This Day in OMG WTF:
It just happened. Someone, somewhere, just wrote a check for a million dollars – maybe even two or three – and handed it to Texas senator/wacko presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, with a straight face, with a manly handshake and a dull pat on the back, while the mournful ghost of a beloved Zen koan floated about the room: If a nutball candidate snorts a pile of money in a rich man’s castle and no one’s around to mock them, does it make a sound?
By the way, this tragicomic transaction occurred, presumably, under the genuine illusion that the climate-denying, immigrant-hating, tremendously unlikable senator from Texas actually has a shot in hell of becoming president (he doesn’t), or perhaps at least of “changing the conversation” (he might, sort of, for the worse). I mean, why else?
Here’s the most amazing thing: Despite the fact that Ted Cruz is perhaps the longest long shot in the GOP field, with miserable poll numbers and popularity so low he has to force a crowd to attend his kickoff rally, despite all this, Ted’s four super-PACs reportedly just raised $31 million.
In a week. Which is a record.
Do you see? When the most flagrantly silly, preposterous candidate imaginable raises more money in a week than any candidate in history, you know something’s become unhinged.
More. More unhinged.
America, 2015: The horrible no good very bad Supreme Court has shoved us headlong into an age of limitless, anonymous campaign donations, bizarro super-PACs and billion-dollar elections no one can possibly parse. Translation: Ultra-rich nutjobs are coming out of the tacky, ornate woodwork to throw piles of money all over their pet causes, candidates, elections, fringe beliefs, all in hopes of mangling the American experiment beyond recognition, for their own benefit.
In other words, thanks to SCOTUS, a new and staggeringly weird, depressing political era is upon us. And it’s nowhere more in evidence than the much-loathed Koch brothers and their nightmare “Freedom Fund,” a billion-dollar machine of maleficence that proves these ultra-wealthy donors are plentiful, they are borderline sociopathic, and in 2016 they now see an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the overheated world in their bizarre, exceptionalist, regressive, schizophrenic image. Fun!
It should be noted that the god of the Koch brothers – and the rich (white, male, Southern, obviously) magnates who support them – isn’t money, per se: it’s entitlement. It’s tax-free, anti-EPA privilege so warped and out of scale, so hateful to fairness and balance, so intentionally antagonistic to real American progress, the environment, to thoughtful humanitarianism, it’s more like a very, very well subsidized cult. That thoroughly despises you.
Best of all? There’s almost no accountability. There’s little way to know exactly who’s involved, and at what level, and what they’re after, exactly. It’s all sheltered, protected, buried under obscure titles and funds and action committees. The oligarchy is calcifying.
Which simply means there’s no way to know which billionaire, exactly, was drunk enough on gin, Xanax and wild Illuminati fantasias to give Ted Cruz a million dollars, willingly. There is only to marvel that lightning, for some unknowable reason, did not strike them both down on the spot.
Read more here:: How to waste a million dollars in 10 seconds – with Ted Cruz!
