America goes to the polls: Let’s not face such very poor choices

DESPITE narrowing but still fluctuating margins, FBI leaks on incomplete investigations into Hillary Clinton’s unwise, possibly illegal, email policy while she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state and a 24/7 conveyor belt of scandal and relentless greed; despite Donald Trump’s racism, boorishness, ignorance, misogyny, contempt for truth and his country’s constitution, today America must choose one of those insecure, frightened people to be their president for the rest of this decade and beyond.

If this was a dilemma for America alone we could watch bemused and disappointed as if it was just a Christmas box-set of an engrossing television tragedy but, as all the world knows, it is much, much more than that.

It is impossible to imagine that America’s founding fathers, mostly good-hearted visionaries driven by high ideals, well-rooted in a common purpose and driven by an active civic morality, when they prepared the three sacred documents of that republic — the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights — more than 200 years ago could ever have imagined that they might be succeeded by such obvious, transparent hustlers.