The crowning of Hillary? And the Pope Francis Effect

==  A premature coronation? ==

The pre-ordination or crowning of Hillary Clinton as the presumed Democratic Party nominee in 2016 was deeply premature.  Even if she winds up with the nomination, why would democrats forego the drama and press coverage of a contested series of primaries and debates? Hundreds of well-vamped and amped opportunities to put forward their shared -- or somewhat varying -- messages – what? Are they really so stupid they would bypass that? 

Even if Clinton were inevitable, the DP’s brightest should step up to tear some spotlight away from the GOP’s astonishing gremlin-frenzy, if only to contrast favorably against the giant rugby scrum of seventeen fanatics racing each other over right-wing cliffs of insanity.

 Hence I was interested to read this argument that the dems ought to take another look at Al Gore. Wow.

Oh, without any doubt, it would be a stronger America today, had cheating not robbed us of the legitimately-elected Gore Presidency, in 2000.  You cannot name a single metric of U.S. national health that did not plummet across the misbegotten reign of either/both Bushes -- one of them the worst president of the 20th Century and the other (I hope will turn out by 2100 to have been) the worst of the 21st. Even a tepid Gore span would have been brilliant, by comparison.  

(Please, please just accept the challenge and offer up one, even one, unambiguous statistical national health metric that attributably improved across either of the last two GOP-held presidencies. One. No? In which case, why should the Republican Party ever again be trusted with a burnt match?)

In fact, though, I do not yearn for Al.  He proved the adage that Democratic Presidents choose, as running mates, people who are qualified for the job, but uninspiring. From LBJ and Humphrey and Mondale to Gore and Lieberman and Biden, this trend is almost perfect. Of course, it is far better than the GOP's alternative fetish – wherein Republican nominees always appoint unqualified fools or horrors to be their Vice Presidential running mates. 

All right, there was one exception to that pattern – Ronald Reagan picked a VP who on-paper was eminently qualified, but who -- lest I reiterate -- ironically went on to become the worst president of the last 100 years. Even worse than his awful son. 

But no. A guy like Al Gore is not what we need right now.

What we do need is someone who can stand up next to Hillary, during debates, and rock the boat!  Alas, while Bernie Sanders sort of qualifies, the stuff he is saying is pretty standard on the left wing of the party. And no, I am not talking about Elizabeth Warren, though she might gain administrative experience for one term as Vice President or a cabinet secretary. No, neither she nor Bernie rock the boat the way I want -- by shattering the narrative.

Okay, since I started writing this missive there have been a couple more DP entries, Jim Webb from Virginia, for one, who represents the Blue Dog wing of the Party, a wing that should be nurtured! There are millions of Americans who are genuinely and sincerely somewhat-conservative by temperament, but who also know the Republican Party has gone  completely insane. They'll need reassurance that the other tent is big enough for them, and that it welcomes a diversity of (sane) views. Democrats who reject a sane Blue Dog out of hand are pure fools. Sane vs insane is vastly more important than "centrist versus slightly-left-of-centrist."

 One quirk that I might be the first to mention. A major NASA project might have to be re-named, if Jim Webb does become president.

Lincoln Chafee and Martin O'Malley have also declared in the Democratic race, and I am willing to look. And now there is renewed talk of Joe Biden. Already the five DPs are more varied than the seventeen GOP fellahs, all of whom get 90% of their talking points from Roger Ailes.  (Though yes, Trump does entertain.)

Still, I am unsatisfied.  We need stronger drink. Maybe not for the nominee, but certainly earlier, during the debates and media discussions leading up to that decision!

No, I mean someone who would take the discussion off at vertical angles to the hoary, lobotomizing so-called “left right political axis!” Someone with solid administrative credentials and popularity and sanity and purpose – but who is bored with all the standard clichés, that are so expertly manipulated by Fox News.

I am talking about Jerry Brown.  

Okay, he’s old and would likely serve just one term. (Dig it, Warren fans?) But he is a masterful politician, hugely successful and popular in the U.S. state that outproduces all but maybe seven nations on the planet and is the source of half our world’s innovative drive. 

Moreover, California is the one place where Obamacare (formerly RomneyCare and HeritageCare and the GOP plan for ten years) has been executed absolutely flawlessly, delivering on every promise and defying every doomcast.

And Jerry despises clichés! They bore him. He would take any and every Fox-Ailesheimers talking point and shred it, just for fun.  He would do what Hillary has proved incapable of ever doing –

-- he’d refuse to play Rupert Murdoch’s game. And hence, even if Hillary winds up being the nominee, she would sally forth from the convention across a landscape where every old-saw and hoary assumption has been up-ended. 

Will Jerry run? Alas, I doubt it. But oh, the fun we'd have! Heck he could even declare that he's doing it "for fun!"

... which brings up a weird hypothesis about Jon Stewart's suspicious timing. But save that for another (fun) occasion.

== Who would be the GOP’s “Jerry”? ==

Where to find one for the other side? A republican who hates clichés and gets bored by standard positions and who would laugh at attempts to discipline him to the Murdoch-Adelson-Ailes-Saudi-Koch party line? Okay, okay... I guess that sort of describes Donald Trump.  But let's also add "somewhat good person" and "sane" shall we? (Note: all I ask is "somewhat"!)

Let’s see… is there one state in the U.S. that routinely produces such characters? Did I mention those mould-breakers Reagan and Brown? Well, sure.

Arnold Schwarznegger has uttered the words that so many of you ought to be saying, by now.

”As a Republican, I’m furious.”

The “Terminator” star and former California governor on April 3 blasted Indiana’s recently passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which many believe to be a thinly veiled attempt to excuse discrimination against gays and other minorities.  But our former “guvernator” went on to blast members of his party who “choose the politics of division.”

Oh, how I would love to see him take the stage, in coming GOP presidential nomination debates, and say that “emperor” Rupert Murdoch has no clothes! That the party of Goldwater and Buckley has been hijacked down paths of sheer insanity.  And that it is time for decent conservatives to save American conservatism, by getting mad at the hijackers.  

And no, I don't care whether he's "native-born." Remember, I am talking about the next 11 months of theater before the conventions.  That is when the actual national dialogue takes place. And boy do we need to shake up that dialogue!

Oh, but then there’s this... California trounces Texas, other states in job creation. And in almost every other category. Heck even if the official nominees are (sigh) "Bush versus Clinton,"*** we could still demand a special California debate.

 Jerry Brown vs Ah-nold in 2016!  

== Did Heinlein exaggerate with “Nehemia Scudder? ==

Via David Ronfeldt: It's evidently from an odd book by Norman Cohn, the expert on millenarianism famed for his book "The Pursuit of the Millennium". The quote may fit a discussion about some current U. S. political trends, though it was originally written for a different audience.

"It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."   --From Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Oxford University Press, 1970, p.14). From the posting Fatal Attraction.

Radicals are starting to simmer, and the fellows who are pulling the latest oligarchic putsch need to understand where it might all lead.  Those of us pushing for a normal, rhythmic moderate-pragmatic “reset” of the flat-open-fair social contract envision something like what Americans have done in most generations, including the two Rooseveltean flattenings… preventing the routine efforts to rebuild feudal pyramids of privilege that ruined 99% of societies, and keeping our flattened-diamond experiment going for another generation.

But read here, how others have already given up. The putsch has already gone too far, they claim!  Elias Isquith interviews Chris Hedges: “We have, to quote John Ralston Saul, “undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion” and it’s over. The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse.” 

Is this right?  No, not yet.  There are far too many positive trends, especially since 2013 was the best year for U.S. civil liberties in two decades or more. Something the far-left and the entire right – both of them allergic to optimism – will never admit.

Still, heed the sounds of pitchforks being sharpened and tumbrels being oiled. The Roosevelts were moderate–pragmatic alternatives to Trotsky, to Hitler, to Stalin, or Bakunin.  As I portray in Existence… any new feudal caste had better try lots harder to be actually smart, instead of delusional (like every other feudal caste, across all of time). Or else they should picture a Billion Bakunins, many millions of them armed not with pitchforks, but genetically engineered bugs. Then, envision them getting jobs serving drinks at high class resorts.

Negotiate with us. The enlightenment made you rich. Try showing it some loyalty.

 == The Pope Effect ==

Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory real..“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said. 

Further -- in words likely to anger some of his conservative critics, the pope backs the science of climate change, saying "plenty of scientific studies point out that the last decades of global warming have been mostly caused by the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) especially generated by human action" 

Yep… one more gol-durned "elite" trying' to use reality to bully the plantation -- er oligarch -- er, Fox -- er, "job creator" (yeah, that's it) lords.  Down with every elite who's not a confederate plantation lord!  You listening, God?  

Okay, okay, this fellow seems to be on his way to becoming the most reasonable and insightful and most humane pope any of us have seen.  Still, and while the messages have mostly been positive, so far, I have my limits. For example, when Pope Francis “denounced what he calls the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians,homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II.”  

While I agree with the actual statement, I find it hard to swallow coming from the Vatican, whose behavior during that same time was utterly accommodating to evil forces committing those crimes.

See this simple dissection of why certain religious dogmas are absolutely tantamount to treason.

Oh, but finally then there's this...

As we speak, Republicans are pushing hard to retract all accountability measures from their own No Child Left Behind reform of U.S. education. 

Now why would they do that? I thought the whole purpose of NCLB was to use testing and comparable metrics to find out where schools are failing so that attention can be focused on them... so that no child would be left behind! 

Remember when testing and accountability were the conservative catch words?

But oh... okay. It turns out the GOP is running as fast as they can to cancel all real measuring and accountability -- for one simple reason. The accountability testing under No Child Left Behind was blatantly showing that Red States are failing. They are falling more and more behind blue states and getting worse. 

So... shall we re-evaluate processes and try to do better? What... no? Um, did I mention these are republicans? Perception is all that matters! The solution is "don't you dare look at us! Especially if we're failing!"

Oh, boy. The next year will be "fun."  Come on Jerry and Arnold ... and Jon... take off those quotation marks.


==================

*** I am still looking for a bold urban guerrilla theater ensemble to look at my script for a very easy political video. One that would be hilarious, pointed and devastating... regarding the problem of political "dynasties." Hey, don't get me wrong. Given any choice between a Bush and a Clinton (and their respective armies of factotums), it's a no-brainer. Another Bush could kill us all. And I got no beef against Hill. Except that we would never know a moment without shrill (even if unearned) rancor. This nominee cannot sooth Phase Eight of our Civil War, no matter how hard she wants to, or tries.

Still... do I have a bit of satire that could at-minimum make you all laugh and cry? Sigh.