonderful thing. During election season (like, right now), we ignore incoming calls if we don't recognize the calling number, or if no number is shown. There's no law that requires you to answer a ringing telephone.

That short pause before the human starts talking is also a wonderful thing. One day autodialers will be fast enough to eliminate the pause, but for 2012, that brief time while the autodialer processes our "Hello?" and routes us to a human or to a recorded message, is just enough time to alert us to the fact that it's a call we can safely hang up on.

This year I'm going to try something new. If I answer a ringing telephone and I don't realize it's a political call until the caller starts talking, I'm going to abruptly and wordlessly hang up. It may be rude, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to listen to them, any more than I have the time or inclination to listen to a door-to-door salesman.

To wrap up:

Politicians must hate voters like us. We think about the candidates, and the issues. We do our research. We look at all sides of the story. We judge the credibility of everything we hear or read, and we ignore  emotional appeals. And we hate buzzwords, slogans, and cute catchphrases, with a hatred that surpasses all understanding. We don't vote a strict party or ideological line, although we prefer moderates over radicals because we know they will get things done and not just crow like a rooster all day long. We vote for what we think will be best in the long run for our community, our state and our country.

Trump is "honored" to have been a part of this? Trump is an idiot.

I used to think that a successful CEO of a large commercial entity would be the best candidate for president of the United States. Jimmy Carter was a successful CEO, but he was not a very good president. It simply wasn't the right job for him. After getting out from under that millstone, he became a great statesman and humanitarian. Ross Perot might have been a great president, but he stumbled too many times on the campaign trail. A presidential campaign requires charisma and leadership, which he had in spades, but also diplomacy and tact, which he didn't value and therefore didn't stock up on.

Now we have Donald Trump, with one of the world's biggest fortunes and an ego to match. A week or two ago, Trump jumped on the "birther" bandwagon, echoing the idiots that four years ago started claiming that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the U.S., and therefore constitutionally ineligible to be president.

And Trump wouldn't shut up about it. All sorts of perfectly valid, perfectly legal proofs of birth were brought out by Obama's campaign office pre-election, and by the White House post-election, but those weren't good enough for the "birthers," and loudly not good enough for Trump, either.

What Donald Trump and the other "birthers" loudly demanded was a confidential document, the "long form birth certificate," which by law could only be requested by, and released to, those who had signed the birth certificate. In Obama's case, that's his mother, the attending physician and one other person (not his father) whose identity escapes me.

I imagine that the president wields special powers, because the president requested, and Hawaii's state Director of Health approved, that the state release a copy of the document to him. One of the president's personal aides flew all the way to Hawaii, retrieved the copy, and flew all the way back to Washington D.C. The trip was completed with some haste, and so I don't think it was a commercial aircraft. That means that the taxpayers paid top dollar for this junket.

I'm not faulting President Obama here. I'm faulting Donald Trump, who wouldn't shut up about it, and whose ceaseless yammering about it became, in the words of White House spokesmen (including the president himself), a "distraction," "silliness", and a "sideshow." Every time the president or a spokesman would hold a press conference on one of the serious issues facing the Executive Office, someone would invariably ask a question about the "birther" issue -- and at least one follow-up question. What a ridiculous waste of time.

Try putting the shoe on the other foot. I'll bet there are a few things in Donald Trump's life that he'd prefer to keep private, things he would rather not share in public. What if every time Donald Trump was approached by a reporter, all they could ask him about was his many rumored affairs? Or his publicized and well-documented manipulation of bankruptcy laws? Or whether his hair was a poorly-fitted toupee or just an awful hairstyle?

Here's what White House spokesman Jay Carney had to say about the whole "birther" issue: "The president feels this was bad for the country, that it's not healthy for our political debate." And White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said, "It was a constant discussion on main stream news organizations."

Donald Trump is oblivious to such things. It doesn't matter to him if he inconveniences people and interrupts the workings of the nation, and forces taxpayer money to be spent on trivialities, as long as he gets the spotlight. Here's what he had to say about it, after landing in New Hampshire and taking full credit for getting the birth certificate released to the public: "He should have done it a long time ago. I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue." (italics are mine)

I hope that Donald Trump gets his nose rubbed in this mess at every campaign stop. I hope that it becomes a distraction to his presidential campaign, to the point that he withdraws completely. I don't want to give the power of the executive office to someone as petty and self-important as he is.

Honored? I wouldn't want to take the credit for pulling off an idiotic stunt like this. He oughta just put on giant shoes, a puffy orange bowtie and a red clown nose. Democrat or Republican, I wouldn't vote for him if he were the last billionaire egomaniac on earth.

UPDATE, April 28: From this morning's paper, here are the words of the Prez himself: "We do not have time for this kind of silliness .... We've got better stuff to do." And my personal favorite: "We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers." Hear that, Trump? He says you're an idiot! And most Americans agree with him.

And here's one final shot from Trump, who wants to go on record as still being an idiot: "I hope it's true so we can get on to much more important matters." (italics mine)

UPDATE, May 16: Donald Trump announced today that he will not run for president. Here is an excerpt from his announcement: "I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election. I have spent the past several months unofficially campaigning and recognize that running for public office cannot be done half heartedly. Ultimately, however, business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector."

We'll give him props for those last two sentences. Prudence and good judgement like this don't come easily when power and ambition are on the line. (And world domination.)

However, his first sentence, the one that sounds like "yeah, I could win if I wanted to," is a throwaway line. It's an unprovable assertion, the kind of smack talk that comes from a bully or a smartmouth who knows he'll never have to back it up with action. Talk is cheap, especially talk like that.

"So, Brain, what are we gonna do tomorrow night?"

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world!"