I'll throw in on this thread, which I would've expected to find today in this forum before I even checked.
Most of the respondents seem to be on the same wavelength and frequency as I -- more or less. I'm not much repulsed by any of your comments, and I could either say none of you were born yesterday, or you're not naïve virgins about how it all works.
I have a theory. Maybe it's a weak theory, maybe not. To be a strong theory, it's supposed to contain "refutable implications."
Donald, Marco, Huckabee, Fiorina and several others are just foils. Either they've made asses of themselves, or said something ridiculous, or they're already known for their bald-faced hypocrisy.
Except for Christy, there's only one, single civil voice in the crowd: Jeb Bush.
The way this all works derives from my small-sample statistics about our presidents, and in some ways, it transcends party.
Since 1960, there have been three presidents from a single state who prosecuted four wars. 5 out of 9 presidencies since 1960 derived from political careers beginning in 2 states.
Both states had a couple things in common throughout the Cold War and into the present day. They're home to corporations traditionally engaged in mining oil -- big oil states, and they'd traditionally had more than their share of the defense/aerospace industry and recipients to large government contracts for that industry. The two states also have the largest number of miles in paved highways -- either singly or together -- than any of the other lower 48.
From a statistical point of view, for two states combined which had 19% of congressional seats in 1960 and approximately 19% plus/minus since the last time I looked in the middle of W. Bush's term -- based on population and as a proxy for "political opportunity" -- it doesn't make any sense. Talent isn't distributed that unevenly. But industries, with their political clout, certainly are.
Jeb Bush may be former Florida governor, but he's a scion of the Walker and Bush families, who in turn were involved in both the weapons industry and oil going back to a time much earlier than Prescott's election to the US Senate.
What's on the menu?
Trump is so obviously a narcissist, and the fact that this means so little to his supporters is explainable because we live in a narcissistic culture -- to some extent, amplified by Hollywood and the "rugged individual" myths and our value system placing the individual above all else.
Fiorina has got to be the Grand Hypocrite of all time. It seems she's living her fantasy derived from reading Ayn Rand's books, who, in turn, was living the same fantasy in Atlas Shrugged. Fiorina killed some 20,000 to 30,000 American jobs, and then turned around in her Senate campaign to boast "I know how to create jobs." She was booted from HP after that, given a $300 million golden-handshake so they could be rid of her.
Huckabee will say just about anything to energize his evangelical base -- most recently, comparing Obama to Hitler.
Rubio looked promising, until he showed a lack of class for saying Obama had none.
That leaves Bush and Christy and a few others.
After the fog, smoke and mirrors clear away, there's an even chance that Bush will get the nomination.
In the background, we had the Koch brothers subsidizing the transportation for Tea Party rallies, funding super-PACs, more or less "buying" Walker's election in Wisconsin. Oh. I forgot about Walker. That's two shills now, not just one.
And the Koch brothers, overseeing and oil and gas empire, have added their own advertisement for "growing vegetables" to "BP puts America first," "America is the new Natural Gas Super-power," "Exxon Mobil is creating jobs in Angola," and so on.
Whether or not all of this is deliberately orchestrated, the big contributors like the Kochs will influence the outcomes. And all of their ilk, like Raymond L. Hunt of Hunt Oil and Halliburton, hobnob in various semi-secret groups, and they cross paths with the military in organizations like the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
I'm not demonizing the military. But consider that Big Oil had been joined at the hip with the National Security Apparatus and CIA since passage of the 1947 National Security Act. There's always been a revolving door, whereby a GS-9 CIA careerist might be enticed by a six-digit salary by some Houston oil company. There is a reciprocal nature to relationships between government and business: it might account, for instance, for the corruption of the Minerals Management Service (remember Deep Horizon) and other institutions.
Going back to the Chuckleheads.
There was a time, you know, when character had a robust meaning. So for me, the last, great GOP President was Dwight David Eisenhower, who grew up as a Kansas farm boy. And Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell speech of the "Military Industrial Complex." In that speech, he only mentions the arms industry, in conjunct with the institution it's joined to.
But half of a "Military Industrial Complex" is "Strategic Minerals," and most of "Strategic Minerals" is involved with fossil-fuel.
Putting clilmate change aside, we had CIA's overthrow of the Iranian President Mossadegh, installing the Shah and the brutal SAVAK secret police. (They don't just hate us for our religion, and we should be mindful that the 1979 hostage crisis was as much a result of the deal swung in the early 50's with British petroleum interests.)
Then, Vietnam veterans returned from S.E. Asia with rumors of mineral wealth in the South China Sea, which has been a repeated news item of conflict since the mid 1990s.
The rest of it, you know. A "diplomatic error" by April Glespie on the behalf of Bush the Elder precipitated Saddam's Kuwait invasion and the first Gulf War.
The rest of it, with the lies about WMDs, the Iraq War -- all recent history.
There's only one problem that ties together the Santa Barbara American Pipeline spill, wildfires in Texas and California, Katrina and Sandy, California's drought, the price at the pump, war, war and more war.
So it would be terrible to elect an narcissist like Trump, a rabid liar like Cruz (a Lone Star candidate), a hypocrite like Fiorina, a shill like Walker, or just about any of the others. How Christy fits into that equation, I can't say. What are the industrial underpinnings of New Jersey?
Sheldon Adelson could teach us about fixing the game. But the game has always been fixed.
The problem: civilization has been slowly painting itself into a corner with the tar from 200-million-year-old rot -- in scarce supply, and a one-time fluke of prehistoric Nature.
Everything else is superfluous: Planned Parenthood selling fetus parts; mass shootings by stars-and-bars lunatics; the poor middle class; college tuition. Minor issues, even if relevant, or trout-fly issues like abortion for prayerful half-wits.
HERE'S A FUNNY AFTERTHOUGHT: It's all a SHELL game. You know -- the big, yellow shell?
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