Week of 07/25/2016

My Problem With... The DNC
– by David Matthews 2

(Note: This is the continuation of the ongoing look at the factors and candidates that make up the 2016 Farce.  Each of the “dominant” factors will be examined.  The author will not entertain nor permit anyone to try to negate the focus of each look by saying “X is bad but Y is even worse” because they all are bad in their own way.  Each will have their turn to be examined and castigated, and you probably will not like it when it is your group’s turn.)

Once upon a time, I had an idea for an ongoing look at the 2016 Farce, aka the 2016 Presidential Election.  I wanted to focus on each one of the presidential wannabes from the two dominant political parties and show why I thought they were part of the ongoing problem and not the solutions that they pretend to be.

And then something stupid happened... the wannabes dropped out, leaving us with just two:  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  A thin-skinned #whinylittlebitch narcissist and a scheming modern-day Lady Macbeth in a pantsuit. 

Yeah, there was also Bernie Sanders, but someone forgot to let the Senator from Vermont know that he wasn’t supposed to be in the script to the 2016 Farce.

“Whose script” you ask?  Well you’ll have to ask the Democratic National Committee.

You see, I have a problem with the DNC.

Well, actually several problems.  And since this article will be posted on the opening day of their national convention, now is the perfect time to vent those problems.

Much like my condemnation of the “Grand Old Party” in the previous article, the DNC is very much a major factor behind how Hillary Clinton became “the nominee”.  But unlike the so-called “Republicans” (who are not in any sense of the word), the DNC didn’t “end up” with their nominee.  They goddamned orchestrated it!

The whistleblower website Wikileaks recently confirmed what many people in America – especially myself – have long suspected: that members of the Democratic National Committee played favorites and manipulated the system so that their BFF, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would win and be their nominee.  She didn’t want it to be a “nomination”, but rather a “confirmation”.

Believe me, this is the batch of emails that Hillary wished would never be released.  Screw the witch hunt over a “private server”; this is the real email scandal!

It’s one thing to simply say that the game is rigged.  It’s one thing to speculate how the DNC is favoring one candidate over another, especially when it’s your candidate that is losing out and you don’t know any other reason to explain it.  Even when you don’t have a dog in that race, it’s easy to dismiss a political outsider like myself when they make that kind of observation.  But it’s another thing entirely to have an electronic trail actually proving it.  To show actual bias from people that are supposed be neutral.  Hell, there’s an email showing money changing hands between the DNC and Hillary’s campaign!

And it’s not the first time this has happened. Remember 2008?  That was supposed to be Hillary’s nomination back then, if not for that “uppity” junior senator from Illinois coming in and “stealing” all her thunder and becoming President of the United States.  How “dare” Barrack Obama do that to her!

Hell, the narrative this time around mirrored the start of 2008’s season.  How Hillary was supposed to be “the” nominee, and everyone else shouldn’t even bother trying, how she’s lined up every single super-delegate before a single vote could be entered.  The script is pretty much cut-and-paste, much like Melania Trump’s GOP speech, only this time around they made sure that they wouldn’t have that “uppity” senator problem.

And this, right here, is pretty much my problem with the DNC.  Much like how there is nothing “Republican” with the GOP, there’s nothing at all “democratic” about this party! It’s all plutocratic!  It’s all about the party bosses and whom they will allow to represent them publicly. 

Think about this: just how did Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid end up being the “leaders” in their respective legislative bodies?  They both were inept and incompetent when they served as Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader, but somehow they “defaulted” to those positions.  Why?  Because they knew how to play the game.  And that’s all that matters to them.

Look at how the DNC are treating the Bernie supporters.  Rather than trying to reach out and appeal to them and try to accommodate what they want, the DNC is muscling through their own people and their own agendas. 

Look at who Hillary selected as her running-mate!  Instead of choosing Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has general appeal for the whole party, Hillary selected Senator Tim Kaine, who mirrors the things that she likes.  They love big banks and Wall Street.  They’d continue the screwjobs that Eric Holder dished out when he was Attorney General when he let the banks get away with their crimes against America with pocket change for fines. 

That’s not reaching out to the Bernie supporters.  That’s kicking them in the nuts and telling them to be thankful for it, and, oh, by the way, they “need” to vote for Hillary or else the GOP wins.  Forget about fixing the bugs in the Affordable Care Act.  Forget about holding the banks and big corporations to account for their actions.  Forget about help for sky-high college prices or job-killing trade deals.  Just sit down, shut up, and vote for Hillary or else the GOP wins.  That’s their “unity” speech right there.  It’s “Vote for Hillary or else Trump wins.”

You see, that’s the DNC’s standard operating procedure.  They have become the party of “default”, and they embrace that status more than Kaitlin Jenner embraces hers.

And it’s easy to see why.  It’s like the old joke about two men being chased by a bear, with the punchline being “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.”  They don’t have to do anything to “fix” the problems of the nation.  They just have to show that the GOP can’t.  They don’t have to prove that they’re the “better” option, just not “the worst”.  They don’t have to demonstrate their worthiness, only show that the GOP isn’t worthy. 

It’s the lazy slacker approach to things.  They don’t have to put in any effort.  They just have to show that the “alternative” is worse.

But here’s the thing:  the Dems really need those Bernie voters.  They’re young and enthusiastic and right now they’re interested in the political system!  They need those people to vote for them. But that will change if the Dems alienate those young voters.  Kick them in the nuts and tell them they “have” to sacrifice everything they believe in to vote for someone they hate “or else the GOP wins”, and the DNC will send most of them back into apathy and into their parents’ basement.

The Democrats can’t rely on the senior citizens like they used to.  Not only are they dying, which happens when you get old, but they’re spending more and more time watching Fox News and becoming GOP voters.  The other special interest groups that the DNC used to rely on have been dying out as well, thanks mostly in part to the GOP.  They need that new blood, and they’re spitting in the faces of that new blood in the name of politics.

Let’s get brutally honest here... the DNC has become a merit system of cronyism.  There’s no actual principle anymore with them.  They’re not really “for” anything other than getting in power and staying in power.

Remember what I said before about how you have a contingent of GOP party players that believe that getting in office is simply a matter of “paying your dues” and “waiting your turn”?  Well that’s the DNC in a nutshell!  It’s no wonder why people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Vice-President Al Gore all think that they “deserve” the Presidency.  The party bosses and party players have deluded themselves into thinking that this is how the world works and they are pompous enough to expect it to be that way and then they wonder why they lose.

And, yes, this is Hillary Clinton’s race to lose, and if she does lose in November, then she only has herself and the DNC to blame for it!  They wrote the rules and they need to be held to account for it should it fail.

The only good thing about the events of this past weekend is that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is out.  She’s taking the fall for her party’s games being exposed, and rightly so.  But don’t think for a moment that this will fix anything.  This week’s DNC convention is all-Hillary, all the time.  She’s still the standard-bearer for merit cronyism, and the party bosses and players will still demand that everyone rally around her simply to deny Donald Trump the presidency.  It’s still a death-spiral from a two-sided death-cult that is strangling America with each election season that passes, which is now never-ending.

Don’t like it?  Too bad.  If you want things to change, then there are two more groups that are an integral part of the 2016 Farce that need to be exposed and they need to be castigated and they need to be cajoled and they are the only ones that can fix things.  We sure as hell cannot expect either the GOP or the DNC to fix things for us.  They don’t know how... and they certainly lack any possible incentive to.

Week of 07/18/2016

My Problem With... The GOP
– by David Matthews 2

(Note: This is the continuation of the ongoing look at the factors and candidates that make up the 2016 Farce.  Each of the “dominant” factors will be examined.  The author will not entertain nor permit anyone to try to negate the focus of each look by saying “X is bad but Y is even worse” because they all are bad in their own way.  Each will have their turn to be examined and castigated, and you probably will not like it when it is your group’s turn.)

When I first started the whole “My Problem With” series earlier this year, I was hoping to cover all of the GOP and DNC presidential contenders in the 2016 Farce.  Sadly, I had no idea that by the time I got to this series, most of the wannabes would burn out and drop out faster than the ABC Network’s remake of “Uncle Buck”.  Hell, Ted Cruz dropped out right after I roasted his pompous self-righteous ass, and he was supposed to be the one with staying power!  Remember?  He was supposed to be the latest to bear the title of “God’s Anointed Candidate”.

Before we could even say “and then there were three”, we all pretty much presumed it would just be two... a modern-day Lady Macbeth and a career narcissist with an ego that is so big that his ego has an ego and a publicist and runs one of his businesses.  (We talked about Bernie, and I’ll go more into his problem next time around.)

So now it’s two... if you still believe in the Orwellian script that says that there are and have always been two and only two political parties since the dawn of existence.  And, yes, it is just that... a script.  A bold-faced fraudulent lie.  But way too many people believe in that fraudulent lie.  In fact, that lie has become so big, it is quite literally a death-cult.  A death-cult that will spell out the end of the United States of America if we allow it.

But that’s a separate subject for a different time.

And while I’ve had some modest fun racking those dominant presidential contenders over the verbal coals, I’m not done doing it.  Because even though I’ve gone through the candidates, they’re not the only ones responsible for the 2016 Farce being the monumental unholy farce that it is.  The dominant political parties are equally to blame for this being the 2016 Farce, and the next two weeks are their supposed “moments to shine” as they each hold their national conventions and make their so-called “choices” official.

And since this particular dominant political party will be starting their convention when this article posts, they get to go first.

I have a problem with... the Grand Old Party, which they still pretend to call “Republicans”.

First a disclaimer.  Long time readers know that I was once an actual card-carrying dues-paying member of the GOP.  I drank the “Regan Republican” Kool-Aid of getting the government off our backs and out of our lives.  Then I found out that they weren’t the pro-freedom group they pretended to be.  In fact, they wanted to put people like me in prison because I happened to like reading Playboy Magazine (long before it was replaced with the fraud that exists today).

This is the party that claims to still be the “Party of Lincoln”, when, in fact, if Abraham Lincoln knew what the GOP was doing today in his name, he’d be showing up in Cleveland with an axe-handle in each hand and a boatload of whoop-ass for everyone there.  But, of course, he’s long since dead and buried, and so were any dreams that he helped to bring about.

The GOP claims to be a “big tent party”.  Everybody is supposedly “welcomed” there.  Except I discovered more than twenty-five years ago that this “big tent” was really just a Christian extremist revival tent.  Everyone was “welcomed” just as long as they sat down, shut up, paid their money and voted the way they were told to vote.

The GOP claim that they are the “party of freedom” and of “less government” died a long time ago.  They are now the party of 9/11; the party of the “new normal” of police state rules and Homeland Security and war-on-demand.  And they don’t hesitate to remind everyone of that!

That is why, for the longest time, I have refused to refer to them as “Republicans”.  They no longer deserve that name.  They have no moral claim to it after the crap that they’ve been pulling.  They behave like a gang of geriatric party animals, so I will continue to call them the “Grand Old Party”.

As a matter of fact, someone should start a drinking game for the GOP convention.  Every takes a drink the minute the words “terrorists” or “Islamic extremism” or “Radical Islam” is uttered.  Then again we could drive everyone into the emergency room with alcohol poisoning.

So what is their part in the 2016 Farce?

Simple... they helped to make Donald Trump not only their nominee, but also they created their own worst nightmare.

There has been a basic disconnect of the GOP from the general populace.  With every campaign season – and that has become non-stop now thanks to both dominant political parties – the GOP has slowly gravitated towards their extremist base.  We saw this back in 2008 with Senator John McCain and his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin.  McCain was obviously the “establishment” nominee.  He was the “sane” one.  The “reasonable” one.  But underneath that was the groundswell of extremism that Palin channeled like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist”.  Hell, she still channels it, and she’s not the only one.

The problem is that the GOP only has their extremist base left to count on, and they damned well know it!  They have cultivated their crazies like so much Midwest corn.  That’s what keeps them in power during the non-Presidential campaigns.  They’re the only ones fanatical enough to show up at the ballot box all the time. 

Unfortunately, at the top are still party bosses and party players... otherwise known as “the establishment”.  People like Senator McCain and Mitt Romney and the whole Bush family.  These are the people who think that being President is simply a matter of paying your dues and waiting your turn.

And it is this precise disconnect between “the establishment” and their base that created the situation that they are in right now.  Where a self-promoting narcissistic clown like Donald Trump can take over the GOP and turn it into the ultimate version of his TV series “The Apprentice”.

And how the hell do you think he got there?  Huh, GOP bosses?  Tell you what, I’ll answer it for you.

Let’s get brutally honest here... like I’ve been saying over and over again, the GOP bosses have nobody to blame for Trump being their nominee but themselves!  They created the situation whereby the masses could no longer tolerate the games being played by “the establishment”, and thus they went for whomever would appear to actually shake things up.

Think about it.  Every single so-called “establishment” candidate crashed in miserable defeat and failure. 

Every.  Single.  One! 

And all of the so-called “outsider” candidates that the “establishment” tried to adopt failed as well!  Senator Marco Rubio, aka “Little Marco”, was a viable contender until the “establishment” tried to adopt him as their champion... and then he failed miserably!  The Canadian-born #Cheat2Win Senator Ted Cruz was considered a viable alternative to Trump... until the “establishment” declared him to be their final champion... and then he failed miserably!

Hey, get this into your pompous heads, GOP bosses:  your party may be going on, but you are a gang of turncoats and losers in the eyes of your own supporters!  That is why they picked Trump!  He may be talking crazy, but he’s talking their kind of crazy.

And the only good thing that the GOP has right now is that Trump had enough sense to pick someone like Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.  Pence may be a bible-thumping milquetoast, but he’s far better than Governor Chris Christy or the nutty hypocrite, Newt Gingrich, who lately has been channeling the ghost of disgraced drunken loser Joe McCarthy in his attempt to be like Trump.

So I have no sympathy whatsoever for the GOP and the Trump-sized mess that they are in.  They have a candidate that a lot of people don’t like, that the “establishment” doesn’t want, and they have to put him up as their champion and defend him because that is what “the base” demands.  He played by their rules and he won the nomination, and now they have to live with that.

But, you know, the GOP wouldn’t have this problem if they didn’t cultivate the polarized hatred in the first place.  If they stopped letting Fox News and talk radio rile the masses into a frothing frenzy and reminded the base that they can’t have a political party of just themselves.  That having a “big tent party” really means accepting other people into their ranks, and not just as mute sheep.

And maybe it would also help if the GOP bosses were to tell their so-called “destiny” wannabes that getting that nomination really isn’t a matter of “waiting your turn” and “paying your dues”.  It’s not a goddamned merit system.  Then again, after seeing how their counterparts in the DNC got their nominee, I can understand why they keep thinking it is one.

But I suppose that’s asking for too much isn’t it?  Maybe it would be best if the GOP simply take the hit, and if they happen to lose, then they can decide if they should follow their predecessors into oblivion and let another political party take over.  After all, that is how the “Party of Lincoln” came to be in the first place.  Otherwise they’d still be Whigs and Know-Nothings.