The salacious sex standard

The issues and challenges affecting the United States in its presidential derby that the country and the rest of the relatively lesser Free World has somewhat adopted as the model of the ideal democracy and whose society many have subconsciously held as the model to emulate, at least in its perfect, upstanding, squeaky clean and antiseptic Hollywood Donna Reed Show state, have all mostly come to head in the last few weeks. Amidst the most contentious US presidential campaigns in recent history, serious cracks have broken through the surface, with the most noxious slime seeping out. Cracks we’ve long seen in our own facsimile of democracy.

There are a good number of reasons for concern. It is not just one that should alarm the Americans but anyone on both sides of the Mississippi experimenting with democracy, as has our relatively younger impressionable democratic republic.

One of the foremost reasons for concern, rearing its ugly head in the last couple of days, is the realization that genetic and unadulterated partisan politics and media bias, both by far unethical as prosecuted in a presidential campaign, now rule and prevail over reason.

One is over-encompassing and is a generally held view where exceptions are rare and far between. Politicians are indeed scum. Their reputations are well-deserved and attributable solely to their own antics. The current composition of at least two major branches of government is proof. If in doubt simply review any congressional inquiry, whether at the Senate or the House of Representatives, the former when deliberating the widespread and pandemic extrajudicial killings under the anti-illegal drugs program of the current administration, and the latter on the vicious and nauseating demolition job undertaken against a standing senator of the Republic.

Media bias is relatively limited compared to the political epidemic but as it can rear its ugly head among major general circulation broadsheets and in the most popular broadcast media channels, despite limited origins their effects are as encompassing as political dirt dished out by politicians.

Simply analyze the banner headlines and the six o’clock news that caters to the widest media markets. Separately, genetic politics and media bias are disgusting enough. Together they reflect our worst.

In the land of milk and honey from where we copied partisan politics and all its attendant stink, necessary issues and the necessary debates that are needed to examine these concerns and present solutions from both sides are all but diluted by both politics and media bias. Analyze the current American presidential campaign. Where salacious sex scoops and the morality standards the self-righteous quickly espoused have now replaced much of the principal criteria for the presidency, allow us to quickly go through a list of the compelling issues that have been piled upon, now effectively lost and buried under an avalanche of negative passion directed against one candidate.

Let us start from a generalized perspective. From both the Republican arena and the Democratic, there has been a latent wave of anti-establishment passion and both have names. For the Republicans it is property mogul Donald Trump. For the Democrats, socialist Bernard Sanders. Trump had bested at least three handfuls of contenders who the public had seen generally as representative of the establishment that had for too long inflicted itself on the American economy producing the kind of civil strife and profound negativity not seen since the tumultuous sixties. Sanders, on the other hand, had presented a credible challenge that attracted such huge crowds of anti-establishment socialists that it had taken underhanded means and tactics just to pull the rug from under him.

Now let us go through a litany of burning issues subsumed by one candidate’s smear tactic to refocus from issues that concern the public welfare to those that myopically concern so-called fitness, temperament and sexual proclivity. Buried beneath the resultant sex standard are issues like abortion, Roe v Wade, taxation, border security, employment and international trade. Also buried quite conveniently are issues like the criminality of destroying vital evidence and public documents, criminal enrichment and the bargaining away of presidential influence for cash donations.

The Americans have forgotten that their first president, himself a founding father and one of their greatest was involved in a sex scandal where he was supposed to have fathered an illegitimate child from a colored slave. And yet such issues should be deemed irrelevant, as George Washington may have been one of the greatest American presidents.

The iconic John Fitzgerald Kennedy, together with his father Ambassador Joseph Sr. and brothers Attorney General Robert Francis and Senator Edward were all involved in embarrassing extra-marital sex scandals, including two that ended in tragic deaths, and yet all had carved respectable, if not exemplary, reputations in political governance and leadership.

No one has forgotten the rape charges slapped against Bill Clinton. But, likewise, no one can forget that he was also a very competent president.

Unfortunately, as November 8 looms closer, partisan politics and media bias have focused on scandals thus sideswiping concerns that might fully benefit the greater American public.