Super Tuesday gave voters just what everyone expected: a general election almost no one wants.
Vermont was the only state whose Republicans rejected the GOP’s inevitable nominee. We can expect any day now to be hearing spurious tales about health hazards associated with maple syrup produced by illegal Cuban migrant workers on Communist communes.
In another outlying result, Nikki Haley trounced the former president in Washington, D.C. over the weekend, by a margin of nearly two-to-one. In doing so she handed her opponent a win, if he should choose to accept it: “I wouldn’t take those 19 delegates if they came crawling out of The Swamp on their knees.”
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side—to which we hasten in perverse emulation of profit-driven media outlets’ knee-jerk pursuit of meaningless symmetry—a potential sign of weakness for the Biden campaign has emerged in American Samoa. Reports from Pago Pago say Jason Palmer got a decisive 56 percent of the vote, compared to a meagre 44 percent for incumbent Joe Biden.
The insignificance of this result is hard to overstate. As a territory, not a state, American Samoa will not cast an electoral vote. Its population of under 45,000 registered a turnout rate of two-tenths of one percent. These numbers are so small that one imagines a new field, quantum political science, might be required to understand it—were it not for the money.
We’re hearing about American Samoa because Jason Palmer—previously associated with “Microsoft, Kaplan Education, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the impact investor firm New Markets Venture Partners,” according to ABC News—could afford to set $500,000 on fire to scratch a political itch. Palmer spent $11.11 for every citizen in Samoa. His 51 votes cost him $9,803 each.
So, those 91 votes in Samoa are strangely reflective of the election, after all. Our allegedly secular priesthood, the U.S. Supreme Court carved a stone table in 2009 decreeing that money equals speech. That Citizens United decision was just an instance of the bully rubbing our noses in it.
The phrase “money talks” dates back to the 19th century, and has accurately reflected our politics ever since. In the Gilded Age, railroad barons and other industrialists did as they saw fit. The proper role of government functionaries was to protect their rights.
The wealthy knew very well they were in a minority—they’d spared no effort to make things that way. It was vitally important that most people had to worry about going hungry—otherwise how could the few make a profit?
Aside from a crash now and then, this system worked well for the better part of a century—for the beneficiaries. One golden egg followed another, until… .
Oops. How are you going to keep ’em down in the factory, after you’ve closed it and sold their jobs to the Chinese Communist Party?
Tell ’em God’s on your side.
It’s as hard to believe as a horse head in bed, but the facts are undeniable. The plan is to stay in charge of the government, and on top of the economy, by convincing the most hyper-religious sector of the public to put an amoral, immoral, lying, cheating, treasonous, insurrectionist felon back in the White House.
And, once he’s there, let them call the shots. Iran has its Guidance Patrol. Afghanistan has its Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Why should Islamist fundamentalists have all the fun?
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 lays all this out in plain sight. Republicans are going to knock down the wall between church and state, and use its remnants to build a wall on the border, to make it easier to crap on the poor.
“But…but…but,” you may sputter, in a froth of indignant confusion. “Not only is their candidate depraved himself, but every day we hear about another MAGA fanatic getting arrested for a sex crime.” That’s the trouble with heathens. They underestimate the power of salvation and repentance.
This isn’t just about imposing Christianity on everyone, regardless of race or creed—although, to be sure, it is about that. Just ask disgraced-but-forgiven former National Security Advisor and un-registered agent for Turkey Mike Flynn. He’s going around delivering stump speeches to the faithful, saying things like this: “If we are going to have one nation under God which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God.”
Speaking of one-track minds, the plan also revives Dick “Dick” Cheney’s Unitary Executive Theory. Dolt #45 will ostensibly call the shots, but he’ll only be a Potemkin dictator.
Being an oligarch means never having to face the consequences of your depradations—and always having ample means to carry out your crazy schemes.
The postwar era represented a big change in the American economy: it was unusually kind to ordinary working families. People had homes in the ’burbs, cars in the driveways, and kids in colleges.
This was unacceptable to people who thought they deserved to have it better than everyone else. With a tiny fraction of the profits they “earned” from the sweat of others’ brows, they established sheltered workshops full of professional apologists for capitalism. Their steady stream of one-sided, misguided, wrong-headed arguments, just plausible enough for the corporate media to swallow, habituated the public to—if they failed to convince the public of—a vast steaming heap of bad ideas.
We may be about to see them being put into practice on a scale that has hitherto been unimaginable.