The Iowan Farce

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

The Iowa caucuses are over, and the media is again frothing over the impending New Hampshire primary and the subsequent South Carolina primary.

The Madison Conservative has previously commented on the overall absurdity and basic unconstitutionality of elevating these private enterprise beauty contests to the level of a true democratic republic election, and thus we will not belabor the point further.

The lessons of  Iowa are however stark in their reality and history has taught us that if we do not learn from our history and the mistakes we collectively as a nation have made, then we are doomed to repeat those mistakes again, and in certain cases repeat them in perpetuity.

Let us examine more closely some of the lessons of the Iowa follies of 2011. There were, as the mass media tells us, several ‘viable’ candidates, and that in the aftermath of the caucus, one such candidate, Representative Michelle Bachmann, withdrew from the race. The notion of ‘viability’ is an interesting concept and the storyline that some of the candidates would be forced to withdraw from contention is a dangerous path to take.

To wit:

There were roughly 123,000 total votes cast in the caucus. According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), there were approximately 303, 824, 640 registered voters in the United States as of the 2008 presidential election. There are no further updated counts to be found via the FEC, despite the fact we have had three national elections in the interim; apparently the FEC only considers the numbers of registered to be of significance only in a quadrennial way.

Simple math thus tells us that each Iowa vote cast represents approximately 2,469 American voters, or in other words a state that encompasses 1/50^th of the United States body politic has become so powerful in deciding this nations fate with only a true 1/2469^th representative sampling.

This was most assuredly not what the founders and the framers had intended.

Another lesson from the Iowa state circus was the perpetuation of the political class and the media’s love affair with it. Of the seven ‘viable’ candidates, somehow all of them warranted some level of political titular honor despite the reality that most of them are again no more than mere citizens.

To wit:

Mitt Romney is no longer a governor, yet he is continually addressed as such.

The same fact applies to Jon Huntsman.

Newt Gingrich has not been the Speaker of the House since the late 1990’s; how he retains the title is indeed suspect.

The American electorate needs to dissuade the media from creating a elective class that believes in political titular birthrights. It is a dangerous trend in American politics and does not bode well for the future of American democracy if we afford nornmal citizens a lifetime title.

The biggest lesson that should be taken from the Iowa process is that six or seven people on a stage with a minute time frame can never and will never provide the people of this nation with an honest and intellectual airing of the issues which confront the nation.

The media providing the insipid and intellectual lightweight questioning should also be shunned as nothing more than carnival barkers hawking the two headed dog as being something of substance. It is insult to the American people. The electorate should demand debates in the Lincoln- Douglas model: subjects discussed openly and honestly for hours without an eye to creating a sound bite for the media.

If we do not heed these lessons from Iowa and the subsequent primaries of private entities, than we shall, as the saying goes, get the government we deserve.

The Primary Season Lie

(ed. Note : the political parties at the heart of this discussion have purposely been given lower case denotations; they have abdicated their right to proper punctuational  designation)

There can be few acts more nefarious to American democracy than those perpetrated by a select few upon the American electorate under the guise of protecting the freedom of the press and the sacred right to vote.

Honest political debate and people of good will having opposing views upon how to lead America into the future are nothing more than the signs of a vibrant and healthy democracy flourishing  under the ideals set forth by the founders and the framers of the United States Constitution. The current assault on our freedom is being executed on the American people by the full spectrum of the body politic and their ignorant media flacks who blather on about issues for which they are ill equipped to discuss with any modicum of intelligence.

This is not a tirade on the mass media outlets, but rather a warning for vigilance on the part of the American people to protect and preserve their birthright of freedom.

The current mythology being presented by many of our elected officials and media pundits is that this is the ‘primary’ season, where the major political entities meander and wander through an arcane and intellectually dishonest practice of determining their respective nominees for the presidency of the United States.

The entire process is a charade and an insult to democratic principles for which untold millions have sacrificed their lives to protect.

To wit:

It may come as a surprise too both democrats and republicans alike, but they are NOT government. They are private enterprises who have lied their way into the halls of power by an electorate who have been too busy earning their daily wage ( to be first confiscated arbitrarily by the taxman) , raising their families and pursuing the American dream to notice the theft of their democracy.

The republican and democratic parties have created the entire primary series of shenanigans out of whole cloth. They are free to select their slate of nominees in any method they choose, but they must avoid the subterfuge of presenting the process as being open and honest. Many states, under the guidance of the respective parties, have registration restrictions to vote in a primary; republicans cannot vote in democratic primaries and vice versa. In a ridiculous attempt to present a more ‘open’ and free process, some states allow for open primaries, allowing any registered voter to vote in either or both primary. The ability for political mischief in the name of political sport is a disgrace to those who fell at Gettysburg, the beaches of Normandy, and anywhere Americans gave their lives in defense of liberty.

The mass media who present these side shows as integral to democracy are either intellectual light weights or outright stupid; in either case, they are harming American self-rule in more ways than one.

The American people should, en masse, ignore all the caucuses, primaries and any variation to demonstrate their solidarity against the assault on their freedom.

Our ancestors, ourselves and our posterity deserve no less.

American self-rule is not sport. It is the realization of the history of man to live in freedom.

The nonsense of primaries, caucuses and straw polls must be kept in the pantheon of the ridiculous and not allowed to further infect the body politic.

The only election that should be allowed media coverage in the context of national significance is the quadrennial one delineated in the Constitution.