The Donald, The Hillary and the Dada of American politics

This is either a work of art or

 an American presidential election

And so, it has finally come down to this: 

A century after Dadism gave up on real painting and sculpture (because what was the point now that nearly everyone in the western world had a camera?) Americans have given up on real hope that politics can improve their lives, or right the nation’s wrongs instead of perpetuating and extending them. 

Because what's the point of hoping any more?

The great Dadaist Marcel Duchamp in 1917 signed a urinal with a fake name and declares that it was art because he said it was art. It was, of course, a parody of art.

Ninety-nine years later we have a looming parody of a presidential election.

On one side, there's Donald Trump, who says we’ll make America great again because he says we’ll make America great again, just as Duchamp said it was art because he said it was art. 

And you can bet your bottom dollar (if you still have a dollar by then) that America will be great again primarily, or perhaps only, because the Donald will not only declare its greatness but also have you beaten by goons with rubber hoses if you disagree.

By then we might also be in a nuclear war with oh, say, North Korea. Or China. Or Iran. Or why not Pakistan? The war will be  conducted to demonstrate The Donald’s pride in his own unpredictability. 

Or Trump may have crashed the economy by then. Or he’ll have replaced Obamacare (and perhaps Medicare, too) with nothing, nothing, nothing.

The only thing that's nearly for sure is that we won't have a wall on the Mexican border — unless Trump makes you and me pay for it.

But that will be great, because the Donald will tell you it’s great.

On the other hand we have Hillary, she of the secret speeches to the enemy, whom she now appears to be assiduously courting in the wake of her own perceived inevitability. 

Nevermind that without Bernie’s backers it’s even money whether she'll win the election. It’s more important to her to make nice to a handful of neocons — only a handful of them since the vast majority of the so-called Conservative right would sooner pluck out their own eyeballs and eat them than vote for her.

One must assume that Hillary assumes…that the  young and vital left wing of the Democratic party will get swept up in her wake, like so many putrifrying half eaten hotdogs, and cigarette butts, and chewing gum wrappers sucked into the wake of a departing ferry. 

One must assume she believes that the left fears of a right wing Supreme Court nomination or three will cause a disaffected 45 percent or so of the Democratic party to vote for her regardless of anything else.

Pray that, horrid as Hillary is, she is right. We are already on the verge of a court fiat that will completely legitimize corruption. If we don’t get a Democratic appointee to replace Justice Scalia, and other aging justices as they depart, the next thing we’ll have is a restoration of the divine right of kings, with kingship and other titles and entitlements of medieval nobility bestowed on those who can bid the highest.

Get ready for King Charles and King David (Koch). 

This nation has already demonstrated that deliberate nonsense — nonsense more nonsensical than the Dadist art of the early 20th Century — works as brilliantly in politics as it works on museum walls.

Life in these United States is now a nonsense poem. Sanity and progress are dead. Long live insanity and wet rot! Or to quote a Dartmouth College freshman (not me) named Lawrence L. Kramer more than half a century ago:

Tara and sis boom bah, boys

Go play your fife and drum

The Captain isn’t here, boys

He never said he’d come

He won’t be here tomorrow

He wasn’t here today

So play your fife and drum, boys

And waste your lives away

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and the adult coloring book craze

My father can out-scribble your father.

And so can my President.

Too much attention to political punditry makes Crank a dull boy. An entire trend almost escaped my notice until I went on a wildly haphazard surf across the Internet and discovered the Adult Coloring Book craze.

If you haven’t heard of it until now either, then both of us need to crawl out from under our rocks and take a look at what’s going on around this planet.

I know this may sound crazy, but adult coloring books are the newest new thing. This is bigger than world hunger. Bigger that global climate change. Bigger than nuclear catastrophes. Bigger than a sackfull of rattlesnakes and another one chock full of squirming and wriggling ISIS agents.  Or as an online publication called Publishing Perspectives puts it, “It’s Springtime for Crayola.”

And not only Crayola. Another online publication called The Independent is reporting that a German manufacturer of colored pencils, Faber-Castell, is huffing and puffing to keep up with the demand for its products.

“Currently, we are running more shifts than usual in our factory in Stein, Bavaria in order to satisfy the global needs for artists pencils related to the colouring trend for adults,” reports Sandra Suppa, the pencil-pushing manufacturer’s spokesperson.

But wait, there’s more!

London’s Telegraph reveals:

Colouring books have become a surprising feature of many bookshops’ bestsellers lists in recent years, with Waterstones previously noticing a 300 per cent rise in sales in just one year. 

Melissa Cox, head of children’s buying at Waterstones, told the paper: “Colouring books are doing really well at the moment, which initially surprised us… and we realised adults were buying them for themselves.”

And right there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it: the Ultimate Explanation for Everything. The windows through which you can peer to see why so many people are taking Donald Trump and Ted Cruz so seriously and civilization is going down the crapper. 

It explains why Trump and Marco Rubio were able to get into a nose thumbing match over whose fingers (and presumably, therefore, whose penis) is smaller. Or bigger. It explains why Trump, and Fiorina, and Palin, and others, thought, or still think they’re qualified for public office.

Most of all, it explains why our nation is going to hell in a garishly embroidered hand basket.

We, and evidently the rest of the world, have regressed into a state of complete and utter infantilism. Our pastimes have devolved — from building furniture in the garage, or souping up hotrods, or feeding the homeless, or translating Cicero from the original Latin, to coloring within the outlines someone else has created for us in coloring books, just the way we used to when we were kids.

Speaking of kids, in must be scary has hell to a nine year old to see see your parents acting more like children than you are. And don’t try to defend this by saying that the coloring books are on “adult themes," which some of them most certainly are. That just proves my point. And scares the kids even more.

The planet — I suspect led by the likes of Trump, Cruz, Palin and other Americans, not to mention Marine LePen in France  — is eagerly, no voraciously seeking to dumb the culture down. That may be because reality is just too tough to conjure with. 

The planet is overheating. The seas are rising, yet water shortages are growing. The global  economy is finally colliding against its Malthusian limits as once fertile farms turn into deserts, forests into housing subdivisions, oceans into garage dumps, and fresh air into carbon dioxide. There are no simple answers to all of this, only complex, difficult and costly puzzles.

So let’s skip all that and instead go into denial by acting like children. My father can beat up your father. My fingers  are longer than your fingers and therefore guess what else of mine is longer. My wife is prettier than Ted’s wife.  My president can nuke the puke out of your president.

Where is this leading? What should we do about it? 

I know not what course others may take, but as for me…..hand me that box of crayons.          

Need a good tactic to attract thinking people but still win over the yahoos? Introducing the “Designated Imbecile” vote-catcher

"6 munths ago I culdn't even spel 

'Imbecile' and today I are one!"

Oh thank you, Steve M of “No More Mister Nice Blog.” 

I just went through some of your last two days’ offerings and there it was – an occult inspiration that I am now officially stealing to make un-occult. I do this in the hope it will shower me with glory and praise from the center and left, and no doubt also scorn and opprobrium from those on the extreme right – the ones hanging over a rational cliff by their fingernails.

In a piece entitled “Foreign Policy Made E-Z, the way Heartland America Likes It,” Steve chronicled some truly idiotic statements recently made to radio broadcaster Hugh Hewitt by wannabe Republican candidate for President Scott Walker. These were seized upon with deserved glee by Joan Walsh of Salon.

Republican balloon gets 

pricked, stabbed and busted

Next, Steve swung around his own battery of howitzers and blasted some of the stupidest remarks made by Walker and others on the addled right.

You can follow the two links above and treat yourself to many minutes of delightful reading, chock-a-block full of chuckles. I won’t repeat it all here, but I do need to summarize some of the points in order to get around to my Designated Imbecile idea.

Scott Walker, the foreign policy genius (yes yes, I do indeed toss around that phrase lightly) complained about the middle eastern situation, vis a vis  Israel, Iran and the U.S.

It was like the old movie Trading Places, said Walker, and (sorry, I gotta quote), “In the eyes of this president, our ally is supposed to be Israel. Our adversary has been historically Iran. Our ally is supposed to be Israel. And yet this administration completely does it the other way around….”

Umm, Scott? Iran was our ally too, under the Shah (and for a while it was also Israel’s principal petroleum supplier) until the Ayatollahs and the so called Revolutionary Guard put the kibosh on the way things were.)  We once even gave the Shah a ticker tape parade down Broadway.

And as Steve’s blog points out, it’s hard to tell from Walker’s penetrating analysis which country is Dan Ackroyd and which is Eddie Murphy. Maybe we could switch Scott over to Abbott and Costello. I think Who's On First? is the analogy Walker's grasping for.

Send Wisconsin’s treasurer

off to the Syrian desert?

Also worth jeering at: Walker’s claim that he’d be ready to fight ISIS because he creamed Wisconsin’s state employee unions. Right Scott, it’s exactly the same thing. If ISIS goes on TV and shows some disgusting thug holding a knife to an innocent man’s throat, you can call them up  (if you can find the ISIS switchboard's phone number) and say, “That’s it, buster. Drop the knife or I’ll cut the pension benefits you already earned and shaft you on health insurance while I’m at it.”

There was also Ronald Reagan, already in office, who had a handy answer back in 1984 when a suicide bomber blew up an American embassy in Lebanon and it turned out that security improvements for the embassy hadn’t gotten off the drawing board under the Reagan administration.

“Anyone that’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.”

And with that impressively stupid statement, Reagan won re-election five weeks later.

Stupid pays as stupid is.
Or something.

 Clearly, when you want to be president, it pays to talk stupid – at least when you’re a Republican. But isn’t there some way Democrats could win over the Stupid Vote without offending people who still pay attention to the news (real news, not Fox News), and still analyze events more or less rationally, and still vote?

Folks, I think I have the answer.

The Designated Imbecile.

The Republican Party has never needed to designate imbeciles. They abound in Republican ranks. Think Sarah Palin. Think Michele Bachmann. Think Governor Rick “Whoops!” Perry of Texas. Think of Senator Rafael Eduardo ("Ted") Cruz's stirring reading of Green Eggs and Ham on the floor of the U.S. Senate. For that matter, think Scott Walker. 

The problem is, these imbeciles are permitted to run for president, governor, Congress, the Senate, what-have-you, scaring the last living handful of intelligent Republicans away from the voting booths, or sometimes even into the waiting arms of Democrats.

So I’m suggesting  that we Democrats designate a permanent non-candidate as our official imbecile. This person would follow the legitimate Democratic candidates around from stump speech to stump speech. The candidate’s  words would provide rational ideas, logical programs and inspiration.  This would attract most of the bright Americans to vote for him. Or more probably, her. 

Talking stupid for

fun and votes

Meanwhile, after each speech, the Designated Imbecile would stand up and talk stupid on his party’s behalf. Like a small community’s village idiot, he’d be well-enough known so that brighter folks would be kindly to him, but everybody would nevertheless gather around to listen. 

The  Designated Imbecile would give the same fools who vote for candidates who would destroy Obamacare, and now Medicare, a reason they could understand to change their minds. For example, “Have you noticed that Muslim nations don’t have Obamacare? Do you want to be like them? Don't eliminate Obamacare or next thing you know, we’ll have Shariah law here.”

Well, it’s a thought, and a stupid one at that. But I insist it’s a defensible thought. If people won’t vote for you, give them a stupid reason to change their minds. Just make sure somebody else does the stupid talking – your own carefully curated Designated Imbecile – while you show up the Republicans by speaking intelligently.

The curse of John Mitchell: How a middle of the road guy like me became a raving leftist—without changing any of my political opinions

Back in my Mid-20th-Century college days I was a centrist Democrat. I supported the tax structure as it was (I seem to remember that the maximum rate for the really, really well-fixed was up around 70 percent for part of their incomes. They grumbled, but I don't recall anybody publicly declaring it was "socialism." And by the way, the economy boomed under higher taxes.)

I, and all Democrats, and nearly all Republicans were for Social Security. At least that's even what most of the Republicans said. They didn't dare say otherwise or their constituents would have voted them out of office.

I hadn't heard the subject of Medicare come up yet, but I would have been for it. Years later, a more-or-less centrist Democrat named Lyndon Johnson came out for it. And got it. I approved.

I believed in a stronger national defense than we have today. There was a thing called the draft. I hated dealing with it, and I hated my days at Fort Dix, but I was for the draft.

(Vietnam shook my support for the draft some, but only because of Vietnam. In retrospect, the rising tide of anger among young people that they might lose their lives for what turned out to be a fantasy, and even the sympathetic anger of some of their parents, probably helped bring the war to a close sooner.)

Yesterday' centrist is

today's left winger

I still favor almost exactly the same things today. So how come I'm suddenly considered a raving leftist in my dotage?

I haven't found support for this during a quick dive into Google, but I distinctly remember John N. Mitchell, who was Nixon's attorney general, venomously telling a TV interviewer, "This country is going to far to the right you're not going to believe it." I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining that I saw the old sourpuss says this, some time before he did time for his participation in the Watergate scandal.

Well, the vindictive SOB was right. We moved so far to the right that we're even to the right of John N. Mitchell, who while a New York State official tried to borrow money in defiance of the voters with something called "moral obligation bonds."

Mitchell's dead. But his

evil curse lives on.

What's happened is, a huge chunk of Americans have gone so far to the right that they're now voting to destroy themselves.

They didn't object to national debt under George W. Bush, but now they're objecting to any debt that could turn the economy around, bring up the value of their homes, and get everybody working again.

In Mid-20th Century America, most middle class Americans didn't object to higher taxes on a small part of the income of the richest Americans, but now we object—even though it's the lack of taxation that will eventually destroy our national defense, our economy, and our own lives.

Most middle-of-the-road Americans lived with the draft — hated as it was — from WWI through Viet Nam. Say two good things for the draft:

1) The draft gave us a real national defense, for which we've now substituted a bunch of video games (like "Drone the Wedding" and "Blow Up Some Building in Bagdad") and a ragtag bunch of over-used, overwhelmed, exhausted and too-old soldiers who get shot and exploded to pieces without the nation troubling itself much about them.

2)The draft kept us out of some wars and shortened others. Had drafted Americans been dying in Bagdad while George Bush shrugged, mobs of enraged Americans would have taken apart the White House, brick by brick. The Congress is alert enough to its own interests to know they would be next, and not to repeat the civilian unrest brought on by a draft-fed Viet Nam.

Where do you

stand today?

What is now "centrist"—like Barack Obama—used to be considered conservative Republicans. What are now right wing Republicans used to be considered batshit crazy lunatics. And today's batshit crazy lunatics like the "Tea Party" party-goers, Michelle Bachmann, Sharron Angle, and Mitch McConnell, and John Boehner, and this week's version of John McCain would have been locked up in mental institutions because they're a danger to themselves and others.

So I'm a Mid-20th-Century Centrist, and if you think I'm a leftist, you're so far right that even John Mitchell wouldn't believe you and it's time for you to check yourself in at the funny farm.

Hillary Clinton’s amazingly unwitting acknowledgement of the Clinton-can’t-win prophecy

Listen gang, I hate – absolutely hate – to come down on any Democrat who’s a Presidential candidate.

Let it also be said that even Hillary Clinton would be better in the White House than any Republican I can think of, most especially better than Terrible Tempered Rudy or Fibbing John McCain.

That said, it seems apparent that Hillary just shot herself in the foot – well, maybe also in the arm and the nose and the earlobe and the kneecap – in a flap over Hollywood mogul David Geffen’s fund raising efforts for Barack Obama.

It all started when, in addition to abandoning the Clinton camp to raise funds for Obama, Geffen told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in an interview that Hillary is a polarizing figure who’d have trouble getting elected. He pointed to her stubborn refusal to admit she was wrong about Iraq: “It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t.”

And then he added that while “everybody in politics lies,” the Clintons “do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”

Had she been a smarter and less polarizing candidate, Hillary might simply have told her campaign people to ignore the remark and, if asked by the press, say that "Mr. Geffen is entitled to his opinions, with which we disagree." She would have looked like a big, bring-us-together kind of person.

Instead, foul temper conquored all. Clinton campaign headquarters turned on the high voltage revenge machine. They came out with a demand that Obama denounce Geffen’s statement and give him back the money he’d raised for them.

Fat chance, and Hillary knew it. She’d never do any such thing herself. And then, as if to prove Geffen’s point about lying, the Clinton team lied and said Geffen was Obama’s finance chairman. That job is held by a woman named Penny Pritzker.

So let me see here: A private citizen switches his alliance from Hillary to Barack. Hillary’s enraged people immediately revv up for bloodlust, making an impossible and angry demand, followed by a lie.

Obama, of course, is firing back out of self-defense, though not nearly as viciously.

But you don’t even have to read between the lines to see that Hillary is every bit as polarizing and fork-tongued as Geffen said.

Speculative call: If Hillary brings down Obama, she’ll bring herself down as well, leaving the field open to John Edwards. Which wouldn’t be all bad, much as I like Obama.

For more entertaining dirt on Hillary’s explosion check out these:
http://www.slate.com/id/2159182/
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/wp/2007/02/22/2179
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/team-hillary-shoots-back-_b_41763.html