Dinos and Rinos v. Insurgents
On the left Bernie Sanders threatens the Dinos or the Yuppies, the careerists and aspiring professionals who are democrats in name only but reflect the values of onetime moderate republicans. Increasingly, the public is learning that the Clintonistas exemplify the “bad faith” dinos, who are foreign policy hawks and Wall Street travelers.
On the right Donald Trump has tapped into “the politics of grievance and anger,” the white flight identity refugees, who oppose the browning of America and ignore the Jeffersonian maxim that “all men are created equal.” But Trumpistas must compete with Cruz’s twisted Christians, who ignore the gospel notions of “love thy neighbor” and “turn the other cheek.” These “republicans in name only” (rinos) like the Paul Ryan/Ayan Rand wing believe in the “borrow and spend” politics of the wealthy who support the war machine socially and the NRA individually.
In this the greatest reality show now being televised, the blowhard broadcasters torture the electorate in the language of Vegas bookies, and daily recalibrate the odds of the presidential horse race. Meanwhile the pundits ignore climate change, offshore and Manhattan/D.C. tax evaders, the drone attacks on women and children abroad while creating daily more enemies who conspire to blow up you and yours at home. By ignoring fair tax assessments, the wealthy have shifted the burden for a decaying infrastructure onto to the backs of students and the poor, today’s indentured servants. Each day some statistician announces that fewer individuals (100? 60?) control more assets than the bottom fifty percent in the nation and world.
The values of the enlightenment (universal human rights) have been replaced by the culture of gluttony, embodied by shopping baskets full of detritus from Walmart and pictured in the way energy companies plunder the planet and emit carbon that warms the earth and shortens the lifespan. And so we reap the whirlwind of rising tides and impromptu storms.
While the Clintonites question how Bernie will pay for reform, they ignore the almost 20 Trillion dollar debt borrowed by a generation of rinos and dinos in the Senate, House, and White House. For our representatives have exported the tools of war and manufacturing jobs abroad and saddled average Americans and their grandchildren’s grandchildren with short and long-term debt. The presidential circus renews each day resource-free and wind-filled conversation just as the information age speaks less with knowledge and more in the manner of gossip. The language has been so trivialized by the decadent arts of public relations that nobody believes anybody anymore.
Still, now comes a new generation of millennials, reminiscent of the dropouts from the sixties but who are “drop ins” and want to “fix the fixers,” the sixties sell-outs spawned by the “baby-boomers.” The “Berners” offer both an antidote to “politics as usual” in both the short and long term. For the Sanderdistas, an outgrowth of “Occupy,” are slowly forming alliances with “Black Lives Matter” and all the young people who reject the conventional politics of conformity.
You can Bern with Bernie the unreconstructed socialist or stagnate with Clinton; climb on the Trump train or crucify yourself with Cruz. We report, you decide.