Laughs and Loathing In Las Vegas

Given that a New York jury is currently deliberating the fate of Harvey Weinstein, Mike Bloomberg certainly picked a bad night to utter the words "women" and "consensual" in the same nasal breath.

 Weinstein's defense against rape charges is that it was consensual sex. Bloomberg's defense of the nondisclosure agreements related to his serial workplace misogyny ("Jokes I told") is that the gagging of women was also consensual. These gals, Bloomberg insinuated, loved every minute of his smothering legalities. So no, he will never release them from their lingering pleasurable bondage.

It remains to be seen whether the thousands of ads playing every single minute all around Bloombergville USA will offset his dismal debate performance. He seemed hell-bent not so much on winning the nomination and the presidency, but on winning the Oscar for his wizened, whining live-action portrayal of Mr. Burns. 

"Portrayal" is kind of a stretch, because the godzillionaire former mayor became stone cold dead on his feet once Elizabeth Warren got through with him.

Just the clip of him rolling his eyes in bored disdain as she destroyed him should be enough to ruin his candidacy. Then again, there are those nonstop ubiquitous ads costing him an estimated $3000 a minute just in local TV markets alone, the hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune being spent on bribing politicians and super-delegates and cable TV executives and journalists and paying off the country's entire stable of consultants, pollsters, PR flacks and caterers. At the rate that his vast fortune is consuming all the "talent," the least he can do is endow a graduate program in Electoral Chicanery at Harvard to keep churning out the elite entrepreneurs of the future.

Elizabeth Warren did Bernie Sanders a huge favor by going after Bloomberg, while only making soft murmuring complaints when the NBC moderators baited her with the Bernie Bro trope. As for Bernie himself, red-baited from both the right and the center, his theory that a couple of his online supporters might even be linked to "Russian interference" made me roll my own eyes in dismay. But I suppose we should be grateful that at long last, Sanders did not once preface an answer with "So-and-so is a good friend of mine."

Since his good friend Joe Biden is already a political corpse, nobody even bothered to call out his breathtaking hypocrisy when he scolded Bloomberg over his racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Biden's authorship of the racist Crime Bill set the stage long ago for Bloomberg's own ethnic cleansing ("gentrification") campaign. As recently as Obama's second term, the former vice president was leading the charge for more cops on the street and more high tech military hardware of the type used against the citizens of Ferguson, MO when they became upset over the police killing of Michael Brown. The fact that immigration activists loudly disrupted his closing argument was barely even mentioned in mainstream media debate narratives this morning.

Given that billionaire Tom Steyer was missing from the stage, centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar got more generous time to snipe at one another while urging everybody else to stop fighting so as to beat Donald Trump and magically "bring the country together."  What do you call it when two annoying, cloying centrists cancel each other out - besides its being a very refreshing sight to behold?

I've gone from dismay to delight that Bloomberg successfully bribed his way on to the debate stage. People finally got a look at him without the protective gauze of his glitzy TV commercials. They're also getting a much-needed true picture of the hordes of liberal politicians who have fallen all over themselves to endorse him in exchange for his "philanthropy." He has shown once and for all that not only can he not beat Trump, he is simply a more urbane, nasal,annoying - and dangerous - version of Trump. He is Trump without the stand-up comedy talent.

If Bloomberg is anointed the nominee in the second ballot of a contested convention - or worse, if he is simply the stalking horse for a third Hillary Clinton run -  it will spell the final and long-overdue demise of the Democratic Party and perhaps even usher in the long-overdue street actions and revolts and strikes that this country so sorely needs. It would likely be the smallest turnout in modern electoral history.

Even if Bernie Sanders does win the presidency, moreover, the corporate Democrats will have no other choice but to show whose side they are really on as they thwart his every reasonable executive action.

Thanks to Michael Bloomberg, reality in all its ugliness is finally getting a fair shake and a fair hearing. The rotten center cannot hold.