THE COMING CATASTROPHE

THE NATURE OF THE COMING CATASTROPHE

It's already too late. The Senate is not going to have enough Republican votes to rescue the United States from the continuing catastrophe that is the Presidency of Donald Trump.

He has already turned the United States into the most hated country in the world. He has already denied the Greenhouse Warming to favor the oil and coal moguls and dragged America out of the admittedly pathetic Paris Pact while California burns, oceans rise, island states sink, ecospheres collapse, and the biosphere of the whole planet faces terminal destruction. He has double crossed the Kurds, called the generals babies and idiots to their own faces on their own turf and soiled the honor of the military in Syria and destroyed the belief in the word of honor America itself. He has sliced America into tribes hating and fighting each other in order to win election. He is flagrantly guilty not just of the formal impeachment accusations but of much worse crimes and anyone who does not rely on Fox for news knows it.

To be painfully blunt about it, Donald Trump is not just stupid and ignorant he is a profoundly evil man (see and hear DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN here on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE).

How could such a creature be elected President of the United States? (first you might want to read THE THE ABNORMAL NEW NORMAL here likewise on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE for the history of the Republican Party from Lincoln to Reagan, a little dated maybe, but still relevant.) But to update it, Trump played on the reality that passionate anger, despair, and hatred, ranks knowledge and reason, as emotion ranks logic. And even so, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, and won only by the gerrymandering effect of the Electoral College and the knowing interference of Russian trolls.

How can it possibly get worse? Well, we are all too likely to find out. As things stand now, only a terminal disease or accident, a trip to the funny farm, a coup, or a murder is going to keep him from completing his already disastrous first term. But of course at least the Democrats will rid America of this nightmare in the coming presidential election.

Won't they?

The first law of rock and roll is make sure the act before you is shit. And the first law of electoral politics is that passion of any kind ranks moderacy and logic. But the Democratic National Committee has demonstrated that it has no such political street smarts. Instead it has rope-a-doped itself.

Their assumption was that, Trump being what he is, any Democratic candidate who made no waves would beat him. So they chose Joe Biden as their boy and after all, he had the chops, a major Senator and a Vice President, a man of the center who could play it cool. But because Trump seemed so vulnerable, 21 other people said why not me? And there were 22 or so candidates over a year before even the primaries, two of whom were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who feared and loathed the DNC machine and whose despisement of them is mutual.

And what the DNC so stupidly did was create a demolition derby to tighten the race with a whole year of more and more boring debates in which the would-be presidential candidates bad-mouthed each other so that they would defeat each other and Biden would float to the top.

But it hasn't worked out as planned. Because Biden is boring while Sanders and Warren are passionate revolutionaries and carry the torches for the generations who see no future, no personal economic future, not even a future of a livable biosphere, who despise the Abnormal New Normal for good political and personal reasons, who, while they may not yet be a majority, are a strong plurality.

So what we have now is three meaningful candidates, Sanders and Warren who together have more support than Biden who has about as much support than the two of them together. So the chance that anyone is going to come to the Democratic Convention in Milwaukee with a winning majority is nil.


Even without that Prince from a Foreign Land, Michael Bloomberg. Who could care less about the DNC, who has bad-mouthed no one but Trump, who has already vowed to put his money where his mouth is to the tune of at least $1billion to defeat Trump no matter who is nominated and who somehow succeeded three terms as mayor of New York as a Republican, an Independent, and a Democrat, and, as the song sort of goes, if you can make that there, you can make it anywhere.

Who is going to emerge from the inevitable smoke-filled room smoking what?

Stay tuned sports fans.