China comments on U.S. presidential elections
The 2016 race for the White House has brought its own set of insults, intrigue, and injury that have baffled and bewildered Americans.
The Xinhua News Agency provides a Chinese view of our political process. Xinhua is the official press agency of the People's Republic of China. The largest of all media organizations in China, Xinhua is also the most influential.
BEIJING, May 6 (Xinhua) -- The 2016 U.S. presidential election has so far been a complete farce full of defamation, lies and big money.
The next U.S. president, not surprisingly, will be either the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump or the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Defamation
For many years, U.S. presidential campaigns have become a process in which the candidates defame each other, unearth their rivals' scandals and even spread rumors.
On Wednesday, Clinton's campaign released a web video criticizing Trump. The ad is a compilation of unkind things Trump's fellow Republicans have said about him during the party's nomination campaign.
For his part, Trump has been criticizing Clinton for playing the gender card. "If she were not a woman she wouldn't even be in this race," he added.
Ravings, Lies
In the primary this year, some candidates have made promises that seem glorious but are difficult to realize.
Trump, for instance, is famous for his blunt and sometimes incendiary remarks.
The property developer said in his presidential announcement speech that Mexico was sending "rapists" and drug dealers to the United States. He has repeatedly vowed, if elected president, to deport about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
Bernie Sanders, a Democratic socialist U.S. senator from Vermont, has built his campaign around a promise to deliver universal health care and free college education.
"Trump's ideas are wacky -- but Sanders' are weak," Richard Reeves, a senior researcher with the Brookings Institution, said in a column article in March.
The deep-rooted culture of telling lies in U.S. presidential elections is behind all of these big promises. A Huffington Post op-ed commented on such phenomena by saying that maybe the new standard for serving as U.S. president is not being frank but telling lies.
Big Money
"Money is the mother's milk of politics," Jesse Unruh, a Democratic politician and former speaker of the California State Assembly, once said. This sentence seems to accurately reflect the situation in the U.S. presidential campaign.
In the United States, money surely isn't enough to become president, but you can never capture the White House if you are not rich.
Last September, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter told media his heartfelt words: "We've become now an oligarchy instead of democracy."
It is estimated that the spending in this year's election will exceed 5 billion dollars, breaking the record of 2 billion dollars set in 2012 and becoming the most expensive one in U.S. history.
Protests
To regain their lost "democracy," thousands of activists held rallies and staged sit-ins outside Capitol Hill in early April to protest big money in politics and barriers to voting. But the week-long protests ended with the arrest of more than 400 demonstrators.
In conclusion, today's so-called American democracy is actually nothing more than an ill-disguised oligarchy in which defamation, lies and big money are rampant.
Read the entire article at Xinhua News.