“Sophie’s choice”, which comes from the 1982 movie of the
same name, refers to an extremely difficult choice where both possibilities are
terrible. That’s the way I feel about the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
In 2016 we had a miserable choice between (1) a female Democratic
egocentric sociopath with a sleazy history, and (2) a male (nominally)
Republican egocentric sociopath with a sleazy history. The election was clearly
the Democratic sociopath’s to lose, but she managed to lose it, mostly because
in assembling her campaign team she prioritized personal loyalty over competence,
so she got a blindly loyal but thoroughly incompetent team. So incompetent and so arrogant, in fact, that
they refused to listen even to the wise advice of her politically-brilliant twice-elected
ex-president husband.
Being an egocentric sociopath, she of course blamed everyone
else, her staff, the media, the FBI, the Russians, etc., and even wrote a book
about it. It couldn’t possibly be that anything she did contributed to her loss.
Meanwhile the (nominally) Republican sociopath who won has
governed (I use the term loosely) the country (barely) adequately up until the present
coronavirus crisis. To his credit, he has tried his best to deliver on ALL his
campaign promises, even the misguided ones, which is not behavior normally seen
in professional politicians. And to be fair, Congress and the federal bureaucracy
have proven to be every bit as inept and dysfunctional as he is. I have to say
he has stood up remarkably well to the incessant and unceasing attacks by the liberal
media, the entrenched Washington bureaucracy and the unhinged left, who seem
incapable of getting over the fact that they lost the election.
And in fact the dissolution of the world order that has
prevailed since the end of World War II is not his fault, despite the hysterical
charges of his enemies. It has been slowly falling apart all through the last
three administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, ever since the collapse
of the Soviet Union deprived the West of a common enemy, and he is just continuing
the trend toward American self-focus (but perhaps at an accelerated pace)..
In the upcoming 2020 election we will apparently have a choice between
this (nominally) Republican egocentric sociopath and whomever the Democrats
nominate. The two Democratic contenders remaining are
(1) an aged and angry socialist (nominal) Democrat whose
political ideology ossified somewhere in the 1950’s, who wants America to
emulate the 1960s Swedish socialist system that the Swedes themselves abandoned
in the 1970s because it didn’t work, and who seems oblivious to the miserable
economic failures of socialist systems all across the world from the Soviet
Union to Venezuela, and
(2) an aged, folksy and rather likable (in the crazy uncle
sort of way) party Democrat whose encroaching senility is so painfully obvious
that his staff is trying to limit his exposure to live events to the shortest
times possible, and somehow put a positive spin on his unpredictable outbursts
and occasional weird behavior (like sucking his wife’s finger while she is
talking on live TV).
It looks right now like encroaching senility will win the
Democratic nomination. Normally I would predict that this election is the
incumbent Republican sociopath’s to lose, especially against encroaching
senility, but he has been so wildly erratic and ineffectual in his response to
the coronavirus pandemic that he may well lose it.
Meanwhile, this appears to be the choice we will have on
November. Those who vote blindly on
party label or party ideology will have no problems. But for independents like
myself this is another Sophie’s choice
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