Rocking the Vote

From my archived blog (November 2018) at donaldjeffries.wordpress.com

This article from seven years ago could have been described just about every election during my lifetime. Trump, as he visibly unravels before us now, has long stopped talking about Term Limits. No one else is pushing it, either. Political discourse is pointless if there is no avenue to express your dissatisfaction. No return desk to complain to, as you would with any other product. If the votes aren’t being honestly counted, then the entire process is a tragic charade. If they are being counted, then the tragedy is much deeper, because that means a majority of those whose vote counts the same as ours really do want this.

A few days ago, American voters proved once again that they are incapable of throwing the bums out. And at this point, does anyone really dispute that they are bums? That is, of course, if the votes are actually being counted. Which might very well not be the case.

As is typical in virtually every U.S. election for at least the last fifty years, over 95 percent of incumbent members of the House were returned to office. “Only” 89 percent of our esteemed Senators were reelected. What does this persistent message of voter approval do, other than to empower our thoroughly retched “representatives” and encourage them to continue their peculiar brand of “public service?” More nonstop war. More immigration. More foreign visa workers. More corporate welfare and consolidation of wealth in the greedy hands of the elite.

This is what the American people evidently want. Apparently, they think the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein are just the kind of leaders America needs, as it further crumbles into Third World status. I devoted a section of Survival of the Richest to our “best and brightest” political representatives. The names change, but the empty rhetoric, the lack of principles, and the absolute failure to do anything at all to improve things for the majority of the people is an American constant.

Meanwhile, the polls out there still suggest that approval for Congress is at an all-time low. There have been various laughable explanations for this, trotted out by the usual suspects in the establishment press. “Most people hate Congress, but love their own representatives,” is the most common rationale. This is absurd; what has any “representative” done for any average person? Why would any average person feel that they’d been represented well by these career party hacks?

I remember all the “vote them all out” efforts over the years. There was a “Clean House, Senate, Too” movement thirty years or so ago. None of them worked. Invariably, 90 percent or more of these awful people are returned to office by those who ostensibly have the power to fire them. And they just don’t, or won’t do it.

Now I’m assuming that these votes are actually being counted, which is probably a naive thing to do. So if the fraud is that massive, and voters are really intelligent and informed enough to be attempting to turn these glorified welfare recipients back out onto the street, I apologize to them. In that case, it’s obviously not your fault, and the ballot box is no longer an option. Certainly, both sides believe the process is rigged, but they are locked into their foolish partisanship and think that it’s only rigged against their particular favorite in our carbon-copy “two” party system.

The Democrats will finger the “Russians.” The Republicans will perhaps quietly mumble something about the untold numbers of non-citizens that are incomprehensibly being allowed to vote in our elections, but otherwise will vaguely lash out at the “Democrats” who cheated their candidate. The late Collier brothers exposed the corrupt nature of our electoral process in their excellent Votescam many years ago, and I included a lot of their story in my own book Hidden History.

There were some especially comedic aspects to this midterm election. A Trump supporter, brothel owner Dennis Hof, was elected to the Nevada State Assembly. The fact that he’d died the month before didn’t seem to have much of an impact on those astutely rocking the vote. In a lurid detail that didn’t come from the Onion, Hof’s body was discovered by legendary porn star Ron Jeremy. And he was romantically involved with “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss.

Not to be outdone, Texas Democrats reelected Don Reynolds, who is presently serving a one year sentence in jail. Adding electoral insult to injury, Reynolds ran unopposed. Think about that; the only candidate is in jail, yet the “opposing” party can’t even run anyone against him? Not that the non-inmate was likely to win, of course. After all, Reynolds was an incumbent.

If American voters are truly responsible for basically disenfranchising themselves, by continuously returning such despicable snake oil salesmen to office, they deserve all the pain and suffering that will inexorably occur when this casino economy crashes. If they really think that these kinds of people are the best this country has to offer, and that they provide any kind of “representation” whatsoever, then there is no further point in trying to communicate with them.

Donald Trump has expressed his support for congressional term limits. The whole term limits issue was all the rage back in the early 1990s. The Republicans included it as a plank in their Contract with America. Predictably, once these Republicans wrested control of Congress, their ardor for term limits evaporated. Trump says so many things, some of them quite good, but he rarely follows up with anything concrete. My guess is any term limits proposal coming from him will emanate from that dark corner of the White House where he produces a steady stream of feverish tweets on Twitter.

It’s hard to overthrow tyranny when your friends and neighbors keep giving the tyrants their stamp of approval. Donald Trump has accomplished one very bad thing; he has divided the country essentially into two equal warring camps, with each side firmly planting themselves behind one of our comical “opposing” parties. Trump is the worst thing to happen to any viable Third Party movement in a very long time. Even many of those who were Libertarians, or Green Party members, have coalesced behind either the HiPapaLowems or the LowPapaHiems, as Huey Long mocked the Democrats and Republicans, because of their strong feelings for or against Trump.

In the great midterm elections of 2018, we were advised repeatedly that this was “the most important” election of our lifetimes. We are advised that this is the case in nearly every election, of course, but Americans have shockingly short memory spans. It was hard to determine the issues that this election revolved around, other than being a general referendum on Donald Trump. No candidate was demanding we bring the troops home from all the nonsensical places where they are stationed, or end the perpetual occupations and bombings of other sovereign nations.

This was a passionate “us” against “them” battle, and it was tragic to watch. Allegedly intelligent voters figuratively waving their beers in the air, and screaming at the “opposition” like they were watching the Super Bowl. No talk of peace. Or auditing the Fed. Or that autism-vaccine commission to be chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. No demands for a desperately overdue infrastructure rebuild and upgrade. Americans instead collectively were declaring, “I’ll take transgender bathrooms for five hundred, Alex!”

Both sides in the phony left-right paradigm are claiming victory. In reality, as always happens in our elections, no average American won.