Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Dork Money

 I've been slightly skeptical of the claim that you can "buy" an electoral result with dark money and the like. There have been an abundance of well-funded candidates who flame out spectacularly when confronted with actual voters. Hello, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis.

However, one thing the money sloshing around our campaigns does is allow narcissistic grifters the ability to hang around their vanity campaigns, soaking up Super PAC money. The colossal amount of bad faith present in the "campaigns" of grifters like Marianne Williamson, Cenk Uygur, and Dean Phillips is difficult to measure with the tools available to science. Then you have the third party grifters like Jill Stein and Cornell West, not to mention No Labels.

None of these idiots has a snowball's chance in Florida/hell of becoming president. Unlike Bernie Sanders, who I think legitimately ran for political messaging purposes and then did surprisingly well, they have no message, no platform. They soak up money, live large for a few months and then slink back off to wherever they came from. 

In the case of people like Uygur and Phillips, they then actively spread Trumpist bullshit about electoral fraud. In Uygur's case, he is constitutionally banned from running. This isn't even a question! He was not born a U.S. citizen! Yet, he could poison just enough naïve young leftists to tip a close election. All to "boost his brand" and live off the campaign contributions.

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