Kunstler: The Technicolor Swan and When the Deal Goes Down.

Kunstler is a registered Democrat but despises the modern party. Perhaps he could register as an independent.

Kunstler: The Technicolor Swan.

I registered as a Democrat in 1972 — largely because good ole Nixon was at the height of his power (just before his fall, of course), and because he was preceded as party leader by Barry Goldwater, who, at the time, was avatar for the John Birch Society and all its poisonous nonsense. The Democratic Party was still deeply imbued with the personality of Franklin Roosevelt, with a frosting of the recent memory of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, tragic, heroic, and glamorous. I was old enough to remember the magic of JFK’s press conferences — a type of performance art that neither Bill Clinton or Barack Obama could match for wit and intelligence — and the charisma of authenticity that Bobby projected in the months before that little creep shot him in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Even the lugubrious Lyndon Johnson had the heroic quality of a Southerner stepping up to abolish the reign of Jim Crow.

Lately, people refer to this bygone era of the 1960s as “the American High” — and by that they are not talking about smoking dope (though it did go mainstream then), but rather the post World War Two economic high, when American business might truly ruled the planet. Perhaps the seeming strength of American political leaders back then was merely a reflection of the country’s economic power, which since has been squandered and purloined into a matrix of rackets loosely called financialization — a criminal magic act whereby wealth is generated without producing anything of value.

Morehere.





Kunstler: When the Deal Goes Down.

Who needs Russia when the Tweety-Bird-in-Chief is hacking his own presidency into a global joke? Or at least it might be a joke if the USA weren’t such a menace to international order, and to itself, by the way. Interestingly, the 25th amendment allows for the removal of a president from office on account of incompetence or disability, but not for being an embarrassment to the nation.

They may come after him anyway with the 25th, especially as the financial system unravels later this year, because this time, unlike 2008-9, central bank interventions will not avail to rescue the faltering money system from nine years of previous central bank interventions. All it takes is for the “liquidity” flows to seize up and before you know it, there’s no food in the supermarkets because everything in our just-in-time economy is exquisitely calibrated to the sure expectation of getting paid, and when that goes, it all goes.

More here.

Kunstler: The Pause That Refreshes.

Kunstler: The Pause That Refreshes.

Let’s take a breather from more consequential money matters at hand midweek to consider the tending moods of our time and place — while a blizzard howls outside the window, and nervous Federal Reserve officials pace the grim halls of the Eccles Building.

It is clear by now that we have four corners of American politics these days: the utterly lost and delusional Democratic party; the feckless Republicans; the permanent Deep State of bureaucratic foot-soldiers and errand boys; and Trump, the Golem-King of the Coming Greatness. Wherefore, and what the fuck, you might ask.

The Democrats reduced themselves to a gang of sadistic neo-Maoists seeking to eradicate anything that resembles free expression across the land in the name of social justice. Coercion has been their coin of the realm, and especially in the realm of ideas where “diversity” means stepping on your opponent’s neck until he pretends to agree with your Newspeak brand of grad school neologisms and “inclusion” means welcome if you’re just like us. I say Maoists because just like Mao’s “Red Guard” of rampaging students in 1966, their mission is to “correct” the thinking of those who might dare to oppose the established leader. Only in this case, that established leader happened to lose the sure-thing election and the party finds itself unbelievably out-of-power and suddenly purposeless, like a termite mound without a queen, the workers and soldiers fleeing the power center in an hysteria of lost identity.

They regrouped briefly after the election debacle to fight an imaginary adversary, Russia, the phantom ghost-bear, who supposedly stepped on their termite mound and killed the queen, but, strangely, no actual evidence was ever found of the ghost-bear’s paw-print. And ever since that fact was starkly revealed by former NSA chief James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press, the Russia hallucination has vanished from page one of the party’s media outlets — though, in an interesting last gasp of striving correctitude, Monday’s New York Times features a front page story detailing Georgetown University’s hateful traffic in the slave trade two centuries ago. That should suffice to shut the wicked place down for once and for all! [Kunstler's snark aside, you can read the article "A Glimpse Into the Life of a Slave Sold to Save Georgetown" here Update: I found out about this one from The Advocate--P.Z.] The Republican Party, to avoid going full-Whig and sliding down the laundry chute of history, made a bad deal for a new figurehead who is liable to make the party look way worse than it could ever accomplish on its own. This golden boy has dragged the party poobahs to the put-up-or-shut-up room of our nation’s capital — the place that Senator Rand Paul was searching high and low for last week — where they are charged with reforming the country’s health care racket. It looks for now like they will cook up a toxic farrago of new giveaways to their patrons in the hospital cartel, the insurance companies, and pharma. The voting public already detects the odor of 30-day-old carp in the first tastings of the dish. There’s a fair chance that the recipe will end up getting tossed in the capitol dumpster, and that in itself could finish the party because there’s little question that the current system known as ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act (not) is something like a fatal tumor in the nation’s craw. If the effort to fix that fails, the Republicans complete their transformation from the Party of No to the Party of Just Go.

The Deep State seems eager to sever its connections to both putrifying parties and attempt to run the groaning colossus of government ad hoc if necessary. The military and intel chains of command remain intact, along with their “assets,” and one can easily imagine anxious meetings of scenario-running in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the Langley frat house. What if…? “What if we just smoke the fucker?” an old Agency warrior remarks offhand, and the roomful of colleagues pause in their cogitations to weigh the notion. Some of them nod and make a moue, and others just cough into their sleeves. One young striver in the back mentions “a little something” they’ve been working on that involves hairspray and a neurotoxin derived from the Gaboon viper….

And then there is our President himself: Donald J. Trump, in the awesome solitude of his Twitterverse dome. A strange destiny brought him to his place in history thus far, and many of us surveying the scene lo these many months kind of get it: the festering disgust with the other three corners of American power; the dismal fall of the middle class into a purgatory of repossession, idleness, opiates, and tattoos; the accelerating purposeless of the dwindling consumer economy; the matrix of racketeering that systematically drains everyone’s financial mojo while adding humiliation to the shoddy service it delivers; the pointless, costly wars in faraway places and their conversion into permanent shit-holes; the disgraceful disfigurement of a once grand national landscape into a wilderness of dying malls and freeway ramps.

So, onto the scene strides The Donald, a giant among the squalling midgets of our time, with his promise to bigly re-greatify this suffering land. I suppose he means well in his torturous way. So did a lot of other figures in history who found themselves at the top: Idi Amin, Uncle Joe Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, King Leopold of Belgium, Adolf You-Know-Who, Pol Pot. The list of the well-meaning is very long.

Kunstler: The Bag Holder and His Bag.

Kunstler: The Bag Holder and His Bag.

Can you see those swans coming in for a landing on Pond USA? They’re not exactly black swans, because you knew they were out there circling, but they’re dark enough against the twilight’s last gleaming to give you the heebie jeebies.

Troubles and portents of more trouble are stacking up as we approach the Ides of March zone of financial turmoil. You must surely surmise that a debt ceiling impact, a Federal Reserve interest rate hike, and the election of a Dutch anti-EU leader all scheduled for that one day are a good start on the greater unravel to follow. Glowering in the spotlight at center stage will be President Donald Trump, designated bag-holder of the Deep State and its myrmidons. And what’s in that bag he’s holding? Just a couple of shit sandwiches and a hair shirt for his journey down the lonely road to exile. But getting rid of Trump would only leave the Deep State with a bigger problem: itself. That is, an economy and a society that can’t be governed by any means.

I think many professional observers-of-the-scene are missing something in this unspooling story: the Deep State is actually becoming more impotent and ineffectual, not omnipotent. Case in point: RussiaGate — come on, let’s finally call it that — the popular idea that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election. It’s popular because it’s such a convenient excuse for the failure of a corrupt, exhausted, and brain-dead Democratic establishment. But all the exertions of the Deep State to put over this story since last summer were negated this week by two events.

First, there was former NSA Director James Clapper’s appearance on NBC’s Sunday Meet the Press show with Chuck Todd featuring the following interchange:

CHUCK TODD:
Does intelligence exist that can definitively answer the following question, whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials?

JAMES CLAPPER:
We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, “our,” that’s N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.

CHUCK TODD:
I understand that. But does it exist?

JAMES CLAPPER:
Not to my knowledge.

And so what to make of the RussiaGate histrionics served up by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, NPR, and sundry tools as Senator Chuck Schumer (D–NY)? What I make of it is a growing civil war in the government itself, and perhaps something arguably like sedition.

Second matter: this week’s release of Wikileaks’ Vault-7 trove of purloined government documents. These seem to suggest that US Intel agencies have acquired the ability to spoof any activity on any sort of computer or program that makes it impossible to track the identity of any hacker and, what’s more, gives US Intel a tool to make any party appear culpable for any given case of hacking — meaning that if so called computer hacking “footprints” had been discovered linking Russia to the Hillary-DNC-Podesta emails, those footprints could have been engineered by US Intel itself… meaning further that any so-called “evidence” of Russian election hacking could not be proven one way or the other.

Now, this might be too fine a point for the RussiaGate partisans, but I don’t see how it fails to moot the issue. The partisans are still finding other ways to propagandize. On Thursday evening, NPR ran a story about Russia breaking a missile agreement with this wrap-up from correspondent David Welna:

WELNA: Still unclear is how President Trump, an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, might respond to Moscow’s defiance. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.

That lapse of newsmanship is the kind of thing that makes me (a still-registered Democrat) want to support the defunding of NPR.

All this hugger-mugger may be further mooted by the financial disorders of Spring 2017. Don’t underestimate the Federal Reserve’s eagerness in sending Trump on the road to political perdition with his shit sandwiches and hair shirt. The Fed’s board of governors knows full well that their interest rate hike could sink even the carefully fabricated Potemkin appearance of a healthy economy. It would also create more dire debt-servicing problems for the US Treasury when and if the debt ceiling problem ever gets resolved. They’re holding a hand grenade in the old USA bunker and they’re getting ready to pull the pin. Just watch.

It's easy to get caught up in the Trumpocalypse & forget to appreciate conservatives destroying each other over it pic.twitter.com/1JHsVcQnnP

— TBogg (@tbogg) August 25, 2016

The Republican Gomorrah moment is here, and the Democrats will be more united behind Hillary than the GOP behind Trump, but Tbogg shouldn't be too smug. E.g.,

.@DrJillStein Feminism is about de-militarization & assuring a just future for all. #JillNotHill https://t.co/eCAKBkDbef

— Green Party US (@GreenPartyUS) August 18, 2016

Not on Facebook but I'm asking progressives who are to ask ppl to vote for #JillNotHill 🌍🌻🍃☀️ #OurRevolution pic.twitter.com/sRlZujrkSH

— Lola's for Chocolate (@Ontheotherhand) August 25, 2016

Kunstler: Let the Games Begin!

Kunstler: Let the Games Begin!

Hot air balloons may be crashing in Texas, but in Philadelphia last week sainted Hillary, draped in spotless white privilege robes, floated through the glassiest ceiling of all on mighty gusts of saccharine gas. The good wife… the good mother… tireless fighter for the rainbow outcasts and gender martyrs of this patriarch-plagued republic, she pledged both continuity and change to the credulous faithful as history yanked her above the gurgling cesspits of allegation, suspicion, and distrust that lo, these many months, had come to be her natural haunt.

The cameras cut to poor brooding Bernie seated just above the delirious groundlings, frowny-faced, arms crossed, brow beetled beneath his white Corinthian curls, perhaps suffering the effects of cheese-steak poisoning. He’d endorsed Saint Hillary with all the passion of a Seventh Avenue soft goods jobber hawking last-year’s resort-wear, and the next day he would up-and-quit the Democratic Party — as if that was not sending a message to the true believers.

Yet another email maelstrom almost spoiled the gala, this one revealing the strings and levers pulled by the DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in violation of the Party fairness charter. She was axed in a New York minute, and the whole country — including the ADD-afflicted news media — dropped the story to behold the awesome ascension of She-Whose-Turn-It-Is. All except the arch-boor Trump who cracked that maybe Russia could find those 20,000 emails missing from I’m-With-Her’s fabled server. The entire nation, including the aforementioned Special Needs news media, actually missed the point of the gag — which was: how lame are the US security agencies if they couldn’t find those emails but Russia could? And how come nobody raised that question?

Julian Assange then appeared, Jacob Marley-like, to warn the minions of Hillary that he had portfolios full of interesting material yet to dump, and would take his sweet time choosing the opportune moment to do it. How Hillary must wish she could send a Navy SEAL team into Ecuador’s London embassy to ventilate that hacker-rat! It will be fun waiting for Julian to make his move, and to see how much Xanax Hillary will require in the meantime. The DNC coronation show will prove to be only temporary relief from the phantoms and revenants of misdeeds past.

The distraction du jour is whether Trump has become an agent of Russia. Notice that this line of intel comes direct from the neo-con central agitprop desk. This unofficial US War Party representing the amalgamated war industries has been busy demonizing Russia throughout the current presidential term. Not all Americans are so easily gulled, though. Those who know history understand, for instance, that the Crimea has been a province of Russia almost continually for hundreds of years — except the brief interval when the ur-Ukrainian Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev one drunken evening gave it away to the then-Soviet region of Ukraine in a fit of sentimentality, assuming it would remain a virtual property of Greater Russia forever. [More about the 1954 transfer of Crimea here.--P.Z.] Notice, too, that since Russia annexed it in 2014 (being the site of its only warm water port and major naval stations) not even the US neo-con war party has been able to make a credible case for fighting over it. Instead, they’ve resorted to name-calling: Putin the “thug,” Putin the “worst political gangster in the world.” This is exactly the brand of foreign policy that Hillary will bring to the Oval Office.

Not that Donald Trump offers a coherent alternative. The reasonable suspicion persists that he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground vis-à-vis how the affairs of the world actually work. For him it’s all same as tough-talking the sheet-rocker’s union. Then, of course, Trump had to immediately step in dog-shit by bad-mouthing the mother of an American army hero who-just-happened-to-be of the Mohammedan persuasion. Trump for practical purposes is a child and a reasonable case is not hard to make for denying him presidential power.

And so the great disaster movie of 2016 commences: Godzilla Versus Rodan the Flying Reptile. Which one will survive to completely destroy the sclerotic remains of our nation? The good news is that voters are moving to the Third and Fourth party nominees, Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Green) in droves, herds, flocks, porpoise pods, and stampedes. Perhaps both of these relatively sane candidates will show enough polling strength to make it into the Great Debates. Won’t that be fun?

Kunstler: The Odious Versus the Tedious

Kunstler: The Odious Versus the Tedious.

You thought the Republican convention was a ghastly spectacle of royal Trumpery (and Iago-style backstabbing featuring the arch-asshole Ted Cruz)? Now comes the Democratic Annunciation of I’m-With-Her-It’s-My-Turn, the incarnation of crony corruption in our late-state Republic of Racketeering. Remember that old movie, The Exorcist, with its demonic spewage of projectile vomit. Expect something like that on the grand scale in Philadelphia this week as the Exalted-Breaker-of-Glass-Ceilings steps forth to accept her victory tiara.

The New York Times is blaming the Ruskies for releasing those thousands of new emails disclosing the perfidy of the Democratic National Committee staff in pimping for Hillary against Bernie and trafficking with the major network news operations to manage and spin things Her way — and especially to rig the electoral machinery against Sanders. How much will his supporters Feel the Bern this week in Philly as the party attempts to put on an appearance of unity (Ha!) behind HRC? How can it conceivably be possible now for Bernie to stand by her side for the crucial unity photo op? I suspect he’d rather chew his right arm off.

For my money, the Ruskies should get the Nobel Peace Prize if they were behind the email release. What higher service to democracy than to expose the anti-democratic workings of the party that affects to call itself Democratic? The sudden appearance of 20,000 smoking guns made party chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz vamoose faster than you can say Debbie Wasserman Schultz, though her replacement, Donna Brazile is every inch just another blatant HRC foot-soldier. Perhaps she’ll have to orchestrate the proceedings with smoke signals or invisible ink instead of emails.

As the conventions rolled out, the aggregate miasma we call the news industry resorted to that tired trope of Optimism Versus Pessimism. Translation: you can’t handle the truth so somebody please bring out the rainbow-leaping unicorns. The American zeitgeist is a tattered garment worn by a three hundred pound tranny in a diabetic coma. It’s probably beyond salvation at this point. Somebody please put it out of its misery. Hence: Trump Versus Hillary, the odious versus the tedious, the election to end all elections.

I derived scant enlightenment listening to the Republican nominee Trump’splainin’ just how he will make America great again. As sheer oratory, Trump made Warren G. Harding look like Pericles. “I am your voice,” he bellowed to the assembled delegates dressed in costumes that made them appear like rodeo clowns from another planet. And that speech was carefully crafted by supposed professionals and mounted on a telepromper. Now Trump will go forth speaking in his usual incoherent vernacular as he vies to become the first president removed by a military coup d’état for blundering incompetence.

Hillary countered by showboating her vice-presidential pick, Tim Kaine of Virginia, America’s new high school Spanish teacher. I was only surprised that she didn’t choose Lebron James. Ambition called and Tim Kaine answered and you wonder just how he will regret picking up the phone as the campaign heats up and he has to Kaine’splain the growing allegations of Hillary’s misdeeds. Can a running mate up and quit before the election? It’s never happened before.* But Kaine might be concerned about his reputation.

So, gird your loins for the awful pageantry of the week to come: kind of a road company version of The Manchurian Candidate. The election is now between the borderline personality Mommy and the arch-narcissist Daddy for the hearts and minds of a public sore beset by the initial spasms of economic and cultural collapse. Perhaps Big Brother is waiting in the wings.

*A reader reminds me that George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri, stepped aside when it became public that he’d been hospitalized for mental illness earlier in life and subjected to electroshock therapy. My bad.

Kunstler: Going Full Whig.

As usual, take Kunstler with a grain of salt (esp. parag. 2), enjoy his ultra-gonzo prose, and realize his main point: Both parties are fracturing, maybe irreparably.--P.Z.

Kunstler: Going Full Whig.

Hillary’s dumb riposte to Trump’s dumb slogan — make America great again! — was “…America never stopped being great.” I guess she’s been traveling around the strip-mall wastelands of Carolina failing to notice the carnage that lays upon this land like a mortal scrofula. America has been committing suicide by bad choices for decades.

We took the collateral winnings of World War II and poured it into a suburban sprawl alt-universe so depressing that our citizens are the most over-medicated people in the world. That alone might help to explain how Hillary and Trump lumber inevitably toward their respective nominations. The cheering “folks” marshaled out in the Piggly Wiggly parking lots are so buzzed on Klonopin and Zoloft that they can’t tell how these two odious celebrities epitomize the very forces behind their pharmaceutically-masked despair.

A nation sunk in such falsity is sure to suffer life-threatening blowback and it looks like the first thing to go will be the life of the political parties. Both Democrats and Republicans have gone full Whig, riding into the 2016 election on the garbage barge of history. Hillary went on hyper-gloat after last week’s South Carolina primary, where she stuffed her pander-bag with black votes reaped on empty promises to re-boot the Civil Rights era. It was painful to watch that get-me-outa-here smile stretched across her face as she hugged the last selfie-snapper and slouched toward the ordeal of Super-Tuesday.

I don’t care how many primary victories Trump racks up, the GOP poobahs will not support him going into the convention. They will crack the party up into warring factions before they let him hoist the gonfalon of Lincoln and the Gipper. Be warned: plans are already afoot to shove Trump aside, to derail him with some scandal easily excavated from a life spent greasing other pols and playing ball with the mob-riddled construction industry in New York, Jersey, and Nevada. Failing that, they’ll leave him with a gutted shell of the party apparatus and by-hook-or-crook get some other figure to make a well-funded run under a slightly altered banner: Paul Ryan, Bloomberg [he's planning to run independently--P.Z.], Romney, just maybe Kasich. The Koch brothers will organize the money mojo. Failing that, there is always the mysterious magic of the Deep State for winning friends and influencing history.

This is not to endorse the old Republican establishment, just saying that they are increasingly desperate to derail this monster of their own creation, and will go to institutionally suicidal lengths to get it done. It will be more than another election cycle, if ever, before the right-of-center portion of the US political spectrum can realign itself into something resembling a party.

Or perhaps this is America’s true imperial moment, when all party politics surrenders to the pre-tsunami undertow of events. None of the idiot network commentators or Wash-Po or NY Times columnists seem to notice that the global economy is sinking into a coma, and in so doing is igniting cluster-bombs of default through the financial system. That so far insidious destruction should effloresce exactly around the time of the nominating conventions. The tide will have visibly gone miles out just as Hillary mounts the podium like some bad joke of a national mommy and Trump sits fretting in his Cleveland hotel room wondering how his rococo dreams of glory turned into a shit sandwich from room service. Yeats’s widening gyre is upon us. The biggest surprise of all yet-to-come is that television will fail to explain it. The second coming will not be the reappearance of the celebrity known as Jesus Christ, but rather of the event called the American Civil War.

Kunstler: Can't Anyone Fix This?

Kunstler: Can't Anyone Fix This?

The legacy mainstream media has a collective brain like dog’s — it exists in an eternal present, so that whatever’s happening right now is all there is. Thus, Hillary’s performance in the first Democratic debate, being as bad but not worse than her competitors’, means she has a lock on the nomination for president. The better part of a year lies between now and the convention, and time would be on the side of whatever force or figure rises to oppose the woman whose “turn” in power rides a myth of inevitability.

What perhaps ought to be more alarming is the way that the two major parties are lining up to be a men’s party and a woman’s party, a perfect acting-out of psychological archetypes in a society churning out millions of lost souls year-by-year. The American people apparently want a Daddy to fix all the broken systems and they want a Mommy to reassure them that everything will be all right. Hillary, of course, wants to be both, but her problem is that a lot of voters won’t accept her as either.

Her record doesn’t suggest she’s much good at fixing anything. That’s why the Benghazi affair is such a good stick to beat on her with. That was a moment when America needed a Daddy with a toilet plunger or a screw gun and all they got were cables from the home office saying everything was going to be all right. Mommy couldn’t save the Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans slaughtered there. The big pretense, of course, is the idea that congress holds hearings “so something like this will never happen again.”

It’s an interesting neurosis we’ve developed since the heyday of the assassinations in the late 1960s, this continuing promise to abolish the unforeseeable. Of course new atrocities happen all the time despite these ritual committee inquiries — these days, the mass murder of strangers is more in fashion than targeted political slayings — and there’s always another incident, and it ought to be obvious by now that we’re not so good at making sure that bad things don’t happen.

But that’s the Republican-controlled Benghazi Committee’s mission: to demonstrate that Mommy can’t fix stuff. It will be easily left to Hillary herself to prove that she’s not much good in the Mommy role either — reassuring the multitudes that everything’s going to be all right. Instead, Hillary falls back on an obsessive-compulsive pander tic, kind of an incessant hash-tag jabber of promises to the familiar cast of supplicants. Give it twelve months and see how sick of it the voters will get.

To see how much the Democrats have become the woman’s party, just consider the men candidates up on the debate stage: all pitiful archetypes. Bernie Sanders plays the meshugganah grandpa role reserved, on the screen, for Larry David [Larry David played Sanders on Saturday Night Live last week.--P.Z.] or Alan Arkin. He’s always worked up about something that nobody else can really get worked up about, always raising his voice and stabbing his finger in the air in imitation of Yahweh. There’s Jim Webb, a bobblehead rattling off long legalistic disquisitions that never get to whether he can fix something or not. [He's more substantial than Kunstler realizes, but Webb has just left the primary.--P.Z.] There’s Martin O’Malley, known primarily for his “six-pack” and “guns,” but with the persona of a frightened seven-year-old who doesn’t want to rile the teacher. And Lincoln Chaffee, a dizzy neighbor like Kramer in Seinfeld, butting in with cockamamie schemes that demonstrate he can’t fix anything.

Is it not amazing that the Democratic Party could not grudge up one figure really worth taking seriously? To me, this is truly symptomatic of how bereft of significance the party is? I’m not so sure the party will survive this election cycle. But the disorder across the gradient is equally impressive. The large Republican field of professional politician candidates is held in such bad odor as far as being able to fix anything, that the sinister clown Trump is able to put over his idiotic act of being a Daddy who can fix everything and anything, just by blustering. I suspect he’ll wear out his welcome — but if he doesn’t the Grand Old Party is showing serious signs of a serious crack-up.

Whoever get elected inn 2016 is going to face a crisis every bit as terrible as the crisis of 1860, only this time when the country blows it could come from a dozen different directions and be a lot harder to fix than the secession of Dixieland.

Kunstler: The Parties Crawl Off to Die.

Soon I'll have a post about why I post Kunstler's column, given his misanthropy. For now, he pronounces a pox on both parties.

Kunstler: The Parties Crawl Off to Die.

The Parties Crawl Off to Die

I‘ve alluded to being a registered Democrat now and again, a disclosure that makes some readers go feral with wrath. For years I could only justify it as formal opposition to the cretinous brand of Republicanism that washed over the country like a septic wave with the reign of that sainted pompadour-in-search-of-a-brain, Ronald Reagan, whose “morning in America” bromide was among the biggest whoppers of my lifetime. With Reagan, we got the officially-sanctioned marriage of right wing politics and the most moronic strains of Southland evangelical religiosity. (Ronnie stated more than once his belief that Biblical “end times” were close at hand, which should have raised the question of his actual concern for the nation’s future — did he think it had one? — but nobody ever asked him about it.) George H. W. Bush expressed a similar view, perhaps merely pandering to the dolts of Dixie.

So, who in his right mind could have subscribed to that load of bullshit?

Meanwhile, the youthful and magnetic Clintons came on in 1992. They put on a good show of national stewardship in the early going. Bill could speak English fluently, unlike his two predecessors. Hillary’s committee to tackle health care reform came to grief, but the effort at least implied a recognition that medicine was turning into a shameless racket (now fully metastasized). Bill managed to shove through a species of welfare reform — remarkable for a Democrat — that has since deliquesced back into a swamp of disability fraud. But the Clinton turning point was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency.

Add to that now the signal failures of Barack Obama: 1) no prosecution or attempted regulation of widespread financial misdeeds 2) no effort to counter the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to buy elections; 3) no end to dubious military operations in distant lands, and 4) healthcare “reform” that only fortified the existing rackets — take all that together and you can only recoil from whatever it means to be a Democrat.

And now the return of Hillary, gliding above the election arena like Rodan the Flying Reptile — caw! caw! Get me outa here! It’s not just her, of course. It’s the whole disgusting circus parade of identity politics, and PC witch-hunting, and trans-sex drum-beating, and girl-lugging-a-mattress-around-campus idiocy, and blame-it-all-on-Whitey whinging, and drone-strike-du-jour warfare, and out-of-control NSA surveillance monkey business, plus throw in the outrageous scams of “civil forfeiture” under a president who was supposedly a professor of constitutional law — the list of Democratic-sponsored absurdities and turpitudes gives me the vapors.

The New York Times ran a front-page story Sunday saying that the Republican nomination-chasers were sounding too ominous, too dark, about the state of the nation, at least for the purpose of getting elected. As if the Times has an interest in them succeeding. I guess they were “just sayin’.” For my money, you can’t paint a dark enough picture to fully capture the decadence and depravity in the current zeitgeist. This, after all, is the basic appeal of Trump — though a panoramic shot of his supporters in one of those stadium love-fests suggests that their very demeanor is a big part of the problem: crowds of overfed tattooed clowns in nursery togs clamoring for a return to 1956. Good luck with that.

More than once I’ve referred to the earlier period in US history, the 1850s, when the political compass points shook loose and parties died. The Whigs disappeared altogether (and fast!) and the Democrats became a rump party of southern slavers. Well, the two major parties of our time are now perfectly poised to enter the Temple Grandin cattle chute of death. But history doesn’t repeat, of course, it only rhymes, and this time there are no other political parties standing by to take their place, no credible institutions, certainly no one like Lincoln. There are only Bernie Sanders and the execrable Trump.

Sanders functions nicely as a foil to the flying reptile. But the self-labeled socialist has a big problem. The public may be simmering with grievance, but my guess is that they are not especially hot for more redistribution of the national wealth — that is, whatever little remains in the hands of a sore beset former middle class. The absence of any other reputible figure on the Democratic “bench” belies a party now more hollow than a supermarket Easter egg.

What we see gathering is a political storm as perfect as the typhoon that has formed in banking. Surely the financial storm will strike first and it will leave the public stupefied with loss. I would not even bet against the possibility of the 2016 selection being canceled in some manner. Imagine, for instance, what the Pentagon brass thinks of Trump. And what they are planning for him. Just sayin’.