2016 election full of hypocrisy

By all possible accounts, the 2016 presidential elections have been the most watched, talked about and controversial in United States political history. Numerically its debates have been the most watched televised face offs since their introduction decades ago. Observers saw a staggering number of Republicans, over one dozen, head through a vicious cycle of primaries, leaving the least qualified and least expected “candidate” standing, Donald Trump.

On the Democrats side, even though there were a few stragglers at the beginning, it was fairly well understood that the contest would come down to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. For much of the early primaries and caucuses, it remained fairly close up until the beginning of the summer, with Clinton pulling ahead sizably and Sanders going on the suspend his campaign, ultimately endorsing Clinton, to the chagrin of many of his supporters.

Recently however, as emails from former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz were released from Wiki Leaks, it became clear amongst other things that the intent of the DNC had been to sabotage Sanders from the beginning, as well as also detailing plans to attract Latino voters, likening them to grocery store customers, along with other patronizing remarks.

With such heated and already controversial beginnings, there really was no way the 2016 elections could have gotten any less repugnant after the primaries had ended, and Americans had chosen for themselves the two most disliked candidates in this nation’s history, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. With a winning combination such as these two brilliant individuals, could anyone expect nothing less than the most hypocritical presidential race ever to be a blight upon the freedom of humanity? Hopefully not, because that’s exactly what they’ve got.

For starters, the bombastic Donald Trump has never held the same political views for any longer than a year or two, similar to a free agent in sports, going wherever the money happens to be at that particular time. He now tells evangelical Christians that he has always been a conservative, he even knows one whole Bible verse… and hopes they don’t know that in the last two election cycles he has donated money to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and that up until this year he was a very vocal proponent of abortion.

Trump claims that trading with other countries is a terrible scourge upon the working class, while knowing full well no American would ever make 15 cent “Make America Great Again,” hats as a career, which is precisely why he has them made in China. Because nothing would make America great again like bringing back terrible and tedious jobs that were shipped out because they were terrible and tedious.

Immigration has been one of Trump’s most vocal issues, calling for the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants and the building of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The stupidity and economic disasters this would bring aside, Trump has never seemed to have a problem with illegal immigrants as long as they are working on his own buildings. Also, for a guy who claims to oppose the Iraq War, a view he likely found on Wikipedia, his policy proposal to drone strike the families of suspected Islamic terrorists, key word suspected, is absolutely contradictory to the notion that regime change has only further endangered the United States.

Just as neither Republicans nor Democrats have a monopoly on stupid ideas and lust to control our lives, Trump does not hold the lone dishonorable seat of hypocrisy in this election. Hillary Clinton’s own hypocritical ways go back even longer than Trump’s and run blatantly contrary to what she has built her campaign on.

Just as one would expect, since not supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 made you a racist, not supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 makes you a sexist.. even though she ran against him in 2008. Clinton has spent much of her time campaigning on the possibility of becoming the first female president of the United States, and as such often brags of the support she will bring for women and victims of sexual assault in this country. Ironically enough, as a lawyer in 1975 she actually defended and got off with a minimal senetence the rapist of a young girl, later being recorded saying with a laugh, “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” This was only several years after she was removed from the Congressional investigative committee on the Watergate Scandal for gross negligence and dishonesty.

Clinton’s own hypocrisy regarding her apparent support for women’s rights as well as the LGBT community only worsens when one looks at the bulk of her funding relative to the Clinton Foundation. Saudi Arabia, where women can be forced to marry their rapists or executed, and where homosexuality is punishable by lashing then stoning, has donated upwards of 25 million dollars to the Foundation, while also conveniently having multibillion dollar weapons deals signed off by the then Clinton State Department. One would think that if women and gays were worth more than just votes to Clinton she would refuse funds from such tainted sources and use her international influence to combat such grave abuses of human rights.

Foreign policy wise, Clinton like Trump proves a hypocrite once more. After having voted for the Iraq War in 2003, Clinton has said if put in a similar situation again she would vote no, however facts seem to say otherwise, as she has had several opportunities since to prove herself a friend of peace. Clinton lead the push to enforce a NATO no fly zone over Libya as well as the arming of rebel groups battling government forces there, leading to the ouster of Gadhafi and the creation of yet another power vacuum to be filled by radical terrorist groups, first the Libyan Dawn and not the Islamic State.

Following this, she supported President Obama’s efforts to do the same in Syria, and during her time in the State Department and even after regularly has advocated for increased weapons transfers to “moderate rebels,” or in other words groups that give the weapons to ISIS after saying they won’t. All in all, Clinton as with Trump provides America with just another lesser of two evils situation that will only lead to more wars and more bombs being dropped in the name of “spreading democracy.”

Clinton’s last piece of hypocrisy that she so adamantly professes has been her stance that she will take on the big banks and make Wall Street pay, she never actually mentions the Federal Reserve that funds both the former and the latter. Anyways, for someone who says she can’t be bribed and wants to stand strong against corporate influence, one would think she wouldn’t be too popular with such institutions. Well, think again! Along with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches at with various Wall Street firms, several of Clinton’s top campaign donors and donors to the Foundation are Goldman Sachs, Citi Group, Chase, JP Morgan and Barclays Capital, all of which have one relation or another to the “too big to fail” banks that Clinton supported bailing out. All in all, it doesn’t appear that she really is this saint untainted by greed and coming to rescue the little guy from the big bad banks.

All things considered, both of America’s choices are just as hypocritical as the other, perhaps only in different areas. But could we expect anything less? After a decade of wars, media dedicated to ratings as opposed to truth and a president and congress who never once bother to follow their own rules, it is poetically fitting that we reap what we have sown.