Erin, I can’t tell you how pleased I am to find that we are, by and large, on the same page regarding our current political crisis – and crisis it is. But we do differ on a couple of fine points, so I would like to explain the thinking that went into how I came to the opinions I hold.

First of all, addressing your “deviation from the main point” of my post, I wasn’t comparing the actions of the Trump Administration to the subsequent actions of the Biden Administration in Afghanistan, I was holding them up for ridicule together, equally. Remember, both of them campaigned on a platform to get us out of Afghanistan. So, apples to apples, since both administrations had the same goal and Biden was only continuing the process Trump started.

And both of them botched their jobs. Bigly (to quote a former president).

So, yeah, the whole thing stinks of Vietnam and our utter defeat there, too. But, in all fairness, even with the incompetence of the last 2 administrations in full force, they are only mostly responsible for that stench; the root cause of it was a couple decades in the making, spanning several administrations.

Not that anybody will ever be held accountable for any of it, not with the current SCOTUS…

Yeah, it’s a hot-button issue for me…

Be that as it may, I am otherwise in full agreement with your post. We, The People are not in control, despite the fact we’re supposedly the ones with the power. The current administration is incompetent, the country is failing, and we have lost all faith in our institutions – even the ones we should still revere.

I would like to point out, though, that we have had “3rd-party” candidates in all of our elections, we just never hear about them. Check out this Wikipedia page, which lists all the Presidential candidates since George Washington: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_candidates. It’s fascinating…

Anyway, I’m not talking about Ralph Nader or the guy from Maine who wore waders for a hat, we’ve had some highly-qualified people run for President over the past several decades and more under banners that didn’t display a pachyderm or a jackass. But because they didn’t bend knee to one of those two banners, they were excluded from the process, so the media ignored them and we were kept in the dark about them – and worse, told that a vote for them is a vote for the evil of the opposition.

A few of these 3rd-party candidates have impinged on the public consciousness over the years (Strom Thurmond, Ron Paul, Ross Perot, to name a few), but once that happened the puppet masters you speak of (who live under the two aforementioned banners) changed the rules, with our semi-enthusiastic endorsement. We had a fully-qualified, fairly conservative candidate who ran under the Libertarian banner both in 2012 (Obama/Romney) and 2016 (Clinton/Trump); his name is Gary Johnson, and he’s the former Republican Governor of New Mexico. He’d have been a good President, likely better than any of the other candidates running. Ever hear of him? Not during the campaigns, and not through the media, either “mainstream” or “social,” not unless you were following me at the time… His final vote count was barely measurable… Because the current rules are designed to exclude anyone except a Republican or Democrat from the public campaign process.

Until We, The People wake up and demand better, we get what we deserve.