MSNBC host Chris Matthews predicted that if socialism ever came to the United States, talking about Bernie Sanders, capitalists would be hung in Central Park and that he might be one of them. Would that necessarily be bad?
One Man’s Bliss Is Another’s Nightmare
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Three cheers for the young lady in the last frame !… 😉
Henri
The Democratic-Republican power structure won.
The Democrats’ firewall against popular challenges to the duopoly’s power structure held.
It matters little that Biden is channeling Reagan’s “charming” early Alzheimer’s.
The Democratic Party power structure would have held even if its candidate was a Yellow Dog.
(Apologies, Ted, for mentioning this common affliction so soon after your mother’s recent experience with it.)
Chris “tweety bird” Matthews just announced his “retirement” live.
Basically he finally got the richly deserved boot after a particularly dense series of
characteristically logic-free, idiotic, mindless and abusive outbursts that even the
MSDNC cretins couldn’t justify.
He is NOW utterly free to be strung up in Central Park. However, the profound damage
his seemingly infantilistic stint as mewling sycophant to oligarchs has inflicted on US politics
(presumably “the point” of such a “media career”) cries for a bit more sadistic solution.
He is survived by an alarming over-supply of inane twits trying valiantly to exceed the abysmal
depths of “tweety bird’s” unabashed anti-journalism.
Here’s hoping he will be tabbed as the VP running mate of ole Joe “hey, where are you
going with those feet in your mouth” Biden. What a pair of “the best the US has to
offer”?!?!?
Well, falco, if the old saw to the effect that «a people gets the government they deserve» is true, I can’ but wonder if the same is the case about the media….
Henri
Hi Henri,
I’d phrase it thusly: “The people get the government that the media tells them they should have.”
Indeed, falco, but to my mind, the question remains : «Whence comes the media ?»…
Henri
Hi Henri,
Re: «Whence comes the media ?»
Out of the wallets/purses of those who are candidates for “tweety bird’s” Central Park fantasy.
Well, as Abbott Joseph Liebling famously noted some six decades ago (and he was hardly the first to point this out).
It of course goes double for other, even more costly media, like radio or TV stations, not to mention enterprises like Facebook, etc….
Henri
What makes this round unique is that we’re arriving at the point where the majority of the American slavebody is no longer needed. Amazon can ship slaveproduct from China or India in a day or two at most. The rich don’t need roads; helicopters and private jets will do for transport, and for those few road-way excursions that can’t be avoided, there are vehicles sufficiently robust to handle unmaintained surface roads.
If I were one of the ruling class, what I’d do is make it so difficult to buy a home, afford children, etc., so emotionally taxing to cope with the stresses of a system in which job INsecurity is baked into the system that I’d end up with a huge pool of labor with no close connections to friends and limited numbers of family members (ideally, zero of each). I’d bog down those with ambition with huge loans for college degrees that meant nothing, and I’d lay them off every few years so that emergency expenses would force them to use their credit cards to the point where pretty much every penny they have is going to keeping their head above water with prior debt. I’d introduce a system of politics that would divide them among themselves on issues of gender, race, sexual orientation, and I’d throw a fraction of a fraction of a single percent of my personal wealth into advancing candidates who would run on those fractional aspects, thus keeping any risk of an informed resistance from rising up until it was too late.
I’d then bring a few of those starving, struggling, college-educated people with no friends or family with me to the gated compound. There, they’d make my bed, and scrub my toilet, and cook my food, and do my laundry. They’ll be grateful for the chance to be my loyal servants in the last few years of the country, and man oh man, who wouldn’t love owning a slave.
Alex
I think your above hypothetical is very close to the really existing.
That future bears a strange similarity to a present denied by most of the entrenched duopoly’s political class.
You heard it here first.
Yellow Dog Biden will announce, should he win the Democratic Party nomination in Milwaukee, that his running mate for Vice President is to be Hillary Clinton.
Hillary claims to be a poor candidate but a great administrator, so Hillary could play Dick Cheney to Joe Biden’s George W. Bush.
In other words, Hillary will be chosen to be the brain behind the brainless Biden.
And should Biden’s non compos mentis become a noticeable distraction, or should some other misfortune occur, Hillary would do her slithering slide into the presidency.