☆ Running for office and holding office is usually something like being nibbled on by fish 24/7 and eventually eaten whole and digested. So political survivors and up-and-comers try to develop a thick skin and an entrenched fortress around themselves – lawyers, patrons, real estate money, political guardians, machine alliances, etc. They all claim they do it because they love their community and want to serve their community. The rhetoric rarely varies that much, other than the occasional loudmouth idiot or the even less occasional person with actually very good ideas. Campaign rhetoric is often as hollow of a gesture and as trite as holding a baby up for a photo-op during the election.
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There are certain mantras that are designed to insulate them or make them immune to criticism (at least in their minds). But in their own perceived insulation they have stopped being able to see how transparent their actions are to most of the rest of us. And it’s also because their playbook has not varied and they don’t have a very diverse imagination to come up with new ideas. It’s also possible that the simplicity of what they claim is crucial, such as “messaging” and “optics”, largely reflects the lack of those very things and the unconscious game for them is to create a sense of purpose or an inherent vestigial nobility that they themselves attach to their own profession. They’re the last ones to seem to realize that there is no nobility in politics anymore.
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But to them it is almost as if they seem to think they have gained access to an inner sanctum, a rarefied strata of holy men who are beatifically anointed, but it is closer to them also thinking unconsciously that they are now inside of a Shakespeare play, as if they have transcended reality itself by the sheer force of their will, as if they are now Godlike, revered, celestial, and infallible. “Chosen”. Most of them handle it really badly, abusing their office for personal gain and for the gain of their patrons or simply becoming a recurring paycheck and then a pension, a useless expense whose salary taxpayers are forced to swallow.
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Most of us, even those who follow politics closely, are hard-pressed to point to significant accomplishments by either major American political party. Occasionally, a legislative bone is thrown our way: gay marriage, “health reform”, “jobs programs”, etc., but of course the majority of the Democrats’ and Republicans’ tenures are always about chipping away at the middle class while seeming publicly like they ferociously support the middle class. They spend their time trying to build political capital with voters, often synchronized with an election year. Roughly 60% (possibly much more if you factor in full transparency) of federal income tax goes to fund a bloated war machine, so you get the usual propaganda for that crap in the way of big flag pins on the lapels, excessively obvious patriotic gestures that become normalized, dick-measuring style perceived lack of patriotism between political opponents, and blatant high school pep rally flag waving that should be embarrassing to most intelligent people. Samuel Johnson is still very relevant, as the last refuge of a scoundrel remains this wild-eyed patriotism horseshit.
Third parties have been marginalized to the point of being almost insignificant and often only noticeable when one of the two big parties wants to blame the Greens or someone else for ruining their chances, eg. Ralph Nader in 2000, Perot in 1992, or even Jill Stein in 2016, even though she got 0.9% of the national vote … Gary Johnson got twice as many votes but was not blamed or lambasted with a similar scrutiny. The two big parties rarely take responsibility and realize that it is up to them to win enough votes to be elected. They blame other candidates and create false premises to invoke whatever insanity they want to pass off as “what actually happened”.
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Gay marriage stands out as one of the lone actual accomplishments that is pointed out in terms of progressive politics, however that is an achievement of activists and others of similar ilk who created the climate for something like same-sex marriage, it was not the politicians that spearheaded that civil rights milestone and Democrats had to be pushed and pleaded with just to sign the legislation and when they did it was used mostly for political capital.
Recently we have been going in retrograde motion with abortion choice under attack via toxically religious justifications that have no place in politics, corruption now having been institutionalized by the highest court of the land, in the guise of legislation like Citizens United and voting protections for many demographics being rolled back. And this is all years before the current deeply corrupt administration. Even the minimal legislative reform to the healthcare system that was passed in 2010 is a small drop compared to what could have been put in place and became more of a handout to the already-insanely-wealthy insurance companies than anything else. And during the same era that this happened, during the Barack Obama administration, the middle class shrank and the black and Latino communities continued to suffer even more drastic setbacks economically. In addition, Wall Street was held completely unaccountable for the unmitigated implosion that they caused in 2008, and executive salaries continue to climb unnecessarily and insanely during the last eight years. And we already know what direction they’re going in during the administration of the current fraudulent president. The rich continue to loot and to pillage and savage the planet. And then complain about the state of the grass on their golf course.
Of course, the pressing question currently on the majority of Americans’ minds, despite the claims to the contrary inside the right-wing echo chamber is how do we stop the American Taliban, the GOP? They are politically autistic and for that reason are unaware of the damage they cause or unwilling to change course. Or worse – all too willing to kill off people in the name of commerce and in the name of managing the world population that they themselves were part and parcel in creating – the GOP wants a better and more responsible population, but they also want to outlaw abortion, Planned Parenthood, and everything in place that would help alleviate population problems. And eventually the GOP will get around to trying to outlaw contraception and other idiotic and uninformed ideas they spin.
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The GOP has a base that is boiling over with a misplaced rage and a wild misinformation and has severe Stockholm Syndrome, a blinded Dunning-Kruger effect eating away their common sense, and a middle school level comprehension of very fundamental issues and of important concepts like the Constitution and free speech and what it means to pay taxes into a pool where everyone shares as needed, which is what the American democracy tries to abide by, in theory. But the fraudulent and misinformed and calculating conservative movement continues to mislead and lie, trying to deceive people into willingly giving up all of the hard-earned benefits of being an American citizen.
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The core of the GOP, of course, is an amoral, heartless, careerist, dark place that poses as patriotic, community-oriented, and noble, but is easily exposed as simply the diametric opposite of that. Why is it so hard for a bunch of people in the US to see that? Maybe bad education. Or is it just part of the ruse that elected Democrats also benefit from? The dumbing-down effect. Because both Democrats and Republicans have failed completely to improve education significantly.
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Consumer coercion and the now normalized corporate sponsor patches on politicians like bought-and-paid-for NASCAR drivers is part of the fast-moving cancer. Both parties serving their campaign donors is not only repulsive but is exactly how the country’s infrastructure, education, stability, health, sanity, peace, and the future collapse.
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The time to take a bold stand was probably 40 years ago, then 20 years ago, then during the Bush Jr. years, then during the Obama years (at least we got OWS in 2011), and now, um… well…
Becoming a banana republic has always been a very real threat as long as delays to stop the corruption have continued. Any country built on capitalism that has no end goals other than more money was going to crash eventually. “It can’t happen here” no longer applies. And both parties have perpetuated the corruption for their continued gain, the Republicans just do it a little more blatantly.
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The fundamental question is how do these GOP knuckle-draggers thrive and survive? Obviously money. The classic power game. But what else resides in their swollen amygdalas? Besides football, toys, and delusions.
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The Democrats have not fought hard enough to prevent the advances of this grudgeful political attack that is now decades-old.
One of the main reasons the darkness of the GOP has survived is because of the completely ineffective political strategies of the Democratic party. And there is no credible threat from any third party. The Green party and any other parties are always so disorganized, underfunded, and ill equipped to be any kind of firewall at all. In 2016 the Green party decided to attack Hillary more than Trump and certainly had a hand in Trump’s election. One Green party member who went to Philadelphia to protest the DNC then explained that the Green party did not go to Cleveland to protest the RNC as much as they did the DNC in Philadelphia because (and I quote) “it was farther away”.
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So exactly what stupid shit did these two parties get into after all these years? The inevitable frontier mentality that has been romanticized by the John Wayne attitude and these fake Patriots, this team sport bullshit of my party vs. your party and my party will kick your party’s ass. Low-brow approaches to management, especially when you consider that the entire country and world are hanging in the balance. It really isn’t a game, by any stretch of the imagination. Unless the game is pure, unmitigated sadism.
What debt do we owe either party, at this point? Our vote? No, definitely not that. Impaling them through the anus with a forty-foot metal spike…? Tantalizing, but that would be playing by their rules and that’s their game – divide & conquer.
However, much of this has been planned and orchestrated by GOP think tanks for decades. When better things and progressive values were on the rise in the 1990s, the GOP, via the Heritage foundation and the National Review, etc., ad nauseum, planned their counter-attack to a more peace-loving world movement. Post-Berlin wall and post-Eastern Bloc, there was a few years when Newt Gingrich and a young John Boehner and the young Turks of the then-new and post-Reagan/Bush Sr. Republican party were attacking Bill Clinton for mostly fabricated and petty things. However, those wasted years of slander and squabbling created a void into which the Republicans planted many malignant seeds, out of which grew the Tea Party and this new strain of ugly and nationalist Russian-style conservatism orthodoxy now embracing Putinism more than even Reaganism, let alone common sense or a viable vision of an attainable and sustainable future.
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Conservatives are willing to sacrifice as many people as they see fit as if they were Aztec priests atop a pyramid, however there is no plan and no vision and mere bloodletting seems to be the only map they have at the moment. They’re willing to destroy as much as possible to prove that they can hold the power even with no viable plan for what to do with any of the power. A classically unhealthy situation which the world used to suffer from greatly when unfit kings and queens ruled most nations, which of course was exactly what the plan was to avoid when this nation was created here on the continent now known as “America”, previously known as “Turtle Island” to indigenous people.
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The problem with the Democrats is the severe centrism and the willingness to cave in to any and all GOP threats or demands. Or perhaps there is some tacit game the Democrats and Republicans are playing to hand power back and forth to each other in cycles of approximately 8 years. Maybe it’s some backroom machinations by a bunch of sociopathic Freemasons still thinking they have magic powers because of a secret handshake. Nothing’s shocking anymore, clearly.
Primarily the problem however could be that there is a persistence of a frontier mentality in this country, a strange and misguided wistfulness for the frontier of the Old West and an infantile romanticization of the mythology of the cowboy… and when cowboys finally see that their game has existed inside a fishbowl and they get a brief blinding flash of “the Fishbowl” they don’t have an epiphany – they can’t stand it… and that’s what makes them so angry, that they have merely been swimming inside a fishbowl all this time. Then they swiftly forget the insight and they’re left with blind rage and nothing else. And this is the fatal dysfunction and premise that is running a federal government that is supposedly entrusted to oversee the welfare of hundreds of millions of people here. Hundreds of millions of people.
And then the Democrats explain it as a “game of inches” in terms of getting things done, meanwhile conservatives seem to be running away with the ball by breaking the rules and stealing elections and buying up political offices and judges. Democrats seem to have no plan but to try to keep their half of a deeply gerrymandered country, but they are barely able to make good on that, being so compromised and oafish.
But just why are there so many disgusting little turds floating around in the fishbowl…? It’s unlikely that humanity is really this horribly disgusting that politicians are reflecting any of who we are at all. In the past we never really were as bad as some of the revolting rulers and kings and queens and dictators who claimed to represent us. Those twisted and inbred not-so-royal people never should have defined us or any of the world’s history, mostly being that they were largely European hillbillies in expensive outfits. It certainly is strange how too much of history is demarcated by wars and kings and queens, despite some of the social and scientific advances that we now have.
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Not to belabor the transmission, there is a bipolar fissure that has grown more extreme recently. Now inside “the Fishbowl” it seems to be a kind of standoff in a deeply schizoid mind which is destroying itself the way that brain cancer debilitates and destroys the host. And the Wild West cowboy frontier mentality is currently winning, despite some of the forward progress directed by some decent outside players. And despite the cowboys having no idea what they’re doing other than firing off their pistols like drunken rednecks in the woods, the echoes keeping them company, mostly.
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So what we have done is put our trust and future in something like a really goddamn terrible investment bank that it turns out is running a Ponzi scheme, with the first red flags being diminishing results and then eventually a massive and cataclysmic crash. We have all the warning signs but we have signed the title over to two political parties and given them the keys. We squawk and we yell but the back and forth between the two parties is simply yielding more of the diminishing results of the repetitive and tiring Sisyphusian cycle. It’s not that much different from having kings and queens in charge of serfs.
If you want to free yourself, you’re going to have to stop investing in the Democrats and Republicans because it’s been a losing investment and we are going to need better forms of actual representation now. At this point, it’s an emergency. But we’re like junkies. We just want a fix and a brief rush of endorphins. And even emergencies don’t necessarily alarm junkies.
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There are actually those who are building alternatives or waiting for much of the population to get on board, but other people say they don’t have the time for it or they don’t want to talk about it. People say ridiculous and ignorant things like “You should never talk about religion or politics at the table”, but sadly they’ve never talked about religion or politics enough at any point anywhere to understand how it works and why it’s so crucial to all of this, so of course it gets ugly when people finally talk about it at the dinner table… which is where most people often wind up seeing each other… and no one truly knows who anyone is really or what it will take for us to be able to get out of this fish bowl and distance ourselves from this ridiculous cycle of money and corruption and political gamesmanship. You want answers. The answer is right here. And it’s been spelled out to you before, many, many times.
If you want it less apocalyptic and less dark & foreboding, it’s right here, but the laziness and the apathy have a grip on much of the population. And the other half just wants to shoot people or some other romanticized idea of what it was like to live in the Old West, the ridiculous fantastical notion people have after having exterminated much of the Native American population. Genocide. Thank John Wayne or Ronnie Reagan and a long line of cowardly presidents for that tragic delusion of victory.
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As plain as the GOP blindness is, it is also kind of insane that liberal voters will run right back to the Democrats and just start the same empty vicious cycle over again, only to once again be betrayed. It’s what Wall Street used to call easy money in the 1980s. We already know that Republican voters are infantilized and inhabited by the GOP ideology to the point of not being able to think for themselves, much like a crackhead haunted by the rock. But what excuse do the better educated liberal voters have for continuing to fall into the trap of thinking that the Democrats will represent them accurately and honestly? That’s almost worse than the childlike trust that GOP voters allow themselves to be possessed by merely at the unfurling of the flag. Humanity is allowing itself to be directed by this reductive team sports mentality, the demons standing at the gate of transcendence.
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Clearly, Democrats are selling their voters out pretty quickly after every election, even though a lot of people hate the Republicans and blame the Republicans … and for very good reasons. A bunch of you seem to have forgotten that the Democrats had all the power just a few years ago. But some of you trust your kidnapper, the same way the clueless Republican voters trust their own party as their future is being sliced and diced. Stockholm syndrome. Spelling it out again. …
The two parties and their elected politicians have become merely prison wardens.
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There’s no way to really resolve this without a lot of you getting out there, especially those who have put this shit off for far too long, just like a lot of other things, just like that novel you were going to write. You never got past lunch.
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Build the alternative representation to this implosion outside the clutches of these two starkly embarrassing political football teams. Subtract the Dems & Repugz. The masturbatory dimension Facebook was originally built with was with far less real thought than are in the words you just read here. Zuckerberg just wanted to get laid.
And: Ideas predate money.
Empires crumble and usually empires crumble when everyone’s been lulled into that sense of comfort, the one that has been quickly vanishing in the USA, but is still propped up with propaganda and team-sports-style patriotic guilt trips. Maybe we don’t have it in us. Or maybe it’s just that YOU yourself don’t have it in you. Because you know the solutions already. And you ignored all the signs. Up till now. ♤
2 Rethuglicans.
