“We head to Chicago on a wave of euphoria, exuberance, exultation, excitement and even, you might say, ecstasy.” - Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
By James Howard Kunstler - August 19, 2024
Looking a little insurrection-ish at Chicago’s United Center all of a sudden as Illinois Governor Jabba the Pritzker orders a wall built around the perimeter to protect the Democratic Party from its very own basket of deplorables — the pro-Hamas, Antifa / BLM nose-ring-for-lunch bunch — with the state’s National Guard “on standby.” The New York Post and other news sources report 100,000 anti-Israel protesters migrating there to liven-up a convention that also has the potential to go off-script inside the arena — since the script was written by a handful of party mandarins, with the gamed consent of the convened delegates, who might be a little ticked off about the deal.
What the party needs most this week is a plausible aura that it is firmly in control of events, having pulled off coup-after-coup on its own rank-and-file. Most recently, Pelosi & friends passed the black spot to “Joe Biden.” (The easy way or the hard way.) He took the hint and dropped out. But then, how exactly did Veep Kamala get plugged into his slot? Five minutes prior, they were, like, yccchhhh, her? And then, two seconds later, somebody arranged a pre-convention Zoom call “virtual vote” of the delegates — like a Las Vegas David Copperfield magic trick — followed by “certification!” (By whom? Answer: the certifiers.) Badda bing, badda bang! Their “democracy” got rolled.
So, you can imagine that things might fly out of control in exact proportion to the Mandarins’ desperate need to seem legitimately in control — when they are just a clique of scared-stiff tyrants running scams on their own people — and the result looks like the Democrats’ certified metamorphosis into the Party of Chaos.
Why scared-stiff? Because of a long list of serious crimes against the American people over the past decade, various treasons committed under color-of-law, for which they fear prosecution and punishment if the wrong person gets elected.
Just in the normal course of things in Chicago, local ABC-7 News reports, “At least 23 shot, 5 fatally, in weekend gun violence across city” over the pre-convention weekend. You have to wonder whether this ordinary background lawlessness will wash over into the political turmoil certain to roil the streets. Lootin’, anyone? Businesses in the downtown “Loop” district have boarded up their windows. As if a measly sheet of plywood can keep them out.
I happened to be at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, more in the role of a larval journalist than an activist, but right there in the action. I drove to Chicago from upstate New York with my college pal Bill Murphy in his beater Rambler — the car with reclining seats you could sleep on! (We did, in various parking lots.) Prior to the event, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother, an avowed anti-war candidate, marched methodically through the primaries collecting delegates, giving hope to the vast Baby Boomer college demographic that he would end the stupid war in Vietnam and the military draft with it. When he got shot in the head at the Ambassador Hotel June 5, the night he won the California primary, everything changed.
The then-mandarins of the party looked to cram in the pro-war veep Hubert Humphrey to run against Richard Nixon. Left on the battlefield were two anti-war knights, Minnesota Senator Eugene (“Clean Gene”) McCarthy, a cranky poet without much fight in him, and George McGovern, a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time prairie socialist from the nowhere state of South Dakota. You might be amazed to hear that the mainstream media of the day was against the war, and pretty hostile to the political establishment that ran things from President Lyndon Johnson on down to Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago — with the CIA and FBI lurking darkly in their shadows, busy assassinating folks. Walter Cronkite had a shit-fit on-the-air watching Mayor Daley’s thugs push around network journalists (esp. Dan Rather) working the convention floor. The party emerged from the convention in a very bad odor. Humphrey lost in November.
Daley and his police were a rough bunch, and treated the hippie mobs in Grant Park and down on Michigan Avenue quite harshly, with tear gas and billy-clubs. The National Guard was poised visibly on the roof of the Art Institute with rifles trained down at the hippies below. Things got pretty yeasty. It’s a wonder nobody got killed. The party went ahead and nominated Humphrey with ruthless efficiency. In the end, the 1968 convention riots were an act of futility. The ’68 convention was the public debut of the organism that we call the blob today — the Deep State in action. And it was the twinkling-out of hippie idealism. The Vietnam War ran another seven years until it ended ignominiously under Gerald Ford, followed by disco, inflation, and the offshoring of US industry.
This time around, the news media has been fully absorbed into the blob, doing all its bidding, like the blob’s personal Chat GPT, while the blob itself has grown to be a larger and more potent governing entity than the flimsy scaffold of elected officials who front for it. But the Democratic Party has faltered badly in its years’ long efforts to cover for the blob, mainly by lying to the American people about everything. Running “Joe Biden” in 2020 was a dishonest act of desperation that only worked with a rigged election and then prosecuting anyone who attempted to complain. The party knew that “JB” was a mental phantom four years ago, and they had the effrontery to try running him again in ’24, until ol’ “Joe” made it impossible with his demented public behavior.
They also know that Kamala Harris is an empty vessel with a drinking problem, but they’ve desperately pulled out all the stops to make her appear legitimate. Her performance the past three weeks has not exactly been reassuring. Her running mate, Governor Walz, comes off straight-up insane. Why would they now not attempt to dump them with the same bad faith they installed them?
Gawd knows what mayhem might . . .
[SNIP]
