Here's my post-fight analysis, just for the hell of it.
Back when, for tactical reasons, Obama got the nod over Clinton, they promised her she'd be next in line. All the king's horses and all the king's men were lined up behind her. But in the United States we have this fiction that the government has "the consent of the governed," and "represents" us, executing "the will of the People." That's all horseshit, of course, but it's a fiction that must be maintained at all costs for the psychopathocracy to claim legitimacy on the world stage.
So you can be corrupt, but you can't be too OBVIOUSLY corrupt. You have to keep the illusion going. No one's supposed to see the man behind the curtain.
To give you illusion of choice, they let Bernie Sanders dance around in the primary -- making sure that no matter what happened, he would NOT win the candidacy. He was to serve as the Pied Piper in a bait-and-switch con game, which was completed with his endorsement of Clinton. He COULD have run as an independent. He COULD have thrown in with Stein when she invited him to. That would have made sense, given the similarity of Sanders' platform and Stein's. But instead, he endorsed the candidate whose philosophy was LEAST like his own. Why? That brings us to the other part of the set-up.
The Queen displaying how gentle and nurturing a woman President would be.
They needed a straw opponent for Clinton.
They chose Trump. A card carrying member of the 1% and a long-time pal of the Clintons. His job was to mug for the camera, to play the part of the obnoxious, offensive loud-mouthed fascist -- the better to drive voters into the arms of the purported "lesser evil" played by Clinton -- a PROVEN war-mongering psychopath. Remember how she LITERALLY laughed about the murder of Gaddafi ("we came, we saw, he died") That was the revelatory moment. Her cackling over Gaddafi's death was the mark of a true psychopath, as empty of empathy, compassion, guilt or remorse as a tomato can.
Trump was supposed to take a dive in the late rounds, and Clinton's camp had the fail-safe Plan B of flipping the vote at the polls, just in case. The fix was in. No sweat.
So what the hell happened?
Mary Shelley wrote about it.
Falling in love with his own image.
First, the Clinton's underestimated Trump's narcissism. Visions of the oval office started dancing in his head. His ego wouldn't allow him to take a public beating. A savvy liar, Trump tailored his rhetoric to target the specific complaints of various segments of the pissed-off public. He mixed in a little truth with his bullshit. But, instead of discrediting that truth by association the the aforesaid bullshit --- which was part of the original plan -- people seemed to lock onto those bits of truth. As Simon and Garfunkle sang, "All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." Nothing new about that. But it enabled Trump to portray himself as the underdog anti-establishment renegade. One thing about Americans; we love to root for the underdog. Trump cast himself as Rocky, and Clinton was Apollo Creed, the Corporate Champion.
The other thing Clinton didn't count on, a wild card that couldn't be anticipated, was the Wikileaks email revelations. It's okay to be corrupt as long as you can maintain plausible deniability. But, like I said, you can't be OBVIOUS about it. Wikileaks made it too obvious.
Not once, but TWICE, the FBI honcho gave her a pass -- and we now find that he has alleged financial ties to the Clinton Club.
The Clinton's phony "charity" foundation came to light, etc, etc, etc. And at every turn, another body seemed to turn up in a statistically unbelievable sort of way.
Then Clinton tried to play the vagina card: Let's prove how liberal and evolved we are by electing a WOMAN President. (Never mind electing an HONEST President; that option isn't on the table). Perhaps some people remembered what we got when we decided to show how liberal and evolved we were by voting in our first Black President: George W. Bush, only darker. I have to say, I hadn't thought it possible to have a worse president than Dubya. But Obama proved me wrong. He out-Bushed Bush all across the scorecard.
But I digress.
Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue
Coincidentally, at the same time that Clinton was asking you to vote for her ovaries -- after Trump was revealed to have made some boorish comments about women who will let a rich big-shot grab them right by the crotch --- as if by magic, numerous women showed up claiming that they had been sexually assaulted by Trump. He'd apparently been assaulting women for decades --- BUT none ever came forward until just before the election. Some people bought it. I suspect mostly pseudo-feminists and their sycophants. For others, that timing was a little too suspicious.
Don't get me wrong here. Without his money, I don't think Trump could get laid in a Turkish harem, and his boasts remind me of the locker-room braggadocio of an adolescent virgin crowing to the boys about his supposed "conquests." "Smarmy" is the only word that comes to mind. But not far behind on the smarmometer were the hysterical Clintonites who lied about it, completely misrepresenting what Trump had actually said. So that dirty trick may have back-fired, too.
Questions about Clinton's health didn't help, either. Too many odd little moments of apparent incapacitation. Did she have Parkinson's? Was she a a dry drunk? Rumors multiplied like bunny rabbits.
At every possible turn, the arrogant Red Queen shot herself in the foot. But to be fair, she has big feet.
Nothing up my sleeve...um... oops...
The thing about election-rigging is that is has to be believable. You can shave a point or two. You can deal yourself a high pair off the bottom of the deck --- but you can't deal yourself five aces. Your guy can take a dive after a punch that ought not to have put him down, but he can't just walk out into the ring and fall down without a punch being thrown. There are limits to the audience's "willing suspension of disbelief." If you're too obvious, the mark will walk and squawk. If there's a significant enough "landslide," that's a vote that's hard to flip. Add to that mix the fact that Trump swore he wouldn't lay down if he lost, but would demand a re-count, and so on. THAT might blow the whole rigged game wide open.
So now day has dawned and there's much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Clinton Camp as Trump emerges President-elect of the United States. As if the GOOD guy (there wasn't one) LOST and the BAD GUY (both candidates were execrable) WON. That, too, is bullshit.
What next?
I expect a Trump presidency to be like driving 20 miles lost on a bad road, riding on the rim of a flat tire, while hung over and trying to not to spill scalding hot coffee from your thermos onto your lap.
Trump's a big fan of the police state. That won't be good.
On the other hand, he doesn't want to get us into a game of nuclear chicken with Russia.
So at least we'll be around to fix whatever mess he makes of things.
"I can't believe this shit."
Maybe this will get our collective asses off the couch and out into the streets where we belong. Liberty isn't a spectator sport. You want it, you're going to have to fight for it. And if you're not willing to fight for it, then you don't deserve it.
Early colonists voting.
See?
People get exactly the kind of government they deserve.
That's either encouraging -- or terrifying.
Liberty & Justice,
sj
