Puppet show masquerading as democracy

As I am anguished about the perils to our own democracy, I must say that I find the handwringing on the part of some abroad a bit ironic — or, to put it more charitably, reflecting an obsession with form over substance.

There is of course the European Union, which does have a parliament that is effectively a glorified debating society — all the real power being vested in the European Commission made up of unelected bureaucrats. This is quite bad enough: the UK did wisely with Brexit (as even my elder brother, a onetime socialist and EU-booster turned Euroskeptic in his retirement, now admits), and Israel was wise to keep the EU at the metaphorical arms’ length of joining the Enlarged Economic Area but nothing further.

In the USA, we have something even worse going on, as Daniel Greenfield lays out here. Two of the “majority” senators are mentally incapacitated — Fetterman in a psychiatric hospital, 89-year old Dianne Feinstein ostensibly hospitalized for “shingles” but clearly suffering from dementia —but “they” still cosponsor bills from their hospital beds (including one that would “Protect Women’s Health” by permitting abortion until right before birth). Or rather, their staffers do — the same ones that announced Feinstein’s not running for re-election without her knowledge.

The New York Times claims that Senator Fetterman “runs his Senate operation” from a psych ward. Photos have been released of him vaguely looking at pieces of paper. No satirist could have come up with a bleaker metaphor for the country than that one of the Senate’s deciding votes has been hospitalized in a psych ward for his own safety, but is still running everything.

The paper tells us that, “since Mr. Fetterman checked in to the hospital, he has co-sponsored a bipartisan bill designed to help prevent future train derailment disasters, opened new district offices across Pennsylvania and hired four new staff members. On Wednesday, Mr. Fetterman sent a letter to the agriculture secretary.” With productivity like that, maybe we should stick all of Congress in a mental institution. Fetterman was so badly off that couldn’t feed himself in a city filled with eateries, but is now in a position to write legislation that will change the country.

Every morning, Fetterman’s chief of staff arrives with a briefcase “full of newspaper clips, statements for him to approve, legislation to review.” And so the government is run. According to the New York Times, the Senator from Pennsylvania even touchingly shares “with the nurses some of the sweets that have been sent to him by fellow senators.” But “his staff is marching on in his absence”, much as they were doing in his presence. Fetterman out of the way makes it even more convenient. The staffers run things while Fetterman munches on some candy.

The Times, in the great tradition of the three phases of a liberal scandal (1. denial, 2. minimization, 3. announcing that it’s the new normal), told its readers that “in the Senate, a staff-run institution even in the best of times, that is hardly atypical. It is not unusual for lawmakers to be told by members of their staff, sometimes after the fact, what bills they are co-sponsoring.”

If this is democracy (in substance, not name), I’m a ball bearing. But more than that:

Not only does the Senate Democrat majority consist of the D.C. staffers in two offices trying to work around the elected officials whose names are on the door, but the Senate’s proudest son is sitting in the Oval Office (when he’s not vacationing every other day in Delaware) and appears to have trouble completing sentences or remembering that his son didn’t die in Iraq.

Who’s actually running the White House? More of the same folks who are running the Senate.

[…] Two of the three branches of government are not being run by the people elected to do that job. That isn’t representative government, it’s a monarchy with titular figureheads who are there to give the public the illusion of democracy over the reality that D.C. runs itself. If the Senate is a “staff-run institution”, as the Times puts it, in which the status of the actual elected officials is a mere technicality over their ability to cast votes, and the White House is currently occupied by a former Senate member whose statements are routinely corrected or walked back by officials, who is actually running the country and has our system of government become illegitimate?

Not a monarchy but an oligarchy. Using Emmanuel Goldstein’s “The Theory And Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism” [the book-within-a-book in George Orwell’s “1984”] as a howto manual.

The Constitution requires that a senator be at least thirty years old, but if he or she is irrelevant to the process, then we might as well have a twelve year old or Caligula’s horse in the Senate.

As the old quip goes: in the name of good old American efficiency, it does the same with half the horse.

So, “democratic” transnational oligarchic collectivists: if you want to go fight actual enemies of democracy, good. I have a device that will help you find it: a reflecting metal layer behind glass, what’s it called again 😉

ADDENDUM: Everything, everywhere, all at once.

ADDENDUM 2: Flying pig moment of the day: “Pope Francis called today’s fashionable gender madness “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations” of our age. “Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.” For those who might not see that as actually dangerous, the pope explained, “All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences. The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”