I Feel A Storm Brewing

You know that feeling that some of us get in our joints before a weather change?  That uneasy, totally non-scientific, feeling that some folks get before a storm?  Yeah, that one.  I'm feeling something, not in the weather above my head, but in the politics of this nation.  There's a storm a'brewing.

Hillary is supposed to complain about the hacks to her emails.  (The irony is strong in this one.)  She thinks that there is some conspiracy between Donald Trump and Vlad Putin to sink her campaign.

Some of the more vocal Trump supporters have lost all faith in the system we use.  A tiny minority is even suggesting a coup if Hillary is elected. To be fair, Trump himself has decried the call for violence after the election.

Americans on both sides are losing faith in the way we elect a president.

It doesn't help that this is the weirdest election season I've ever seen or followed.  The Republican candidate is a loose cannon.  The Democratic nominee is demonstrably criminal.  They're both bad for America, but in starkly different ways.  We're going through a national revulsion on a huge scale.

The Obama presidency has been horrible for America, unless you are one of the political or corpoarte elite, you're probably worse off than you were eight years ago.  His legacy is a shambles, a list of failure on both the domestic side and the foreign side.  Racial relations have slid back forty years, and those of us who remember the race riots of the '60s are forced to re-live them.

For the first time in my lifetime, I don't trust the Supreme Court.  Regular readers know my contempt for Justice Roberts.  Both the IRS nd the FBI have been weaponized to serve the current political masters.  In the past eight years we've made some progress in expanding freedom, but in many ways, freedom has been constricted as well.  New regulations are strangling small business and the overall strength of the government has grown to the point where many find it better to close their doors than continue to provide services that Americans need.

The divide between rural and urban Americans is growing.

America needs a reset, and it needs it quickly.  This election may be a tipping point.  I pray that it is decided at the voting booth.  I also pray that whatever the outcome, the winner is mindful that fully half the electorate is against him or her and that the loser is magnanimous enough to go quietly away.

America needs a unifying president, and I don't see either one of these nominees as capable of unifying the country.