I Have Seen The Future...And It's Chicago

This has been a theme here over a number of posts here.

Such as this. And this. And this. And this. And this, this, this, this, this, this and this. Not to mention this, this, this, this and of course this. I then got tired and stopped going through the archives. You get the idea.

Now, here's a hat-tip to Dr. Sanity (see here): she pointed to this post on The Greenroom over on Hot Air.

I won't comment extensively on either post, but consider this: this sort of bare-knuckle, below-the-belt, send-a-bus-of-protesters-to-your-house type of political campaigning is characteristic of your typical Chicago thuggery.

I have seen the future of politics in the US, as far as the Democrats are concerned: it's Chicago.

Go and look at Chicago politics, and you will find the same kind of corruption, the same kind of arrogance and sheer contempt for the common man, the average voter. It's heavily entrenched in the city, based on a system of local governance that has, for over 100 years, yielded nothing but corrupt governments and corrupt politicians. It's called the party machine, and exists via corrupt cronyism, patronage and outright intimidation, extortion and not a few murders to keep the system in place.

What do I mean by seeing the future?

Simple: President Obama and the Democratic Party Machine behind him are trying to install the party machine in Washington DC, with the goal of achieving the same kind of permanently corrupt system of governance that the people of Cook County have been living with. You do this by making the system itself corrupt: in this case, the takeover of the banking system, of turning the automobile industry over to the unions - and don't think that Ford won't be able to escape this, just wait for a wave of crippling strikes towards the end of 2009/beginning of 2010 - and the imposition of massive debts on the good citizens to keep them in their place.

Watch for the following: watering-down of the civil service system in order to install greater number of political operatives on the public payroll; stacking the court system to ensure that legal challenges do not make it out of the lower court system; rewriting ethics laws to ensure that any recourse is through the most corrupt; demonization of any opposition; the personalization of politics, including character assassination to make it very costly to oppose the bosses; including in normal legislation key passages that effectively require patronage; the use of police and government offices for intelligence-gathering purposes; use of the power of the courts and the power of government attorneys to intimidate political opponents, ruining them via long, drawn-out court battles and finally, the most critical problem: the establishment of a large, if not majority, of voters beholden to the machine.

In other words, the destruction of the American Republic and the establishment of a Democracy gone wrong. The future is Chicago.



And it's not a pretty future at all.

Imagine not being able to get a mortgage because you're a Republican (and hence a risk to the Party Machine); imagine having your house seized for eminent domain, but then find that it's been sold for a pittance to a member of the Party Machine; imagine having someone beat up your wife in front of your house because you've blogged about something that's wrong; imagine your kids failing school because their teacher has decided that they're not worthy of the Party Machine. Imagine being in the Party Machine without a way of getting out.

Watch for an attempt to call for a constitutional convention following some major event, be it terrorist or yet another financial collapse, to "update" the Constitution, to "bring it into the 21st Century". Watch for intimidation of Republican politicians, of witch-hunts in the Senate and in the House - we're awfully close to them right now - and watch, most of all, how this is either papered over (boy, the state of the press in the US gives that new meaning), ignored, or tastefully spun.

Watch for how developing opposition is dealt with: it's already obvious that the Obama White House is, in terms of going aggressively after public opponents, has clearly trumped the Nixon White House for making politics personal.

That Public-Private partnership to work out the TARP deals? That's a nice name for corruption. This is just the start: let the Democrats set things up the way they have been, and you'll be looking at the permanent Democratic majority of bought and paid for votes, a national Party Machine with no functioning opposition.

That is how Republics fall.