On April 27th Ted Cruz tapped Carly Fiorina as his running mate. On May 1st Fiorina fell off the stage at a campaign rally. On May 3rd Cruz announced he was dropping out of the race.
When Cruz still was running, winning delegates, Republicans denounced him. I hadn’t watched the inane Rachel Maddow in years, hadn’t until converging with The Sisterhood. I ran smack dab into the television host when Laura tuned to MSNBC and Maddow was parading footage of the Cruz bashing.
First up: John Boehner. The former speaker of the House called Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.” Maddow nearly peed herself.
Next, Maddow presented images of NY Rep. John King who said comparing Cruz to Lucifer was an insult to the devil. Again, Maddow nearly peed.
A clip of SC Sen. Lindsey Graham’s performance at the Washington Press Club Foundation’s Congressional Dinner followed. The wretched warmonger recognized more for his zeal to bomb anything, anywhere, was inebriated with the sillies. He said, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” Graham’s hahahaha had Maddow writhing—yet again about to pee her pants.
I hit Google to validate what I’d seen on Maddow’s show, confirm that I wasn’t hallucinating, hadn’t had too much bubbly. Up popped one of religion’s most vocal Christian Islamophobes: the Rev. Franklin Graham. The evangelical had decried Boehner on his Facebook page with a shame on you and then, “You had no business calling Ted Cruz ‘Lucifer in the flesh’—this is an embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to our nation.”
Has this hypocrite ever once demonstrated insight into the real shame of the nation? The shame of war, the shame of trampling countries, the shame of creating humanitarian crises, the shame of exterminating men, women, children to advance imperialist foreign police, and the shame of domestic inequality? No, Graham’s gift is to pontificate racism, fear, and hatred, the antithesis of the Christ’s teachings.
Come hell AND high water, I’m poised to witness the imminent chaos, Trump vs. Clinton. Nothing is off limits in Trump world, except Trump’s world. Trump will ravage Clinton. And he’ll render The Clinton Foundation vulnerable, as defenseless as US infrastructure.
There. Will. Be. Shit. There already has been. Shit slinging. Shit hitting the blades.
Trump ridicules anyone who challenges him. He pledges evicting immigrants and building a wall between the US and Mexico. He’s called women fat pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals, bimbos, and once said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” And while Trump did condemn George Bush for invading Iraq, he supports waterboarding, said, “Torture works,”
Clinton, the corporatocracy’s choice, is no better. Indeed, she may be worse.
It’s a shit show.
Missy Comley Beattie has written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.com.
A shit-show it is. A show of such degradation that it can only be by design. To degrade the electorate. I wrote some time ago:
The US and it’s cohorts are no longer democracies where people matter and vote wisely. Corporate Rule is up and running. Look around. Their media vehicles manipulate entire populaces into doing and thinking what the ‘managers’ want them to think. The grotesque pantomime of political elections are pure entertainment dressed as the workings of a healthy and powerful political system. The people as political actors has been removed by a global corporate system that has subsumed political power and its institutions. What you see on your box is a glittered ghost of politics, pure simulation. It doesn’t matter who gets in anymore. The game is the same. The projected agenda remains. You have different characters with different abilities, like in American football perhaps. You use this guy to do this and that guy to do that. Bush dumb wrecking ball from texas, Obama dancing fred Astaire from kenya. See the clip where Reagan is told by his corporate master to speed up his speech as it was too slow. A glimpse and then it’s drowned out with the noise. We are in a period of massive change, yet continue to look at the shadows on the cave wall.
The idea of taking sides, voting for him, as opposed to the other, no longer holds any agency. You do it like you would to American idol or the apprentice. You take a side and a stance, that is human and normal, but it is here a closed system of no agency. You are simply being entertained, outraged, and engineered to become mean, perhaps. The degradation of entertainment life will bring down a public to a beastly form. To degrade and make hate. To engineer hate. The words spewed from trump’s mouth have already started to form themselves into structural forms. Eg: maybe we should know when a woman is menstruating this would help everyone to get along better. Trump is the great degrader of moral men and women everywhere. Turn your back on him and the system of hate and start looking for brighter horizons of potentiality.
Or not, perhaps the current times cannot be navigated by a morally upright individual. You need a kind of maniac to make sense of it all
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
- H.L. Mencken
“Sustainable development” is an oxymoron. Collapse is inevitable, and necessary. The Hindus and Mayans believe civilization has reached an apogee and collapsed, only to rise again, many times. Perhaps Homo Insatiable’s greed is a control factor, so that like bacteria in a petrie dish we expand to our limits, then create our own mass extinction event, so that other species may simply live, as we should have learned to. Kerry is telling college grad’s to prepare for a world “without borders.” But he is not advocating a world without gov’ts — but rather one gov’t to rule us all, with he and his masters in charge, of course. Power corrupts, of course, and the more powerful, the more absolute the gov’t, the more absolutely corrupt these wannabe all-powerful politicians will be. Drumpf speaks blithely of nuclear war, probably thinking that Russia will be cowed if he evinces insanity. Killary has no such need for nuance. She’s never seen an illegal war she didn’t love. The world KNOWS she’s insane. If either is elected they’ll likely be the last president of the United States. And so it goes. Back to square one.