PUTNEY — It's been amazing to watch how rigged and undemocratic the presidential debates have been.
I was surprised to finally see CNN allow anyone else to speak besides Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the last debate. And the NBC debates could not have been a more blatant demonstration of censorship, with lesser-known candidates relegated to the edges of the stage and given almost no questions, so that they were forced to yell and interrupt in order to have just a few moments of speaking time.
And neither of these networks seems to know what the president does, which is directing foreign policy, acting as commander-in-chief, and enforcing the laws that are written on Capitol Hill.
No one is being asked how they would leash or unleash our military or how many more countries we might crush with economic sanctions. Instead, we are being treated to a long litany of things that representatives and senators have not been able to accomplish on Capitol Hill, no matter how long they might have been there, like Bernie and Biden.
So how will they accomplish all their domestic initiatives as president? By executive order? Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are engaged in a 24/7 forever civil war that has involved, over the last three years, a corrupt FBI, false intelligence, spying, talk of impeachment on Inauguration Day ... the list goes on.
The only candidate who seems to know what her job would be is Tulsi Gabbard, who has based her campaign on questioning our horrendous foreign policy and monstrous military actions of the last 18 years.
As former California attorney general, Kamala Harris has apparently avoided all entanglements with powerful people, declining (according to The Intercept) to go after Steven Mnuchin's OneWest bank after it engaged in “widespread misconduct.”
As San Francisco district attorney, she is accused of having shut down priest-abuse cases. Do we really want an enforcer of the nation's laws who might release a pedophile like Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, just because he is rich and has powerful friends?
And I don't think I've heard one word from any media outlet on Bill Weld's challenge against Trump. Why not? Libertarian-leaning Weld would probably be 100 times better than Donald Trump. Certainly 100 times more adult and less offensive.
I urge fellow voters not to be misdirected by the mainstream media and to look carefully at all the candidates over the next year.
Think hard about contradictions of expressed concerns about “climate change,” when most members of Capitol Hill have rallied together in bipartisan fashion to throw tons of money ($1.3 trillion a year for the entire national security complex, according to Brown University's Watson Institute) at a financially corrupt Pentagon, while another recent study questions whether our military apparatus has the largest “carbon footprint” on the planet.
So if you believe in climate change, you might have the greatest effect by supporting a candidate who has served in the military and is vowing to rein it in.