obviously, we are having 'trustworthy and honest' issues with the major-party candidates. as often, the primitiveness of the categories masks the complexity of the question. trump is far more honest than clinton in one particular dimension: his public persona is, one would think, closer to his private one; his public persona more closely enacts his actual inner life; or he shows you who he is. (not that he too doesn't have some issues here.) i think that is important. in one way it is obviously essential to democracy: we really do elect insincere fakes all the time. hillary's white papers on wall street might sort of matter, but not if she intends to do nothing about it. you have to infer who and what you're voting for from leaked emails. trump's frank self-revelation is good because now you can vote against the actual him.
of course, the sort of integrity where you hang together as a human being is only one sort of honesty: you could have a lot of that and pretty a pretty bald liar and deceiver. and of course honesty is only one dimension of moral character, and you could be a pretty honest groper, for example; trump has been. or you could be a pretty honest fascist etc. in that sense.
anyway, the scandals hurtling around clinton today seem worse to me. this band memo thing is filthy, really filthy. there are hundreds of avenues of exploration now open, more to come. i think we'll be in an impeachment before many months have passed, and this one will be richly warranted.
i think the chaos in the political system has actually eventuated from mindless partisanship: both parties have been devoted for a quarter century only to decimating each other: every utterance is another strategic little manipulative salvo, and all that money is generated to destroy ypour mutual enemies. so i think in a way if it is to survive, the system has got to open up, reconfigure, become much more multidimensional and much more representative. if nothing else, these two parties have thoroughly discredited and shamed themselves this year.
