The Meltdown of the American Presidential Election Process
The United States stands alone in having the world’s longest and most expensive presidential political race. In England, when a national election is officially set, the campaigning occurs within the space of a single month. Each party can only spend $33 million on each election.
The campaigning for U.S. president is officially ten months long. But in reality, candidates need to position themselves at least two years earlier with exploratory committees, campaign fundraisers and debates. And we spend an insane amount of money on each contestant. In the 2008 presidential race, the candidates spent a total of $1.7 billion.
I have no real excitement amount the 2016 race. The process has become so corrupt that I fear the type of candidates it will produce.
On the side of the Democrats, there doesn’t seem to be a race at all. The party insiders and the media have pre-decided that Hillary Clinton is their candidate. The Democrat debates are a sham; having been buried in odd weekend hours against big television events including NFL playoff games, and ahead of the busy Christmas week.
You can’t have a fair contest with Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign co-chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz as head of the Democratic National Committee. Also the Clinton campaign renting office space in the party headquarters is a clear conflict of interest.
The liberal media has been the most disgraceful in regard to Clinton. The other day I saw a headline on a news site: “Hillary Clinton Ranked Most-Admired Woman in U.S. for Record 20th Year.” What has allowed Clinton to maintain this high ranking is the media’s failure to do its job. In a real world, the press would have grilled Clinton over Benghazi, her private email server, and the cozy relationship her Clinton Foundation has with foreign governments.
For the most part, Hillary Clinton runs her campaign from inside a bunker. While she hides from people that might ask embarrassing questions, her stooges are sent out to defend her. When Donald Trump is under attack, Clinton pops her head out of the bunker, makes a quick shot at him, and then she’s back to the shelter.
On the Republican side, we don’t have the problem of a lack good candidates. The problem is that the vast majority of the media’s attention is focused on Trump. By slamming the Billionaire with negative coverage, the press has turned Trump into the ultimate alternative candidate. People are so fed up with Washington D.C. going against the will of the people, they are attracted to the guy who promises to shake-up the system.
I think Trump would make a better president than Clinton, but I’m not sure by how much. Trump never really explains how he’s going to fix America, he has no experience in politics, and he has very thin skin. My greatest doubt with Trump is moral issues. In the past, he has been for abortion, gay marriage and the Legalization the drugs. The choice here for Conservative voters: Is it better to half a Republican than no Republican at all?
There is little doubt in my mind that the best candidate for President is Ted Cruz. He supports limited government, a ban on taxpayer-funded abortions, and measures that would strengthen the Constitution. Because he stands against the corporate welfare system that pervades Washington D.C., he remains a long shot at getting the nomination.
I welcome a new president that reverses the destructive policies set by Obama, but I cannot help have a fatalistic outlook on the future of our nation. If we are indeed close to the end of the last days, the quality of political leaders will degrade with time (which has happened). My greatest hope is that the Lord Jesus will come soon. I can’t imagine a world where I’d reflect back on the current political arrangement as the “Good old days.”
“But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13).
“Because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7-8).
–Todd
Piercing the Perils of 2016
Never in my own memory has a new year appeared at its beginning to be more prophetically interesting. Never–in my thinking, at least–has one portended more perilous times, as the apostle Paul would have it. Yet I wouldn’t trade my time on this darkening planet with anyone of any other generation.
The fact that the Lord of Heaven has put me here at this strange, ominous, yet immensely fascinating time in history makes it all the more intriguing–even riveting, in terms of wanting to know what happens next. He has put you here, too, at this time when the final curtain is about to fall. He has trusted you to be an actor in at least part of the final scenes of this great, cosmic play called human history. No illustrious personages of the past–not Julius Caesar, not Napoleon Bonaparte, not Alexander the Great, not even Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan were so privileged. We are about to serve as active members of a most especially commissioned cast who populates the end-times stage.
There is about to occur a schism–a separation–of cataclysmic proportion. It will rend one part of humanity from the other. It will not be a natural catastrophe that will inflict the humanity-dividing rift. It won’t be great political upheaval in America and around the world that will cause the tearing apart of life upon the troubled planet. Those things will certainly happen. But it won’t be acts of nature or of man that will bring about the very last scene of the age. That last act will be orchestrated by the Master Director of all Creation–by the Lord God of Heaven who is the final judge of good and evil.
The excitement presaging that grand climax of the age is building. Momentous events, written on the pages of Holy Scripture, are about to come alive. The final curtain will rise when Jesus steps out on the clouds of glory and calls all believers–His Bride, the Church, to Himself. If you are a believer in Christ alone for salvation, you will catch the grand finale as you watch from the luxuriant balconies of Heaven.
We see the drama building all around us for the tumultuous scenes set to play out during the times just ahead. The year 2016 is cloaked in the fog of malevolence this world continues to wrap itself in–an increasingly anti-God, anti-Christ vesture that embraces humanism forewarned about by the psalmist.
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. (Psalms 2: 1-3)
A quick scan of the news just the past week exposes, I believe, the arrogance of those the Scriptures call “earth-dwellers” who incessantly strive to break asunder the governance God rightfully placed upon His creation called man. The reports are laden with prophetic indicators.
One such report is seen in the prideful claims by a U.S. State Department spokesman, as the boast involves the increasing call for “peace and safety,” While the situation in Syria grows intensely worse by the hour, with the Syrian people torn violently between the forces of Syrian dictator Basher Al-Assad and the hordes of ISIS murderers, Secretary of State John Kerry is lauded as bringing about a peace that just isn’t happening and will never come to pass.
State Department spokesman John Kirby wrote under the headline, “Bringing peace and security to Syria”: “Under Secretary of State John Kerry’s stewardship the United Nations passed a U.S. sponsored resolution to create a road map for Syria.” Again, the problem is that like in all of the humanistic efforts at bringing true peace, the only “peacemaker” is kept out of the peacemaking. Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, is denied at every turn by the president of the very country that speciously purports to be making the peace. (President Obama, remember, upon his very first week in office, proclaimed that the United States is not a Christian nation.)
The president of the United States of America, in effect, proclaimed regarding the governance of the God of Heaven: “Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.”
We can believe what that omniscient, omnipotent, governing authority has to say about such arrogance and willfulness. The message is chilling for the planet’s inhabitants who will be left behind when the great schism aforementioned takes place.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. (Psalms 2: 4-6)
Details of what is about to take place in 2016, of course, lurks in the murkiness of an ever-increasing pall of trepidation. But, for those who are secure within the unshakable, impenetrable shelter of their Lord and Savior, there is no reason to fear. Piercing that black uncertainty is an effulgence that lights the path to the brightest of all possible futures. It is that Blessed Hope of Titus 2: 13! –Terry
–Terry
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