oooooooooooo!!!!!! *echoing as I ran away from the Clinton abyss*

the lame stream media refuses to cover the damning Durham report that makes Watergate look like child's play. Same deal with Hunter's laptop, the freedom convoy, and....

She must know she would have her ass kicked by anyone else, especially Trump. The dims are really desperate. Grabbing at straws.

Traditional left-right analysis is hopelessly out of touch with political reality in the USA. Here is my short history of the last seven decades of political evolution:

Liberals

This term has always been more of personality type than a political ideology. As of the 1950s, liberals were in power of both political parties with full agreement on the New Deal's regulation of corporate hegemony -- anti-trust, unionization, Keynesian economics, the Marshall Plan and Civil Rights. In New York State, the Liberal Party endorsement meant something and there was such a thing as liberal Republican.

The major accomplishment of LBJ was in the area of Civil Rights. He also tried with very limited success to wage a War On Poverty. An old lawyer friend of mine was the head of a Legal Services office in El Paso -- a truly radical idea that has been dead and gone for six decades. Imagine having a federally paid lawyer represent you in a suit against your city for discriminatory policies.

The quintessential liberal politician was Hubert Humphrey, an ultimately sad figure in recent history -- The Happy Warrior who just could not win the Big One. Another ghost from the liberal past was my personal hero, George McGovern -- the Bernie Sanders of his day. Wnen he could not break 40% in the national election of 1972, the GOP was able to demonize the word and the only two Dem presidents for the next three decades were southern governors who twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid looking and sounding like a "liberal."

That was then, this is now.

Liberals are new to the totalitarian game and they don’t quite have the hang of it yet. They have been out of power since the Lyndon Johnson Administration, and of course six decades later that means today’s liberals have never been in power. I find it ironic that their only connection to the liberalism of the 60s is in the area of Civil Rights. LBJ is alleged to have said that he knew he had turned the country over to the Republicans for a generation when he jammed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Bills through the byzantine institution called the United States Congress.

It turned out to be two generations, but with the elections of Obama and Biden, what is left of American Liberalism is now in control of Congress and the Presidency – and for the first time ever, the main stream media is now an active supporter of what is left of liberal ideology. That of course is the descendent of civil rights – identity politics.
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Conservatives.

While the purview of liberalism has shrunk over the decades, conservatism has expanded into areas that Robert Taft would have found criminally insane. The traditional isolationism of the GOP was abandoned first by President Eisnehower and far more definitively by Nixon and Kissinger. Conservatism as opposition to government spending went down the Memory Hole as Reagan and W Bush created structural deficits for the Federal Government. The idea of small government collided with the desire to scoop up religious voters who wanted abortion ended and Christian prayer mandated in public schools.

All of these contradictory strands of "conservatism" have not held together well enough to rebuild the Nixon and Reagan super-majorities, and Big Business Changed sides in 2008. Of course big money owns both parties, but the alignment has shifted:

Whereas it used to be Corporate America plus Angry White Males and the Women Who Can Stand Them against liberals and minorities, with Obama's support from Wall Street, the contest is now, Corporate America, liberals and minorities against Dumb White Folk. What used to be the Salt of the Earth Base of the GOP is now a lunatic fringe of racist, fascist, ignoramuses. They are pitted against the literate, reasonable woke white people plus minorities -- plus corporate American which includes the corporate media.

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So long as anyone takes the political system seriously, they will not understand anything about what is going on in the world. When multiple countries are telling the exact same lies, obviously individual national politics are irrelevant. The truckers grasp this and do not waste any energy worrying about elections.

Personally, once I thought through what Trudeau's little putsch really means, I came to the conclusion that civil war I thought I saw coming was not going to be "civil" at all. Just like the Communist Fairy Tale of global revolution uniting the human race, we are looking at its mirror image -- a global revolution from the top down. Left and right are irrelevant constructs to this war that Trudeau is escalating as we speak.

There are still liberals and conservatives. It is just what they "believe" has no relevance to anything in the real world now.

This is repost from September of 2020 -- when the contours of the top-down revolution started to emerge:
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From Wikipedia:

"Withering away of the state" is a Marxist concept coined by Friedrich Engels referring to the idea that, with realization of the ideals of socialism, neoliberalism, the social institution of a state will eventually become obsolete and disappear as the society will be able to govern itself without the state and its coercive enforcement of the law.

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On March 10, 2020, the National Basketball Association shut itself down to prevent the spread of Covid-19, before either the Federal Government or any State had issued any such order. College basketball immediately revised its previous decision to play March Madness without fans to cancel the championship tournament. By the end of that week, toilet paper disappeared and grocery shopping became a dystopian nightmare.

At the time I thought that was bizarre and ever since I have marveled at the weird mix of public and private sector decision making in this crisis. The daily ration of "news" features much reporting and even more speculation about the creation of a vaccine, a deus ex machina that is hoped will smite the evil virus. Once it exists. So now there are literally hundreds of for profit corporations racing, literally racing, for the bonanza of getting there first. It is the policy of our government to encourage this race and that gazillion dollar payoff is considered the best inducement to ensure success.

So who is going to decide which Magic Injection is first? That implies being sure that it will work as advertised. Who makes that call? Trump? Biden? The Ghost of Mr. Science?

This begs the even bigger question of who is in charge now?

I take no position in this screed as to whether anybody intended for this to happen, but we are watching the withering away of the state, as naively predicted by Engels to give way to the fair distribution of production established by a triumphant working class. It turns out that driving force now is The Corporation. Having corrupted the State and rendered it useless through intentional incompetence, The Corporation is now replacing The State as the setter of rules and the enforcement of social discipline.

You see the First Amendment rendered obsolete by Social Media mega-corporations who now define the truth and suppress what used to called dissent as toxic disinformation.

You see the basic premise of democracy thrown out the window because of the virus. It takes "science" to deal with it, not your own ignorant and selfish point of view. So, although the elected leaders like Trump, Cuomo and Newsome are the guys on TV telling us what the decisions were, they ain't scientists either. And guess what? We have a political debate about whether each of those Electeds really listened to real science.

Where to we find Science to get the right answer? Who pays for science these days? Who signs the paychecks for the scientists who really know the right answer? How many professional researchers are drawing checks that are absolutely free of political or corporate taint?

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Where I live in West Hollywood, California, there has been civil unrest, rioting, enough looting to oblige virtually every merchant to board up the storefront -- yet almost everybody wears their mask in public. For whatever reason, people around here take the virus seriously, even when they are looting. Well, they ain't obeying Trump, that's for sure. And they ain't obeying the police.

But they do obey Science.

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Six months after starting the national shutdown, the National Basketball Association created a studio version of the sport and the playoffs are currently proceeding in a Disney owned property called, The Bubble. On the floor of the basketball court you see written in letters bigger than the paid advertising, "Black Lives Matter." Same thing with the women's pro league.

And you can find Black Lives Matter Public Service Announcements on television regularly and if you look quickly at the end, you can see that it was produced by The Ad Council.

I have no complaint against corporate America changing sides and supporting the idea of BLM. It is better than the opposite. But, holy shit!!! This is now a corporate institution that goes far beyond just the NBA. You have the broadcast partners at Disney and WarnerMedia, and you have all their zillion sponsors -- all driving home this message directly connected to the riots.

I repeat, I would rather have the networks saying nice things about the profound outrage that drove two weeks of mostly peaceful demonstrations all over the country than calling for the National Guard to restore order. But, uh, something is not quite right about all this.

We also have the strange movement to Defund The Police. Of all the ways to address the longing for a fair, honest, honorable and compassionate police department, cutting off the money cold turkey is probably the stupidest. It is also the surest way to motivate cops to be pigs -- to come after their jobs.

But it does occur to me that if the urban police department does not survive the coming Depression and social upheaval, the gooniest of the goons will have no trouble finding work in private security, working for corporations who will make sure that they have all the law and order they need, as the State withers away.

The original selling point of neoliberalism was that anything the State can do for you, a profit making operation can do it better. They have already "privatized" prisons and schools. The virus is speeding up the process of government discrediting itself.

The chaos of the election that both parties are planning will be a hoot. Probably the last one.