In her Wall Street Journal article The Week They Decided He Was Crazy, Peggy Noonan ends with this observation about the future of the USA:
“I end with a new word, at least new to me. A friend called it to my attention. It speaks of the moment we’re in. It is kakistocracy, from the Greek. It means government by the worst persons, by the least qualified or most unprincipled. We’re on our way there, aren’t we? We’re going to have to make our way through it together.”
Noonan is correct. No matter who is elected President this year, the result will be the same: America will be turned into a kakistocracy.
As I say in an previous post, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is a choice between the lesser of two weasels.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think that this year’s presidential contest were a Zucker Brothers movie. I keep expecting police detective Frank Drebin to burst in and arrest both Clinton and Trump.
Democrats can take consolation in the fact that Clinton’s corruption was hidden from them at the start of their Party’s nomination contest. Who knew that Clinton was a graduate of the Richard M. Nixon School of Morality?
Republicans, however, can’t take such consolation. As Republican pollster Frank Luntz has said, this election “should have been a slam dunk for the GOP.” As Walter Shapiro puts it, “The undeniable truth is that Trump has already lost an election that a rational Republican might well have won.”
It’s too bad that the GOP didn’t nominate a rational Republican.
Although some professional pundits have already called the election for Clinton, the election isn’t over yet. As crazy as this contest has been, anything is still possible.
If Clinton did win, the Trumpkins wouldn’t let the contest be over. Doyle McManus explains why:
“In 1964, amid an earlier conservative insurgency, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter wasn’t writing about mental illness, he explained, but “the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people.”
Its characteristics, he wrote, include a belief that the political system is rigged and that malign conspiracies are at work to thwart the popular will. That kind of thinking rises in “a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise,” he wrote.
But in most campaigns, such sentiments belong to the fringe. This year, the Republican nominee has made them his central theme.”
The Trumpkins’ paranoia is made worse by the kind of hysteria being promoted by Notre Dame professor John Gaski. He writes, “There appear to be three particular policy consequences of a Hillary Clinton presidency that individually would be sufficient to extinguish the United States of America.”
In a 2014 column Gaski writes, “It appears as though the American masses may have become too ignorant for our nation to be able to survive.”
In other words, the USA is doomed, DOOMED I tell ya!
Granted, some paranoia is to be expected during any political contest, but the level of the paranoia currently coming from the political Right is amazing. It is enough to make one get out the popcorn as if one were watching a movie.
I’m just waiting for the end of the movie, when the men in white coats come to take away the main characters.
This current political movie is a sequel to the one that came out after the 2000 presidential election, the one in which Florida Democrats had to seek counseling. They couldn’t handle the fact that Albert Arnold Gore, Junior lost in Florida after he tried to win by violating the U.S. Constitution.
At least those Democrats sought psychological help for themselves. One wonders if Trump’s supporters will do the same if Trump loses.
The “Wanted” posters say the following about David: “Wanted: A refugee from planet Melmac masquerading as a human. Loves cats. If seen, contact the Alien Task Force.”