Having Fun Fighting

IN THE ELECTION OF 2000, Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes,but was closing the gap, when the U.S. Supreme Court spoiled all the fun by giving George W. Bush the presidency, five to four, voting along partisan lines,stopping the recount. The rest, as they say, is history. Bush the second's second Iraq war, the Islamic State, et al. Blame Florida governor Jeb Bush, the Florida election commission, Ralph Nader, or the high court, your choice. Gore probably should have been president, since he led the national popular vote by half a million. To this day, Ralph insists the blame isn't his. All he did was enter the race as the Green Party candidate; the voters did the rest, and, in any case, who knows for whom those who voted for him would have voted for otherwise? The German people elected Hitler, the American people elected two versions of Bush, a pair of war criminals if ever there were. The first Bush invited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait (google: April Gladspie, scroll down to "conversation with Saddam", read it, and weep). After being double crossed, Saddam, understandably, tried to arrange for the death of G.H.W. Bush, failed to get it done, and paid dearly when his son, dubya, took office. The tragedy is that all this, including the loss of thousands of young American service personnel, could have been prevented, if only the elder Bush had dealt with the dictator honestly, and had told him, in no uncertain terms, that any hostile action against Kuwait would not be tolerated by the United States or Nations. Now, as we approach the choicee between Hillary and Trump, we are confronted with a choice between a female hawk, and a male maniac, or at least, a male who talks like a maniac. Elections have consequences, and one might long for the days of Ralph Nader, or for the emergence of a systems of American political parties under which there are more choices given. The European parliamentary system sounds tempting. many parties, many candidates, and a proportionate representation in the national legislature, based upon percentages of votes received. We could have a government in which the Green party, and the Libertarian party, and any other parties putting up candidates for the residency could be represented in Congress, forcing coalitions to form for the purpose of passing legislation. Sound messy? That's because it is, but surely, not much more messy than the system of gridlock we now have, in which we not only are no longer capable of filling seats on the supreme Court, or passing federal bu But maybe, at the root, we don't really want that. maybe we don't want to get anything done. It ma be that in the United States of Adversarial relationships, we just plain have more fun locked in perpetual internecine warfare.