As a college senior in 1966, having just turned 21 years of age, I was eligible to vote for the very first time.  I botched the whole procedure.  I was standing in a secure voting booth, with the curtain closed, reading the ballot before me.  At the top of the ballot were selections for governor and lieutenant-governor and in the middle of the ballot which contained barely more than a dozen offices, there were five or maybe six judicial offices being selected.  (In New York State, we are supposed to take pride in our judges being elected by the people.  That is actually pretty stupid.)  Either all but one or all of the judicial jobs had the exact same name on most or all of the five or six parties.  I had not known that before.

I couldn’t stop staring.

I think I went into a trance until a voice outside shouted that my time was up and I panicked.  (I had come to vote for Democrat Arthur Goldberg for governor because I was worn out from Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s continual lectures in the news, for eight years, about making New York State government ever bigger and presumably ever better!)

I screwed up so badly that I ran my hand down one party and depressed each candidate selector.  As I was walking home, I calmed down enough to visualize the ballot.  Against my intended will, I had accidentally voted for every Republican candidate which I believe then was Row A.  (My intention had been to vote for every Democrat candidate.)

My second voting experience was in 1972, when I was too busy working and saving money while living in an inexpensive residential hotel without a TV to follow much news and politics.  At that time, I did not often read the New York Times.  Mostly I just scanned the sports news and discarded the paper.

[My memory of the 1972 Munich Olympics Anti-Semitic Massacre comes from reading the Times – without any TV coverage – or ‘Optics’ in today’s eternally misleading Political NewSpeak (or Political Gibberish).]

By 1972, I had no idea President Nixon had shrunk the American Viet Nam military by 75 to 90 percent from Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 500,000 man buildup.  (I well remember the 1964 presidential election when Lyndon Johnson said on television: “I’m not going to send American boys to do a job that Asian boys should do.”  By then, we already had 20,000 military in South Viet Nam, 19,000-plus in violation of the treaty that ended the French-Indochina War.)

Impatient for the ending of this endless war, I joined the social herd of every political talker that I encountered at work and elsewhere and became a McGovern voter.

[I did not learn until the 1980s that Henry Kissinger had secretly spent almost the whole four years of Nixon’s first term negotiating an end to American involvement culminating with the return of our POWs.

[Quite a few years later, long past the ‘Christmas Bombing’ News Media Hysteria which had become so ubiquitous, it even infected my AM clock radio Rock and Roll station early AM and late PM news blurbs, I belatedly learned that many of our ‘European NATO Allies’ were delivering trade goods to Haiphong Harbor which was, until December 1972, as off-limits to American air power as the capital city Hanoi where our POWs were being tortured and also where the North Vietnamese MIG defensive fighter air force was equally securely based immune from attack by our Air Force for over ten years.  The ‘Christmas Bombing’ of Hanoi and Haiphong was very persuasive to the Communist government’s four-year secret negotiations stall.  It took about 15 subsequent years for me to acquire this ‘knowledge.’  All I remember at the time was the brief announcement that Admiral James Stockdale and Jeremiah Denton and company finally came home.  No TV; no Optics.  I had long since been ‘persuaded’ by the 1950s, when I was still in grade school, that Nixon was a quintessential Bad Guy!]

[Two weeks after the Yom Kippur War against Israel began on October 6, 1973, in the midst of the massive news media fixation on the Watergate Scandal, President Nixon ordered our military to fly war planes from Spain to Israel.  The pilots would fly back commercially to Spain and repeat the procedure. Soviet troops, using Soviet surface-to-air missiles, shot down so many Israeli military aircraft that they would lose the war.  Israel had ten-times as many pilots as planes.  If not for President Richard M. Nixon, hated by every liberal American Jew including my mother, Israel would have lost the Yom Kippur War.  I did not learn that fact for ten years.  My mother never did.]

My third voting experience in 2004 was, in retrospective understanding, albeit in a different way, as wrong-headed as the first two – also due to my ignorance at the time.

I had thought that, if Arab Terrorism was to actually be preemptively overcome, the final place to militarily attack would be the strongest single Arab Military Dictatorship – namely that of Sadam Hussain’s Iraq.  With Arab Terrorists hiding in many Arab countries that, at that particular time, were cooperating with our military, it seemed logical to me that the last refuge to hide from our military force would be in Iraq.  Where else could such (not yet executed) Jihadist War Criminal Capital Murderers flee to try to escape Justice.  Furthermore, until I saw the movie American Sniper ten years ago at a motel in Montauk on cable TV, I had no idea American Rules of Engagement were as fatuously self-defeating as such Rules of Engagement that has been exclusively imposed on Israel, especially when American ‘aid’ began after 1968. (NATO, without United Nations authorization, had no trouble bombing Belgrade during the Yugoslav war. They even blew up the Chinese Embassy – so who cares?)

I never voted again until 2020.  When President Trump received 11 million more votes in 2020 than he was elected with in 2016, the sheer irrationality of such a result as faux-president Biden and ’81 million votes’ caused me to post a lengthy essay on December 5, 2020 with the title: “Reason vs. Faith.”

I had nothing more to say for two years.  Now I do, in a similar ‘last gasp’ comment.

 

I have finally learned a few incontrovertible facts of how the actual American political process really works in two critically important categories – both revolving about MONEY – namely DONORS and POLITICAL MEDIA ADVERTISING.

Only Rush Limbaugh ever used to talk sometimes about DONORS.  If you have any common sense about Human Nature, all Human Communication falls within one of two distinctly different categories – those who are fundamentally sincere, and those who put on a fully believable Act of ‘SINCERITY’ given the advantages and disadvantages of such an ‘appearance.’  Actors rarely show a ‘genuinely surprised reactive emotion’ but rather maintain an appearance or expression.  (They remain focused on reciting their ‘lines.’)  It is as if they are wearing a mask to hide their true feelings which the outside world never sees.

[In the age of Socrates, professional actors, during a performance, covered their faces with Masks and recited the playwright’s dialog.  Their professional job title was HYPOCRITOS.  (That is not coincidental.)]

Professional Politicians resort to ‘automatic’ cliché language which causes this jaded and cynical old man that I have become to never be able to trust any of them.  They speak a Political ‘NewSpeak’ or Political ‘Gibberish,’ that I can’t stand hearing anymore.

There were occasions on CSPAN in the 1980s when the younger ‘Plugs’ (Joe Biden) came off a stage where he had performed a rousing speech, and smirked proudly as he told his off-stage colleagues: “I GAVE THEM RAW MEAT!”

To me, all Professional Politicians speak with the equivalent trustworthy objective integrity of mega-millionaire Lawyer Gloria Allread.  Would she lie on TV??

Some Donors actually give money for socially prestigious or personal emotional gratification – especially the Entertainment Industry  Celebrity A$$holes and Inherited Wealth Schmucks.  Other more ‘Practical’ Donors make a ‘donation’ and miraculously receive ‘Practical’ Big Government contracts or regulatory advantages in what was easily identifiable fifty or sixty years ago as GRAFT from Big Government workers.  Way back then, there was a COMPETITIVE NEWS MEDIA – each institution desperately seeking an exciting scandal to ‘report on’ and expand their influence.  That all ended in the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s once the Big News Media privilege of defaming people who got in the way of the Social Oligarchy thanks to the 1965 catastrophic error of the SCOTUS in the 1965 Sullivan Rule fiasco.

By the 1970s, our government had become such a large and growing Corrupt Bureaucratic Regulatory Leviathan that Regular Annual Donors could acquire de facto permanent ‘temporary’ exemptions from costly Over Regulated Legal Requirements.

(I think the Great Obama perfected the ‘special’ annual exemptions for specific corporations that began to appear to me as a perfect analog to the centuries of well-paid-for Papal Indulgences that helped to inspire the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago.)

As to the Political Media Advertisement stuff, there are several points worth making.  Almost all such ‘ads’ are half-truth defamations of the competition, manufactured and distributed for very large secret fees (sometime a percentage of the total cost to the candidate) by ‘Professional Political Consultants.’  Emotional Persuasion applies exclusively – rational reasoning is irrelevant – integrity only gets in the way.

Back in the 1980s, when the Wall Street Journal published some annually factual articles, I several times encountered a graph of four years of all TV advertising.  Each year had a modest inflationary increase over the previous year- except every fourth year, the increase was much much bigger.  Those were the Presidential Election years.

Something strange happened in early 2016. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Businessman Donald J. Trump and Dr. Ben Carson ran for the Republican Nomination for President without soliciting (or even perhaps accepting) DONOR MONEY.  Their use of Political NewSpeak was negligible compared to everyone else.  Listening on the radio, I could understand what they said in the early debates.  I gloried in their explicit and public criticism of the egregious Left-Wing political bias of the Evil Scumbag Press that I had not heard before.

The more I have learned about Dr. Ben Carson’s actual personal history, actual Integrity and anti-Narcissist lack of Personal Ambition for unearned Fame and Popularity, the more perfect he looks.

And after eight years of Social Political Ruling Class DEFAMATIONS of President Donald J. Trump in every way possible, the more I marvel how he reminds me of the old John Cameron Swayze Timex watch advertising cliché – “He takes a licking but he keeps on ticking!’  I don’t believe another human being could have survived in our corrupt world this far towards a Rational Redemption – nor would I expect any other soul to be able to survive the next four years of it.

2024: President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Dr. Ben Carson

Should actual Moral Redemption follow – President Ben Carson’s eight years could finally defeat the Endless Stream of Beelzebub’s personally narcissistic (i.e., ‘So Special’ to Mommy and Daddy) Useful Idiots of Evil-Causing-Idealism (i.e., Ideology).

PS:  If Character Really Matters (as I sincerely believe), who has more integrity and less unbridled personal ambition than Dr. Ben Carson?  Name three ‘competitors.’