By Cliff Montgomery – July 28th, 2016
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has told Democracy Now that the U.S. presidential candidates for the 2016 election – Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – offer Americans nothing but a fool’s choice for the executive office.“Well, you’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?” he declared during an discussion with reporters.
“Personally, I would prefer neither,” he added.
It’s a response that one suspects will be understood and appreciated by a large number of American citizens. If one gets past the overheated – and probably calculated – rhetoric of Donald Trump and the pretense of sage-like wisdom from Hillary Clinton (who has never been a sage and often politically unwise), one finds that the two presidential candidates are substantially similar in political ideas and beliefs.
To state it bluntly, when one gets down to matters of substance they both behave like fairly conservative Democrats.
Both make a number of vague promises to American workers, but neither appears to have any substantial plans to change a capitalist system that aggressively rewards wealth and privilege rather than work and personal character.
Trump’s stated plan of building a massive wall on the U.S./Mexican border has understandably gotten a lot of negative attention. But few journalists have pointed out that the Obama Administration’s plan of allowing the illegal sale of guns to Mexican drug cartels – in the vainglorious hope of tracking those weapons and thus finding out the identities of those making up the cartels – has proven to be every bit as poorly considered as Trump’s wall.
Hillary Clinton was the Obama Administration’s Secretary of State during its ill-fated misadventure with the Mexican cartels.
Trump now insists that the Iraq War was a mistake, and should never have occurred – but it appears that he didn’t always hold such views. Clinton voted for the Iraq War during her tenure as U.S. senator for New York. She now claims to regret that decision.
Regardless, Assange pointed out to Democracy Now that a Trump presidency probably would be “completely unpredictable” – though he added that he couldn’t, in good conscience, support either candidate.“Look, I think – you know, we know how politics works in the United States,” Assange told Democracy Now.“Whoever – whatever political party gets into government is going to merge with the bureaucracy pretty damn fast,” he added.“As a result, corporate lobbyists will move in to help control those levers. So it doesn’t make much difference in the end [which of these candidates wins the presidency],” stated Assange.
