Gridlock. It is the name of the game for the John Birch-striped Libertarian funders of the Tea Party who are grinding the federal government and the social welfare systems into dust. So their standard-bearer has to insure gridlock continues. Ted Cruz? Nah. Marco Rubio? Nope. Hillary Clinton? Absolutely.
In 2012, long before it erupted full-force, I told you of the Republican's UnCivil War. We have the NeoCon faction, currently still subordinate to the smaller but unbelievably well-funded Tea Party.
The Tea Party does not exist to "do" something in government. Their credo: Just "undo" it.
As one side-show climate denier, Marc Murano, recently quipped in the documentary Merchants of Doubt, "We're the negative force. We're just trying to stop stuff."
Robert Kenner's (Food Inc.) brilliant documentary focuses on climate change, but the Genie of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that he exposes in that arena is used to "stop stuff" in the greater Libertarian drive to "cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," as the funders' coordinator, Grover Norquist so succinctly stated.
Gridlock is the game. Manipulating the media, progressives and moderates, is the masking magic of misdirection.
Kenner explains how this political misdirection works with the visual metaphor of the magic trick:
Magician Jamy Ian Swiss says: "The thing that sets magicians apart from con men and other kinds of thieves and liars is that we're honest liars."
He should have added politicians, and the back-room Libertarian elites like Mr. Norquist and the Kochs and Coors and Mellon-Scaifes and Olins who engineer and fund the Tea Party, perhaps the greatest sleight-of-hand in political history.
Yes, America, we are being played for suckers. How?
Shiny coin: Shut down the government.
Sleight-of-hand: Shatter the "grand bargain" of John Boehner and President Obama and break the political system so compromise is not possible and the electorate sees the whole government as a "fail."
Shiny coin: Attack women's reproductive rights.
Sleight-of-hand: Attack programs like SNAP and Head Start and break down the social safety nets of the hated New Deal;
Shiny coin: The endless votes to defund Obamacare.
Sleight-of-hand: Defund research into climate change, and distract the media and political wonks.
Shiny coin: Attack LGBTQ rights.
Sleight-of-hand: Keep Contango and other rip-offs of the American consumer from dominating the news cycle.
Oooh. Aaah. Applause all over Fox News.
If you want gridlock, you can't control all the major bodies of government, as I pointed out in my HuffPo piece prior to the mid-term election, "Win the White House... Why?"
If the Republican Party dominated government, if it had the Executive branch, then the public would demand that they DO something, instead of just trying to "stop stuff." The GOP would be accountable. They would be gone in two years, and their tactic of stuffing legislatures with conservative nimrods who take orders when progressive, moderate and liberal voters stay home, would be done. Shattered. Over.
Polarizing figures are great grist for gridlock. Hillary Clinton is a Libertarian gift.
We've already seen how Barack Obama has been used to channel white America's racial fears into a complete shutdown of compromise, a cornerstone of American Democracy. A Hillary Clinton Presidency will look a lot like that. Lose the racism. Use the gender fear.
Plus you have the glorious gift of Right Wing radio's Renaissance. The whole fetid format was built upon Rabid Rush Limbaugh's running rants about the Clintons.
Republicans kept that Clinton Administration hamstrung with a full frontal war on the White House, replete with the meat of the media: Innuendo and scandal. White Water and other shiny coins stopped any action on health care, the environment, and most of the progressive agenda.
The problem is also that the Clintons themselves are master manipulators of that negative political climate to their personal advantage.
In some ways, the recent non-scandal State Department email "scandal" was a preview of how Mrs. Clinton not only thrives on, but may encourage that negative attention. Setting up a private email server, given the high likelihood of perception issues, would seem to be somewhat intentional. It is better to be talked about in a highly charged controversy with no real "scandal" that generates thousands of hours of free news chatter about Mrs. Clinton worldwide than to be out of that limelight.
The Clintons are negative symbionts of the Libertarian masters. Mrs. Clinton cannot be an agent of change if she cannot meaningfully explain how she will break the Libertarian's gridlock machine. She wasn't even trying to focus on it when she announced her candidacy on Sunday, a troubling sign that it may be more politically expedient for her to be part of the problem rather than the solution.
AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BEHOLD THE GIANT GOLD COIN ILLUSION! Watch the smiling, politically polarizing blonde on the left, ladies and gents. Nothing up our sleeves...
The Tea Party candidates in the GOP presidential clown car are the side show to her coronation. Jeb Bush has a lot of bro baggage, and Chris Christie is an old-school GOP machine politician whom the Tea Party base will turn their back on, if his warm welcomes at their annual CPAC meetings are any indication.
America needs a champion who will end gridlock and break the Tea Party funders' stranglehold on our democracy.
Anyone interested in taking that on? Bernie? Liz? Buddy? Bueller? Anybody?