Rightward shift robs voters of a real choice

opinion@dailylobo.com

It is remarkable that every presidential election seems to top the previous one in terms of importance. With each race, the public faces the same dilemma: right-wing corporatism flirting with outright fascism or right-wing liberalism propped up by militarism. Noble alternatives, such as third-party candidates advocating peace through justice for all at home and abroad, are deliberately ignored and consistently discarded from the public debate as nonviable, ridiculous options by the bipartisan establishment funded and controlled with corporate money whose function is the fulfillment of its political prophecies or will.

It seems almost fitting that special tribute is thereby paid to the spirits of Halloween when the freakiest candidates dance on the national stage for highest popularity. Who this time is the most grotesque in the land of the free? After Nixon, Reagan and Bush, all mass murderers in their personal pursuit of American imperialism, we got McCain, and now Romney, the sneakiest political chameleon, promising the heavenly blue from the highest skies of utter impossibilities, suspiciously silent on how America’s leading job-killer could ever create any jobs for the working and middle class. He is the slimy, smiley buffoon dancing to the corporate tune.

With Romney and Ryan, we know what stands at the end of the Republican road: the abolition of the state, dissolved by privatization into capitalist entities; the total destruction of nature for the idolatrous sake of the money-making business; the dissolution of society into private clubs that fend for themselves against each other to keep the senseless competition going — in short, the Romnification of America.

The role of the Christian religion is to sanction the whole diabolic enterprise. Those millions of desperate souls, losers in the Darwinian struggle for survival, brought their bad luck of sickness, homelessness, poverty and uneducation upon themselves — apparently as punishment from God for not believing in the “right” way in the perpetual growth of the free market economy designed to advance the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the sanctified few.

They should have known better. A race has only one winner. By divine design and demonic capitalist definition, the many are excluded from the privileged few. Resources are finite. Their “growing” scarcity makes the battle more deadly and thus more interesting. In the end, after all failures, there still are, as always, two options left to be enjoyed: coerced charity by condescending pity and the most sacred of American freedoms — the freedom to die and the freedom to be killed — “viable” options already in our current society.

Consequently, the poverty draft serves as an excellent recruitment tool for a war-waging army, and the felony of poverty and higher skin pigmentation ensures that racism keeps supplying the hungry prison business with clients more valuable when locked up.

All of this is consistent with Republican attempts nationwide to exclude minority voters with imposed low turnouts, purged voter rolls, restrictive voter ID laws and other legal, or illegal, measures: evidence of a deep-rooted hatred for democracy.

What is left in the light of this deplorable plight for the American voting cattle as they are marching into the slaughterhouses of manipulated voting machines, effectively in Republican Romney hands, is the choice for the lesser evil, or, what has become idiomatic in American English, “the least worst” — an insult to every free spirit, especially a people that deems itself the most free.

Trapped in the suction of the right-wing drift within the Republican Party, Democrats have continued the American legacy: a totalitarian tyranny abroad emblematized by its drone warfare, and a spying plutocratic oligarchy at home that is increasingly concerned with its unruly dissident subjects. 

However, in the spooky darkness of this election season, into which an increasingly angry god seems to have spoken with the natural force of a devastating hurricane as a final appeal to reason to recognize the consequences of climate change, there is still a significant choice to be made: the choice between a flip-flopping man without a conscience and a man who has professed rational intelligence and is therefore known to have a conscience to be appealed to.

Given this legacy, we shall see if the Republican assault on women, minorities and democracy at large will manage to get away — again — with another stolen election.