Twilight Zone Of Politics

We're So Screwed It's Not Funny

Just check out this list:

• The first day of the new sitting week began with a government MP calling for Labor leader Bill Shorten to resign if Donald Trump is elected US president.
• One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts then released a 42-page document claiming the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology corrupted climate data and that global warming is an international scam.
• Roberts was flanked by fellow climate science deniers, Tony Heller (left) and Tim Ball. The latter claimed the ~global climate conspiracy~ was all the fault of a group of elites called the “Club of Rome” and an international businessman named “Maurice Strong”.
• It was later discovered that Tony Heller blogs under the pseudonym Steve Goddard and has written conspiracy theories about the events surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre.
• When journalists at the event started asking questions about fellow One Nation senator Rod Culleton, party adviser James Ashby yelled at the media and the press conference was shut down.
• The Senate spent most of the morning discussing the plebiscite on same-sex marriage. But with Labor, the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team and Derryn Hinch all pledging to vote against the bill, it’s going to fail.
• During that debate, David Leyonhjelm dismissed the argument that the plebiscite will be hurtful to LGBTI people, comparing it to Martin Luther King halting his advocacy for fear of hurting “psychologically fragile Negroes”.
• OK, back to the House of Representatives… government MP (and former whip) Scott Buchholz accidentally seconded a motion criticising his own government for “short-changing pensioners”.
• Then One Nation senator Rod Culleton got up in the Senate and delivered a bizarre speech defending himself from claims he’s actually ineligible to serve as a senator because of a previous conviction (since overturned) for stealing a truck key.

And if you go to the link, there's more!

Like, uh, what the fuck has happened to our polity to throw up such idiots into seats of power and high office of this land? This is the like the Peak Stupid, the Apotheosis of Climactic Idiocy, The Apocalypse of Dumb, the Twilight of the Idles, the Dance the Sugarplum Morons... you get the picture. If you had a competition to see how much stupid you could fit in a Volkswagen and replaced the venerable wagon with Parliament House, well then you'd get what we seem to have right now running our nation. Really, never has the fine line between *running* and *ruining* been so fine.

It's Coming To An End

We can almost see the finish line. It'll be about 36hours from now before we'll know who is going to be the next POTUS. At this point the smart money - and I do emphasise the smart bit - is on Hillary Clinton. The dumb, deplorable, miserable, crass, ill-educated money is on her opponent Donald Trump, from whom if we never heard anything ever again after this election, would be too soon. 

The FBI have now cleared Hillary. This has been one of those issues that make you scratch your head; especially the zombie movie like second life this idiotic email server business got in the wake of James Comes announcing that there might be something in Anthony Weiner's laptop that might pertain to Hillary. Well of course there *might*, seeing that Weiner is the rare talent who combined his name into his behaviour and managed a political career of some description while doing so and -let's face it- being so. If anybody's computer could possibly connect dick pics with blown covers on classified information, it would be Anthony Weiner's laptop. 

I have to say it's a brave officer who wants to even touch said machine. 

Anyway, what surprises me about the FBI is that they want to search through that stack of emails in search of something upon which to indict Hillary Clinton. The better stack would be the stream of emails that Wikileaks are releasing. 

JOHN PILGER: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. 

JOHN PILGER: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth]more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. 

JOHN PILGER: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. 

JOHN PILGER: That’s extraordinary. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction]to their ambitions.
She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. 

She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.

So yes, that would be the person who is most likely going to be the next POTUS. Amazingly, the FBI won't be investigating this stack of emails because it wants to busy itself with the other emails. Unbelievable. 

I sure as hell don't want to be on the side of Trump, but honest to goodness, Hillary Clinton is a really tough sell as the 'good' alternative to the 'bad' choice of Donald Trump.