Triumph of the Neurotic Simplifiers
The zero-sum game of U.S. politics claims yet another victim


Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who as the billion-eyed audience may recall has been a subject in posts past, (shown here with his partner-in-life Elizabeth, via the now Flying Dutchman Kucinich website), isn't part of the Presidential Beauty Pageant anymore.

He was turned off by the mainstream media because he couldn't afford to haul their pampered behinds around on buses. Kucinich got shut out of debates since he couldn't get the attention he deserved, and due to his lack of access to airplay, he couldn't participate in the roulette style methodology of politics posing as democratic politics in this country.

Just turn off the money machines. Television should participate in democracy, rather than sell underarm deoderant, and give time to candidates during election cycles--half our a piece--like infomercials. They must air a certain percentage of commerials with a lottery as to who gets on when. Take the need to raise such staggering amounts to run, and you'll get a better grade of candidate. Simple. Except then people of the nation don't want better candidates, otherwise they would've taken decisive action a long time ago to make that happen.

We are content to bumble along with a parade of meritocratic milquetoast mediocres long as their views reflect what around somewhat less than half the country says it thinks is important. This isn't republican democracy as it should be; this is more like a psychological disorder.

I suppose I knew the day of Kucinich's announcement was coming, I just didn't want it now. But a man has to know when to cut his losses. And he wants to keep his Congressional seat. People may have wanted his message, but he couldn't reach enough of them who would've otherwise cared.

So, welcome to the John McCain presidency, a foundering economy and unending war and rumors of war, here, there and everywhere, and a consistent refusal to face the deficit music. Anybody who seeks even to approach the hard cold truths is labeled a kook, or ignored. Ron Paul has his cult following. Mike Gravel sunk without a trace. Kucinich, with his pocket Constitution and wild and woolly ideas about, well, peace, didn't get his message through. But I'm not even sure enough people, who could make the difference, wanted to hear what he was saying.

Hillary is unelectable. Obama could possibly give McCain a run for his money; but in the end, the people of the United States are too scared and the conservative political structures too powerful to allow him an election, or if he manages, a term of office that isn't fraught with constant political and personal attacks that will neuter his effectiveness.

But my guess is that the pallid McCain will be the White House's next occupant, because he's old, not really a maverick anymore if he ever was, and few people really want the paradigm shift that is so needed. And perhaps that is well. McCain will inherit a rasher of shit from Bush, and McCain will go down with James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover as men who failed in a crisis.

Those in the field who have a seat in Congress--Kucinich, Paul, Obama and Clinton--should go back and do what they're supposed to do. Provide the balance to an executive that is bloated like a summer tick, swollen on other people's blood, and inflated further by arrogance and delusions of grandeur.

They've all failed. Every single last one of them. Some have tried to restrain the curtain that's falling over us all, but they aren't getting enough assistance. Nobody wants to believe that the ship can, in fact, sink if the management is insufficient enough wrap the vessel around an iceberg.

The Republicans seek to bribe the citizenry with $300 a piece, and underwrite the stupidity of those who enrolled in ARMs, and thus we're all culpable in the downfall, yet no one is taking the blame. From Enron to the Bush administration's shilly shallying about whatever torture is, and the 935 lies told to get us in the sucking sands of Iraq, to the sub prime mortgage lenders--and their buyers--it's all just rock and roll, right? None of this seems to matter to anybody.

And I'm told by those who wish to hope, that, hey, it's still early, and maybe Hillary (who at this point seems to me assured the coronation, er, I mean nomination) can win the Presidency. I just don't have enough confidence in the U.S. electorate, which seems at best bewildered and at worst deluded, in making a choice that isn't a pallid white guy. We are a Coke v. Pepsi country, after all.

How heartless the rightists can get is evidenced by the bloviating John Gibson of Fixed Noise, cracking wise on the day of Heath Ledger's death, and the nutjobs who say they'll picket the actor's funeral because he dared to make a film where he portrayed a gay sheep herder (not a freaking cowboy, as everybody says).

These people say the respect life. They don't. They respect nothing and nobody.

As Norman F. Cantor, the great Medieval historian wrote, emphasis mine:

"The study of medieval history teaches us that civilization is the result of a complex interpenetration of spirit and power of moral and material resources; that this delicate compromise is not easy to maintain, that its preservation requires mature intelligence, sophisticated moderation, and constant vigilance; and that the enemies of civilisation, apart from the uncomprehending primitives, are the socially irresponsible zealots and the neurotic simplifiers."