Smart Money, Stupid Money, and Flatulence

Let's cut to the cheese, I mean the chase. This presidential contest, at which we the plebeians are reduced to mere spectators, has officially devolved into a battle between elitism and vulgarity.

The headlines in the mainstream media blast out the story that the Clintonites desperately want you to hear. This is a battle between piles of cash. There's good, plentiful cash and then there's bad skimpy cash. None of it will ever actually be yours, or even used to improve your lives, but they do want you to root for it anyway.

And at this point, the smart liberal money (elite Clinton) is beating the stupid reactionary money (vulgar Trump.)

Trump is getting crushed, not by the allegedly superior and more humanitarian policies of Hillary Clinton, but by her big fat mean Money Machine. It really is a Dollarocracy, people!

Trump Starts Summer Push With Crippling Money Deficit  jeers the headline in today's New York Times:  

Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.He has a staff of around 70 people — compared with nearly 700 for Mrs. Clinton — suggesting only the barest effort toward preparing to contest swing states this fall. And he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday, after concerns among allies and donors about his abili a competitive race.

Nothing insults and weakens a narcissistic tycoon more than accusing him of being flat broke. Not accusations of bigotry, or misogyny, or xenophobia, or con artistry, or sprayed-on tan, or fake hair. In Trump World, honest and direct personal groveling before members of one's own class is tantamount to panhandling and an admission of failure. It's a slap in the face to the Art of the Deal. It's a blow to Trump's super-ego, or more accurately, to his super-id. His self-worth is based entirely upon his net worth. And his net worth is looking more and more like a Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme by the minute.

Fund-raising efforts for Mr. Trump have been hampered by the candidate’s own erratic public comments. He has repeatedly said he will pay for his own campaign even as his volunteers fan out around the country to solicit six-figure checks, confusing allies and potential donors alike.

“Two days ago, he said, ‘I may fund it myself,’” Mr. (GOP Operative Ed) Rollins said. “Donors are all being cautious about what’s going to happen here.”

And if Hillary Clinton is labeled a rich elitist candidate in the process, solely defined by her bank account, that suits her just fine. It deflects attention away from the essential vulgarity of her own rise to power, her subsequent self-enrichment from her family foundation, political influence-peddling, paid speeches, and various venal SuperPacs.

She has no Trumpian qualms. After all, she heartily admitted that she and Bill were "dead broke" when they left the White House, just barely scraping by with a new estate in Westchester County and multimillions in book advances, not to mention a Senate seat representing Wall Street for Hill and the lucrative speaking circuit for Bill.

Her virtue, they want all of you poor slobs out there to know, lies in her superior ability to handle her money and get an endless supply it by expertly stroking and grooming an endless supply of eager donors. Trump's vice is not only his mishandling of his own possibly fraudulent fortune, it's also his inability to hire the right people to handle, and get, the billions in campaign cash that he so desperately needs to win. Schmoozing well with others doesn't come naturally to a media bully whose main claim to fame is firing people when he's not kicking them out of his Nuremberg-style campaign rallies.

Hillary knows how to take advantage of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. As leaked DNC documents show, her bundlers are even furnished with a delicate script to help coax the mega-rich from their money. Donald hasn't  figured how to flatter too many people besides himself yet, and time's running out. Therefore, as the media narrative has it this week, he should be disqualified on the basis of his puny finances as well as on the basis of his policies (whatever they really are; he hasn't figured that out either.) The handful of wealthy donors who select the candidates, win the elections and buy the government policies and tax breaks they want, certainly don't want to invest in an incompetent or lying gasbag with attention deficit disorder.

 The self-dealing benignity of the educated wealthy has been an integral part of the mythology of American liberalism since the founding of the Republic - just as dissing greater-evil barbarians like Trump has always been part of their public relations campaign to hold on to power. They claim to abhor his boorish divide-and-conquer rhetoric, even as they themselves are just fine with the status quo of Planned Political Gridlock for Plutocratic Gain. Similarly, the smart Founders justified owning other human beings by simply pointing across the pond at those vulgar Brits, who had the poor inhumane taste to banish people to workhouses and debtors' prisons.

Not that everything is calm and cool in Clintoncashland, of course. Otherwise it wouldn't be Clintonian. Even with her premature "clinching" of the nomination, Hillary is strangely still paranoid about Bernie Sanders.

On Monday, for example, the New Jersey Democratic Committee unceremoniously purged its own former chairman just because he is a Bernie Sanders delegate. The booted official, State Assemblyman John Wisniewski, wryly called the move ironic, given that right before he was dumped, the committee had been discussing ways to unify Clinton and Sanders supporters.

This move came right on the heels of the Congressional Black Caucus vowing to fight Sanders's proposal to abolish the super-delegate system, in which both elected officials and unelected donors and lobbyists get weighted votes to put establishment candidates over the top in intra-party contests. The CBC is also vehemently against holding open primaries in states that currently bar Republican and independent voters from casting ballots in Democratic primary contests. "We wouldn't want to have to run against our own constituents," protested Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), somewhat feebly and undemocratically.

Apparently, Hillary's campaign slogan of "breaking down barriers" doesn't quite extend to opening doors to more marginalized voters. 

Meanwhile, the cash-strapped marginalia plan to fight the political hot air with some potent gas of their own. Vulgarity is as vulgarity does, as my mama used to say. So former Green Party vice presidential candidate Cheri Honkala has announced an epic Fart-In to counteract Hillary's acceptance speech next month in Philly.

Honkala, a single mom who has personally dealt with poverty and homelessness, told Truthdig: 

“We will be holding a massive bean supper for Bernie Sanders delegates on American Street in my Kensington neighborhood on the afternoon of July 28,” she said. “We are setting up a Clintonville there, modeled on the Hoovervilles of the 1930s where the poor and unemployed built shanty towns. The Sanders delegates, their bellies full of beans, will be able to return to the Wells Fargo Center and greet the rhetorical flatulence of Hillary Clinton with the real thing.”

Honkala said she would issue an invitation to Sanders to join the bean supper, which she is calling Beans for Hillary. She has asked donors to send cans of beans to 1301-W Porter Street, Philadelphia, Pa., 19148.

“Any remaining beans will be served to the homeless, although we will, of course, be urging Sanders delegates to eat as much as possible,” Honkala said.

This kind of flips the noxious advice to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil right on its butt.

How about making the Evils hold their own noses for a change?  

 Jonathan Swift, writing under the pseudonym Don Fartando, may have been the first to warn the proles of the severe health hazards of bottling up your gas. He  wrote a satiric pamphlet, called "The Benefit of Farting" way back in 1722, to counter a scolding sadistic screed published by the austerians of the wealthy ruling class, advising the poor on "The Benefit of Fasting."

Confronting the bombastic Clintonian winds of war with a mass outbreak of popular bumbast might be just the therapy that everybody needs.

The Fart of the Deal