The Embarrassment of America

One more vignette from our sojourn!

On the way back, we overnighted in Kentucky and found a nearby establishment which was showing the Packer game.  Unfortunately, it was also showing the "debate" on other screens.

There were two other couples watching, one from Canada, and one from England.  When we had gone through the polite small-talk about travel, homes, and the football game, both of those couples gently said something about the candidates.  They were gentle, but clearly understood the problem.

Here's what they did not say, but what they hinted at knowing:

...both major American political parties have seen fit to nominate for President of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald J. Trump.  The Democrats have nominated a brazenly corrupt, decades-long scandalized, quasi-socialistic, national security-undermining, should-be felonious septuagenarian plutocrat.  The Republicans, in committing something closely akin to Jonestown-esque mass suicide at their nominating convention in Cleveland, have seen fit to nominate a borderline-deranged, spiteful, grossly uninformed, quasi-fascistic, Kremlin-tainted, anti-American exceptionalism, Mafia-connected, monstrously vulgar, malcontent tangerine buffoon....

It's a very odd feeling to have to acknowledge the truth to foreign guests in our country.  It's very odd to be ashamed of the US' political system.

But that's what it is.

(FWIW, the English folks seemed to be sympathetic to Conservatism; the Canadians, not so much--perhaps because our English guests run their own business and the Canadians were both on Government payrolls.)