Spotlight: Defamation, lies, big money true face of American democracy

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.

Trump won the crucial Republican primary held Tuesday in the Midwestern U.S. state of Indiana. Both his rivals for the Republican candidacy, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, have ended their bid for the White House.

Clinton, who is now more than 90 percent of the way to clinching the Democratic nomination, has turned her attention to the general election.

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.

Campaigning in Indiana this week, Trump and Cruz were engaged in a testy back-and-forth.

It started when the New York billionaire repeated a claim published by tabloid newspaper the National Enquirer that linked Cruz's father, Cuban emigre Rafael Cruz, with former President John F. Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

"The man cannot tell the truth but he combines it with being a narcissist," Cruz said, "a narcissist at a level I don't think this country has ever seen."

The Texas senator termed Trump a "serial philanderer" -- likely as part of his strategy to try to win the support of evangelical voters.

Trump, in response, said Cruz had become "more and more unhinged."

Earlier, Trump and Cruz started what some voters called a nasty fight, spatting over their wives.

In March, an anti-Trump super PAC (political action committee) released an ad featuring a risque photo of his wife, Melania, a former model, taken in a GQ photo shoot. "Meet Melania Trump. Your Next First Lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday," it read.

Trump attributed the ad to the Cruz campaign and warned on Twitter: "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!"

He retweeted side-by-side images of Cruz's wife, Heidi Cruz, with an unflattering grimace, and his wife, Melania, in a glamorous pose. "No need to 'spill the beans'" read the caption. "The images are worth a thousand words."

Besides, U.S. media reported Cruz has had a series of extramarital affairs and his wife Heidi has struggled with bouts of depression, which the Cruz couple denies.

In fact, the Clinton-versus-Trump situation in the U.S. presidential election has formed in mid-April, when the two fronts started an increasingly fierce war of words and called each other "a disaster."

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.

"She's done a lousy job in so many ways and even women don't like her," he told Fox News Sunday. "But it is the woman's card and she plays it and I will let you know in about six months whether or not she plays it well, but I don't think she'll play it well."

"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.

In another outburst of emotion, Trump called for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks last year.

Trump has also been strongly critical of free trade agreements the United States has forged with foreign countries.

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.

"Today, the strength of a candidate's policy prescriptions and the strength of their political support seem unrelated. Or if there is a relationship, it is an inverse one. Trump provides the most vivid example of the sundering of policy from politics," he said.

Paul Krugman, a distinguished American economist and Nobel Prize laureate, said in an April column article in the New York Times that "on many issues -- including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform -- he (Sanders) seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic."

The deep-rooted culture of telling lies in U.S. presidential elections is behind all of these big promises.

In the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney is said to have told 533 lies in 30 weeks.

Clinton, who repeatedly declined to apologize for her use of a private e-mail system while she was secretary of state, admitted later that the arrangement was a mistake and that she was "sorry" for it.

"As I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility," Clinton said in an interview with ABC News in September 2015.

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.

In this year's election, Trump is "really rich" as he said in his announcement speech, while others are busy raising money.

A Washington Post report on April 15 said that until the end of February, U.S. enterprises and rich people have donated 600 million U.S. dollars to super PACs and 41 percent of the money came from 50 super-rich families in the country.

In April 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that limits on the total amount of money individuals can give to candidates, political parties and PACs are unconstitutional, which opened the door for big money in politics.

"The perfectly legal flood of money that pervades American politics has fundamentally corrupting effects," said Benjamin Page, a professor with the U.S. Northwestern University.

Last September, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter told media his heartfelt words: "We've become now an oligarchy instead of democracy."

"It (big money) violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nomination of president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. senators and congress members," he said.

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.

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. Endi