To the Polls, Little Doggies!
Rush right in, folks, offer up your rump for the brand of your choice! Turn down this chute and get a big C for Change, or maybe an E for Experience if you’re of the Donkle breed of beef. Wait, don’t want to be part of THAT herd? The other ranch has some cooler symbols. You can get branded with a CROSS if you like cooked squirrel and JEEBUS. No? How about a BEEHIVE on your fat, ignorant ass? They’ll put some magic underwear on for you until it heals. Still doesn’t feel right? Well, there is always the straitjacket symbol, if crazy old coots are your thing.
Yes, yes ... I know. You’re helping to choose the leader of the “free world”! You’re turning down that chute because you WANT to!
You’re a free citizen in the greatest Ranch on EarthTM, after all. How DARE I suggest that you’re being led astray, that you’re just the product in a well-oiled enterprise engineered to deliver meatsacks to the owners?
After all, some of you are independents! You’re free to pick a side and keep the center alive!
CYNTHIA McKINNEY: Well, of course, in Georgia, we’ve got some pretty restrictive laws, and we‘ve challenged them in the courts, the open primary, the second primary. And basically, by utilizing the open primary, people can go to the polls and they can pick up a ballot of a political party of which they have never before participated, and that’s what’s happened to me twice.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened exactly. You’re saying that Republicans came and voted in the Democratic primary to get you out?
CYNTHIA McKINNEY: Yes, to determine—and so their votes then determined who the Democratic nominee was going to be.
If you don’t do your part, some mavericks who won’t run with one of the accepted herds will lead us all off a cliff, or some other dire outcome.
Moo, go where they lead you, head right down that chute into the pen polling station and play your part in this grand enterprise.
It doesn’t really matter, but if it feels good to play along, then more power to you. You’re a piece of beef to them, livestock, a captive breed that exists to be exploited for the people who write their checks. Have fun.
For the Democrats, the real game is being played between two factions of the elites. The economic, military and political elites are solidly behind Hillary Clinton. The cultural elites have lined up behind Obama. We the voters are sitting in the stands passively watching. Hillary Clinton should be able to win. Goldman Sachs and the arms industry usually trump Oprah Winfrey and Hollywood. But if there’s any explanation about why Obama has exploded so brightly onto the political scene in 2008, it’s the fact that TV and Hollywood have stepped up to shroud the political debate in a fog of big budget escapism. They’ve managed to convince a good chunk of the cultural elite and millions of American voters that you don’t have to confront the occupation of Iraq or the destruction of the Constitution at all, that you can simply retreat into an expertly produced big budget epic of an escapist fantasy where a black Kennedy revives Camelot and where the invasion of Vietnam or Iraq, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, or legalized American torture never happened. This is politics as entertainment, an attack on democracy using an 18 month long Presidential campaign.
My vote is not to participate.
People telling me not to forget to vote, all excited and my view of the truth sits unspoken on my tongue. They are breaking my heart Madman!
Posted by on 02/05 at 11:09 PMI feel churlish pointing out how pointless their “choice” is ... but it is.
The wars will go on. The inequities of our culture will continue.
People need to face it.
Posted by on 02/06 at 12:30 AMChurlish! That is exactly the word. Its 2am here and I cannot sleep. I really over did it with the caffeine today. I feel like I’m in some weird twilight zone where everyone is gone except me.
Posted by on 02/06 at 04:46 AMPolitics as entertainment, as spectacle and as farce. A sick, tragic farce.
For the first time in my life I didn’t vote for a presidential choice in the primary. I cannot put my mark by name.
But I am conflicted come November. Clinton and Obama both suck and for obvious reasons. But I can’t stand the thought of President McCain.
Posted by on 02/12 at 01:37 AMUnfortunately, James, even if it ends up being Clinton or Obama, we’ll end up with much the same foreign policy, police state and corporate welfare.
Posted by on 02/12 at 08:48 PM
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