2024 and the Choice Between Choices

One of the biggest problems in US politics comes down to basic facts that we refuse to deal with straightforwardly.

To begin, people don’t like liars, yet our political leaders — and the political parties who support them — are just that. Americans see political leaders not just lying, but lying, being supported and defended by their political party as they lie, and as a result getting away with lying. This naturally infuriates people and makes them distrust one another.

Of course, there’s a massive effort to resist the lying in politics, but it tends to just make things worse. Democrats call out Republicans for lying, but they don’t do the same to fellow Democrats. That’s where we get the “they go low, we go high” nonsense from.

Likewise, Republicans call out lies from Democrats, but not from other Republicans. And the news media outlets are the same: Fox News et al routinely ignore Republican dishonesty, and “mainstream” news outlets do the same to Democratic dishonesty.

(No, the “mainstream” — i.e., left-wing — news outlets are not objective or non-partisan. Yes, they do a good job of countering Republican misbehavior, and I hope they continue to do so. And yes, they do sometimes go after Democrats. But they aren’t nearly as diligent about condemning Democrats for lies and incompetence and wrongdoing as they are with Republicans. Fox News does a terrible job of holding fellow Republicans to account, but they still do a better job of it that the left-wing news media does in holding Democrats accountable.)

In other words, the people who claim to combat the problem of lying in politics don’t do anything of the sort, they just add the problem of hypocrisy. And hypocrisy, like lying, is something that people hate and that makes them distrust one another.

And so, when it comes time to vote, what do we get? We don’t get candidates who are honest. Instead, we get candidates who are dishonestly billed as honest, or candidates who are “at least not as bad as” their dishonest, hypocritical opponent. Over and over, we’re told that the upcoming election is “the most important election” of our lifetimes — just like all the previous ones allegedly were. And we’re told that one of the two main candidates — the Democrat or the Republican — represents an existential threat to America and democracy, and so we have to hold our noses and vote for the other one because they’re at least better than ushering in the Apocalypse by letting the “worse” one win.

For 2024, that means we’re going to have a contest between the same dishonest, untrustworthy parties as we always do — Democrats and Republicans — and perhaps even the exact same dishonest, untrustworthy presidential candidates we had in 2020: Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Biden and Trump are each disgusting.

Look at Trump:

Trump has a litany of “grab them by the pussy” sexual assault accusations against him, and he’s probably a serial rapist.

Trump has lied about so many things, it could well be easier to list the things he hasn’t lied about.

He’s being indicted for a number crimes related to ridiculously foolish behavior such as paying hush money to cover up an affair, mishandling government documents, as well as trying to “find votes” and other ways to tilt the 2020 election in his favor.

Certainly, there have been some unfounded accusations against Trump — for example, collaborating with Russia — though even there, it seems like his best defense is to acknowledge that he’s just too reckless and incompetent to be guilty.

There’s more about Trump that’s just horribly wrong, but you get the point.

And then look at Biden:

Biden also has a long list of accusations from women that he touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, in at least one case to the point of assault.

Biden has often claimed that, when he was a a senator in the 1970s, he was arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela. This never happened. He’s also said he was arrested while marching in the civil rights movement, which also didn’t happen.

And he’s made a lot of claims about his education — graduating in the top half of his class, earning three degrees, getting a full scholarship — that aren’t true.

And, of course, Biden was perhaps the “most influential” vice president we’ve had, serving in the Obama administration, which I’ve pointed out elsewhere was riddled with dishonesty that Biden evidently never bothered to criticize.

Like with Trump, there’s plenty more about Biden that merits condemnation, but there’s only so many hours in the day.

This is what we get to choose between in 2024, in all likelihood.

I know that some people — many of them Democrats or Republicans — will say that, if you look closely, you’ll see that one of these candidates is not as bad the other, and is therefore the one we should vote for.

There’s two problems with this. First, hardly anyone ever really looks closely at both the Democratic and Republican candidates. Instead, they look closely at the candidate from the party they don’t like, ferreting out every last lie and indiscretion, while mostly ignoring all the same misbehaviors of the other one. They then arrive at the manufactured conclusion that we should vote for the candidate from the party they like.

Nope, not falling for it.

Second, I suppose that, if you looked closely enough at heavy smoking and heavy drinking, you could figure out which one is actually worse for your health. But that wouldn’t be a basis for choosing one of them over the other, because they’re both bad for your health to the point that your best course of action is to reject them both.

The same goes for Biden and Trump, Democrats and Republicans: whichever one is not quite as bad is still not good enough. The better call is to vote for someone or something that has a better relationship with truth than any of them (which shouldn’t be difficult).

The two dominant parties are full of liars and hypocrites. If Joe Biden or Barack Obama had done the things that Donald Trump has done, Republicans and Fox News and other right-wing news outlets would be howling in outrage about it. Likewise, if Donald Trump had done the things Joe Biden or Barack Obama has done, Democrats and the “mainstream” news media outlets would never let us hear the end of it. But our so-called leaders and our so-called journalists are utterly committed to dishonesty and partisan hypocrisy.

We need to stop supporting them. We need to break this cycle. We need to stop confining our votes to whichever of the two main candidates who we’re told is marginally better than the Apocalypse.

We need to choose between choices. We can limit ourselves to picking between heavy drinking and heavy smoking, hoping we select the one that’s not quite so bad. Or we can reject them both, and open up the possibility of choosing something that’s actually good for our health.

Don’t vote Democrat. Don’t vote Republican. No more choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Only vote for people who are honest.

And if you can’t find an honest candidate for public office, write in the word “honesty” on your ballot; that way, people will know that you took the time to vote, and that you didn’t find any of the existing candidates to be honest enough to be worth voting for.

That’s the only way to send the message to politicians and political journalists and we’re fed up with dishonesty. You won’t get a choice for honesty until you announce that you’re rejecting the dishonest choices.

No, it might not fix everything in American politics, but it’s the only way start to build trust and get rid of the hatred.