Buttigieg closed at
a tight second place behind Sanders and both
were awarded the same number of delegates, which
with the bizarre Iowa shenanigans means the former
South Bend mayor is now leading the pack in total
delegates despite receiving fewer votes than Sanders
in both states.
It is entirely possible that we’ll continue
seeing strange electoral results combined with mass
media manipulation result in Buttigieg riding a
contested convention into a superdelegate-boosted
nomination, even if Sanders has more votes overall.
We have at this point in time seen no reason to
believe that Sanders will be able to secure
the number of delegates needed to prevent such
an occurrence.
Then you’ve got
racist Republican oligarch Mike Bloomberg
jumping on the ballot come Super Tuesday, with his
$300 million+ ad campaign throwing more chaos
into the mix. Billionaire Bloomberg’s unprecedented
campaign spending power has enabled him to push up
just shy of second place in a recent Quinnipiac
national poll despite having no redeeming
characteristics and no real goal agenda apart from
stopping Sanders, which is as clear an illustration
as you’ll ever see of the power of money in US
politics.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
Whether it winds up being Buttigieg, Bloomberg,
or one of their ideological alt-centrist clones like
Amy Klobuchar or the floundering Joe Biden, the
mainstream narrative will soon converge around one
candidate in a very positive way, with the only
important qualification being that they aren’t
Bernie Sanders. Many powerful people will do
everything they can to prevent a Sanders nomination,
whose presidency
they oppose more than Trump’s. As journalist
Matt Taibbi recently
pointed out, the Democratic establishment has
“every incentive to play every conceivable card.
Trillions at stake.”
The primary argument used will be that defeating
Trump is all that matters, even if it’s with another
racist Republican plutocrat. If they succeed in
sabotaging Sanders’ candidacy, he will help advance
the same argument, as will a majority of his
supporters. This argument will click perfectly in to
a foundational assumption that establishment
narrative managers have spent the last three plus
years reinforcing, namely that once Trump is out of
office, everything will be okay.
Final polling average (RCP): 28.7% - Sanders 21.3% - Buttigieg 11.7% - Klobuchar 11.0% - Warren 11.0% - Biden
The premise that everything will be fine once
Trump is gone isn’t one people generally say out
loud. They don’t even usually think it. But the fact
that so many Democrats who were fine with the way
their nation was being run on January 19 2017
suddenly became furiously critical of it on January
20th tells you that this assumption is at play. And
the relentlessly Trump-centric liberal news media
has only reinforced this unexamined assumption.
Things are not going to be okay once Trump is out
of office. Do you know how I know this? Because
things weren’t okay before Trump got into office.
America was a murderous imperialist force whose
citizenry were suffering under crushing austerity
and steadily mounting authoritarianism on January 19
2017, and it remains so today. Certainly the current
administration has added its own levels of
nefariousness to this dynamic, but the same is true
of its predecessors.
By this stage in his administration Bush had
launched two full-scale ground invasions and
implemented unprecedented levels of global
militarism and Orwellian surveillance, while at the
same stage Obama had already overtly destroyed Libya
and was working on covertly doing the same to Syria.
Trump has continued and expanded all of the most
evil agendas of those two administrations and
added immensely depraved warmongering elements
of his own, but you can’t even rightly argue that
he’s done anything quite so evil as what Bush did to
Iraq or what Obama did to Libya and Syria. Trump is
not the unprecedented presidential horror that the
Democratic Party-aligned media spin him as.
Imperialist elites dislike Trump not because he’s
a uniquely dangerous president, but because
he puts an ugly face on the things they were
already doing before he took office and plan to
continue doing once he leaves. The reason many
rank-and-file Democrats dislike him is similar: he
forces them to think about the evil things their
nation does.
They don’t actually want to fix any of these
problems, they just want to stop thinking about
them. They’re not interested in waking up, they just
want to get an uncomfortable wrinkle out of their
bedsheets so that they can go back to sleep.
John Mulaney
does an under-appreciated bit at the end of his
famous “There’s
a horse in the hospital” routine comparing Trump
to a horse running rampant in a medical facility,
where he admits he just wasn’t paying attention to
what was going on during the previous
administration:
Or sometimes they go, “If you’re so mad at
the horse, how come you weren’t mad when the
last guy did this three and a half years ago?
You’re beating up on the horse when the last guy
essentially did the same thing five years ago.”
First off, get out of here with your facts.
You’re like the kid at the sleepover who, after
midnight, is like, “It’s tomorrow now!” Get the
fuck out of here with your technicalities. Just
’cause you’re accurate does not mean you’re
interesting…
But when people say, “How come you were never
mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I
wasn’t paying attention.” I used to pay
less attention before it was a horse. Also,
I thought the last guy was pretty smart,
and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by
nature. I’m lazy by nature too. So I
don’t check up on people when they seem okay at
their job. You may think that’s an ignorant
answer but it’s not, it’s a great answer. If you
left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re
not going to race home and check the nanny cam.
But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey…
I think this is how most mainstream liberals
feel, if they’re honest with themselves. They felt
like they didn’t have to pay attention to the things
Obama was doing, and they want to go back to that.
Even though the distance between
a truly healthy society and what America was
like under Obama is many orders of magnitude greater
than the distance between what America was like
under Obama and what America is like under Trump.
Wanting things to go back to how they were before
Trump is wanting things to go back to the conditions
which gave rise to Trump. The belief that everything
will be peachy keen once Trump is out of office is
therefore more dangerous than Trump himself, because
it guarantees more Trumps, and it guarantees that
the underlying disease of which Trump is a symptom
will remain uncured.
Treating a symptom doesn’t cure the disease.
Believing that getting rid of Trump will fix
America’s problems is like believing cough syrup
cures tuberculosis.
The disease is the oligarchic imperialist dystopia
which is tormenting millions and controlling
billions all around the world. A movement toward
health doesn’t look like not having to pay attention
anymore, it looks like the exact opposite: becoming
fully conscious of all the ugliest and most
unpleasant to look at aspects of the thing that
America has become. It looks like turning and facing
all the bloodshed, genocide, white supremacy,
oppression, exploitation, corruption and degradation
which form the fibers from which that nation has
been woven, deeply ingesting and grokking into their
reality, and then healing them completely.
The belief that everything will be fine once the Democrats get rid of Trump is more dangerous than Trump himself.
If the narrative managers succeed in installing
Pete Buttigieg or one of his ideological clones, the
temptation for millions of Americans will be to go
back to sleep. But America won’t be any healthier.
The coughing will have stopped, but the tuberculosis
will remain. The sociopathic imperialist oligarchy
will continue along the exact same trajectory, but
the symptom of an oafish, incompetent and ham-fisted
president will have been eliminated.
And that’s all any narrative manager ever wants.
Their job is to normalize the empire’s depravity and
keep its highly profitable murder and exploitation
from awakening the masses. That’s why propaganda is
so toxic.
I’m not interested in telling Americans whether
they should have Trump or some centrist Democrat in
office; the odds of four more years of Trump being
more disastrous than under President Pete are a
toss-up as far as I can tell. But I do wish the
malignant belief that eliminating Trump will solve
America’s main problems could be expunged from human
consciousness forever.
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