I’d read and seen videos of the Danube’s low water level, so I knew about the remnants, some dangerous, from World War II, exposed to our view.
What I didn’t know was this, from Harper’s Weekly Review:
Europe’s biggest rivers recorded record-low water levels, exposing in the Danube River Nazi warships from Hitler’s Black Sea fleet, a German-military motorcycle, an undetonated 1,500-pound British bomb, and the remains of a woolly mammoth.
Doesn’t it seem that campaign cash numbers have eclipsed polling numbers when we look at elections? A new “truth” has emerged: the guy with the biggest war chest is winning the campaign.
Notice I didn’t say that the guy with the most money is going to win the election. Because I don’t know this is true. In fact, the recent Democratic primary in Michigan seems to have tossed out both meters — polling and campaign funds — as anything near predictive.
The SCOTUS Six decisions involving money in politics have provided a constant drumbeat for pundits and prognosticators who believe their employment depends on election predictions. Polling, even by reputable pollsters, has been devalued. It never should have been so overvalued in the first place; a poll is only a prediction based on the answers to questions the pollsters themselves devise.
Since I’m not a pundit — that is, I know nothing except there will be elections which some people will win and some won’t — I’ve been wondering ever since Citizens United, etc., about this gross money-in-politics thing. Does big money verifiably buy elections?
The necessity of raising a lot of money to support a run for office is irritating to many of us who are asked to give it, even if the candidates asking are exemplary people who are or will be terrific public servants. And even though we all know candidates need money to be competitive in campaigns, especially Democratic candidates who are always being faced with those massive GOP war chests.
Nobody likes political fund-raising. I always remember Steve Israel, a Democratic Congressman from Long Island, who was for four years during Obama’s presidency the chairman of the DCCC. Which meant raising money, pretty much incessantly. When he quit Congress, he said it was because he had to spend more time courting donors than being a legislator; he found it thoroughly distasteful.
Maybe it sounds nutty, but I’m not sure that all this money does much more than give very rich people the illusion (or, in the cases of certain rich people, the delusion) that they have all the power in the world because they have all that money. In 2022, I did a bit of research on the subject, which demonstrated that my instincts sat right alongside whatever intelligible facts can be pulled out of this bulging bank vault.
I see hugely rich people flinging their money around, beaming with pride. I also hear those hugely rich people flinging out remarks on a number of topics related to our form of government, remarks for which I can’t locate a more perfect description than…stupid. Ignorant and stupid.
It’s been a long time since I’ve attributed any intellectual acuity to successful business people. Determination to, and knowing how to, make tons of money is a knack, similar to my grandfather’s skill at what he called peddling (now called sales and marketing), that is, convincing other people to give you money for whatever you’re selling: matches, flowers, “brain health” pills, crypto coins, or shares in a new company which promises to transport you to an imaginary planet composed entirely of gold. Or a “genius” at money management who offers an attached perk: pedophilia.
I see all that, read about all that money, dark or light, given to certain kinds of people running for elected office. And then I see elections from my place on the voting lines and I see…people. Living people. Lots of living people, more people than all of the hugely rich people in this country. Each of whom has only one vote — as do I and each of my compatriots on that voting line.
Some people vote with their money; the rest of us vote with our minds and, nowadays, some emotion akin to loathing.
There are more of us than there are of them. Tons and tons and tons more of us.
Is it possible these 2026 midterms will not only demonstrate the power of ordinary voters to appreciate fully our form of sane government, but also demonstrate to the few extraordinarily$$$ voters that all their $$$ will never buy our elections?
That isn’t a prediction. It’s a hope.
If you want to experience the contrast between two GOP administrations who have lied, watch the 2010 thriller, Fair Game. It’s the true story of how George W. Bush and his cohorts, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, et al. — despite having actual expert evidence from the C.I.A. that there were no nuclear weapons in Saddam’s Iraq — lied to us in order to start a war as dishonest, ugly and stupid as Trump’s.
Besides, it’s a really good film and has held up well since it was first released, when I first saw it. It’ll tear into you, I’m sure, since it’s a wrenching dual portrait of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, and her husband, Joe Wilson, a retired diplomat, whose opinion column in the New York Times exposed the lies.
That was back in the old days, when rotten presidential administrations kept the lies relatively simple, even as the CIA argued against them, hid the facts smoothly, and destroyed careers and lives — in that case, Iraqi scientists — with smirks and sleazy aplomb.
There’s been a long-standing argument in and around politics that Bush and his responsible cabinet members should have been investigated and prosecuted for conjuring up lies to start a war. A couple of them were. Scooter Libby’s prison sentence of 31 months was commuted by Bush. Trump gave Libby a full pardon.
It’s something, isn’t it, that gross, twisted, egregiously obvious lies have become the entire communications from the current White House? That no information produced by the intelligence community or the DOJ or any of the Trump agencies has any credibility at all?
From Joe Wilson’s NYT article, “America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information.”
Sanctity of information.
We’re the captive audience for a crazy sur-reality show performed by inmates of a multi-disciplinary psychiatric institution.
