Out With the Yobs!

It was neither the Russians nor Trump’s thuggish yobs that put the Great Pretender undeservedly in the White House. 

 

It was the Democratic National Committee who, with their pc-at-any-cost corporate mentality, sabotaged their own goal by brushing aside Bernie Sanders,  the one candidate who could have beaten Trump. Instead they quixotically backed Hillary Clinton, not because she was the better candidate, but because she reflected their naive and narcissistic belief that given the choice, Americans would vote for a woman because, well, because she's a woman.

 

Wrong. The electorate, sad to say, responds to raised-voice blood-and-guts emotion. And the Trump steamroller--us vs. them rhetoric, strong-arm tactics to keep "enemies" at bay and out of rallies, impossible promises, emphasis on "real" Americans, the marginalizing of minorities, open bigotry, especially the demonizing of Barack Obama, and the threat of terrorists and rapists behind every tree--was nothing if not bloody and emotional.

Speaking of all those promises, whatever became of most of them? You can find that out at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-promise-tracker/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ecdfc0995e08.

 

I have often said the biggest problem the DNC has is that it won’t fight dirty often enough, and when it does it shoots itself in the foot--witness the Sanders debacle. America's first  best hope for the 2020 election is likely the upcoming midterm election this Tuesday (11/6) in which the DNC isn't directly involved. If enough seats, especially in Congress, can be turned blue, the Yob-in-Chief will face some much-deserved comeuppance.

 

Up for grabs in Tuesday's election: The entire House of Representatives; one-third of the Senate; and more than half the gubernatorial seats in the Union. Several of those seats are considered safe for the incumbent or are uncontested. However, there are enough contested seats to change the balance of power in Congress and in the leadership of a majority of states. If you're undecided about voting, check the following links to see if you're in a battleground area. If you are, get out there and make a difference.         https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Congress_elections,_2018 and https://ballotpedia.org/Gubernatorial_elections,_2018

In 2016 we turned into what H. L. Mencken called a "boobocracy." Let's redeem ourselves in 2018. God bless America.

 

-- Diogenes

The 561

561: If you're an American you should remember this number, because just as 666 is the number of the Beast, 561 is the number of your government--the number of people who have the ability to change your life and the destiny of this country.

There are 535 people in Congress, 9 on the Supreme Court, 15 in the Cabinet and two executive officers. I include the justices of the Supreme Court because, at least since the Citizens United decision, if not the 2000 presidential election, they have made themselves arbiters of power. The vice president is included for his role as president of the Senate, not as understudy to the president.

To put that number in perspective, consider this: Right now there are approximately 327 million Americans who are governed in one way or another by that 561. The term 1 percent is frequently used to refer to the elite financial class. That's nothing. We are overseen by less that 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of our fellow Americans. The specific number is .0000017, or seventeen ten-millionths of the population.

Put in a different way, each of those 561 has power over about 583,000 individuals--about the population of Wyoming. Going further, we could say that each of us is governed by 17 ten-millionths of a person: an earlobe, perhaps, or a toenail?

Absurd? Ridiculous? Of course. But the point is that not only is the United States not a democracy, it is no longer even a republic. It is an oligarchy; and given that more than half the members of Congress are millionaires and that the White House is occupied by an obscenely wealthy person, it is a financial oligarchy. The very rich are in power and everyone else gets screwed.

Now the money-laden Congress has allowed the government to close down and seems in no hurry to get it running again--never mind how many hundreds of thousands of government employees go without paychecks and are unable to make their mortgage or rent payments or feed their kids.

Government shutdowns are neither new nor unique to this administration. But those misguided souls who voted the Grand Poobah into the presidency in the belief that as a businessman he could make the government run efficiently and avoid such problems are surely now seeing the error of their ways.

The 2018 midterm election will be of exceptional importance. In it we will have the opportunity to clean the rot and corruption out of Congress; or we can maintain the status quo and allow the tiniest, most unworthy fraction of  the American population to continue to lead us like the sheep we have become.

--Diogenes