In previous posts I offered several main points to consider about this election:
1 – The corruption of the Republicans / the Elephant in the Living Room
2 – The corruption of the Democratic National Committee
3 – The naïve innocence of liberals and intellectuals
4 – The surprisingly neutral position of the Military-Industrial Complex
5 – Boy psychology: do either of these candidates really want to be President?
This month we have two more issues to ponder: the choice of Kamala Harris for Vice President, and the Democratic convention.
1 – The utter, utter corruption of the Republican Party, from the absolute top to the absolute bottom, is becoming clearer. The media and the public have finally begun to acknowledge that this national crime syndicate / conspiracy cult is capable of doing absolutely anything to retain power. And all but the most radically naïve among us are realizing that racist con men like Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach are the norm, not the exception.
This astonishingly rapid change in awareness has resulted almost entirely from Trumpus’ brazen attempt to destroy the Post Office in a year when voting by mail is a matter of public health. It all happened in less than two weeks:
8/10: Lawmakers Demand Removal of Postmaster General DeJoy
8/13: Postal Service Confirms It Has Removed Mailboxes in Portland and Eugene
8/14: Postal Service warns states across US about mail voting
8/14: Mail sorting machines across the country being removed
8/16: At least 21 states plan to sue USPS over mail delays, despite rollback of policy changes
8/19: Trump campaign sues New Jersey over mail-in voting
8/17: House Democrats summon Trump Postmaster General to explain sabotages
8/17: A comprehensive guide to the sabotage of the United States Postal Service
These revelations come with good and bad news. The Good News is that more and more liberals and progressives are waking up to the massive corruption in the system that Democratic leaders have ignored for the past five Presidential elections (including the Obama victories). To restate what I’ve written before: if not for voter suppression and computer fraud (not to even mention voter apathy) the Democrats would have won all five votes (and both houses of Congress) by massive landslides. We are talking about new openings appearing in the myth of American innocence, and Trumpus doesn’t seem interested in hiding any of it.
But an honest look at our history also shows that such rents have appeared many times before, and that the oligarchs who control both parties have always responded by putting forth candidates such as Obama whose primary duty is to repair those openings and put the public back to sleep. This brings us to the bad news, the growing presence of (and refusal to acknowledge) the various elephants in the living room. As Greg Palast has been warning for years, even if Congress were to completely repair the Post Office scandal, voter suppression – especially having to do with the vote-by-mail process – and computer fraud can still give Trumpus his win.
And so far, public awareness of Post Office scandal has not resulted in any significant repair of the situation. DeJoy is simply refusing to undo any of the massive damage he’s done to the Post Office’s ability to deliver the mail, and there’s little the House can do, with the Senate on a month-long vacation.
8/19: USPS Workers Told Not to Reinstate Mail Sorting Machines in Internal Email
8/19: Dismantling Continues After DeJoy Said It Stopped
8/20: USPS Sorting Machines Are Still Being Dismantled Despite DeJoy’s Promise to Stop
8/21: DeJoy Has “No Intention” to Reinstall Sorting Machines, Mailboxes
According to California representative Ro Khanna, the mail sorting machines that DeJoy ordered removed were primarily in swing states:
Florida: 59
Texas: 58
Ohio: 34
Pennsylvania: 30
Michigan: 26
N. Carolina: 15
Virginia: 12
Wisconsin: 12
Georgia: 11
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has dealt yet another blow to the right of ex-felons to vote in Florida, and evidence is emerging of Republican plans to send an illegal army of intimidators to polling places in minority neighborhoods.
Beyond that, it would be foolish not to expect the Republicans to dip into an arsenal of dirty tricks and October surprises that they have cultivated and refined ever since the days of Richard Nixon, up to and including threats of war with Russia, China, Iran, Nicaragua, Cuba, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela.
We should expect an ‘October surprise’ from Bill Barr
October Surprise — Will War with Iran Be Trump’s Election Eve Shocker?
Trump Threatens To Crash Economy If He Loses 2020
Forget the Nasty Insults. Trump Plans to Sabotage the Election
2 – The only slightly less despicable corruption of the DNC: As I wrote in Part One of this series, I hope that Biden will prevail over Trumpus because the stakes are too high to imagine another four years of this madness. However, we have to awake from our innocent fantasies about the progressive intentions of the Democrats. There is absolutely no doubt that the DNC fixed the results of most of their primaries to steal the nomination from Bernie sanders. I offered abundant evidence in Part Three, but if you need more on-the-ground reportage of the process, read Craig Jardula’s article “I Witnessed the Death of Democracy.”
Vote or work for Biden. However, as Russell Dobular writes, we must understand the Democratic leadership as
…a party primarily concerned with raking in big bucks from wealthy donors, while drawing enough superficial distinctions with their opponents to maintain their identity as a separate party…No modern Democrat has ever won without high youth voter turnout, and there’s no way they didn’t understand that crushing the candidate of young voters was going to suppress their vote. Nor has any modern Democrat ever won without a high share of the Latino vote, and yet they chose to publicly and openly conspire against the candidate who was the clear choice of Latino voters…Without coronavirus, Biden was a sure loser and there’s no way the party’s decision makers and strategists didn’t understand that. No, they aren’t that stupid…the battle they’re fighting is only secondarily against the GOP, and primarily against the left wing of their own party…
A mythological perspective acknowledges that when a society is in decline, it elevates the very worst of its people to positions of power and grants them permission to engage in acts of cruelty that in earlier times had been restrained by public shaming, and still earlier, through effective ritual. As my book argues, such patterns inevitably include the literalization of the old myths of the sacrifice of the children.
The difference? The GOP is consistently, uncompromisingly evil and for a long time has had no one in leadership with any ethical standards whatsoever. This absolutely includes the “Never Trumpers” who spoke at the Democratic Convention this week, such as the war criminal Collin Powell. Throughout their careers these people have consistently supported the worst of the Republican agenda. They simply think that Trumpus is “bad for the brand.”As for the Democrats, their leadership, for their own nefarious reasons, stilltolerate vestiges of idealism among their activists.
3 – Liberal innocence: This is not the first American election that is likely to be sabotaged. Liberals who may be shocked by the growing evidence of Trump’s willingness to do so are, once again, revealing their innocent belief in an our peculiarly unique form of exceptionalism, that “it can’t happen here,” or at least that it hasn’t happened yet.
I pointed this out last month, and it continues. Academics, at least liberal academics, seem to prefer to live in some kind of neo-Platonic world of ideal archetypes and pure science, especially Political Science and Economics, that give no credence to human imperfection. Every day, articles such as this one appear: “Polls Favor Biden: Is It Different This Time?” Like its predecessors in 2016 and this year, it does not mention voter suppression, computer fraud or even the Post Office scandal. Neither does it make any attempt to explain the critical difference between exit polls and official results.
4 – The Military-Industrial Complex: Here are several more articles that support my argument that the generals and the arms merchants have little concern for who wins in November.
Boeing CEO Confident in Military Spending No Matter Who Wins November Election
House Democrats unite to pass $733B defense bill
Biden And His Ventriloquists Keep Out-Hawking Trump
The 2020 Race Is Down to Center-Right vs. Far Right
US Intelligence: If Trump Wins Russia Did It, If Biden Wins It Was China & Iran
5 – Kamala Harris: There’s plenty of writing (and evidence) of her position as a moderate among Democrats, and there’s no need to repeat any of it here or show a photo of her hugging it up with the war criminal Netanyahu. Instead, I’m going to ignore my normal cynicism and quote Michael Moore:
Biden could’ve swung right (Susan Rice), but he swung left. Kamala is one of the most progressive Senators in the US Senate and will…be the most progressive Vice President in the history of the United States. She is and remains one of the first co-sponsors of Bernie’s Medicare for All bill. In fact, go down the list — she checks nearly every box on Bernie’s platform: Living Wage, Choice, LGBTQ+ equality, peace, child care, etc.
It says a lot about Biden that after she rightly confronted him about race in that first debate that he held no grudge, no animosity. In fact, he might say it gave him pause and a chance to consider how his friendship with segregationist Senators might have been hurtful to people of color and that, even at this age, he can change, he can do better. As progressives, isn’t that at the core of what we stand for? Isn’t that the change we are fighting for? Our belief that America can do better and that our fellow Americans will join us in this movement for a more just and equitable society? Kamala Harris is one more step in that direction.
I’ve met her a few times and I can tell you (and you know I won’t BS you on this because I pretty much despise all politicians), she’s sincere, she has heart, she’s on our side. No, she’s not you or me. But we’re not on the ballot. WE are the movement, which in the long run is what is going to get us what we need. We keep building that movement, we will succeed. And one of our missions in 2020 is to crush Trump, reclaim the Senate and bring down the system of greed, racism, misogyny and white male privilege that gave us Trump — because that, my friends, is what has thrown us into the mad, dark hole we’re in…Black America once again saving us and forcing us to be what we say we are but never were.
May it be so! Next: The Democratic convention.
madnessatthegates 
Pingback: Barry’s Blog # 345: A Mythologist Looks at the 2020 Election, Part Six | madnessatthegates