After more than three years of talking about it, the way-too-long 2016 election is actually under way, and as always, the actual Iowa caucus results don’t look very much like the polls. No surprises there.
The Democratic side was a tie, no two ways about it. One thing you can say for certain about American elections – when they’re very close, there’s no way to sort out who really won, and in this case we may never know. The Clinton camp basically adopted the W. Bush strategy in Bush v. Gore: declare victory and move on. It is remarkable, to say the least, that Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist, 74 years old, no PAC money, etc., was able to take on a political machine that includes a former president stumping for the celebrity candidate.
I think one advantage Bernie may have is that he is making a case for something different than the status quo. His presidency would not be a third Obama term, whereas from the sound of Hillary (and what we know of how the Clintons govern), we would have continuity under her guiding hand.
What about the G.O.P.? Well, the biggest bigot-hugger won. Trump learned the meaning of the word “lose”, and Rubio apparently thinks that coming in third is better than coming in first (perhaps because the number 3 is bigger than the number 1 – just a guess on my part). Predictably, the Republican contest appears headed toward producing a candidate with extremist views on a whole range of topics, from abortion rights to foreign military actions and so on. It could hardly be anything else. Trump is an arbitrary billionaire, capable of doing just about anything. Cruz is a sanctimonious wind-bag, in love with his own voice and with the sweet memory of carpet-bombing the darkies. Rubio is the cracked vessel that crazed neocon foreign policy advisers are carried around in. Christie is the somewhat larger container that the anti-Social Security Peterson Institute is carried around in. I could go on.
So, if Iowa demonstrated anything, it’s that the Democratic race is indeed a race. It also confirms what most of us already knew – some crackpot will be running on the other side.
Don’t forget to vote. No, really … I mean it.
luv u,
jp
Who’s the moderate in that race? Christie? Don’t say Christie. He’s vehemently anti choice, wants to provoke war with Russia, and has all the racial sensitivity of Nixon during his drunk period (to say nothing of being a shill for the Peterson Institute, which advocates for privatizing Social Security). Forget Jeb Bush. He’s easily as bad as his brother on the issues, only with less raw political talent. Rubio? He’s the bold “young” candidate who seems to have his head stuck in decades-old Cold War strategy like a bug in amber. Frankly, any one of these candidates would be an unmitigated disaster as president.
The Cuban exile policy is the perfect illustration of what these GOP pols complain about with regard to incentivizing the influx of undocumented immigrants, and yet they have no problem with folks flocking here from Cuba because they can’t earn a lot of money back home. But when it comes to families running for their lives from the hell holes we helped destroy during the 1980s, that’s different. If the likes of Cruz and Rubio had had their way, Cuba would be a free market basket case like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and every other disaster area we “helped” over the years. Of course, then the legions of exiles fleeing drug gangs would find no red carpet on these shores.
Lindsey loves Georgie. At the kid’s table, Lindsey Graham got a little carried away over his bro-mance with ex-president and hopefully future convicted war criminal George W. Bush, saying in essence that he misses W and wishes he were still in office to handle the big-as-the-sky threat known as ISIS, which Lindsey previously said wants to “kill us all!!” Not hard to work out why Senator Graham’s poll numbers, even in a highly reactionary GOP primary race, hover somewhere between zero and zero point five. Not a majority position.
Starting with the debate, probably the most telling moments of that sorry spectacle were the attacks against the event moderators – the calls of unfairness most effectively delivered by Ted Cruz, who (as Sam Seder has pointed out) really owns that sense of grievance that has become such a central part of the Republican/Tea Party narrative. There goes the “liberal” media, ripping into us after having given the Democrats the kid gloves treatment. Several of them – Christie, Trump, Carson, Huckabee – took turns revealing their inner Gingrich, whining at such a pitch that their grievance grew legs and very nearly derailed the entire GOP debate schedule in the days that followed. Pauvre petit!
I think the part that’s most flabbergasting is the level of hysteria over the Iran deal. You expect to hear overheated rhetoric at an event that features Michelle Bachman and some dude from “Duck Dynasty,” but this was way the fuck over the top. Ted Cruz suggested that the Iranians, once they have acquired the nuclear weapon they so LUST after, will blow it up off the coast of the U.S. to create an electromagnetic pulse, shutting down our electrical grid and killing MILLIONS! What. the. fuck. What a fantasy! And this from a sitting Senator.