Sunday night, saw another political debate come and go. This debate was about the candidates from the Democratic Party seeking their party’s nomination for President of the United States. Each candidate attempted to put forward their vision for the future and their view of the present.

If a person from Mars or from another country had dropped in this past week, they would have witnessed two debates, one from each political party. The visitor would have come away from these two debates believing that the participants could not have come from the same country for their perception of their own country was so starkly different that they couldn’t have been talking about the same place, unless they had some odd sense of an alternative reality. If there ever was an example of the two Americas that we have today, we saw and heard it from the debate participants. For any of you who still think there is no difference in the two political parties you aren’t paying attention.

By the way, I do not understand why some of the candidates are asked to attend, because they are barely asked any questions. Last night was one in which the former governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley was humorously asked if he had anything to add at the end of the evening. The audience saw the irony and laughed, but the moderator, Mr. Holt, did not get the absurdity of the question since the poor governor was seen and not heard. If you are going to have a debate, each candidate should get the same question and have the opportunity to answer it, with the same time given to each candidate to respond. I don’t understand why they call any of these media folk moderators because none of the debates have been handled fairly with each candidate having a fair chance to be heard. It is nothing but a joke to conclude that any fairness exists.

There were topics that came up last night that the Republican candidates have not even talked about. If there is an epidemic of heroin usage and other designer or prescribed medications it is a topic that each party should talk about. If not how is the public going to make an informed decision? The poisoning of the water in Flint, Michigan was added by one of the candidates at the end of the debate. Doesn’t the media care about a topic like that? Or maybe there are no ratings in it for them. We have had many debates thus far, but strange is a word that comes to mind regarding the way that they have been handled. Some candidates are ignored! Is the media through their choosing who to give air time to choosing who is going to be at the top of the food chain, in terms of popularity and poll numbers?

Let us for a moment talk about the stark differences in the two political parties. The Democrats want to raise the minimum wage, Republicans are against it. Democrats want to either improve the Affordable Care Act or have Medicare for all. Republicans want to get rid of the ACA. Democratic candidates want to keep American troops from being boots on the ground as Republicans call them. A person from another planet or another country, would swear that all of the candidates but 2 from the Republican Party want a war, in fact they sound darn right eager for a fight. The tax plans of the Republicans seem eerily similar, they want to reduce taxes to the degree that you could not pay for what we have now. Government for most of the Republicans is the enemy, with each candidate vying for the top spot of who can eliminate the most of it. They have little or no use for government, except for the military. They claim or military is too weak, even though the new carrier that was recently launched has more firepower than our old fleets had put together. For Democrats, government can be for good, partnering with Americans to improve the lives of the Middle Class. Republicans somehow believe that the Middle Class will be helped by not having an increase in their wages but returning to the idea of trickle down economics where somehow magically reducing the taxes of the wealthy will somehow make the lives of the Middle Class better. For Republicans, illegal immigrants are the enemy, as they battle to see how draconian their solutions will be to remedy the problem. Muslims have become the whipping boy as well. Minorities are lazy and food stamps and any assistance to those in need should be removed from the Federal Budget. Hold onto your benefits as the Republicans are after your Social Security and Medicare. They couch their alleged remedies in the language of reform but it is a canard, they really want to eliminate the programs entirely for the younger citizens and turn it over to private enterprise. The Democratic candidates talked about gun safety and climate change. The Republican Party is the only major political party in the world to deny that we have a problem of climate change. Of course, Republicans advocate that every American should go out and buy more guns before the government takes them away from you. What a joke, there are as many guns out in the public as there are people, but we still have an epidemic of 33,000 people dying per year from gun violence.

So my fellow citizens and political junkies out there in television land, there really is a difference in the two political parties. Now if we could only have an honest debate!