Our Politics Were Rigged and Rotten Long Before Tyrant Trump

Our political system was disingenuous because Liberal politicos steered right upon taking office, ditto for conservatives, and dishonest because nominations, vote tabulation and media coverage were ri

By
David Gottfried

Yes, Trump is repugnant.  But I wish Democrats would stop praising American politics, as it was in the days before Trump, like dour, dumpy members of the Daughters of the American Revolution  lamenting the passing of the “Good Old Days.”  

Very simply, American politics are rigged and has always been rigged, but for reasons other than those Trump imagines.

First, I will demonstrate that our allegedly democratic process is often undemocratic and that the path to electoral victory is strewn with minefields which negate the popular will.  Second, I will explain why you rarely get what you vote for because liberals morph into conservatives upon assuming office  and conservatives steer left when taking the helm of power.  (This problem began to abate with Ronald Reagan who was as conservative as he said he was.) 

The Counting of Ballots, News coverage and Nominations are Rigged

A)  Bush v. Gore

Some people think that it’s absolutely terrible to challenge the results of an election.  Have the Dems all gotten amnesia.  Not only was the 2000 election stolen (The butterfly ballot, 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 the  names of blacks who were entitled to vote, the hanging and dimpled chads, Republican operatives halting the recount in Dade County)   but the Supreme Court certified the steal.  

In a word, the Supreme Court gave Bush a TRO (A temporary restraining Order) to stop the recount in Florida. The law provides that one only is entitled to the expedited injunctive relief of a TRO (Relief awarded BEFORE one has proven one’s case) on the grounds that 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 would instill doubts about the integrity of our electoral system and would imperil our Democracy.

Of course, the truth was the exact opposite of the lie promulgated by the Court:  By shutting down the recount, our doubts about electoral honesty were magnified.  We wondered:  Just what were they hiding. 

The Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, was just as dishonest as Trump is today.  

There are other flaws in the Court’s decision; there’s no time to mention them.

Please read the Court’s disgusting decision.   

The Court’s contention, that our electoral system could only be defended if we stopped the recount and forever shrouded the truth, seemed to come straight from the searing lie in George Orwell’s “1984,”  “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”  The Court plainly believed that ignorance is strength because it wanted us to be forever ignorant of the real results of the 2000 election in Florida.    

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) Nominating Conventions are a nature preserve dominated by big, fat stupid animals, known as party hacks, who are inimical to good government. 

i) The honchos in the Dem National Committee trained their fire on Bernie Sanders in  2016 and in 2020  (I formerly adored Bernie.  Now, I can’t stand him because of his rejection of Israel and his surrender to radical and Islamic hordes)

a) Donna Brazille, while working for a media outlet, gave Hillary the questions that she would be asked in a debate against Bernie Sanders before the debate was held.  

ii) Do you remember Howard Dean’s valiant campaign in 2004.   An amazing article, the day after he bombed in the Iowa caucuses (He had been doing great because of his full-throated opposition to the war in Iraq), noted that newsman boasted, immediately after the Iowa caucus, about their luck in savaging Dean with attacks which they knew were unfair.

iii) And lest we ever forget:  In the primaries in the Spring of 1968, 85 percent of Democrats voted for the anti-war candidates, Bobby Kennedy and Gene Mc Carthy.  Nevertheless, at the convention about two-thirds of the delegates supported the pro war candidate, the President’s castrato and stooge, Hubert Humphrey.   Pennsylvania was one of the sickest states as Mc Carthy won that state’s primary by about half a million votes, but 90 percent of Pa’s delegates went to Humphrey. 

The process is rigged because 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. 

The words “Democracy” and “Republicanism” both connote wholesome things we are supposed to like, and supposedly are related, and I would bet my right lung 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 Hish 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.

Why Liberals Turn into Conservatives, and Why Conservatives Morph into Liberals

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 recently elected liberal to the right.  Similarly, as soon as a conservative is elected, liberal Jews are crying at the waters of Babylon, and liberal blacks head to the water to get baptized again, and the New York Times, sounding like Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver, urges us to be brave in fighting the fascist Republicans, and before long the Republican president is often paralyzed.  

A cursory glance at a few presidencies of the post war era proves my point:

The conservative feats of our gallant, “liberal” Democratic Presidents:

JFK

He reduced the corporate income tax from 52 percent to 48 percent, increased corporate depreciation allowances, 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. His pronounced conservative policies were reflected in economic facts: Although wages for blue collar workers rose about 22 percent from 1961 to 1965,  stock dividends climbed by over 50 percent.

LBJ 

In some ways he proves my point.  In some ways he slays my point. 

In Foreign Affairs he was so militaristic that he made Winston Churchill look like Neville Chamberlain.  Lyndon Johnson sent the marines to the Dominican Republic when Socialists ascended to power, fomented a right-wing coup in Greece in the Spring of 1967 and dramatically expanded the War in Vietnam.

Most people agree that Johnson, for all his wrongs visa vis Vietnam, was a magnificent liberal because of the vast array of domestic programs inaugurated during his reign.  However, the liberalism he furthered arguably helped bureaucrats and professionals who allegedly helped the poor more than the poor.   Michael Harrington advanced this criticism in a chapter of his book, “The Twilight of Capitalism,” entitled “Bourgeois Liberalism.”

In about 14 pages of pithy, withering prose, Harrington unmasks the liberal lions of the New Deal and the Great Society and demonstrates that they are often perfect examples of the proverbial “Emperor’s New Clothes.”   Yes, the government gives a paltry amount of money to subsidize housing for the poor, but that sum of money is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize housing for the middle and upper classes through the deductibility of mortgage payments.    Yes, the government supposedly  helps farmers by paying them not to grow crops, but this program has been dominated by the largest landowners, and in the 1930’s, one to two million sharecroppers were evicted from their homes because plantation owners took government money to keep the land fallow.  

LBJ did more for American blacks than any president since Abraham Lincoln.    So my thesis arguably comes apart on this issue.   However, in large measure global forces made lawful segregation untenable.   The United States was locked in a doomsday struggle with the Soviet Union.  To an extent, the resolution of this struggle was supposedly contingent on the attitudes of the non-white nations toward the United States and the Soviet Union.  If America continued to uphold legal segregation, Soviet propogandists would have  a field day converting the third world to the Red banner of communism.  

JC of Georgia

(Who thought he was the Jewish JC from Bethlehem):   He opposed the Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill that Democrats begged for, reduced the corporate income tax rate from 48 percent to 46 percent and cut aid to cities and slum neighborhoods.  When told that his refusal to let Medicaid fund abortions was unfair, he tartly replied, “Some things in life are unfair.” 

Unfortunately, I can’t recall either Carter,  or the late 70’s,very well.  The Carter administration was so boring that it was like a gentle soporific. It wasn’t like Seconal, which made one blessedly unconscious; it was more like phenobarbital which only dulled you enough to make you feel really stupid, like horrible TV comedies, with a Southern twang, that were emblematic of the intellectual vacuity of the Carter age.   I am looking at you “Hee Haw” and “Family Feud.”     

 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 Steagle Act.   He gave billionaire media outlets fresh billions by subsidizing the development of HDTV.  He pushed Congress to enact a Draconian crime bill.    

He breached George Bush’s pledge not to bring Eastern Europe into NATO.   By enlarging NATO, and bringing American and Western European fire power a thousand miles closer to Moscow, he rekindled Russian fear and hatred toward the West and may have been the catalyst that begat Putin.

Most of Clinton’s professed progressive aspirations were poppycock. In 1992, he seemed poised to institute plenty of programs to help poor Americans, but there is only one thing he really fought for:   Nafta.  He said he would give more Americans health care, but his health care proposals were demolished because the media, predictably, characterized Hillary Clinton, charged with organizing his reforms, as a dominatrix in league with the Devil.   Instead of more access to health care, we saw the metastatic growth of managed care.   

Barack Obama 

He abandoned the public option for health care.   He refused to permit Medicare to bargain with big pharma.   Federal agencies, which were responsible for curbing the abuse of consumers by creditors, failed to defend debtors and millions of homeowners lost their homes to rapacious bankers.   Obama robbed Medicare to pay for his much touted “Obama Care.”     

When he assumed office, the economy was spiraling down with alarming intensity.  The obvious cure for a decline in output and spending is deficit spending.   Obama did the right things.  He gave us deficits.  However, they were not large enough.

Of course, the Republicans savagely attacked Obama for our deficits, and Obama’s response was shameful, the contrite and cowardly response of a cuckold wanting to get whipped by his wife and the stud she’s seeing.

Obama apologized for letting the deficit get out of hand, making himself appear incompetent.  Instead,  he should have candidly said that the deficit is bigger and that he wanted to make it bigger because tried and true economic precepts hold that when unemployment, production, spending and investment all go down, the economy needs a stimulus which is most readily available by an injection of money into the economy by means of a bigger deficit.

During the Obama years, the tepid recovery never penetrated the American heartland.  Opioid addiction soared and life expectancy started declining for the first time in more than 100 years.  The heartland of America got its vengeance in 2016, and Donald Trump assumed the seat of power and transformed it into his throne.       

The  Heroic Liberal Achievements of our “Conservative” Politicians

Eisenhower  

Shortly after he took office, he negotiated an end to the Korean War; it was decided that the border between North and South Korea would stay at the same place where it was before the war had started.  Of course, if the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, had won the 52 election, there would have been no end to the Korean War.   If a Democratic had dared to try to talk of peace, he would have been defamed as an agent of Moscow and promptly tarred and feathered. 

Ike agreed with Moscow that Austria would be neutralized, i.e., that it would be aligned with neither Washington nor Moscow.  If a Democratic had tried this, he’d have suffered the same fate as any Democrat who would have tried to end the Korean War.

When the French lost at Diem Bien Phu, in 1954,  they left Vietnam.  Democrat Lyndon Johnson jumped up and down and beat his chest and held that America had to go to Vietnam to fight the Commies.  Eisenhower conferred with our best generals, Ridgeway and Gavin.  The three men concluded, in under 90 minutes, that getting involved in Vietnam would be sheer lunacy.  (If only John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had had their intelligence !)

Also, Ike never made any effort to dismantle, abridge or undermine the provisions of FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair deal.  Throughout the 50’s, Americans found more and more consumer goods readily accessible and affordable.   Unions were strong, and they were a hell of a lot stronger than they were in the days of Clinton and Obama.        

Richard Nixon, liberal Saint extraordinaire: 

Even Democrats who are so innocent and empty-headed about the world we live in that they know nothing save some trite adages such as “It take a village to raise a child,” know enough to groan, grimace and claim they are in grievous pain when they hear the name Richard Nixon.  We have all been trained to hate him.

That man did do some very horrible things (And Watergate is far from the worst of his escapades), but you cannot claim that he was a hard line, son of a bitch right-winger as President.  He made Jimmy Carter appear to be the spitting image of Herbert Hoover.
 

Richard Nixon, a man often defiled as a fascist ogre, A) Withdrew all ground troops from South Vietnam, B) visited China and Russia. C) Started détente, D) Announced that he was a Keynesian on economic policy, D) Ordered a wage price freeze to fight inflation,  E) expanded the  food stamp program, F) Tried to Nationalize welfare and, if I recall correctly, G) founded the Environmental Protection Administration,

The aforementioned flaws in our political system are finally abating.  Now. Republicans deliver the fire and brimstone they preach, and Joe Biden actually did walk on a picket line for the United Auto Workers.  Maybe our politics are more divisive.  But to me that’s better than a situation where there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.