Just like Louis XVI, the French aristocracy and the royal hangers-on in 1789, our corrupt, 2-headed political Establishment never saw it coming.
Over the past 40 years or so, a multi-billion dollar boondoggle and political con game called the “Presidential Election” has been created. Under the star-spangled banner of “Democracy” the American electorate has been trickerated, lied to, manipulated and bamboozled every 4 years into believing they have democratically elected a President. But the joke’s on us.
Our Presidents from Nixon to Obama have essentially been variations of reverse Darwinism. While the political Establishment, donkeys and elephants, has basically “devolved” over the years into a perverse assortment of thieves, liars, sociopaths, mountebanks, money grubbers, war mongers, bigots and racists. A crucial element of the Wall Street/War Street/Washington DC Axis of Evil.
2016 was expected to be no different than decades past except with many more billion$ sloshing through the system among a handful of gazillionaires and their renta-candidates, a slick and slimey cadre of consultants, advisers, pollsters, pitchmen and political pimps and a too-eager- to-bend-over-for-the-money media.
In the amnesia of history, that is to say last year, yet another genetic mutant from the Bush family, Jeb!, was hoovering in million$ on the sure thing bet that he would romp over the 16 other delusional pygmies fantasizing about being the GOP candidate for President.
On the donkey side, Hillary Clinton, the Queen of You Owe Me, had already cajoled or bought off the major “machers” of the Democratic Money Party in preparation for her coronation as Queen/Presidentess by unanimous acclamation when voting time came around.
Ho-hum!
Enter Donald J. Trump! New York City real estate tycoon and reality TV celebrity. Also a puffy, pink-faced, narcissistic, cotton-candy-haired blowhard. And, it turns out, to the shock and awe of the elephant party, a world class political disruptor. Whodathunkit??
Mexican rapists are coming! Trump trumpeted! Beware of ISIS! Trump bellowed. Muslims go home! Trump commanded. I’m gonna build a yuuuuge beautiful wall to keep everybody we don’t like out! Trump promised. Abort abortion! Jail women! Trump threatened. I hate who you hate! Vote for me! Trump basically bumper-stickered. And that was just for openers.
(He has also subsequently said, less noisily, that he saw no problem with single payer health care or increasing taxes on hedge fund hooligans’ “carried interest” accounting flimflams. He dismissed as dirty deals TPP and the other assorted international pro-corporations trade agreements. He wondered who, at great cost to America, our military is protecting Japan and Germany from 70 years after World War 2 ended? And he declared to Jeb!’s face that the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster based on his brother’s lies.)
The GOP Establishment had instant agita followed by a rolling nervous breakdown. OMG! For years they had been dog whistling racism, bigotry, guns, God and down with gays to their sloping-foreheaded, low information, couch potato, white-is-right base to fire them up to vote against their own best interests. Indeed, the yowling Tea Party was created by the GOP when the “Kenyan” Obama was elected to give plausible deniability to the GOP Establishment’s energized race-mongering and congressional obstruction. Now, here was Trump talking straight at that sour angry base in their own, unaldulterated, mean-spirited, common folk language. And their responsive cheers were deafening and frightening to the GOP professional puppeteers.
In the months since then, Trump the disruptor sucked up all the political oxygen thanks to the media’s drooling eagerness to bank on his entertainment value while he has demolished every GOP pretender with his free-wheeling snark and bellicosity.
After desperately denying reality and clinging to one failed fallback fantasy after another in the hope of sabotaging, obstructing and halting this unexpected and unpredictable political phenomenon, the sclerotic GOP Establishment is now on life support praying for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from none other than Donald J. Trump, the presumptive GOP Nominee!
But that’s only the half of it. One side of that corrupt 2-headed coin.
The Democratic Money Party also finds itself fighting for its very existence. But unlike the hysterical, hypocritical GOP who have been desperately trying to destroy their own front-running candidate, The Donald, because they hate and fear him, the imploding Democratic Money Party has been just as desperately propping up their tomato can, the increasingly unpopular, smug, political shape-shifting, presumptuous, entitled front-runner, Hillary Clinton, of whom, MSNBC host/commentator Lawrence O’Donnell, has accurately pointed out: “Her numbers NEVER go up, they only go down.”
To the Money Party’s surprise and chagrin, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an unfashionably dishevelled, scraggily white-haired, 74-year- old self described Democratic Socialist (eeek!) is their bogeyman. Like Trump, he seemed to come out of nowhere. But not being a Brand Name and with less entertainment value than that media magnet, it was easier for the political/money/media Establishment’s propaganda delivery devices to pretend he didn’t exist.
Until thousands of supporters began showing up at his political rallies to hear and cheer the genuine, unfocus-grouped political and economic philosophy he has been preaching for 40 years: America’s Middle, Working and Out-Of-Work Classes have been robbed blind and screwed royally for too long by an increasingly corrupt cannibal capitalism system. The too-big-to-jail banks should be broken up and the crooked banksters brought to heel. Universal health care is a right not just another consumer product to be hustled by cruel, greedy insurance companies and pill pushers. Single payer health care for all! A public college education should be free not a debt trap. Social Security benefits should be expanded not pimped off to the grasping clutches of Wall Street. America and its government is not the private property of the millionaires and billionaires. And the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster based on lies that Bernie Sanders voted against.
To the Democratic Money Party and their Queen-in-waiting, this was more threatening than Occupy Wall Street. That ragtag rebellion had represented a brief shining moment of clarity (the 99% vs the 1%) but the Occupiers were quickly and easily scattered, their heads bashed in by up-armored police forces around the country. Bernie Sanders was talking about a Movement, a Revolution. And winning primaries.
Hillary and the Democratic Money Party’s knee-jerk response to Bernie’s progressive proposals has been a predictable parody of Obama’s election campaign bumper sticker: No, we can’t! Meaning: No single payer health care. No higher taxes on Wall Street. No bank breakups. No free college. More war. How dare that old Commie coot challenge the latest Hillary-for-Queen juggernaut!
Once upon a time the Democratic Party was the people’s party, the party of FDR, JFK and LBJ before he went Vietnam crazy (“Never steal ALL the money; leave some for the people,” LBJ once wisely if cynically advised his party cronies). With the election of Bill (and Hillary) Clinton a quarter of a century ago (!), the Democratic Party became the National Money Party, selling out formerly bedrock principles for political contributions from the werewolves of Wall Street; eventually, after the world-wrecking financial frauds of the recent past, giving their bankster buddies get-out-of-jail-free cards and $17 trillion in free taxpayers’ money to keep their rigged wheel of fortune spinning.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the deeply corrupt and dishonest Democratic Money Party would be all-in behind Hillary for Queen of Empire in 2016. They clearly know (and trust) a world class political conniver, crook and liar when they see one (or two).
Sounding much like the brainwashed POWs in “The Manchurian Candidate” spouting their hypno mantra: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life”, Queen-to-be Hillary’s courtiers, acolytes and surrogate stooges recite their rote talking points: “Hillary is the most qualified candidate ever to run for the White House. She gets things done.” Huh?
During their 2 White House terms full of sturm und drang, Bill bent over backwards for his bankster buddies’ get-richer schemes, bashed welfare “as we know it”, boosted America’s prison population astronomically and behaved like a billy goat in the oval office. Hillary thoroughly botched her universal health care assignment. She got Bill impeached by shipping his enamored young WH intern, “that woman” Monica Lewinsky, off to the Pentagon and inadvertently into the arms of the demonic Linda Tripp (and the actual rightwing conspiracy). Hillary then played her favorite role – victim - and saved Bill’s bacon from Senate conviction and ouster from office. Henceforth, Bill owed her. And so, it seems, did the rest of us.
Since leaving the White House to the pretend president George W in 2000, Bill and Hillary have become the Bonnie & Clyde of American politics, combining their talents in a double act of selfishness, hypocrisy and greed. He, a consummate smile-and-a-shoeshine sociopathic con man/seducer. She, a shameless, manipulative, profoundly dishonest, power slut.
“We were dead broke when we left the White House,” Hillary has preposterously alibied for their last 16 years of money grubbing among the world’s millionaires and billionaires. Unlike any ex-President and First Lady who ever lived they have amassed a fortune reportedly in excess of $250 million, between their tax-free Bill & Hillary & Chelsea Clinton “charitable” foundation and their $20 million dining-for-dollars personal fund-raising operations. When asked why she accepted $675,000 from Goldman Sachs to speechify at 3 of the Vampire Squid’s executive lunches, Hillary tone deafly replied, “That’s what they offered.”
While the charming rogue, Slick Willy, worked the boardrooms and play rooms of the too-rich, the voraciously ambitious Hillary was carpetbagged into Congress in 2001 as New York’s Junior Senator for Wall Street and, after 9/11, a cheerleader for the Iraq War. In 2008 she mounted a clumsy juggernaut of a campaign for President only to be trounced by the more deft and dynamic (not to mention Wall Street-backed) Barack Hussein Obama. His 1st African American President card trumping her 1st Female President card in spades. Her consolation prize was Secretary Of State.
Madame Secretary’s dubious “achievements” in that lofty resumé-padding post included:
She ram-rodded the disastrous NATO bombing campaign of Libya during the time of the Arab Spring, effectively destroying that oil-rich North African country as a functioning society. “We came, we saw, he died,” she cackled after the rebel gang murder of Libya’s longtime president/dictator Muammar Gadaffi. She vigorously encouraged a massive American troop increase in Afghanistan to pointlessly continue a war in that historic “graveyard of empires” that we have been losing for 14 years. She urged major American military entanglements in Syria to “regime change” President Bashar Al-Assad in favor of “moderate” rebels, who didn’t exist, and to provoke Russia (continuing to belligerantly bang on that tin war drum to this day). Likewise lambasting Iran for one reason or another or no reason.
In conjunction with her general diplomatic globe-trotting, Madame Secretary (and calculating future entitled Presidential candidate) signed off on multi-billion dollar arms deals for the repressive and repulsive Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, “coincidentally”, it has been alleged, raising funds for the Clinton Foundation from them and countless other countries with State Department dealings.
And in a kind of Nixonesque deviousness/paranoia, she installed a private internet server in her Chappaqua, NY garage in order to bypass the State Department system (and the law?) and keep all her email communications secret. The FBI is currently on that case…
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As our absurd primary elections system crawls on its belly toward national Party Convention time, the never-say-die faction of the GOP Establishment in full zombie mode, continues doomed-to-fail rearguard smear/sabotage operations on their new champion Trump. While the Reps and lapdogs of the Democratic Money Party, willfully deaf, dumb and blind to the country’s woeful present economic state and its dubious future prospects, continue to believe their lying eyes in their determination, through machinations and trickerations, to drag Hillary, the Candidate of Yesteryear, across the finish line victorious.
To date, buttressing her bought off total of “Super Delegates” (mostly lobbyists and corrupted politicos), the clunky, muscle-bound Hillary “juggernaut” has run up her primary vote count primarily among the over-60 crowd of African Americans, who voted 99% for Obama, seem to think Bill & Hillary marched with Martin Luther King and remain loyal to the Democratic party no matter what; and white women of a certain age, who recall fervently and nostalgically fighting for feminism in the 60s and 70s and want to see a woman president in their lifetime, no matter who.
The Bernie Rebellion has so far chalked up 20 primary victories, overwhelmingly winning the 50 and under voters, that is to say…the future.
Polls and prognostications of who will eventually be elected 45th President of the United States (Grover Cleveland who won, lost, then won again is counted twice) is a mug’s game at this point. Miracles and Mysteries of the Universe cannot be ruled out. America did, after all, elect the “New” Nixon twice, though we knew better and chucked him out; Jimmy Carter, the well meaning but earnestly humorless Georgia peanut farmer; Ronnie (call me Al-zheimer) Reagan, a clapped-out B movie star, professional pitchman for baking soda and 2-term catastrophic Governor of California; George HW Bush, the GOP’s all-resumé equivalent of convertible garden furniture; the above-mentioned charming scoundrel Bill; George W, the congenial idiot the Supreme Court actually elected; and the current holder, Barack (Barry) Obama, who promised change but delivered chump change.
So before placing any bets on Trump, Hillary or Bernie, consider: Unreality is our new reality. Entertainment is our national addiction. As the Ship of State sails erratically into uncharted political waters, remember the Titanic had an orchestra on deck for entertainment before it hit the iceberg. Faites vos jeux!
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