The Nikki Haley “clean sweep” which exposes the rot
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.
Franklin P. Adams
American politics can be both fascinating and confounding to the casual observer. Every election cycle necessitates the splurging of obscene amounts of donor money on campaigns and is a mix of glitz, glamour, and wild entertainment. Beneath the veil of this elaborate theatrical performance, however, is a cesspool of deceit, treachery, self-service and subservience to a shady elite funding the whole sorry mess.
Judging by how Americans react to the daily in-your-face manifestation of the political system, they’re primarily reconciled to its charms. Without doubt, American politics is the gift that keeps giving to casual outsiders and entertainers looking for content for their shows. Donald Trump is a case in point; he provides mountains of source material for the comedy industry.
And yet, other situations demonstrate the abysmal absurdity of it all. Take the recent New Hampshire Republican primary (another curiosity of the American democratic system where potential Presidential candidates for a party dox it out for final inclusion on the ballot). Nikki Haley, one of the remaining Republican candidates in the upcoming 2024 election, managed a clean sweep of one of the voting districts in early voting – all six voters.
This, however, is not even the hilarious part. The vote-counting process was broadcast on national television as is conventionally done in election cycles, no doubt to appease the masses starved of silly entertainment. From the embedded video, it is evident that the attendant journalists, camera operators, reporters, broadcast personnel, election officials and onlookers outnumbered the actual voters, by some estimates ten to one.
This pomp and ceremony was for a candidate least deserving of such. Nikki Haley, the hawkish erstwhile American ambassador to the United Nations, has publicly called for the bombing of Gaza in Palestine and even Iran by asking genocidal Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish them.” It’s also ironic that she is one in a line of non-white faces in recent years to represent America at the UN, in what must ostensibly be the more dubious side of Imperialism – like in the recent successive ceasefire vetos involving the Israel-Palestine massacre.
Fortunately I’ve weaned myself off the lure of American politics. Late-night left-wing shows, once staple entertainment for me, like Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Stephen Colbert Show, rely primarily on comedic material from right-wing politics and barely elicit a laugh from me. Instead, they serve to strip bare the utter depravity of a political system that will soon eat itself.
Douglas Adams, in one of the books of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy trilogy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, made one of the most astute observations of politics in general, but befitting of American politics in particular, and is a fitting closure for this essay:
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarise, it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job
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