One grim party game for election 2016 involves the question, which candidate
will be the least bloodthirsty? There is no answer to be found, just educated
guesses. Sen. Bernie Sanders and wildcard Donald Trump might be the least overtly,
specifically hawkish candidates left, but neither of them can be trusted not
to continue the warmonger status quo.
Sanders has said he will continue using drones, albeit less often than his
predecessor. And Trump is no politician, and therefore doesn’t yet have blood
on his hands. However, even if he has a nice habit of trashing the Dick
Cheneys of the world, and occasionally saying peace-friendly things, he still
also a massive ego and a desire for the US to have a military to match it. (Not
to mention his apparent hunger for torture.)
Every other candidate still in the race is likely worse. Sen. Ted Cruz has
gone over to both the neocon side, and the evangelical-pandering side and has
been rewarded with second place in the GOP race. Sen. Marco Rubio is blessedly
failing in his efforts to win the presidency, and his tripping does give you
some hope that the neocon elite may not be as powerful these days. We’re left
with creepy Gov. John Kasich, who speaks like a regular guy instead of a DC
slime. However, in that regular guy voice he suggests that we intervene in all
sorts of places, including directly
against Russia.
The less said about Sen. Hillary Clinton the better. She voted
for the Iraq war, she gave us the Libyan invasion, and she continues to be put
many Republicans to shame with her hawkishness.
That is where we stand in 2016, staring at the crop of miserable,
power-hungry people who are sure they can solve not just America’s ills, but
the world’s. They are all happy to kill at least a few individuals to further
their goals. None of them have taken a principled, purely anti-interventionist
stance, and they are not likely to.
Now, for all the panic over the election, nobody seems to be panicking
in a broad enough sense. The last three presidents have crossed so many boundaries
in terms of spying at home, and has war-making abroad. Certainly, one candidate
could make that worse, but what about what we have already? Why is our national
attention span so short?