A Whimsical Jaunt Through The Daily Political News
Doesn’t matter if it’s Team Blue Elephant or Team Red Donkey, both parties are full of manure and neither is gonna save us.
Doesn’t matter if it’s Team Blue Elephant or Team Red Donkey, both parties are full of manure and neither is gonna save us.
I promised myself if I wrote about American politics after the disgusting Democratic primaries, I’d do so more from a place of irreverence than one of earnest caring.
The following, then, is an attempt to have a little fun with headlines and screenshots from just one article on the CNN app. All I can say is I really do count my blessings that I’ve been able to live abroad during these times of inept leadership.
Best of luck to my Yankee compatriots and enjoy the post!
Let’s Start with St. Barack
Anybody who thinks that Obama was “impartial” and didn’t play a role in candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out and endorsing Joe Biden before Super Tuesday must not remember this report. Or perhaps they don’t understand the way Obama operates or maybe they want to help promote a narrative friendly to Obama that says the American people, not elites in the party like Obama, decided on Biden. Here’s the headline from that report to refresh memories:
It’s pretty simple, really. Obama and his wealthy, neoliberal Democratic friends made some promises of things like Cabinet positions to folks like Mayor Pete in exchange for their cooperation. That’s politics 101 and it’s this kind of reporting that makes intelligent people doubt CNN as an honest media actor.
Now, for some context as to why Obama believes he had to stop Bernie, read the following quote.
Bernie Sanders has been called tribal and divisive since he ran in 2015–6 and while it’s not without merit, one could easily volley the charge right back at Obama. Why? Bernie’s campaign had everything you’d want in terms of electibility: the most donors, the most volunteers, the biggest rallies, wins or second-place finishes in each of the first four contests, name recognition and consistently the best polling numbers in a head-to-head with Trump.
If the goal is, as is often claimed by the Establishment Democrats like Obama, to get rid of Trump no matter what, derailing the Sanders campaign in favor of Biden, a guy who had almost no ground game, very little enthusiasm and had only performed well in one state, a state which he won’t win against Trump, before Super Tuesday.
No, it’s long been clear: Obama would rather have four more years of Trump to blame for the woes of the country and the possibility of retaining his legacy than give up power of “his” party to the progressive wing and Sanders. Sad but true, and it’s why Barack Obama will go down as one of the most tragic characters in these waning years of the American republic.
Let’s move on from depressing Obama, shall we? How about a layup against the stupidity that is the Trump team?
Of course the coronavirus response has been “unprecedented,” there’s never been a coronavirus pandemic before.
Okay, okay, you can say that there was the Spanish flu in 1918. Pretty hard to compare eras and also hard to really comment on the response to Covid-19 as we are still in the early stages of the plot.
But looking at these numbers:
…I think we can call it unprecedented but only if we mean in its utter incompetence. Note I included two photos because one of the defenses Trump’s team has is that America is a big country so of course it has more cases, yet we can see that China and India, both with populations of more than 1 billion people than the United States have less than one million the number of cases as Team USA in the Corona Olympics.
How much longer before Trump and his cronies start to brag about “winning” this morbid competition?
Let’s Check in With Uncle Joe, Shall We?
Can we count our blessings that Joe is still alive? I don’t feel like I can answer yes to that.
Moving on…
Political Behavior is Juvenile and Pointless
Yes, instead of working together to solve the issue – ensuring a fair, accurate election during a time of crisis – the two parties are squabbling like backstreet buffoons.
Now, in the case of ensuring fair elections I have to say the Republicans have been the more repugnant party over the years; doing as much as they possibly can to make it hard for working class, minority communities to vote because they know they don’t win those demographics.
So any efforts by them to charge “voter fraud” need to be taken with a big grain of salt. Voter suppression, extremely creative map redistricting to steal seats, wiping voters off the rolls because they shared a similar name to a voter in another state (always a name that sounds ethnic, of course), well, these are just a few of the many disgusting tricks the red donkey team has employed in this millennium alone.
I think the only reason American voters don’t all riot about this shit at voting booths is because they know, deep down, that the two parties just aren’t that different and thus not worth getting arrested for.
The Delusion of King Donald to Finish This Off
In the summer of 1996, I worked in Lancaster for the Los Angeles Daily News covering the inaugural year of the minor league baseball Lancaster JetHawks. Unless that city’s demographics have markedly changed, I can assure you that it has a fair number of Trump supporters.
After perusing the Wikipedia page about Lancaster, it remains reasonably working class, is almost half white (with almost no black people) and one of the biggest employers are defense contractors. Sounds more Red than Blue.
Now, I don’t have the stats for the 2016 election but the CNN article tells us that “a number of aspects of Trump’s tweet (below) were factually inaccurate,” notably that the district Trump is whining about is one of the more hotly contested ones in California:
Unfortunately for our reality challenged president, the person who asked to open that voting booth was none other than the Republican mayor of Lancaster.
But that didn’t stop Trump for one more asinine tweet to finish things off:
Oh, brother! Just going through one article like this is enough to exhaust a guy. Oh, what’s that? It’s just past 2:30 a.m.?
Thank goodness! I can drift off to the land of Morpheus. Morpheus, I’ll tell you, has become a pretty good pal, so much so that for my birthday this year he built a giant wall around Dreamland but it is designed to work for only one person, a man with goofy orange hair who rides a Twitter Dragon.
You see, some walls are good after all.
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