The media loves nothing better than a neck and neck presidential race, so they will try to create one, whether one actually exists or not. Witness the Democratic Primary, which for all practical purposes, was over months ago. To watch an evening of punditry on Cabal news is much like having night duty a on locked ward in a mental hospital. Nonsensical conversations abound. One pundit will say, "The numbers don't lie, there is no way Hillary can win this nomination." Then, everyone else, so-called experts and analysts go babbling on about how she can, in fact win. Hillary, herself, seems to have gone totally 'round the bend, comparing her campaign to everything from the civil rights struggle to women's rights to, now, the election in Zimbabwe.
Whats' next, Patton's Battle of the Bulge?
For me the real kicker was all the references to election 2000, after which we all called for the abolishment of the electoral college and to allow the popular vote to stand as the will of the people. I remember clearly the new junior senator from N.Y saying that she was against that. Well, of course she was. Abolishing the electoral college would make it almost impossible for the two political parties to play their electoral games of voter manipulation and electoral calculation by state rather than by voter, and rarely have we seen anyone play those games better than the Clintons and the Bushes.
I am still for allowing the electoral college to go the way of the horse and buggy (though the latter may be on its way back). I'm also for another blast from the past; pen and paper ballots. Who cares how much time it takes to count ballots, as long as the count represents the will of the people.
What no one wants is another 2000, because this one will not end as 2000 did, with fake vote counts, Brooks Brothers riots and unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings. We live in an entirely different political world than we did then. I honestly don't believe that the people will stand still for another "stolen election" be it real or imagined. Because of all the shenanigans in the last 4 elections, the American people are finally becoming suspicious of all kinds of elections weirdness, and I can assure my fellow independents that illegal aliens voting is the last of their concerns.
This country is as a powder keg. The tension is so think one could cut it with a knife, even though the politicians continue to smile and wave as if that were not the case. We are all living in something closely resembling the Twilight Zone. Tempers are flaring in the hintertlands, mostly at gas stations, but in other places as well. We, Americans, are all playing pretty fast and lose with what's left of our sanity, and the psychotics in Teevee news land are not helping.
We are headed for a full-blown, national break-down and the folks in the D.C. bubble are either as clueless as they seem or they just aren't reporting it or talking about it in the halls of power.
Sometimes, it is better to just stop resisting and hit bottom. Then, there will be nowhere to go but up. From the ashes the Phoenix does rise., or even better, a humble nation of can-do, courageous people, who long for the country we started out to be and finally see the evils of empire, will emerge. They will see the faces of the monster for which their sons and daughters are killing and dying and who will find their courage, if not their faith, and decide to pull the plug on the whole sociopathic government/corporate protection racket, a better word for which is fascism.
Fascism was not defeated in 1945. It simply moved.
It can't happen here?
It already has.
The only question for American voters now is who can lead us forward from here. Which way do we want to go? Toward peace, social and economic justice, beginning to really think outside the box, without destroying what makes us a people; our constitution? Or do we want to attempt to "shoot the moon" and continue down a path begun by some of the most idiotic people to ever gain power in modern day America with the most horrendous deception and fear-mongering, amounting to the most abject betrayal of the American people in history.
What's worse, it is a betrayal that threatens the whole world, in one way or another, very little of it good.
We, Dear Compatriots, are about to get smacked with the biggest load of karma to hit any nation since WWII. In my lifetime, I have found that when karma rolls around, it is far better to accept my due and be grateful for the profound lessons it offers. Karma is about balance, not punishment or reward. It is the correction of error; the error that caused the imbalance in the first place. Anyone care to guess what that error was? Think about it.
America had gone seriously off the rails. It isn't all that sudden. We have been careening back and forth on a down hill slide for the last 40 years, in many ways. Even in ways where we believe we have made progress, now we find that that progress may have been all for show; skin deep. Or perhaps, now, it is real, deep down, and the breathless reporting of an occult racism and/or sexism, possibly even more poisonous and than that which permeated this country back then, is just typical of today's idea of news reporting.
Sometimes I wonder, how divided are we really? Are we really in the middle of a cold civil war that could turn hot at any moment, or are we simply convinced of that, because it is far more entertaining than the truth of the matter, which is that we are all in the big ship of fools....er....state together, for better or for worse. Some of us who saw the writing on the wall early on have long since, quietly, left the country. Some of us may still leave. But many more will stay, ride it out and do the hard work to begin to turn things around, if that is still possible.
No decision is any better or worse than the other. For those who have left, America may well, one day, need her ex-patriots. For those who stayed, America needs her peacemakers and her conscious citizens, her independent thinkers and, especially, the generation coming of age now.
To them, I say only this, "Make peace with each other, but only an authentic peace; one that does not require that you trash your highest principles, park your brain at the door, or sell out to the highest bidder. Some things should not ever be trashed or be up for sale.
Democracy cannot exist where the people are unwilling to compromise. Compromise and consensus are as necessary to Democracy as oxygen and water are to human life. Nevertheless, when and where one group must always compromise, even their deepest held principles, Democracy does not live anyway, but is only a pretty word, turned into a most dangerous deception.
By P.M. Carpenter
If the Democratic Party thinks it has problems -- which it obviously does, what with its presidential-nomination process so clearly resembling Zimbabwe's and all, or so we're told -- it should pause for a moment and consider its blessings: chief among them, it isn't the GOP.
Now there's a party with problems, from its sitting president with Hooverian popularity to its larger image as "dog food" in need of mass recall.
It's panic time at the Grand Old Party, but I've got to give its operatives credit. "Mum" isn't their word, for they are airing their problems hither, yon and with stentorian force. He of last week's ground-meat metaphor is a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and then yesterday there was this honest assessment in the New York Times from a prominent Republican adviser:
The loss of a congressional seat in Mississippi was only the second most disturbing sign for Republicans last week. The exodus of lobbyists from John McCain’s campaign wasn’t even close. The most ominous warning for what the fall might be like for the GOP was the throng of 75,000 people that Barack Obama turned out for a rally in Portland over the weekend ... [which was] was roughly two-thirds the number of Republicans who participated in the Iowa caucuses this year.
This, as the adviser continued for the benefit of those few still lingering in denial, is "growing and irrefutable evidence of an enthusiasm gap between the two parties."
Something, most Republicans realize, must be done. But what?
Most fortunate for the nation is that they haven't a clue. They are simply stumped, void of new ideas and doubtful of old tricks. Even the House GOP's starting point of a new slogan -- "The change you deserve" -- hit a depressing snag right off the bat. And as anyone familiar with modern politics knows, if one hasn't a spiffy slogan, one can't possibly advance one's cause.
Yet the even bigger problem for the GOP is that the party no longer knows what its cause is, let alone market the bloody thing. This huge bump in the electoral road became blisteringly clear this week as Republican House members convened to consider the thematic fate of their party.
As The Politico reports, "Rank-and-file Republicans met to clear the air Tuesday in a crowded, members-only session on the fifth floor of the Longworth House Office Building. Members who attended said the summit was typical of previous meetings, with lawmakers offering their individual visions for the party but failing to come to a consensus about a way forward."
Upon reading the story, however, what struck me wasn't so much their inability to come to a consensus -- they were, after all, a recently stunned assemblage, meeting as they did on the heels of three special-election losses deep within GOP territory -- but the almost morbidly anemic properties of the ideas that members proposed.
One would think that after suffering such humiliating setbacks, and now clearly seeing the writing on numerous other walls, that Gingrichlike fire-eaters would be coming out of the GOP woodwork, bellowing the newest, latest and hottest in demagogic folderol -- you know, exactly what once put them in power to begin with. But that wasn't the case. No, that wasn't the case at all.
Instead, for instance, no less than the chairman of the oxymoronic Republican Study Committee, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, proposed the utterly nonrevolutionary ideas of "reform[ing] the tax code and a unilateral earmark moratorium." And those were the meeting's blockbusters -- tax codes and earmarks, two items around which no typically uninformed electorate will ever wrap its brain. What's more, even the chairman's colleagues were unenthusiastic, having rejected for obvious reasons "the moratorium proposal on two previous occasions."
And things went downhill from there, ideologically -- which for this party is to say, demagogically -- speaking. For example another House member dusted off his years-old plan for a "suburban agenda," the "new version" of which "includes many of the same policy prescriptions as the original -- college savings accounts and legislation to target online predators -- plus new items, such as a food safety measure." A what? We're talking Rome burning here, and the fire brigade is fiddling and piddling. It's almost sad.
If they really wanted to rouse the multitudes, they would flee from their incumbent party leader and his unrepentant policies with vigorous abandon. They would, that is, agitate for something completely different -- say, real "Fortress America" stuff such as a return to Taftian isolationism and Smoot-Hawley protectionism. They would, in short, turn on an ideological dime, since the electoral worm's sensibilities have already turned.
They wouldn't have to believe any of it or anything like that. After all, they never really have in the past. But need I remind them that this is politics -- Republican politics, which has always excelled at trumping sane or executable policy. So the nuts and bolts of it are entirely beside the point.
We want and we demand, for we have come to expect, nothing but the most spectacular of rabble-rousing from the Grand Old Party. It doesn't have to be calls for Taftian isolationism, if that fails to trip their trigger. They could even stick with some of the old. They could, for instance, insist on invading Ethiopia or something; you know, real empire-reinvigorating Mussolini stuff -- anything but, for heaven's sake, a food safety measure.
Come on, GOPers. Show us some of that old-time political religion.
For personal questions or comments you can contact P.M. at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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