Are we crazy??!!!

[Texaschik]

Hello my friends from across the pond :) I don't know how many of you follow US politics, but what are your thoughts on the impending presidential election here? Do y'all think it's crazy that Donald Trump got the republican nomination? Is it just as crazy that Hillary Clinton got the democratic nomination? What are your thoughts?

[supersoftcuddlytoys]

SpecialAgentFreyPie I know, the Honduras business was barely reported in this country and completely down the memory hole now. Hillary at her best. it is incredibly disturbing and heart breaking isn't it?

On Channel 4 news last night they were bending over backwards to spin the "she's a woman y'know and this should be all that matters" line. As awful as Trump is, at least he doesn't have that amount of blood on his hands.

[toadgirl]

One is facing charges for perjury and the other for fraud!!!

Well, they certainly sound eminently qualified for their work as politicians

[FarAwayHills]

Its crazy that in the supposed greatest country on earth the best the country has to offer for leader of the free world is either Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton. It's like a reality show gone wrong.

Mind you, almost as bad here with Corbyn, Boris and Leadsom.

[supersoftcuddlytoys]

Well put toadgirl

At least they're not from the same dynasty. Like Clintons & Bushs . And we're supposed to have an elite class system !

[SalemsLott]

No wonder 20% of the electorate don't know who to vote for

[lljkk]

I'm not your friend but I am across the pond.
I will confidently use my vote for Hillary.

[Hariasa]

I've watched both politicians as I'm moving to the US soon.

I'll have no vote of course but if I did I'd vote for Clinton.

[KittyKrap]

I have family over there, one is a strict vegetarian who rescues animals..she's voting Trump and puts up FB posts daily slagging off Hilary. It could have caused a huge family fall out as another family member here - who LOVES Corbyn asked her who she's voting for. She didn't reply to him.

There seem to be quite a lot of Americans on my feed supporting Trump. A lot more than I expected.

I just look at cat videos.

[Longlost10]

And she's not pleasant to look at to boot haha

[Longlost10]

don't know anything about american politics, but when I've heard Trump speak I have been shocked at his ignorance, arrogance and transparently very low IQ. I don't understand how someone like that has ended up with people listening to him and clapping and apparently agreeing, and taking him seriously.

Do you know that "Trump" means "fart" here?

[Hariasa]

Texaschik I presume that you aren't planing to vote for Trump on the basis of his looks...

[ihatethecold]

And she's not pleasant to look at to boot haha

You really lost an argument coming out with that statement!!

[mathanxiety]

Hillary's liability is her terrible performance as Secretary of State. I'm not talking about Benghazi. The State Department ram amok under her stewardship, fomenting revolution and coups in the middle east and Ukraine, and then left the end result to the yokels. Result: civil war in Syria, Egypt for a while in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, now controlled by the Army, Libya in shambles, with ISIS gaining a firm foothold, Ukraine in a state of civil war, with extreme right wing groups of mercenaries and militias getting a taste of armed action.

This to me is the scariest part of living in the US, as a woman and as a mother of both daughters and a son:
And she's not pleasant to look at to boot haha
Because it says that a woman who sent to Wellesley and then Yale Law can still be reminded of 'her place' and what women should really be judged on.

It's sadly not an isolated comment, or one that came from a cultural vacuum. The culture that this comment arises out of is the culture that makes Trump appealing to those who support him.

My two oldest DDs have claimed their Irish passports. One is seriously thinking of leaving for Europe if Trump wins. DD(18) will apply for her passport soon and will have that option when she graduates. She has decided to study something that would be portable to Europe.

[PitilessYank]

What about Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate? She's terrific.

[PitilessYank]

Trump- I love that he has been like a middle finger stuck up at the Republican establishment, but his ideas and plans are truly terrible. His success makes Americans look like idiots.

Clinton-Not lefty enough, crooked, and many of her beliefs seem expedient, rather than deeply held.

Johnson-hilarious, looks great in bike shorts, but 50% of what he says is nutty.

Stein-great candidate, great party (Green), relatively unknown.

[NotCitrus]

Trump is like Farage - he's persuaded people that he's not the Establishment and will "make the USA great again". No explanation of what that means, but family members with no safe drinking water or medical insurance or job security are saying "90 million unemployed, 100 million on food stamps, cops getting killed daily - hell yeah we need change!" These are decent but desperate people.

[Globetrotter100]

Johnson-hilarious, looks great in bike shorts, but 50% of what he says is nutty.

I personally agree with almost 100% of what he says (he's easily got the most successful blemish-free track record as a politician compared to Clinton and Trump)...so that alongside the rest of your rounding endorsement makes him a standout winner!

I understood that many people are considering his party much more seriously this time round (X3 expected share compared to last federal election) simply because both Clinton and Trump make them gag. Good luck America!

[supersoftcuddlytoys]

Indeed mathanxiety Ukraine was another naked putsch, backed by America, The EU / Germany.

[IPityThePontipines]

How on earth was the civil war in Syria Clinton's fault? I take it the people of Deraa were secretly all US stooges?!

Likewise, the removal of Mubarak from power was not US-backed, but the return to power of the Egyptian military, as fronted by Sisi, certainly was.

I'd also be intrigued to hear alternative views of what Libya would be like now without Western intervention, probably worse than Syria. No regime lasts forever, they all fall in the end, so the (disgusting) idea of keeping a populace under permanent dictatorship "for their own good" isn't an indefinite one anyway.

Some people on here have a very skewed view on world events.

[mathanxiety]

www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/middle-east-egypt-us-policy/409537/ A good discussion of American influence on events, suggesting American failure to engage properly and therefore to control outcomes resulted in outcomes that are not satisfactory except to the State Department.

In the case of Egypt, the US propped up Mubarak's dictatorship, then got taken by surprise by the 'Arab Spring' despite all its rhetoric about democracy in Iraq and the illegitimacy of rule by vicious and corrupt dictators, then failed to stop the Army from intervening in the democratic process because that process had thrown the Muslim Brotherhood into power, and now is left with a situation where they are on the back of the tiger.

In the process they showed themselves willing to dump their friends (Mubarak) and inability to stop being led by the nose (by the Army), and gave tacit support to a brazen massacre of Morsi supporters. They showed themselves willing to continue to pump money into keeping Egyptian institutions afloat (the armed forces) even when no democratic end is served in doing so. (They propped up Mubarak after all.)

Similarly in Syria, the stirrings of opposition to Assad were encouraged, but unlike Libya (lesson learned perhaps) no physical intervention happened. The opposition factions were left to deal with Assad on their own. The vacuum where American leadership and engagement should have been was quickly filled by ISIS. The US should have picked a side and should have backed it fully. Russia picked a side and backed it to what may have been a decisive point, perhaps understanding that when Assad wins he will owe them big time.

The main issue is that they seek to outsource the performance of revolution. They did this in Ukraine too, using right wingers who only very recently abandoned their openly Nazi logo (Svoboda) and other really unsavoury groups to drive a democratically elected president out of office. There was a time when they only did this sort of thing in Central and South America. Back in the day they used to stick around and make sure their blatant disrespect for other states' sovereignty and the democratically expressed will of the people resulted in stable (even if brutal) regimes. Now with the hands off policy, the US encourages revolution/democracy, blah blah, but leaves the details to the groups least likely to want democracy.

Turkey has slid closer to dictatorship too, but the US will not put pressure on it to maintain progress towards meeting EU association and ultimately membership requirements.

This is called 'Leading from behind'.

Libya is in fact worse than Syria right now, and has been for many years.
Amnesty International reported in 2014 - “Armed groups and militias are running amok, launching indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and committing widespread abuses, including war crimes, with complete impunity.” No government has been able to establish even a pretence of governing without backing from militias. The turmoil has fueled the migration crisis as there is no law and order there and criminal gangs and militias are all in on the business.

[FindingRedShoes]

And she's not pleasant to look at to boot haha

Oh dear.

I don't think she is perfect. But she is the only realistic option to beat Trump. The few people in the US that I know are taking the view that that alone is good enough reason to vote for her.

But since you seem to want to vote on the basis of appearance, I can't help but point out that Trump isn't exactly a looker.

[mathanxiety]

And the US continues to prop up the house of Saud.

[annandale]

Trump is an astonishing candidate for the USA to have ended up with. I don't actually think he would be so terrible as President as the whole system is designed so that very little can be changed - brakes of a Rolls Royce, engine of a lawn mower. He'd be more worrying as the governor of a major state IMO.

Hillary Clinton is no more fraudulent than many past candidates. I would certainly vote for her on the 'for fuck's sake will someone organised do the job already' ticket. She was a Goldwater Girl so it's probably best to think of her as a Reagan Democrat or Rockefeller Republican.

[IPityThePontipines]

Math - Thanks for the link, but I don't need the Internet to tell me about Syria. I must have missed the part where Libya was the worst refugee crisis since WW2. Also the part where the Libyan government is aerially bombarding it's own civilians. Oh wait, that's because that's happening in Syria.

And again, while US action or inaction in Syria may be a point of discussion, citing US support for "stirrings of opposition" ignores what actually happened, on the ground with the Syrian people and their treatment by the Syrian regime, actions which cannot be blamed on Clinton.

Likewise, you seem to assume that IS sprung fully formed out of nowhere, when it is widely known that the Assad regime encouraged their growth as a distraction.

As for the Ukraine. Remind me, who backed the militia which shot a passenger plane out of the sky? And where did they get that weaponry from?

[MitzyLeFrouf]

Speaking of Ukraine did anyone watch the ABC interview today? Trump said there was no way Putin was going to invade Ukraine.....

The man has no grasp of world affairs on even the most basic and elementary level!