My Thoughts on the U.S. Primaries
Hi, this is an experiment. I bought myself a selfie stick with a tripod and, just to vary things a bit, I'm going to shoot some videos both inside the house and possibly again outside hoping that this works. In the winter as I've said before, largely because my wife likes to come down here because it's sunny and stuff, we come down here for four months of the year. We like coming down here. We like coming to California to the States. The people here are very friendly. The community where we live, our neighbors are very helpful. We love it.
And, of course, being down here I've been watching on TV the various debates of the presidential hopefuls, at least the people who are involved in both the Republican Primary and the Democratic Party primary, so I want to comment a little bit. I do, on occasion, make the sort of political video, so what are my thoughts on these various candidates. Let's start with the democrats because there are only two of them. I think that Bernie Sanders is very irresponsible and very simplistic. I think it would be a very bad thing if he were voted in as President of the United States. The reason I say that is because to him everything is the fault of Wall Street, everything is the fault of big business, if only we strengthened the unions, but if you really listen to what he's saying there's so much inconsistency. I watched him the other night and he was saying everyone in the States should have access to a university education free of charge. Maybe, maybe, but if you listen to him he basically has nothing but scorn for factory jobs. He said people shouldn't have to work in a factory or something to the effect of it's not the greatest job in the world. On two or three occasions, he implied that a factory job is not a great job and therefore the solution is that everybody should get a university education and then they wouldn't work in factories. Well, the fact of the matter is that (A) probably only 30 or 40% of jobs require a university education. Even though parents would all like their kids to go to university, a lot of what kids do at university is largely a waste of time. There have been studies to show that they don't improve their ability to communicate, to use the language, they really don't learn an awful lot, especially in the humanities, which is a large part of why people go to to university. I think that universities should be heavily subsidized, but I don't think they should be free of charge and I don't think it's a panacea. I've worked not as a factory worker, but I've spent time working in factories and many people actually enjoy those jobs because that is their social nexus. That's where they meet people. They do things that are meaningful. They become very expert in certain jobs and that becomes their life. They're just as proud of that as he is of being a politician. So that's insofar as Sanders. I didn't appreciate his whole approach to that and his somewhat demagogic approach to ‘social justice', as he calls it. With Hillary, again, I'm against this whole dynastic approach. Bill Clinton was there, so now we're going to get Hillary Clinton. Even in terms of her final comments, she twice, I think, made reference to the LGBT community. I have nothing against the LGBT community, but that's not an awful lot of people. It might be a bit of a litmus test in terms of the tolerance of a society, but she seemed to emphasize her support for certain interest groups – the unions, the LGBT community and so forth. I felt that that again was unnecessarily sort of narrowing her appeal and made me feel a little bit suspicious of just how much of a person with empathy for all different points of view she is.
Moving on to the Republicans in no particular order…
Ben Carson, I think it's absolutely extraordinary. I mean he says things that are completely off the wall. He ended his comments the other night by quoting Stalin, ascribing to him a comment that Stalin never made. So I don't take him very seriously. Rubio in his final comment said everything is bad. We're losing our jobs, wrong is right, right is wrong, which is all unnecessarily alarmist. Then he said that we need to recognize that the rights we enjoy in the Constitution don't come from the President, they come from our Creator. Well, first of all, I haven't heard people say that the rights in the American Constitution come from the President. That's a bit of a straw man. On the other hand, for someone who wants to be President of the United States, to me as a Canadian to suggest that the laws or the rights that Americans enjoy they enjoy because of the Creator, that's like Sharia law. That's like laws are created by God and it's not people who make laws. My belief is all of our rights and laws are basically arrangements that we agree upon as a society. This is how we want to lead our lives, this is what we obligate people to do and this is what we allow people to do because we think this is a nice way to organize society. It's not something that is natural law, God-given law. The only thing natural is our general inclination to like reciprocity and I think there's a bunch of reasons why. Reciprocity makes a lot of sense, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Jeb Bush brought his brother out the other day, I mean the more I see his brother involved in supporting Jeb Bush… Jeb Bush seems to also be involved in this petty squabbling between him, Ted Cruz, Trump and so forth. I would not vote for Jeb Bush (A) because he would be the third Bush member to be president. Bear in mind I'm not American so I have no right to vote, I'm only commenting as a foreign observer and not impressed with Bush. Cruz, he just comes across to me as being very petty and sort of snipping back and forth. There's nothing statesman-like about the man. He doesn't represent any sense of ‘boy, I would really like him as a leader,' at least that's how I react to him. I haven't really heard much, other than he's going to be tough on immigration, tough on that, tough on this. To me, he doesn't stand for anything, so I wouldn't vote for him. Trump is very popular, I can't understand it. I think he is the most irresponsible of all those people. He never misses an opportunity to burn bridges, to aggravate people. A couple recent examples, the Pope makes a comment about Trump saying he's not a Christian. To my mind the Pope shouldn't make that comment, he has no right to interfere in the electoral process in the United States. I'm not Catholic, but I think the Pope wanders a lot into political areas where he doesn't belong. That's a whole other issue. He has many positive attributes and he is the leader of 50% of all the Catholics in the world. Trump, though, could have easily said it's unfortunate he said that, but don't inflame the situation. Similarly, I saw him today on a video clip saying that people should boycott Apple because Apple won't cooperate with the FBI on this issue of giving access to the iPhone used by terrorists. In fact, if you read about it the situation is quite complicated. There are very good reasons for Apple to refuse the FBI access to the phone, there may be other reasons why they should, but it's complicated. It's not something that should be decided by someone who aspires to be president whipping people up by saying, well, we'll boycott Apple. What's boycotting Apple? In other words, we will use strong-arm methods to achieve what we want. We will bully Apple basically is what he's saying. That's kind of the approach he takes to trade relations. The United States exists because it has relations with other countries, China, Japan, Mexico, and to just constantly say these people are ‘ripping us off', as he says. I keep on expecting to hear that Canada is ripping them off, too. It's so unnecessarily inflammatory and I don't see the purpose. He's promising to do things that he won't be able to do. At the very least, he won't be able to do them by himself and if he's burning bridges with everyone else who is going to do them with. How is he going to sit down with Mexico and arrive at some deal that's going to help control the flow of immigrants? Similarly, with this whole Muslim thing, we'll ban all Muslims or whatever he said until they're all checked. There are one and a half billion Muslims in the world, they're not going to go away. There are people in the Muslim world who say we have to look at the Koran and we have to look at the historical context in which certain things were written and maybe update ourselves in terms of what makes sense today, today when there are so many Muslims living amongst non-Muslims. So there are those people and I think it makes much more sense to work with those kinds of Muslims so that the Muslim world doesn't consider the Western world as their enemy. Now, that might be unrealistic, but I also think it's unrealistic to make all those people your enemy. Who did I leave out? Kasich, I am very impressed with Governor Kasich. He has a presence. He has empathy with people. For example, every time I've heard him speak he's talked about people with mental illness. There are a lot more people with mental illness, I believe, in the United States. The numbers are larger than say the LGBT community. So if we hear Hillary always talking about the LGBT community, I'm much more impressed with Kasich who talks about the mentally ill. They don't lobby and have parades, they aren't the squeaky wheel, but there are a large number of them, there are serious problems and it is related to the very high incarceration rate in the United States, drug addiction, crime and so many other things. So I'm very impressed with the degree of empathy, even though I'm not a religious person. He bases how he conducts himself, including in his public persona, on his personal beliefs, but he doesn't force these believes on others. So if I were voting in the United States, I would vote for Kasich. He is the only one of all those people who impresses me.
I'm not saying that because in Canadian somehow we have better politicians. I'm not at all impressed with our new Prime Minister (that could be a whole separate rant) and I didn't like our previous Prime Minister either. I just thought it would be fun to throw some comments out there about the primary race in the United States because it's quite topical. So I look forward to being bombarded by negative comments from my listeners.
Thank you for listening, bye for now.
