Ediblog.com
Selwyn Duke
Election Year Nonsense
©
2008 Selwyn Duke
To
use a play on Winston Churchill’s cynical words, the best argument against
democracy is a five-minute perusal of election coverage.
Another way to put it – at risk of sounding trite – is if it
weren’t for nonsense, it wouldn’t make any sense at all.
Yet, if being trite were a sin, most presidential aspirants would
languish in political purgatory.
First
we have the bromidic bilge about change. You
can bet your withholding tax that the Democrat candidates were programmed to
pepper their speeches with the word in a measure as liberal as their politics.
Tell certain constituencies you’re a change agent – even if the only
thing you change is your personality – and the idiot vote swoons.
Change
isn’t by definition good; it’s just by definition change.
One-hundred years ago, Russians’ dissatisfaction with the Tsar led them
to roll the dice. Things couldn’t
get any worse, many thought. So they
made a change.
And
the communists took power in 1917.
Then,
if your child’s diet yielded vigor and health, would you place him in the
hands of some guru promising ambiguous change?
Wouldn’t you demand specificity?
In
C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, written from the point of view
of a demon bent on undermining civilization (a perspective much like that of
certain campaigns), the chief demon Screwtape instructed (I’m paraphrasing):
“Change
is supposed to be a means to an end, but we have to convince people that it is
an end unto itself.”
Many
have been convinced. And, for sure,
mentioning it incessantly has become a political end unto itself.
Then
there’s populism, now a euphemism for statism.
Mike Huckabee thrives on populist rhetoric, delivered with a mouth
greased with snake oil. No doubt, he
turns phrases as well as he turns out Christian votes, but we’re choosing a
president, not a wordsmith.
But
Huck has his strong points. He
believes in charitable giving – at least with tax money – which makes some
think he wears his cross more than he carries it.
He also opposes anti-marriage, although this minister has presided over
some strange unions. Why, he created
an unequally-yoked marriage between Christianity and statism, which basically
means he’ll rob Peter to pay Paul in the name of religion while praying for
votes.
We’re
Peter, by the way.
It
goes down easy, though, with his chicken-fried charm and nimble tongue.
Just remember the masterful verbal salvo aimed at Mitt Romney:
“You
know, people are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of
the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off. . . .”
I
hated the guy I worked with.
But
it’s correct to associate Romney with money.
We had been told that even if Romney kept losing and losing and losing .
. . and losing, he wouldn’t be out of it and could keep campaigning for the
duration, through November 2012.
This
speaks volumes. People don’t
research and vote for the best; instead, they’re bought by the fellow who can
afford the most face time.
And
what a face.
Romney
has one great asset and one great liability.
And
they’re the same thing.
If
a filmmaker cast a man to play the president of the United States, it would be
Romney; he has the looks, bearing, voice, temperament, and, oh, yes, the hair.
Yet if you cast someone to play a phony politician, it would also be
Romney. It’s so superficially
perfect, it doesn’t seem quite real. It
. . . yes.
Speaking
of phoniness and style over substance, there’s Barack Hussein Obama.
Have you ever seen those multi-racial, computer-generated pictures
politically-correct marketers sometimes place on packaging?
I mean the ones that don’t look like anyone you might actually meet;
that is, unless, through marvels of genetic engineering, you somehow amalgamated
the genes of every single racial and ethnic group on the planet into the
Democratic National Committee’s conception of an über-politician.
Obama is as close as you’ll come.
So
the young flock to him because, weaned on political correctness, he fits their
profile. Not only is he
multi-racial, he has a cool, exotic foreign name, a resonant voice and rock-star
persona. He isn’t just a plain
vanilla white dude. It doesn’t
really matter what he says.
Good
thing for him, too, because he makes Romney seem like a font of ideological
fortitude and depth. I honestly
cannot address the substance of what he says because I’ve yet to detect any.
But he’s practiced in the platitude, speaking of change; being a
uniter, not a divider; yada, yada, yada. His
is a Seinfeld campaign: It’s about nothing.
But it sure is entertaining and he lies like George Costanza.
As
for Obama’s nonsense, there’s no greater insult to intelligence than the
“uniter, not a divider” schtick. To
believe it is to confuse cause with effect.
Who thinks President Bush – who we’re told is a divider, not a uniter
– asked 50 percent of us to vote against him in 2000?
Our
division is a product of a deep, abiding philosophical rift.
That’s why it’s called the “culture war,” not the political one.
How much fellowship will there be between two groups on opposite sides of
abortion, anti-marriage, guns, Iraq, the nanny state, taxes, public displays of
faith, and probably the chasm between Heaven and Hell?
To think we’re divided because of a politician gives voters no credit
for having principle; it says that, if the right demagogue comes along, they
will unite around him. It is to
believe all voters are lemmings, as opposed to just those who vote for
tears.
Talking
about Hillary Clinton, it’s said her strength vis-A-vis Hussein Obama is
experience.
Sigh.
Yawn.
Experience
is much like change, an ambiguous term saying little of quality, only type.
What is the given individual experienced in?
As I wrote
recently, if criticized for lack of experience, I’d answer:
Well,
honestly, you’re right. I have no
experience levying confiscatory taxes and stealing people’s wealth.
I have no experience violating the Constitution, writing intrusive laws
and robbing people of freedom. I
have no experience propagandizing and lying to get elected.
I have no experience pandering to special interest groups, taking
lobbyist money and funneling funds to pork barrel projects.
So, you’re right, I have absolutely no experience.
Vote
for the other guy.
Speaking
of the other guy, we have Ron Paul.
Don’t
laugh.
If
you support him, don’t scream . . . yet. Paul
deserves great respect for upholding the Constitution; if other politicians
followed suit, we wouldn’t be losing freedom.
Paul also is honest, and anyone who doesn’t respect that deserves
damnation to a netherworld of listening to Hillary Clinton’s
nails-on-a-blackboard speeches (circa 2003) for all eternity.
But his foreign policy – or lack thereof – deserves criticism.
Dar al-Islam won’t narrow its scope just because we narrow ours.
Now
we have Paul’s supporters. A
motley crew, they hail from the right, left, middle and probably the fourth
dimension and beyond. People thus
find them hard to peg, but it’s not difficult.
I
call them the X-Files Set.
Conspiracy
is their stock-in-trade, and every day or event is an exciting new episode.
It’s not that things aren’t always as they seem in their world;
they’re never as they seem. They
believe Bush and bin Laden shot Kennedy and Oswald perpetrated 9/11, or
something like that. One wrote me
recently and mentioned one of their common themes: Paul would be assassinated
before the election.
Yes,
assassinated.
But,
friends, unless you mean at the polls, you needn’t worry.
He’s not that important or dangerous, and the establishment isn’t
Hollywood. The Paulistas also
believed he’d launch an electoral revolution and capture the nomination.
And now that Paul has won the race to become the most interesting
asterisk in the first six primary contests, I’m waiting for claims that the
vote was rigged (I just gave them an idea).
Paulistas
aren’t crazy, but they do live in an echo chamber.
I understand this well. If I,
who mainly preaches to the choir, believed my email, I’d think my coronation
nigh. That’s why I won’t drink
anyone’s Kool-Aid – not even my own.
The
subject of widely-imbibed, sweet-but-deadly concoctions brings us to perhaps the
worst election-year nonsense of all, the idea that low turnout is bad for
“democracy.”
Poppycock.
Far
too many people vote, largely because those possessing only the superficial rely
on the support of those who can’t see past it.
Thus, our standard for electoral participation is this:
Is
your body warm (not a prerequisite in Chicago and its environs)?
Can you operate a slot machine? Then,
congratulations! You can vote.
This
brings me to something not at all nonsensical.
With our sorry crop of experienced change agents of unity, sweetness and
light, people sometimes ask me whom they should support.
And I’ll answer, since if you’re reading me, perhaps you should vote.
My
motto is simple: ABHHH.
Anybody
but Hillary, Huck or Hussein.
Want
a better choice? Get the turnout
down to about 1 percent.
That
may not be the language of populism or unity, but it also isn’t nonsense.
Selwyn Duke is a freelance writer out or Larchmont, NY. He has written for various publications including: IntellectualConservative.com, AmericanThinker.com and is a regular columnist for RenewAmerica.us.