Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Leadership Qualifications: Zero, Absent

Donald Trump, co-owner of Miss Universe, has been widely accused of sexism
Getty Images

"You know, it doesn't really matter what [they] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass."
"There are basically three types of women and reactions. One is the good woman who very much loves her future husband, solely for himself, but refuses to sign the agreement on principle. I fully understand this, but the man should take a pass anyway and find someone else. The other is the calculating woman who refuses to sign the prenuptial agreement because she is expecting to take advantage of the poor, unsuspecting sucker she’s got in her grasp. There is also the woman who will openly and quickly sign a prenuptial agreement in order to make a quick hit and take the money given to her."
"If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her."
"Rosie O'Donnell is disgusting, both inside and out. If you take a look at her, she's a slob. How does she even get on television? If I were running The View, I'd fire Rosie. I'd look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers and say, 'Rosie, you're fired.'
"We're all a little chubby but Rosie's just worse than most of us. But it's not the chubbiness - Rosie is a very unattractive person, both inside and out."
"I really understand beauty. And I will tell you, she's [Angeline Joly] not - I do own Miss Universe. I do own Miss USA. I mean I own a lot of different things. I do understand beauty, and she's not." 
"Can you imagine that [Carly Fiorina], the face of our next next president? I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"
"I was going to hit her [Hillary Clinton] with her husband's women and I decided I shouldn't do it because her daughter was in the room,"
"I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and f--- her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily... I moved on her like a b----, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married."
Donald Trump, presumptive Republican presidential candidate

All the hallmarks of a degraded mindset are there in living colour. The assertions keep pouring out of this man's mouth like a tap on steroids, fixated on himself as the living arbiter of taste, glamour and physical beauty, he exudes the rank essence of misogyny, as a man who believes he can buy anyone at any time, that nothing is beyond his gasp, even the presidency of the United States of America. The most incredible thing of all is that he may be right. As things stand now, it appears that the presidency is up for grabs by the highest bidder.

If there existed, at any point during the months leading up to the November 9 election, anyone representing either of the leading two parties who exuded leadership qualities, an individual whose background and political involvement gave credit to them as a serious contender, qualified to lead, in whom most Americans could place their trust with the confidence that they would be well served, that person did not appear to galvanize a movement to replace the incumbent with a president the country could be proud of.

Bernie Sanders portraying himself as a Democrat came closest to the goal, not necessarily of proving to the electorate at large that he was capable of answering to the monumental demands of administering the affairs of a great nation, but of appealing to the social conscience of soft democracy verging on socialism, and capturing the loyalty of idealistic youth and a great swath of the comfortable middle class for whom Hillary Clinton's candidacy was a farce. Yet, as flawed and bilious-inducing is her candidacy, Trump's is an absolute disaster.

Clinton and Trump are both crass, hypocritical and unambiguously unfit to serve. And it's hard to argue for either candidate as potentially capable of leading the United States with distinction and unerring statescraft, to bring together disparate parts of the country in a unified whole to work out its problems and satisfy as best as possible the social, civic, security and infrastructure needs of a great country. Yet to imagine that any American could, in good conscience vote for Donald Trump is to imagine a hilarious send-up of a nasty bit of goods, a caricature of failure posing as success.

This leadership campaign has been an exercise in bleak comparisons between the halt leading the blind with an incredulous world looking on in bewilderment, shouting in panic "Is this all there is?!"

Witness to history: lurching to the American presidency 2016 -- 2020

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