From Burke:
There is no qualification for government, but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found,
they have, in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and honour. Woe to the country
which would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to grace
and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse lustre and glory around a state. Woe to that country
too, that passing into the opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean contracted view of things, a sordid mercenary occupation,
as a preferable title to command. Everything ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot;
no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or rotation, can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive
objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to accommodate the one to
the other. I do not hesitate to say, that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor
a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple
of honour ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered too, that virtue is never tried but
by some difficulty, and some struggle.
This election is much struggle on behalf of no virtue.
We're about to send to the White House either one of a pair of candidates who wouldn't know the meaning of a word as big
as "virtue."
My vote was going to be "none of these candidates" going in. And after over three months of a relentless barrage of calls, robocalls,
and all kind of calls blowing up my telephone, one of the distinct displeasures of living in an actual or alleged swing state, the iron
remains in my spine to cast that "none of these candidates" vote. With a prayer that, in four years, this country---what's left of it
---will figure out what corrosion was wreaked when it chose nothing better than a vulgar crank and a vulgar crook to square off
for the White House.