These two men could not be more different, however, they are alike in one respect. They have the capacity to become “spoilers” for their respective political parties.

Donald Trump is eating up all the coverage on the Republican side. He has made forays into politics before, but he has never made it this far with this much support. How much longer can he last? Who knows. Either he will slowly lose support as the election nears and people start to realize that a President Trump is a possibility, or he will flame out dramatically, if, for example, some old tapes turn up with Trump uttering the accursed “N-word”, which is most definitely the third rail in North American public life. A man like Trump cannot become President of the United States. He will be disqualified, somehow, before he gets near the nomination. Unless he runs as a third-party candidate, which he has threatened to do if not treated “fairly”, whatever he means by that, and I expect it will mean whatever he wants it to mean.

As for Bernard Sanders, he has become a thorn in Hillary’s side, apparently, although some say that she welcomes the competition for various reasons. I didn’t expect him to be so popular, and I don’t think many people did. Sanders is a self-proclaimed socialist, even having a picture of renowned Socialist Eugene V. Debs in his office. Bernie Sanders is actually a Democratic socialist. Meaning that he believes in the free market and doesn’t want to eliminate it, but he wants protections for those at the bottom and regulations for those at the top. Which all real Democrats want, and until Reagan came along with his poisoned lemonade, what Republicans wanted also, albeit to a lesser degree. The tension has always been the degree of those regulations and protections. Now, of course, real Republicans want to pretty much eliminate those protections and regulations.

The two candidates, Sanders and Trump, have one thing in common: neither one will become President of the United States. Trump is an entertainer first and foremost. He will not ascend to the Oval Office. Neither will Sanders, the reason being the word “socialist” attached to his name. Nobody who calls himself a socialist will ever become president. He might be president of the real Democratic party, but he will not get enough votes from the center of the political spectrum to become the U.S. President. People on both sides of the aisle are understandably frustrated by political doublespeak and many of them are welcoming straight talk and honesty. But, in these cases, all those two candidates will do if they get nominated by whatever party is that they will throw the election to the opposition. Remember Ralph Nader? I would like to thank him for our supreme court conservatives and the Iraq war. He gave them to us by dividing the Democratic vote and giving the election to Bush.

Being on the left side of the spectrum, I don’t care what Trump does. But I really hope that those Democrats who are rooting for Sanders will come to their senses before it’s too late.

One thing that is clear from the Republican debate is that the entire field believes that the male in the human species is king. Even Fiorina. Else why would there be so little debate about the right of a woman to a safe and legal abortion? Our “rising star” Rubio wants to make abortion unavailable, even if a mother’s life is at risk, even in cases of rape or incest. Yeah, he’s rising all right. Like the Wicked Witch of the West. And small-government advocate Bush wants government to stick its nose into all manner of private business, as the Terry Schiavo affair in his state while he was governor shows.

Can you imagine, just for a minute, what would happen if a group of female legislators got together and introduced a bill to force men to get a vasectomy if they were responsible for, say, 2 births out of wedlock? Makes sense, don’t it? There would be anger and laughter. How dare they try to force their views on us? They don’t have any right to do that. Exactly. These “men” who think they can tell a woman what she is allowed to do with her body are just phonies and chauvinists. The fact that they put all their efforts in support of a fetus and 0, that’s right, zero, in support of the life once it leaves the womb, tells me all I need to know.

This is not a life-advocacy issue. It is a political and religious issue, shot through and through with the notion of male superiority. Males generally have greater upper-body strength than females. Other than that, the genders are =, that’s right, equal. In fact, women might just be a little better. I have a feeling if we could get these male goats out of the presidential offices in all the world, the world would be a much saner, safer place. Oh sure, you have your occasional Margaret Thatcher. There are all kinds of people. But by and large, women would be more cautious and wiser in the use of weaponry and force in all affairs.

The media is all worked up about Donald Trump and his verbal disrespect of women. How about if we ignore his entertainment and focus on the real issue, which is the Republican field wants to make a woman a non-person, simply a vessel upon which to deliver a child into an unsupportive world.

I watched the main Republican debate last Thursday night, having missed the junior debate due to a dinner engagement. The only one of them that showed any vestige of compassion was Gov. John Kasich, who maintained that he went along with the generous and benevolent Medicaid expansion in his state because it seemed to be the Christian thing to do. Indeed. For all the religious talk among the presidential aspirants, there was precious little walk. Huckabee is the gun totin’ preacher who hasn’t seen a war he doesn’t want us to enter. Rubio is the alleged man of the people who is a staunch defender of human rights, but only before birth. After birth, you’re on your own, don’tcha know. Trump just trumpets his own brand. They are all against unions, especially public-sector unions, because God forbid that we should return to middle-class prosperity. Unions were a big part of the days when a middle-class job could be had with a high-school diploma. And speaking of diplomas, with the exception of deer-in-the-headlights Jeb Bush, who supported Common Core, all the candidates are against public schools and their teachers. It seems to me as though the single virtue most lacking among the candidates was compassion.

I have some conservative friends. They are people who I have known for awhile, in most cases long before I knew of their political leanings. I am able to overlook their views because we don’t discuss them, and I honestly don’t think that they support the Republican agenda as much as they might think. It seems as though I trust the government to do the right thing when it is given a job to do and the money to do it with. My conservative friends seem to distrust the government, but in its place they support and trust private industry. That, to me, makes no sense. Money doesn’t care, business doesn’t care. Let the chips fall where they may.

I really hope that none of the Republican candidates becomes president of the United States. I have no more trust in them than I have in business to do the right thing.

Now, you might possibly be wondering what ODS stands for, in this age of acronyms for everything. Well, I will tell you. It is a disease, mostly found among male Caucasians of a certain age, which causes them to hate our President for no reason, ODS meaning Obama Derangement Syndrome. Google it and you will find all kinds of descriptions of the malady. I will give you my take on it, not having (or intending) to Google it myself.

We have our first black President, Barack H. Obama. He has been, by any rational measure, a good steward of our top elective office. He came into town, taking over from George W. Bush. Mr. Bush drove our country into near bankruptcy by starting two wars on credit, while putting through a major tax cut. Bush took a surplus from Bill Clinton and turned it into a massive deficit. Bush looked into Russian president Putin’s soul and found a good man. Ha ha ha. Great guy, as I’m sure we can see by the way he invaded Crimea immediately following his country’s hosting of the Sochi Olympics. Which cost in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars. Hey, wait a minute. Bush found a kindred soul, right? Maybe he did think he saw a “good leader”.

So Obama takes over from our former jackass-in-chief, bails out the auto companies, putting through a stimulus that saved our economy from depression. The only thing wrong with the stimulus was that it wasn’t large enough. W.’s fellow know-nothings (Republicans) would not allow it to be any larger. In fact, the titular head of the party at the time, Willard Mitt Romney, thought we should not have any stimulus at  all. So, President Obama tried to be a new kind of bipartisan President. He was thwarted by a bunch of bums from the opposition who declared that opposing Obama at every chance was more important than saving the United States. Nevertheless, Obama persisted. He passed our first national health care law over fierce opposition, which continues to this day. Obama launched more drone attacks and put out more foreigners through deportation than Bush did. Obama located and killed Osama bin Laden, which Bush failed to do. Yet the Republicans consider Obama soft on national defense. They call him a pushover. Completely false. In fact, a lot of Democrats, myself included, thought Obama went too far in trying to forge compromise with the right-wing Republicans.

It seems hard to believe that there are people so deeply racially prejudiced that they hate Obama simply because he is black. However, that seems to be at least part of it. White people afraid of change, living in a right-wing fantasy world of Fox, Erickson(no relation), Limbaugh, etc. I don’t understand it. In my last blog, I suggested that we are more alike than we think, part of the reason being that, in my worst moments, I can feel the reasoning of some issues of the right. I am human, and I get angry sometimes. I can stray from liberal orthodoxy. But I cannot feel how Obama is so hated by so many of the aforementioned demographic, which, at 59 years old, I am a part. I can’t feel it, I don’t understand it, I have no sympathy for Obama Derangement Syndrome.