The Billionaire Protection Party Playbook

There are 4,398 candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for President. It's a sharp bunch. There are some differences in their proposals but they're all operating on the side of goodness. You should pick one or two you really like and toss them a few nickels and see where it all lands. What you shouldn't do  is worry too much about something called "electability."

Because every single one of them is electable. Most citizens do not like Donald Trump, and do not like him hard. Even most of the ones that do like him don't care for him personally, because he's rude and childish, but they like how that gets liberals all worked up. Of the remainder who really, really like him, a significant percentage will fall down go boom or soil themselves on their way to the polling place.

So if you really like one of the leftmost candidates (formerly known as Eisenhower Republicans) but think you'd have a better shot with someone beiger who can't be pinned down to any position, think again. It doesn't matter who we pick, because the attack machine will be the same for any of them. If we nominated that flamer Jesus, he'd get the same treatment. The massively-endowed think tanks and focus groups that champion the Billionaire Protection Party never let the truth get in the way of a good tactic.

The eventual Democratic nominee will be called a socialist. Doesn't matter that there aren't any socialists running, or that people don't know what socialism is. Most of the ideas Democrats are espousing are very popular. You call the very same platform socialist, and the public turns on them. There will be very sophisticated memes out there proliferating, depicting the candidate as crazed or drenched in red or wearing horns, because that is how we choose a President these days. If you ask the average voter what a socialist is, you will be told that it is a person who wants to take all you have worked for and give it to someone who doesn't deserve it. That's actually what the billionaires are doing, but the Billionaire Protection Party has plenty of cash to devote to confusing you about these things.

Once they've gotten the public all heated up about socialists, they'll start hammering away on the idea that our Democratic candidates not only want to take away what you have, but they want to make fun of you or shame you. They'll say they're coming after your favorite light bulb and your drinking straw and they'll force you into a skinny little car you don't want. They will say this is taking away your freedom. Focus groups have found that Freedom plays really well with Americans. Americans will happily ride the last glacier to rubble and pull the last fish from the sea as long as they still have their freedom. And they hate to be scolded. They will jam a dozen plastic straws in their sodas and blow black exhaust out of their big rigs just to stick it to the scolds and know-it-alls. This is exactly what a two-year-old would do, but the Billionaire Protection Party can afford to shower them with Legos and cheap candy so Mommy and Daddy can go out and paint the town red.

So go ahead and nominate a real grownup. You might just as well. The public might even surprise you and elect them.

The Mandatory Arugula Proposition

I hate to be an alarmist, but y'all are going to be hearing a whole lot about hamburgers now. More than you really want. It's already started.

That is because about ten years ago the libertarian billionaire squirrels sitting on their massive piles of nuts noticed that they weren't getting the affection they deserved from the little people, who had been waiting in vain for their nuts to drop. They realized if they were going to be successful in their plan to get almost all the nuts, they'd have to repackage their message, because their actual message was self-serving bullshit that even a nitwit could see through. The nitwits needed to be softened up by appealing to their core values.

The focus groups and think tanks and libertarian institutes got to work on the project and finally concluded that unregulated free-market piracy that has resulted in extremes of wealth and poverty would sell only if it were recast as freedom. People like freedom. Especially people in America, which has a long-standing devotion to the concept of freedom. Just the concept, of course, not any kind of actual freedom, which is why there was such a big to-do over the freedom to own slaves. Shit, man, people used to argue that one without any sense of irony at all.

So now everything from union membership to vaccination to fair taxation is pressed through the filter of sweet, American liberty. By gum, we've got people all cranked up about their fundamental right to earn less and less, but save on union dues; or to be able to choose which health insurance giant should scrape the profits off their medical care, without questioning why the insurance industry exists at all. And now, friends, it's hamburgers.

Yes, fellow Americans, "they" want to take away your hamburgers.

Who are these dreadful people who want to confiscate our hamburgers? Well. "They" are people who support the Green New Deal. But their primary motivation is not actually to make life miserable for meat-eating Americans and bring on an era of mandatory arugula. They have a much broader perspective, a common side-effect of education. They understand that the carbon-sink forests of the Amazon are being razed for soybean farms to fatten hogs and cattle. And that the factory farming of animals and modern food production, with its manure lagoons and synthetic fertilizer and soil depletion, is a greater contributor to global warming than even cars and coal plants. And that a pivot in favor of smaller, more diverse farms that employ more people and sequester more carbon is not only sound policy--it's crucial. Crucial to our way of life, our freedom, and our continued survival on this planet. Because our current path is utterly unsustainable. [That means we can't keep it up, Mister Man.]

But people so morally beggared that they can't see past their own nuts are now actively rewriting reality for us. They say the Green New Deal is a threat to our liberty and our hamburgers, when what they mean is it's a threat to their money. And that's all they ever cared about.

Two questions, America: in the face of this, are we really going to burn down the house for a cheap hamburger? And, if so: are we two-year-olds?