Showing posts with label peoples party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peoples party. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Then As Farce

The People's Party, which made its national debut to much progressive fanfare a couple of years ago, is now ginning up enthusiasm for the presidential candidacy of YouTube personality and standup comic Jimmy Dore.

Why not? Ukraine elected a TV comedian as its own president, and Volodomyr Z. certainly has set establishment and media hearts a-thumping all across the A to Be duopoly back here in the States. Let's face it - after the electorate getting relentlessly regaled by matinee idol Barack Obama and tabloid charlatan Donald Trump, contemporary politicians almost have to be pre-existing celebrities in order to capture any public attention at all.

 Donald Trump won in the GOP primaries because he acted more like a Borsht Belt comic in the Don Rickles genre than the standard noxious cutout Republicans on the 2016 debate stage. Even if you logically thought the guy was a clear and present danger to the earth and all humanity, you couldn't help but appreciate the zingers he aimed at Jeb! Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and that whole free-market gang.

Hillary Clinton certainly was no match for him. All he had to do was juxtapose his boundary-free media persona against this bellicose and humorless former Goldwater Girl, and the victory was his. As long as a life-long grifter can make you laugh right along with him as he makes your grievances and your darkest unspoken impulses his very own - with no punishment and with such an outlandish reward for him - then at least you don't feel so all alone in the world... for whole minutes at a time.

Joe Biden, sadly, is certainly no entertainer.  He was able to beat Trump in 2020 largely because the pandemic kept him locked up in his basement most of the time. Today, with everybody insanely unmasking as the virus rages on, the Democratic Party is in a veritable frenzy of loud whispering about his lack of popularity with the masses. All of a sudden, they're discovering that he is incapable of telling a good story or selling their Narrative Du Jour. And these days, "stories" and acting ability are really the only qualifications that a potential president needs. So when, in a sort of desperate Hail Mary move, his handlers finally sent Joe to a pre-recorded late night comedy show to entertain the folks at home, he simply ended up parodying his own failure to even basically communicate, let alone regale.

"So there’s a lot of major things we’ve done," Biden garbled to Jimmy Kimmel. "But what we haven’t done is we haven’t been able to communicate it in a way that is ah um…make me say another way.”

Politicians like Obama used to say "Make me do it!" as a disingenuous way to gaslight citizens for their own failure to clamor loudly enough for such nice things as single payer health care and debt-free college.  And since even the sympathetic Kimmel could not make Joe Biden form a complete sentence, he gave up completely and just cut to commercial from the political commercial.

In the most delicate kind of tip-toeing way to describe Biden's mental lapses (a/k/a "gaffes") the New York Times is obliquely urging him to fade gracefully into the sunset and not seek re-election. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod displayed his own skills at the glib doubletalk that his boss was so famous for, when he unctuously told the newspaper from both sides of his mouth:

“Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House, And part of the reason he doesn’t is performative. (My bold) He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality.”

Translation: sure, the guy is senile, but if you think so, its a mistake on your part and you are an awful, awful person, unlike concern trolls like me, David Axelrod.

And that detour from the ostensible topic of this post brings us back, on the long and winding road of political propaganda, to the nascent Jimmy Dore campaign for president. The main reason that I still watch Dore is for his "telephone interviews" with vocal impersonator Mike MacRae, who does a spot-on, hilarious David Axelrod as well as a perfect obstreperously incoherent Joe Biden.



Otherwise, Dore's shtick has been hit or miss for the last year or so, not least because of his rants about the pandemic, largely focused on medications that liberals don't like. There's also been a decidedly misogynistic slant to the show lately, emphasizing the looks and dress of certain female politicians and celebrities. His guest list, which used to include a wide variety of pundits, politicians, labor leaders and academics, has been largely diminished to a couple of fellow male white comic sidekicks allowed to chime in from time to time to bolster Dore's opinions.

 His interviewing style leaves a lot be desired as well, because these spots are all too often comprised of Dore beating a point to death, often bragging that he is the only guy to cover stories that put the establishment in a bad light, and then asking the guest to comment on the rant. When, for example, writer Chris Hedges appeared on the show last week, he was barely able to get a word in edgewise. More and more, the segments on the Dore show revolve around the latest mean Tweet that some liberal troll or media rival aimed at Jimmy and who was then severely "ratio'd" as a result.

I find myself tuning in less and less, and shutting it off as soon as Dore once again ventures into Covid rant territory, or Amber Heard or AOC territory,  amidst non-stop whining that YouTube is going to yank his channel away from him any day now.

But with a million YouTube subscribers and a nationwide standup tour, Dore certainly has his fans. And that brings me to what appears to be a hastily written and unedited email that I got yesterday from People's Party founder Nick Brana:

Millions lack food and health care and live paycheck to paycheck. Poverty wages now gutted by inflation. Eviction and homelessness sweep every city. Desperation so deep it drives people to opioid addiction and mass murder suicide. The looming fall of the dollar and depression. A dying empire lashing out for war with not one but two nuclear powers. The major left wing party in this country leading the charge for annihilation and censorship.

Thankfully, I and many others have recently found real hope and joy in the prospect that Jimmy Dore could run for president of the United States.

 

Jimmy has been considering a run for president with the People’s Party for the past several weeks. We’ve been discussing it with him and Stef and have developed a fifty state campaign and ballot access plan with organizers and leading ballot access attorneys. 


The crowds in Des Moines, Omaha and Kansas City erupted in cheers when Jimmy surprised everyone at his live stand up shows last month and said, “I’m thinking of running for president,” and took townhall style questions for the first time....


Jimmy would be the most popular comedian to ever run for president. He would be the first candidate with his own hugely popular online show — something that has only just now become possible due to the rise of the internet and independent media.

This missive goes on for almost the length of an interminable Jimmy Dore rant, so I'll give it a rest.

Despite the Dore candidacy being non-serious, disingenuous, and at worst, cult-like, it might even do some good. It would bring the whole class war cause of almost everything bad in this country right into the forefront. Since our whole society is tragically crumbling all around us anyway, what harm could a little more farce possibly do?

 But if he wants to get any traction at all, I think Dore should ditch the struggling People's Party, which is actually registered as a fundraising political action outfit. He should run as a Democrat to get even a slight chance of getting on a nationally televised primary debate stage and insulting all the wannabes waiting in the wings - such as the insufferable Pete Buttigieg and corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams, to name just two of the centrists under loud whispering consideration by party bigwigs. If a New Age outlier like Marianne Williamson could get a podium spot last time around, why not Jimmy Dore in 2024?

After all, the Democratic Party is all about the spectacle, as the January 6 Capitol Riot series now playing on the small screens of America has shown. Even if you think that Dore is funny or informative less than half the time, we can still use all the laughs we can get. And the comfortable and the powerful certainly deserve all the affliction that we can hurl at them.

I'm interested in hearing what readers think about all this.