No Matter Who Wins the White House, Americans Lose

Are you as nauseated, saddened, horrified and disgusted by this Presidential election campaign as I am? In one generation, mine, this country has gone from the world’s beacon of democracy and prosperity to the giant village idiot bumbling and stumbling incoherently around the planet, an untethered corporate mascot gone berserk.

With the ascension of Trump, our election process has become an international joke, and other countries look at us with pity and sadness as they watch a once admired champion lean helplessly against the ropes, punch-drunk and bran damaged, in what is surely its final round.

We are here today thanks to greed, plain and simple. Despite a booming economy and a real chance for citizens to live the American dream, the military/industrial/media complex of the 1960s/70s, like Frankenstein’s monster suddenly realizing it has superhuman strength, woke up to its horrible potential to influence this country’s political process through its wealth and connections to America’s elites. The ball really got rolling during the Reagan administration with its tax cuts for the wealthy and, despite sixteen years of Democratic rule, the trajectory has been downhill ever since.

Having destroyed America’s middle class, stretched income inequality to ludicrous extremes and purchased the two major political parties, the wealthy elites are surely enjoying the spectacle we serfs naively call a democratic election. The reality is, they don’t care who is crowned President. The oily, snake-tongued Trump is one of their members, as is the neo-liberal Clinton. Neither candidate is a threat to the current hegemony that is pulling this country beneath the surface like a weight tied around its ankles.

The corporate media dutifully continues its assigned goal of making the Presidential campaign look like a race when it is actually more like a horrific automobile accident from which we can’t avert our eyes. Our elections have turned into a dark spectacle, a cirque du macabre of huge laughing orange faces, cackling countesses and obese promoters counting their stacks of coins backstage. We willingly pay the price of admission while they laugh at our gullibility from behind the curtains, filling their vaults with our hard earned cash.

This election year, regardless of who moves into the White House, Americans will lose, and despite being conned once again, their attention will be drawn to the shiny object the media tells them is the next big thing.

Monday Morning Madness in America

I should learn to abstain from browsing political news on Monday mornings. Getting myself out of bed, showered, dressed and to work on time is challenge enough, I don’t need a further assault on my senses by reading articles about our frighteningly ignorant, dangerously delusional leaders. I need to ease into it, prepare myself mentally for the tsunami of absurdity that passes for politics in America today. Why make Monday’s tougher than they already are?

Today, however, it’s too late. I dove headfirst into Raw Story, The Huffington Post, Truthout, and Salon and found myself treading water in a cesspool of profound lunacy, hypocrisy, misogyny, bigotry, and…I could keep going, but I’ll stop there. From the Governor of Indiana trying lamely to rationalize the inherent bigotry of his “Religious Freedom” law to the droopy faced Ted Cruz wishing the White House could be moved to Texas where people like him to “The Dumbest Person in Congress” Louie Gohmert’s assertion that negotiations with Iran have already failed and we should just fly there and bomb their nuclear facilities.

The gravity of their stupidity has me reeling. The level of government to which they have ascended has me terrified. Whatever name you want to give our election system, it has failed us and allowed dangerously inept people into the halls of power, and the media is forced to take them seriously. How bad is it? The FOX News host who was interviewing Gohmert was visibly stunned and disturbed by his loony plan to bomb Iran. When, as a Republican, you can say something so inane it makes a FOX News host shudder, you have literally crossed the line into a clinically recognized mental disorder.

You can’t unthink this stuff. The Republicans running for President are crazy, and one of them could end up in the Oval Office. America has been given the opportunity to elect a person who would make George Bush look like FDR. It’s Monday morning and I’ve already had my week’s fill of stupidity. Thanks, me.

Welcome to the Capital Hill Asylum

As predicted, American voters, at least that relatively small group that showed up to actually vote, elected the craziest inmates to run the asylum. Lunatics like Wisconsin Governor Scott “Koch addict” Walker, Florida Governor Rick “White-brother-from-another-planet” Scott and Senator Mitch “Yertle-the-Turtle” McConnell are all given back their respective jobs. And then there is the new crop of crazies headed by Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst, who made a campaign commercial where she linked her experience at castrating pigs to her desire to “cut the pork” in Washington. Iowans must have loved it.

As many others are pointing out, the electoral system in America is broken. From the money tsunami unleashed by Citizens United to gerrymandering to voter ID laws that disenfranchise minorities to hackable computerized voting machines, every election is now suspect and less a representation of the people’s will than a slave auction for white billionaires.

And paramount in this particular election was the issue of Obama hatred and racism. Primarily a red state mid-term, we saw how successful Republicans were at demonizing the President and shifting the blame for America’s problems from themselves to the “uppity negro” in Washington. Aided by a cowardly mainstream media, Republican candidates effectively used their code words, winks and nudges to stoke the racial hatred lying just beneath the surface of many white voters.

One rare bright spot was in my own state of Minnesota where we reelected a Democratic governor and sent Al Franken back to the Senate. I don’t envy Al because he is going to have his work cut out for him as one of a minority of sane voices trying to be heard amid the wailing, babbling patients of the Capital Hill Asylum.