Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee Are Dead

Without doing the math, I estimate that I have spent at least half of my adult life voting for third party candidates. The reason was because, as George Wallace used to say, "There isn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans". Well, it's not like that anymore, is it. I don't remember which third party used to refer to the two major party candidates as "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee", but I'm pretty sure it was the Libertarians who used to say, "The lesser of two evils is still evil." That old saw horse doesn't work anymore either because, "Trump and Hillary are both evil, but they are two different kinds of evil." I wish I had made that one up myself, but I must credit Kathryn Jean Lopez, a syndicated columnist who appears in our local paper periodically. Ms. Lopez is a card carrying Catholic, so I suppose she considers Hillary to be evil because of her position on abortion. I don't know what she has against Trump, but there is a lot to not like about Trump. At the time she wrote this, there was some kind of Christian coalition that was trying to build a third party around a guy, whose name I don't remember, but he declined the honor and I haven't heard anything more about those guys.

The thing is, nobody needs to create a new third party, there are at least two of them that have been around for a long time, the Libertarians and the Greens. Whenever the subject comes up, people say they won't vote for a third party because they can't win. They can't win because people don't vote for them, and people don't vote for them because they can't win. Well, if enough people voted for them, then they would win, and then, I suppose, people would start voting for them. I don't vote for somebody because I think they are going to win, I vote for somebody because I like them, or at least I dislike them less than their opponent. In the case of Trump and Hillary, I don't know which one I dislike least, so I don't know what I would do if there wasn't the third party option. It's hard to compare Trump and Hillary because, like the lady said, they are two different kinds of evil.

I don't know what's going to become of the Republicans now, with some of them belatedly kissing up to Trump and some of them boycotting the convention because of him. Maybe the party will be rent in twain, and then they both will become third parties. Meanwhile, on the local level, Michigan has their regular non-presidential primary coming up on August 2. Our incumbent congressman and state representative are both not running for re-election, so their seats are up for grabs, and there has been a lot of grabbing going on. There are four or five candidates running for each office, and that's just on the Republican side. The candidates for congressman have been running negative ads against each other on TV, each one accusing the others of not being true conservatives, and none of them claiming to be a moderate. Our candidates for the state legislature have not been on TV much, but we are getting their propaganda in the mail every day. They too are all trying to out-conservative each other with a vengeance. The Tea Party movement may be dead, but their ghost will haunt the wilds of Northern Michigan for years to come..........Cool!