Our Politics are Rigged but not for the Reasons Trump Imagines
By
David Gottfried
Yes, Trump is repugnant. But I wish Democrats would stop praising American government, as it was in the days before Trump, like dour, dumpy members of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Very simply, American politics are rigged and has always been rigged but for reasons other than those Trump imagines.
First, I will explain how the electoral process, insofar as the counting of votes, and the nomination of candidates, is rigged. Second, I will explain how Republicans, with the contrivance of the allegedly liberal media and masochistic Democrats, effortlessly distort the issues and the facts to optimize their position.
HOW THE COUNTING OF BALLOTS AND THE NOMINATING PROCESS IS RIGGED
A) BUSH V. GORE
Some people think that it’s absolutely terrible to challenge the results of an election. Have the Dems gotten amnesia? Not only was the 2000 election stolen (Recall the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, the hanging chads, the thousands of blacks disenfranchised because of misinformation in Seminole county, the “scrubbing” of voter rolls by removing the names of not only convicts but also names that appeared similar to the names of convicts); The Supreme Court certified the steal.
In a word, the Supreme Court gave Bush a preliminary injunction to stop the recount in Florida. The law provides that one only is entitled to a preliminary injunction (Or relief awarded BEFORE one has proven one’s case) when grave things will happen if one is not given immediate relief. What did the Supreme Court cite as the grave danger that would result if the recount were not stopped ? The Court said that the recount was instilling doubts about the integrity of our electoral system and could imperil our “Democracy.” Ergo, the Court said the recount had to stop. (The Court simply borrowed the arguments made by Bush’s attorneys.) Of course, the truth was the exact opposite: By shutting down the recount, our doubts about electoral honesty were amplified. The Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, was just as dishonest as Trump is today. Please read the Court’s disgusting decision. (And Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s lacerating dissent) The Court’s contention, that our electoral system could only be defended if we stopped the recount and forever shrouded the Florida results, seemed to come straight from George Orwell’s “1984” and the searing lie, of the totalitarian state in the novel, that “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”
B) WAITING HOURS TO VOTE IN THE CITY; WAITING 5 MINUTES TO VOTE IN “LEAVE IT TO BEAVER” LAND
In many urban areas, where the vote is primarily Democratic, people wait for hours to vote. In lily white Republican suburbs, the wait is almost always miniscule.
C) THE BEST DEMOCRATS ARE ROUTINGLY SCREWED BY A NOMINATING PROCESS THAT REWARDS CRASS, COWARDLY PARTY HACKS
i) The honchos in the Dem National Committee trained their fire on Bernie Sanders in 2016 and in 2020.
a) Donna Brazille, while working for a media outlet, gave Hillary the questions that she would be asked in a debate before the debate was held.
ii) Yes, Obama was nominated in 2008, but how many of you failed to follow his record and only assumed that he was progressive because he was black. I remember his campaign boasted that it never took money from lobbyists. That’s true. They did not have to. They took it directly from corporations and did not have to use lobbyists as a conduit. Obama got more from big pharma than Hillary and Mc Cain combined. He did have strong progressive inclinations, but he was a weak man, who did not have the gumption and gutsiness to combat his republican foes, and Republicans ate him for lunch.
iii) I will never forget: In the primaries in the Spring of 1968, 85 percent of Democrats voted for the candidates opposed to the Vietnam War, Bobby Kennedy and Gene Mc Carthy. Nevertheless, at the convention about two-thirds of the delegates supported the pro war candidate, Hubert Humphrey. The Democratic party was adamantly opposed to democracy as it did not believe that there needed to be any correlation between the votes cast in primaries and the composition of delegates at the convention.
2) THE PROCESS IS RIGGED BECAUSE THE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHO THEY ARE VOTING FOR
We call our two major parties the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. It might make more sense if we had a conservative party and a liberal party. But that would be somewhat descriptive, and we like to keep the voters confused and in the dark.
Democracy and Republicanism both seem like cool things that we are supposed to like, and supposedly are related, and I would bet my right kidney that not more than 20 percent of the country can distinguish between the two terms. Naming our parties the blue party and the gold party, as we did in Junior High School, would be just as descriptive and more fun to boot.
Of course, the Dems are supposed to be libs and the Republicans are supposed to be conservative and that, supposedly, lends some clarity to our process. And, supposedly, the system is not rigged because you can get liberal policies by voting for liberals and you can get conservative action by voting for gruff and tough Republican conservatives.
Not so.
3) WHY LIBERALS INEVITABLY BETRAY THEIR LIBERAL SUPPORTERS AFTER THEY ARE ELECTED AND WHY THE SAME DYNAMIC TRANSPIRES WITH CONSERVATIVE POLITICIANS.
As soon as a liberal is elected, right-wingers are hysterical because they are convinced that Vladimir Lenin has risen from the dead and occupies the White House, and they raise such a storm that they push the allegedly liberal president to the right. Similarly, as soon as a conservative is elected, liberal Jews are weeping at the waters of Babylon, and liberal blacks head to the water to get baptized again (I guess that’s the theological equivalent of a booster shot), and the New York Times, sounding like Greer Garson in “Mrs. Miniver,” urges us to be brave in fighting the fascist Republicans (Trump is a fascist, but I don’t think that appellation applies to Gerald Ford) and before long the Republican president is politically paralyzed.
A very quick glance at a few presidencies proves my point:
Consider the conservative feats of our gallant, liberal Democratic Presidents:
JFK: He reduced the corporate income tax from 52 percent to 48 percent, increased the corporate depreciation allowance, expanded our involvement in Vietnam, and did not accomplish any parts of the professed Democratic agenda, nothing for medical care for the elderly, housing, education or the minimum wage. (At that time the minimum wage was one dollar, and for laundresses, most of whom were black women, it was 65 cents an hour. Household help was so inexpensive that millions of white ladies had a “colored girl” to push around all day.)
LBJ. In some ways he proves my point. In some ways he contradicts my point. He’s a wily and tough cookie to figure out.
JC of Georgia (Who thought he was the Jewish JC from Bethlehem): He opposed the full employment bill that Democrats begged for, he reduced the corporate income tax rate from 48 percent to 46 percent and he cut aid to cities and slum neighborhoods.
Bill Clinton: He slashed welfare funding. He let derivatives trade without government regulation (facilitating future financial meltdowns) He presided over the destruction of the Glass Steagall Act. He gave billionaire media outlets fresh billions by subsidizing the development of HDTV.
Barack Obama: He abandoned the public option for health care. (When he assumed office, the economy was unraveling, the left seemed ascendant, and two-thirds of Americans favored “Medicare for All.”) He refused to permit Medicare to bargain with big pharma. Federal agencies, which were responsible for curbing the abuse of homeowners by bankers, failed to defend homeowners and many millions of homeowners lost their homes to rapacious bankers.
I will have to concede that my theory is breaking down in insofar as Republicans are concerned: Whereas Democrats swiftly gave Nixon a party-change operation and made him a bit of a liberal (Nixon withdrew all ground troops from South Vietnam, visited China. started détente, announced that he was a Keynesian, ordered a wage-price freeze to fight inflation, started food stamps, and, if I recall correctly, founded the Environmental Protection Administration), my theory does not apply to Trump. No amount of protest from “liberal” Democrats or the press could dissuade him from his fascistic course.
4) THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED BECAUSE REPUBLICANS LIE ABOUT THE FACTS, THE MEDIA REPEATS THE LIES, AND DEMOCRATS ROLL OVER AND PLAY DEAD
A) The FBI was investigating Clinton during the 2016 campaign. It told the American people that it was investigating Clinton. However, the FBI was also investigating Trump. Nevertheless, the FBI did not tell the American people that it was investigating Trump. It deliberately conveyed the notion that Hillary was dirtier than Mafia Don Donald Trump. Hell, next to Trump Hillary is as pure as Julie Andrews singing “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music.” Yeah, that election was rigged. It was rigged in favor of Trump.
B) The Republicans have said it loudly and clearly, the press repeated it, and the American fools believe it: The Democrats are nothing but spendthrifts. And Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump gave this country its biggest budget deficits.
C) Republicans and the press said that Al Gore said that he invented the internet. Al Gore had simply noted that he voted for pentagon funding which enabled our military to invent the internet. After a year of this nonsense, Al Gore gave up in contesting these falsehoods, and he once actually said, in disgust or despondency, that he had invented the internet.
D) 30 minutes after the first debate between Bush and Gore in 2000, telephone polls showed that most Americans, by a wide margin, thought that Gore had won the debate.
Over the next 48 to 72 hours, all major news outlets said that Gore did a terrible job because he kept sighing during the debate, which they told us was very immature, and the idiot box talking heads said Gore lost the debate.
Finally, the American people learned what the media taught them (And this includes the allegedly liberal media) and they decided that Gore lost the debate. Man, Gore must have been a really good guy given the energy devoted, by the powers that be, toward destroying him.
E) In the Obama administration, we let the budget deficit soar because Democrats considered it good medicine. When there is a recession, and people are spending less, we need the government to spend more to stimulate the economy. Of course, most people don’t understand this, and never heard of John Maynard Keynes, because they spent high school and college majoring in football and cheerleading. Obama did not try to explain himself as FDR did with his fireside chats. Instead, he apologized to the American people for being a profligate bad boy who bequeathed deficits. The American people concluded that Obama messed-up big time, and was incompetent in controlling spending, when in fact Obama’s deficits were not an error; they were deliberate, economic medicine.