American Politics To Continue Being A Grotesque Plutocratic Spectacle For The Foreseeable Future

(Huffington Post) - It's been a while since we've checked in on how American politics is thriving within the Doom Loop of Oligarchy (TM Ezra Klein!), but a fresh dispatch from Politico's Mike Allen offers us another opportunity to goggle at the slow-motion death of American exceptionalism. The issue at hand, as ever, is the ruling class of billionaires who fund our presidential campaign dumb-show. More specifically, it's the Brothers Koch, who have an assignment for former Florida governor and presidential hopeful Jeb Bush. Per Allen:

In another surprise, a top Koch aide revealed to POLITICO that Jeb Bush will be given a chance to audition for the brothers’ support, despite initial skepticism about him at the top of the Kochs’ growing political behemoth.

Mr. Bush will be expected to perform a two-minute classical monologue about tax cuts, a two-minute comic monologue about tax cuts, and 32 bars of a contemporary Broadway musical ballad about union-busting.

This is good news for Jeb, I guess. As Allen notes, the last time the Kochs cooked up an audition, it was at their "winter seminar" in January, and according to those present, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was the clear standout at that confab. But Bush will be getting "a second look" at the brothers' summer conference, because "so many Koch supporters think he looks like a winner."

Read more.

(Godwin's Law appendix:  The immediate reaction to this last ominous quote is, how deluded can supposedly intelligent leaders of a huge business conglomerate like the Kochs be?  So what if they value their influence and money so little they would throw it away by bankrolling a doomed third Bush vanity run.  It seems inconceivable that enough Americans would willingly vote to elect yet a third member of this Bush nuclear family  to the presidency within one generation.  Likewise, if Republicans are stupid enough to allow JEB! to buy the Republican nomination with money from the Koch's and other billionaires, instead of nominating a worthy choice from a younger generation, they immediately surrender their best argument against Hillary Clinton in favor of a contest of competing legacies they will surely lose.  

That's the conventional wisdom.

It's also true that Hitler lost the 1932 German presidential election to Hindenberg, 53 to 37 percent, and that the Nazi's suffered crushing losses in the November 1932 Reichstag elections, dropping millions of votes from previous election totals.  Yet Hitler was absolute ruler of Germany within a year, and had led his nation to complete destruction within little more than a decade.

Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong.  Unlike the Berlin cabaret comics who were celebrating New Years 1933 with jokes about Hitler's political demise, our own political clowns like Bill Maher and others should not underestimate the seemingly pathetic Bushes, neither their pathological Nietzschean sense of deluded entitlement, nor their ruthless political machine.  Both are starkly real, and threaten the Republic with mortal danger.)