HOW TO SUCCEED IN FRINGE POLITICS
WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
In our country today, we have we have the middle-income or middle-class American family, about which politicians from both parties have been raising an alarm. However, when it comes to our politics, we lack what can be called middle of the road, objective and the moderate middle of American politics.
The concept is nearly imperceptible.
Whatever is left is marginal and fringe and we laugh at the fringe – well, we used to and now we have the matriarch, the militant, the meek, the zealous and Bernie Sanders.
Can Bernie Sanders be as fringe as it comes?
Bernie is the poster boy for parapolitics, a fringe candidate, who is losing his fringe image.
Bernie Sanders is rapidly climbing in the polls and attracting huge audiences to his campaign events, Hillary Clinton is starting to attack him and wants to put him back into the fringe bin. After all, Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist. Many voters appear to be willing to look past the labels and listen to what Sanders is actually saying about the issues and the role of government in society.
Of course, few Americans know what “socialist” means. Some mistakenly associate it with Communism. It isn’t really, especially the kind of “socialism” he believes in, but the idea of asking Americans if they really want a socialist President is like asking if they want Dracula to participate in a blood drive.
However, the parapolitical climate has given license for the real vampires to gather like political vultures over the dead body of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday morning.
According to CNN, a government official said Scalia went to bed Friday night and told friends he wasn’t feeling well. Saturday morning, he didn’t get up for breakfast. And the group he was with for a hunting trip left without him. Now when I first heard of his death, I immediately thought the guy was pushing 80 and after reading how he died peacefully in his sleep.
Scalia’s death marks only the second time in sixty years a justice has died before retiring from the Court, and leaves the Court split 4-4 between fairly conservative and fairly liberal, during a heated presidential election year.
It was simple; it was a typical story of a sad death of an elderly judge passing quietly in his sleep, completely logical and reasonable.
I also thought of the irony since I recently watched a rerun of the cartoon “Family Guy” where because of some strange time line mix up, Lois is married to Quagmire. Peter wants to somehow put everything back to normal so he summons the Grim Reaper in order to find the place where he screwed up. When the grim reaper appears to Peter and his dog Brian, he says “Man it has been a busy day, Dick Cheney shot “Supreme Court Justice Scalia” in a hunting accident and the bullet went right through him and killed Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson.”
I thought it to be a sick coincidence and wondered if there was a show in there somewhere, but then talked myself out of it because I really don’t think I could milk three to 5 hours based on a twisted coincidence.
Then something weird happened – the entire country became conspiracy theorists.
After the San Antonio Express reported the story, they revealed that the man who found Scalia’s body was John Poindexter.
Poindexter is the owner of the 30,000 acre Ranch where Scalia was found dead.
John Poindexter is a Texas millionaire businessman who is known for being a donor to the Democrat Party and who also received an award from Barack Obama related to his military service in Vietnam.
Mr. Poindexter was also said to be the primary point man between the ranch location and federal authorities who were notably slow to arrive at the ranch.
Poindexter told the media he tried to awaken Scalia about 8:30, the morning of February 13, 2016, but the judge’s door was locked and he did not answer. Three hours later, Poindexter returned after an outing, with a friend of Scalia who had come from Washington with him.
Eventually, Poindexter entered the silent room, apprehensive.
“I was worried I was going to find something very tragic,” he said.
He spotted Scalia, still in his pajamas.
Poindexter said that he was in perfect repose in his bed as if he was taking a nap. His face wasn’t contorted or anything he then went over and felt his hand and it was very cold with no pulse. He also said discovered the judge in bed with a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled,” said Poindexter.
Then the red headline was placed on the Drudge Report “SCALIA FOUND DEAD WITH PILLOW OVER HIS HEAD.”
While Scalia was pronounced dead “of natural causes” or heart failure, no qualified official had actually examined his body, and there was no autopsy performed, apparently it was the wish of his family.
However, why was an honorable member of the Supreme Court pronounced dead over the phone?
Presidio County Judge Cinderella Guevara said that there had been “no foul play,” but she had “pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing his body and without ordering an autopsy.”
A decoy gray hearse arrived Saturday to distract the news media. It wasn’t until about midnight that a van arrived to take Scalia’s body away.
Then came the strange story of a map of the property set under a bottle of water near the bed.
Poindexter reported “When I went to straighten his room up after he was removed this morning, I noticed he had a map of the property next to his bed, he had obviously been looking at it before he went to bed.”
Haven’t we seen this before? Maybe some predictive programming in a movie by Oliver Stone?
Not exactly, but this smells like the movie The Pelican Brief. Only in that movie two Supreme Court Justices were killed.
There are many people who will say that there were plenty of motives to ‘take him out.”
The animosity between Justice Scalia and the Obama White House was well known. Scalia considered the Obama administration to be a scourge upon the Constitutional-based tenets of the American form of government.
The Obama White House in turn privately viewed Scalia as a legal “dinosaur” who was horribly out of place amidst the ongoing “fundamental transformation” the Obama regime was pushing for the country.
Scalia famously blasted the administration for critical acts such as Obamacare, illegal immigration, states’ rights, and executive authority.
Scalia also blocked Barack Obama’s, Clean Power Plan with a delay. Just last Friday, Ground Zero reported that the 5-4 order halted the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan until at least the final months of Obama’s presidency – and shed doubt on its ultimate fate before the nation’s highest court by suggesting concern among a majority of the justices.
The delay is a blow to Obama’s environmental agenda, highlighting the prospect that his signature program for combating climate change disruption could be in legal jeopardy. It also risks undermining the U.S. commitment to pare greenhouse gas emissions as part of an international accord reached in Paris last December.
The court gave no explanation for its order. Also voting to grant the delay were Chief Justice John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Dissenting were the four Democratic appointees: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
This may put the fate of the Clean Power Plan into the hands of Obama’s successor which by all odds will be a Republican.
Elections are not that mysterious of events; they are not all that unpredictable. They’re actually highly predictable. History bears witness to this and in this era of fringe politics with fringe stories now making the rounds, you can be assured that the political climate is most certainly changing and is now in the process of disruption.
The reason why the odds are in favor of a Republican win is not by any means a theory related to any conservative or even liberal agenda, it is because when an incumbent isn’t running voters statistically turn away from the party currently in power. In fact, a successor candidate in the same party as a lame duck President is three times less likely to win.
Unless there is a surge in Obama’s approval ratings, it will be an uphill battle for the fringe candidate Bernie Sanders, and the legacy candidate Hillary Clinton to win.
Here are some more grim odds to consider — more Justices are getting so old that they too are in the dead pool. The fate of the Supreme Court is now a key election issue, given the possibility that the next President could get the chance to nominate at least two or three Justices due to the age of those on the bench and the possible shift of the ideological balance of the court.
Within two hours of Scalia’s death being reported, presidential candidates along with Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill were feuding over whether Obama should appoint a replacement for the Chief Justice or wait for the next administration to make a decision.
After observing a moment of silence to honor Scalia, the GOP candidates, who clashed in South Carolina, turned his death into a political football and drew battle lines in the debate over his successor.
Doesn’t the timing of everything seem like something out of the Twilight Zone?
Was there motive for taking out Scalia? Is it suspicious that he died in such a remote area at a ranch owned by Democratic supporter of Obama’s?
More times than not, I can conclude in my experience that a lot of whatever happens in government that is fringe and parapolitical is planned and prepared, meaning that the old axiom attributed to President Franklin Roosevelt still applies: “If it happens it is because government planned it that way.”
This is going to end up being one of the greatest political and ideological battles in United States history.
Scalia’s death means that the 2016 election could effectively evolve into a battle involving all three branches of the U.S. government, the White House, the Supreme Court and Congress given that there is a real chance the GOP could lose control of the Senate.
It also comes at a time when the Court is expected to decide several cases with huge political implications, including on abortion and affirmative action.
The Senate Republicans recognize how important it is to maintain a conservative majority on the court.
This leaves a wide open set up for the question, “What would Obama do?
And the answer is a simple, duh.
Published February 15, 2016
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