Sarah Palin might run.
Don’t laugh–OK, laugh. But I think she could win. Not just the nomination, mainly because of anti-Mormon bigotry in the GOP, but the presidency.
The rage of the 20% unemployed, the 99ers, etc., could create a tsunami. Obama will pay for ignoring the economic disaster.
There’s still hope for Obama when he faces his war crimes trial: an insanity defense.
Seriously, it’s nice to see this ruling. Too often, people who are mentally impaired are thrown in prison rather than given the help they need.
Here’s part of my interview on The Young Turks. Fortunately I didn’t cough. Stupid allergies.
David Swanson and I were ruminating about why Americans are so apathetic in the face of corporate and governmental perfidy. He has written a good piece resulting from that chat.
Two-Party System Is Not Democracy
We get the government we deserve.
Don’t get mad at the politicians! It’s your/our fault. You/we elected them.
Most Americans accept these aphorisms. Yet they are lies—lies that distract us from the fact that our political system is a farce. Really, we should get rid of this phony two-party “democracy.” And we will. In the meantime, we ought to ignore it.
The two-party system made simple:
Two worthless scoundrels are on the ballot.
If you vote for one of them, a worthless scoundrel will win.
If you don’t vote, a worthless scoundrel will win.
It’s a pretty unappealing sales pitch. How did it last 200 years?
The two-party system, a political mutation unanticipated by the Constitution and dreaded by the Founding Fathers, mainly relies on the “lesser of two evils” argument.
Next year, for example, many liberals will hold their noses and vote for Obama even though he has not delivered for them. They will do this to try to avoid winding up with someone “even worse”: Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, etc.
Conservatives will do the same thing. They will vote for Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney or whomever—even though they know full well they won’t come through with smaller government or a balanced budget—because Obama is “even worse.”
The two-party system is a sick game. Many citizens, realizing this, opt out by not voting. Others resort to negative voting.
In 2008 one out of three Republican voters told pollsters they were voting against Obama, not for McCain. Out in five Democrats voted against McCain, not for Obama.
A quarter of all votes cast in 2008 were “negative votes.” Thirty-eight percent of voters in the 2010 midterm elections crossed party lines from D to R “to send a message.”
To “get the government they deserve,” as master curmudgeon H.L. Mencken asserted, we would have to have a wide choice of options on the ballot. Two is pathetic.
Two parties isn’t even a facsimile of democracy.
Would you shop at a store that only offered two books? Two kinds of cereal? Two models of computers? Two brands of computer?
What about third parties? The Dems and Reps conspire to block the Greens, Libertarians, etc. with insurmountable obstacles. Minor parties can’t get campaign financing, ballot access, media coverage, or seats at presidential debates. So they rarely win.
“With a single elected president if you’re going to have a chance to win the states, which are all awarded on a winner-take-all basis, again you don’t have a chance,” John Bibby, University of Wisconsin professor and co-author of the book, “Two Parties—Or More? The American Party System” told PBS in 2004. “The incentive is to form broad-based parties that have a chance to win in the Electoral College.”
The argument that we, the people, are somehow to blame for the failings of “our politicians” is absurd. Even partisans of the two major parties are substantially dissatisfied with the nominees who emerge from the primary system.
Politics is not what happens on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Real politics is the process of arguing about how we want to live. In America that happens over dinner with our families, over drinks with our friends, over the water cooler at work (if you still have a job).
What happens on Election Day is a circus, a farcical distraction meant to siphon away the vitality of real politics.
Real politics is dangerous. Real politics, as we saw in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, can actually change things.
The two-party system is a twisted con based on fear. If you don’t vote for Party A then Party B, which is slightly more evil, will win. If “your” Party A wins, all you get is the dubious, incremental pseudo-victory of somewhat less suckiness. But Party A gets something infinitely more valuable: political legitimacy and the right to claim a mandate for policies that you mostly dislike.
“Hey, you elected them.”
“You got the government you deserve.”
Not at all.
It’s a terrible, lopsided bargain. You get little to nothing. They use your vote to justify their policies:
No jobs.
One war after another.
Wasting your tax dollars.
Corruption.
More pollution.
(Notice: I didn’t specify which party. Compared to the vast spectrum of possible politics from left to right, which encompasses such ideologies as communism, socialism, left libertarianism, right libertarianism, fascism, etc., the Dems and Reps are more similar than different.)
Until there’s a revolution we’re stuck with these jokers. But that doesn’t mean we have to pay attention.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
I should have added Obama’s decision to continue “extraordinary rendition”–kidnapping innocent people to torture them–to my list of reasons why I’m done with him.
Cartoonist buddies predicted my Strauss-Kahn cartoon would be a shoo-in for today’s New York Times. I said no, they’d pass. Right again, sadly.
The Hooded Utilitarian website asked me to list my Top Ten Comics of all time for a survey.
Here are mine, what are yours?
The cave cartoons at Lascaux, France, because cartoons invented Art
The obscene political cartoons about Roman officials found on walls at Pompeii, the oldest known editorial cartoons and bawdier than anything a newspaper would run today
The postwar editorial cartoons of Bill Mauldin, roughly 1945-1955 (many are collected in the book “Back Home”), which are constructed using modern tropes and bravely call out American cultural hypocrisy
“Peanuts” by Charles Schulz, the first truly modern comic strip, and consistently entertaining and philosophical
“The Far Side” by Gary Larson, often forgotten today but still the most consistently funny comic I’ve read
Jules Feiffer’s cartoons from 1955 to 1975ish, which established the genre of alternative newspaper comics
“Life in Hell” by Matt Groening, particularly the 1980s era that opened the field to new artistic approaches
“Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel, the first graphic novel to fulfill the form’s potential as literature
“Weird War Tales” comics of the 1970s not because they’re objectively great. I just love them. So trashy, so fun. I wish there was a reissue.
“Tom the Dancing Bug” by Ruben Bolling, the best syndicated cartoon in the US
Honorable Mentions:
Stephanie McMillan’s experimental environmental comics
Matt Bors’ editorial cartoons and graphic novel(s)
Tom Tomorrow
Ward Sutton’s Onion satires
Cenk Uygur will be interviewing me for 15-20 minutes on his online Young Turks Show on Monday at 9:20 Eastern time. You can listen online by following the link.
We’ll be discussing my column this week about the Rise of the Obamabots.
