The political circus

The true issue dividing Donald Trump from the rest of the Republican Pack? He has realized something that strikes terror into the hearts of the Kochs and Murdochs and Saudis who have grown accustomed to treating the Republican Party as their private legislature.  That the angry white men who make up the GOP's core-base are ready for some populism to mix with their gruel of guns and confederate values. 

Hence, Trump has called -- then pulled back -- but will certainly call again for tax increases on the uber-rich, while Jeb Bush and the rest reiterate their wish for ever-lower rates for the skyrocketing oligarchy, long after Supply Side (Voodoo) "Economics" has been proved never to have made one successful outcome prediction. 

Ever. Even once at all. Ever.

Heck, Trump has also spoken for campaign finance reform (if a bit hypocritically, given he's a self-funding billionaire).

Sure, he's repulsively crazy in many of his own (entertaining) ways. But if Donald Trump is leveraging the disappointment of millions of angry white males, perhaps we should cheer a bit that at least he is pointing out: “hey, the foxes and goppers have been lying to you, like mad, too.”

But what's his secret?

== Trump - Comic or Genius? ==

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has a blog - Clown Genius - that decrypts the salesmanship methods of Donald Trump.  The essay is revealing and fascinating: 

“As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every time. Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.”

Um… did I also mention that Scott is also – though a genius – a bona fide crackpot much of the time? “Trump owns Fox,” my patoot.  The Donald’s truce with Roger Ailes is based on mutual self- interest that shifts from day to day.  And the notion that Trump might actually become president is based upon comparisons to 1980’s Ronald Reagan that are not pertinent.  

Reagan was likeable, for one thing, and would have lost anyway, but for two things: the Iran hostage crisis and Jimmy Carter’s patriotic willingness to let Paul Volcker cure inflation, even in an election year. (Something no other politician would have done for the country – Carter was our only grownup president.) 

See also: Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi. 

How deep can the madness go? As we see the very-right-wing John Boehner canned from House Speaker for not being right-wing enough, we should consider where this could all lead.  Here is a very thoughtful essay that plumbs the 1950s roots of "Movement Conservatism" that is based upon fundamental "values" that cannot be argued-with through evidence or cause and effect.  (To be clear, there is a wing of the Left that is also exactly like this, only smaller and (presently) less dangerous.)

What this writer's analysis fails to do is:

1) Apply the word "confederacy" and thus show that this has a context, a clash of cultures that goes back to 1775 as we reach a frenzy of phase 8 of the American Civil War.

2) Reveal the danger that this movement poses to its cynical instigators. As we've noted, Donald Trump is getting huge response from white males with not only his anti immigrant etc slogans, but also sniping at Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News is used to utterly controlling the right's narrative.  Including the "do everything for the rich" policies that are the sun that the GOP revolves around.  Ironically it is Trump, the rogue billionaire, who now rails against that centerpiece, drawing millions of former sheep to look up, blinking amid an awakening populism that the Koch-Saudi-Murdoch cabal ought rightfully to fear.

Watch as Mike Huckabee or one or two others take moves in that direction, as they see their options wane. Seeing a chance for a Hail Mary gambit, they may start lacing in some anti-oligarch populism, hoping to strike a chord with those angry white males.

Hence, like all the talk show comedians, I am rooting for Donald to last a good while.  He’s mixing things up and shaking people out of ruts, and drawing white males to at long last question their confederate loyalty to Marse Rupert. By questioning the GOP reflex -- that tax cuts for the rich are the core and central sacredness -- he is laying seeds for a different sort of middle-class right-wing.  One that - while still raving crazy - finally glances at self-interest.

 Now… please… Jerry Brown and Jon Stewart… do the same thing!  Get in and have some fun.

== The banal insatiability of evil ==

The thing about evil is that it is insatiable*.  Republicans already control every lever of power in Alabama. Yet they bend heaven and earth to stymie voting by their minority citizens. Now, after passing a strict voter ID law, they are closing nearly all of the DMV offices in counties where most black citizens reside, making it much harder to get ID. 

I have oft pointed out that sincere Voter ID advocates would push also for compliance assistance to help poor citizens, married-or-divorced women, and young people to comply with an onerous new burden applied by the state.

Not one red state has done this, even a cent! Proving them utter hypocrites. (GOP legislators often appropriate Compliance Assistance funds for big business, when new regulations come down. Alabama did it this year, in amounts that could have kept those offices open.)

Read this.  There is no clearer illustration of the depth to which the red-gray side of our re-ignited Civil War has sunk. 

Oh… and the rationalization of “budget balancing”?  When a state is so poorly run and its economy so wretched that it cannot keep open its DMVs? The most basic service citizens need, in order to have freedom of movement and ID necessary for so many modern tasks? Nothing better illustrates a party's utter incompetence at the craft of government.

Oh, but this is the tip of the iceberg...

== Electoral Dishonesty ==

And now comes evidence that the Confederate cabal is willing to take cheating much farther. "Days after tea party republican Matt Bevin shocked the state of Kentucky by winning the election for governor in a landslide despite having been notably behind in every poll, political experts are still trying to figure out what happened. Initially the blame was directed at registered democratics, who appeared to have turned out to vote in historically small numbers. But now numerical evidence is pointing to the possibility that the election may have simply been rigged in favor Bevin."

Is this more "loser whining?" Or does fact after fact indicate that we should get ready...

... for the most cheating in a U.S. federal election in modern times.  This will happen for two reasons. 

First: "legal cheating" such as gerrymandering and voter suppression laws have reached their effectiveness limits and they can no longer compensate for  increasing demographic disadvantages facing the Republican Party, as well as the hemorrhage of intelligent conservatives (e.g. scientists, law professionals and military officers) who can no longer rationalize any continued relationship with the GOP’s plummet into lunacy. 

The second reason for panic on the right is simpler – if a Democrat enters office in 2016, the courts will eventually rule that corporations are not “people.” They will rule that it is okay to limit the buying of elections. The courts will also (winds are blowing) finally end the travesty of gerrymandering.

Fortunately for Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs and their Saudi partners, there is an ace up their sleeve. Through shells, they own every company that makes voting machines in the U.S. Machines that have proved to be easily hackable.  In blue states, this does not much matter, since most of them require that voters be provided with a paper receipt that then goes into a box, the old-fashioned way. Back-door hackers and machine company owners do not dare attempt major exploits, wherever random precinct audits could nail them.  

But voters in red states like Kentucky don't get such paper audit trails.  They seem blithely trusting of electronics – so long as it’s mostly white males who own the chips and levers.

Is Kentucky an isolated case? Then try these smoking guns. 

1) Virginia’s voting machines were built with a literal back dook… a locked USB port whose physical key was the same for every WinVote machine ever made.  Read this scandalous story.... Virginia Ditches 'America's Worst Voting Machines.'

2) Without paper audit trails, the cheaters in pyrotechnically-corrupt Kansas thought they were safe, till mathematicians arrived!  “Analyzing election returns at a precinct level, Wichita State mathematician Beth Clarkson found that candidate support was correlated, to a statistically significant degree, with the size of the precinct. In Republican primaries, the bias has been toward the establishment candidates over tea partiers. In general elections, it has favored Republican candidates over Democrats, even when the demographics of the precincts in question suggested that the opposite should have been true.” 

Hence, shouldn’t Tea Partiers be just as angry at the Murdoch Machine as democrats are?  Shouldn’t they make common cause over just this one issue?  

“According to their analysis, Mitt Romney could have received over a million extra votes in the 2012 Republican primary, mostly coming at the expense of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. President Obama also ceded significant votes to John McCain due to this irregularity, as well.”

Could this underlie some of the support for Donald Trump – the only GOP candidate with the guts to tell off Murdoch and his machine? Read this article and see how Clarkson has been blocked at every level with a consistency that shows complete, Orwell-level contempt for even figleaf accountability.

====

* I just spent 3 weeks as Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, in New York.  Arendt famously commented on how insipidly mundane and inferior one often finds evil men to be, seldom mad-genius types. Far more often one sees -- as she put it -- the "banality of evil."  Banal, yet nearly always insatiable.