The Iowa Creature Feature

IS THERE AN ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATE AROUND TO SAVE US?

So, the long awaited Iowa Raucus is over and Ted Cruz received one whole delegate more than the reigning righty, Donald Trump. Yay! Cruz won. We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. The Donald is not unstoppable! The Donald has a weakness.

Perhaps his kryptonite is machinegun[ish] bacon.

Or perhaps I’m using the wrong analogy, as this certainly doesn’t seem like superhero vs. supervillain to me.

To me it seems like the Giganotosaurus is saving us from the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Um…who saves us from the Giganotosaurus?

Hillary!

Dear Lord! Who saves Hillary from the hundreds of Velociraptors waiting for her in Congress?

Look, the fact is that there really is no discernable difference between the Cruzasaurus and the Trumpasaurus Rex. They are both voracious, visceral beasts of destruction endlessly seeking to devour the red meat of progressive policy.

…yeah. I can extend a metaphor!

And this is not just the partisan rantings of the beasts’ preferred prey. The Political Compass website has graphed the political leanings of the top presidential candidates. By this measure, there is no discernable difference between the Republican candidates. All of them are clustered at the top right of the matrix. In essence, they are all Right-Wing Authoritarians, or what I like to refer to as corporatists. After all, if it is your policy to allow the corporate elite to exploit people and the environment to their heart’s content, you better have some authoritarian policing powers set up

to protect the elite from those who will be exploited and forced to deal with the ravaged environment.

All of the top Republican candidates agree on this basic premise. There is very little light shining between them. Sure, Trump is louder and more entertaining; Cruz is more evangelical; Rubio…um…has better hair. But on the substantive arguments, it really doesn’t matter who the nominee is on the Republican side.

Which is interesting when one considers that Trump’s key selling point as a candidate is that he is “anti-establishment.” Yeah. Anti-establishment just like everyone else.

Frankly, I’ve never really understood how a multi-billionaire real estate tycoon who brags about all of the political figures who have called him over the years can be considered “anti-establishment.” Perhaps there’s a different definition for “establishment” that I’ve not learned.

And no, you can’t make the claim that, since he is a billionaire, Trump can’t be bought by billionaires! Um…that’s NOT anti-establishment!

But I digress. Trump is bellicose, bigoted blowhard. Nobody in their right mind should want to see him become President of the United States. We can’t however, lose sight of the fact that all of the viable candidates running for the Republican nomination are nothing more than variations of a theme. The best we can say is that, maybe, some of these candidates may be only acting crazy just to get the nomination, but once they actually become president they will settle nicely into sanity. After all, John Kasich said some fairly rational things and look what happened to him.

What?

Just like any horror show, the monsters are nothing more than a plot device for revealing the darkness that lies within. The true horror is in the fact that such extreme fear peddlers and hate mongers can run at the top of one of our two major parties. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our candidates…