Are These Our Only Choices?

It is December 2015. In about 13 months Barack Obama will leave office and a new President will take his place. That individual will inherit a nation in a state of division and crisis that we haven't seen since Vietnam. They will step into a position of being the leader of the sole true superpower. Sure China and Russia each have a solid military but compared to the U.S. they aren't even on the same page. The world is awash in violence and much of it is in part a result of American action.The U.S. is $17 trillion in debt and many times more than that when you take into account all of the promises made to retirees and others that we simply have no feasible way of paying. Even worse than the fiscal crisis we have a moral calamity that has gone past the point of no return. Illegitimate births, a swelling population that is welfare dependent, mass shootings, abortion on demand, celebrations of deviancy. All are tied to the same moral rot that has eaten away at the heart of the American experiment. When people feel that they have not received a proper level of "respect", they feel justified in shooting someone. Animals like the guy in Chicago who executed a 9 year old in retaliation are far too common. Women are increasingly having and raising children with the government in the place of a husband.

What makes this worse is the state of the electoral cycle 11 months from election day 2016. Thanks to "super delegates" Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton, aka Hillary Clinton, is essentially a lock for the Democratic nomination. Her primary qualification apparently is having a uterus. Many people seem to support her, even given her well documented lack of honesty, because "it is time" to have a woman president. I disagree. What we really need is a competent President of either gender (oops, showing my genderism there by assuming there are only two genders). Her only legitimate opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, is an avowed socialist and is supported mostly by ex-hippies and young voters who want free stuff paid for by someone not themselves. As with virtually every contemporary Democrat she is completely sold out to the abortion industry. Hidden on her campaign page (and going there makes me feel like I need to take a shower. Ugh.) under the category of "Women's rights and opportunities", down near bottom after a laundry list of bribes of additional government spending she is offering in return for votes is her oath of fealty to Planned Parenthood in a video and this blurb:

Protect women’s health and reproductive rights. Women’s personal health decisions should be made by a woman, her family, and her faith, with the counsel of her doctor. Hillary will stand up to Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, which would restrict access to critical health care services, like cancer screenings, contraception, and safe, legal abortion. She will fight to protect the Affordable Care Act, which bans insurance companies from discriminating against women and guarantees 47 million women and counting access to preventive care.

Having made her blood oath to the murderers who support Democrats, Hillary has made clear that if her path to the Presidency requires wading through the blood of babies, so be it.

In years past you could count on the Republican nominee to at least make a passing mention of being pro-life, or at least anti-abortion. This year the guy leading the rest of the pack by about 10% as of this morning, Mr. Donald Trump, doesn't even mention abortion on his "Positions" page. Oddly neither does the guy in second place, Marco Rubio. on his positions page. Third place candidate Ben Carson does have life issues front and center on his issues page as does Ted Cruz. But as for the guy sucking all the oxygen out of the room, Trump, life issues are not even on the radar and yet he gets massive support from "evangelical" voters. Even more troubling are his recent comments on battling ISIS. Trump said:

But in addition to targeting the terrorists in ISIL, their families should also be killed, he said, adding that one of the reasons why they are so effective is that they are using civilians as "shields," calling it one of the reasons the United States has been "so ineffective." 

"It's a horrible thing. They're using them as shields. But we're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families," he explained. "They, they care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.”

You have to take out their families. Pretty sure that we have a name for that, and that name is terrorism. I got that quote from Politico and since Politico has proven itself unreliable and partisan, I went ahead and listened to the interview.and you can too at the webpage of "Fox and Friends".


So a man who is supported by the "pro-life" party and is a favorite of "Christians" is advocating that we track down the family members of terrorists, family members which would presumably include women and children and who may not be even vaguely connected with terrorism, and assassinate them with the U.S. military. War has always led to collateral damage and in days gone by the U.S. has used mass bombing to cow civilians populations (Japan, Germany, Vietnam, etc.) but this goes way beyond that and apparently involves the tracking down and targeting of women and children as if that is going to dissuade someone willing to blow himself up. This targeting of families sounds like something out of a documentary about drug gangs, not the rhetoric of the leader of the free world.

Is this what we have come to as a nation? Two leading candidates a year out from the election who each in their own way are more than willing to kill innocents? Set aside issues of the national debt and gun control and regulations and the Keystone pipeline. The most central value of humanity, the sanctity of innocent life, apparently has no voice at this point in the election cycle. If you need proof that we are heading for a very dark and dangerous place as a people, this is it.