How post-America presently views the two candidates it loathes but has nonetheless chosen

Count on Jonah Goldberg to bring singular wit to a dead-on accurate report of the many ways we see these two at the onset of the last weekend before the first debate:

It’s difficult to capture the otherworldliness of it all. Most of the commentary centers around Trump — and for good reason. He’s the X factor. Some see him as a brilliant, media-savvy disruptor, shaking the foundation of the political establishment. Others see him as a Rodney Dangerfield-esque character (with a touch of Peter Sellers’s Chauncey Gardner) who managed to bluff his way onto the national stage, demanding respect. And that barely scratches the surface. Between friends and foes the descriptions get more ridiculous by the hour. He’s Cincinnatus, he’s Hitler, he’s Reagan, he’s “orange Muppet Hitler” (in the words of some celebrities), he’s George Washington, he’s some other kind of Hitler. And so on.

But it’s worth remembering that Clinton, in her own excruciatingly dull, grating, and pedantic way, has long been a larger-than-life figure, too. It may not seem like it given that she often sounds like a luncheon speaker at a conference of insurance-+industry actuaries. But if you were a student of the lady, you’d know that the flinty demeanor is widely believed to be a tightly managed veneer, hiding a thoroughly ideological, somewhat paranoid, and testy woman.

He says that fans of each insist there is another person beneath the veneer the public sees:

Her supporters, in fact, insist that’s the case: that the real Hillary is like a verdant oasis of wit and charm hidden in the vast desert of her public persona. To borrow a phrase from The Who, the Hillary we see is an eminence front, a put-on.

Intriguingly, this is almost the mirror version of what many of Trump’s biggest fans say about him, except they claim that the bluster and bullying, the stunted, ill-fitted vocabulary and seemingly bone-dry reservoir of policy expertise is what you might call an everyman front.

He may talk like a Joe Sixpack working one of his constructions sites, but underneath — allegedly — is one of the most clever and shrewd businessmen ever to walk the earth, playing chess ten moves ahead. 

Leon Wolf at RedState focuses more on the policy inclinations of each, and either way they add up to more, not less statism:

Trump thinks the President has the power to unilaterally rewrite both the First Amendment and the libel laws of all 50 states in one fell swoop. He also thinks that the President has the authority to tell local police departments to stop black people on the street and frisk them for guns without probable cause. He also thinks the President has the authority to unilaterally undo constitutionally-enacted treaties as long as they were entered into by "stupid people." To say nothing of the fact that he bragged in a live debate that the military would follow unlawful orders coming from him because of his strong, manly leadershipness. I could go on, but you get the point. You get the point. Following in the path of Trump's vision of government leads you to authoritarianism and police state despotism.

Clinton, on the other hand, literally wrote the book on "it takes a village to raise a child" and by "village" she meant "the will of the village as expressed by the forceful intervention of the village's elected officials and bureaucrats." Clinton is on the side of people who want to tell churches they can't not have transgender bathrooms, make disbelieving in global warming a crime, raise your taxes, and so on. You get the point. Following in the path of Clinton's vision of government leads you to your life as a bit player in the real life version of 1984.

So I mean, one way or another, the size and scope of the Federal Government is going to advance quite a lot over the next four years. You ought to really do something about that. Even if that something is the equivalent of crossing the streams - a plan that seems hopeless from the beginning and likely to end in total destruction (like voting for Gary Johnson or Evan McMullin or starting a new party altogether), now is not the time to abandon the playing field of politics altogether. If you think doing so will mean you won't have to think about our corrupt government at all, you are wrong. Sooner or later it will be staring you in the face, like it or not. 

He sympathizes with the natural tendency to want to tune it all out.

But if conservaistm is about anything, it's about dealing with reality as one encounters it rather than glossing it over with a clever narrative.

So, yes, hate 2016. I know I do. But for the sake of your sanity, remember that there is no place else for you to live right now.