My Problem With... The 2016 Farce
(Note: This is the first of a series of articles
focusing on one element in the great farce that we dare to call the 2016
Presidential Election season, or, as I like to call it, the 2016 Farce. I’m not going to play a game of “X is bad but
Y is just as bad if not worse”, nor will I entertain any rebuttals along those lines. Each participant in the 2016 Farce deserves
my full attention and spite and I will not allow anyone to try to negate that
attention and spite by comparing it to other factors. They all will get their turn, and believe me
when I say that you won’t like it when I get to yours.)
I have a problem with the 2016 Presidential Election season, or, as I
refer to it, the 2016 Farce.
Actually I have several problems, but I’ll get to each of the “official”
candidates in due time.
My first problem is something that I’ve talked about repeatedly, and that
is that the “campaign season” itself starts a whole year before anyone actually
votes.
The media and their self-appointed political “experts” now call that time
the “secret primary” because the candidates supposedly “need” that time to line
up their campaign war chests and get their names out for the public to
remember. But I would dare suspect this
extra “campaign time” is really just a way to make those aforementioned “experts”
a permanent full-time profession.
Imagine waking up one day in America and finding out that, instead of
sending out our tax statements on an annual basis, we now have to do them on a
monthly basis. Who would benefit from that? Why it would be your local tax preparer, of
course.
That’s what happened to our elections.
It really wasn’t that long ago that campaigns were few and far
between. You had four years before you
even heard about the next presidential wannabe, and two years before the next
Congressional race. Today pretty much
every year is a “campaign” season in one form or another. Presidential war chests start being built
right after the November elections.
Congressional strategies are “plotted” even before the current batch of
incumbents can mockingly take their “Oaths of Office” for the umpteenth
time. We can’t even get any peace during
the so-called “off-year” as wannabes start lining up for media attention.
Who benefits from all of this?
K-Street and C-Street lobbyists do.
So-called “political consultants” do.
Self-professed “advisors” are able to double-dip as they churn out
talking-point memos in the morning and then serve as “political consultants” to
the various news stations in the afternoon and on Sunday mornings to talk about
those memos.
And all the while, we’re not hearing about the substantive matters that our
current batch of career parasites are engaged in. We hear wannabes talking about “breaking up
the banks” and saying no to “Too Big to Fail”, but nobody is talking about how
they’re already getting away with their criminal activities by throwing the
government some pocket change (which they already
budgeted) and a mealy-mouthed promise to make things better. We hear about the lead in the water in Flint,
Michigan, but we don’t hear about who’s being impeached over causing it, or who
is going to get arrested over it, or, for that matter, what is being done to
fix the problem. Instead, we hear wannabes
and political flakes whine about science and scientists.
Hey so-called “experts”, how the hell did we find out about the lead in
the water in the first place? Or, for
that matter, knowing that lead in our drinking water is actually a bad
thing? It’s because of science! Jesus sure as hell didn’t come down and tell
us this! Oh, and on a side note: you
really do not want that carpenter’s son back down here, despite all your
bible-thumping rhetoric.
We hear about special interest groups and unlimited money, but nobody is
talking about the role the media is playing in all of this. Who do you think is making the conscious
decision to turn politics into a continual freak-show? Who do you think are paying the consultants
to double-dip when by all rights they should be disqualified from ever
appearing on the business side of a camera for conflict of interest? Who do you think are behind the daily “polls”
that are run with wild abandon? It’s not
K-Street or C-Street behind it. It’s the
mega-corporations that own and control the so-called “mainstream media” that
have made this the Farce that it currently is.
What’s worse is that this turn towards continual campaigning is affecting
the operation of our nation. Already we
have a Supreme Court, the highest court in our country, that is hobbled because
the GOP is deliberately using their control over the Senate to prevent a
vacated seat to be filled at least until after the November elections, if not
later. And that’s not the only judicial
vacancy that goes unfilled in the name of politics.
We have a government that has been operating on an endless series of
continuing resolutions, without a real budget for years. Why?
Because political brinksmanship and gridlock make for great campaign
tools for the perpetual campaign season.
Do you know how to end the need for presidential executive orders? Simple: the members of the House and Senate
need to get off their pampered asses and actually do their jobs in passing
reasonable legislation instead of fulfilling some unrealistic campaign promise
or spend their days whining about it on the campaign trail. Do you know how to control the runaway
regulations that get imposed? Simple:
the members of the House and Senate need to stop whining about “runaway
regulators” on the campaign trail and actually do their jobs in Washington.
All of these things have turned our government into a joke, and all in
the name of campaign platforms, all so our career politicians can continue to
get elected and re-elected over and over again.
Finally, there is the one part of the continual campaign season that this
commentator that been complaining about for twenty years now, and that is the
perceived lack of significant options.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the whole 2016 Farce, from its bastard
unofficial and insane beginnings in 2014, has been a colossal commercial for
the two dominant political parties, with a continual Orwellian subliminal
message to the great unwashed that these are the only options that they can
choose from. That we have to pick from only
one of the two candidates that survive the primary and caucus process and the
national conventions, and that there are supposedly no other options. Even if there are several options on your
ballot, you are told – and you, the vast moronic voters, actually believe – that
there are only those two horrible options.
And you don’t know too much about those other options, because the media
has been fixated on the two dominant parties, so you stupidly buy into the
script that those options “can’t win”, so you don’t vote for them.
I can’t stress this enough: a huge part of the problem we have with our
political system, especially with the 2016 Farce, lies firmly at the feet of
you, the great moronic voters. The
politicians lie, but you choose to buy into them. The media presents us the script, but you
choose to follow it. The parties may be
rigged, but you choose to support them.
The career politicians are corrupt and inept, but you choose to re-elect
them. As long as there are options and
you consciously refuse to accept those options and you continue to choose
failure and ineptitude and incompetence and corruption, then you – each and
every single one of you – are to blame for the mess that we are all in.
Now that I have that out of the way... on to the “contenders”.
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