The Quadrennial Farce Is Almost Over; Israel's Barbarity Isn't and Won't Be Anytime Soon

The interminable lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential elections is finally almost over, with the establishment approved candidates in a virtual statistical tie.  Once again a horrendous choice is offered to  American voters in order to distract them from their problems, which cannot be faced by either the Democratic or Republican parties, much less solved by them.

In the final weeks the empty rhetoric of Kamala Harris and unending insults of Donald Trump seem unable to budge the electorate, which appears to have decided long ago for whom it intends to vote. Neither the crude personal attacks by Trump against Harris nor the efforts of Harris to present herself as the candidate of good sense and the future appear to have convinced anyone of anything.

Trump has been unable to make clear any plans he may have for governing the country he promises to "make great again," and offers nothing convincing on why he will be better in a second term than he was in his first, when 400,000 Americans died of Covid while Trump repeatedly claimed it was on the verge of magically disappearing.  

It never did.

Meanwhile, Harris has warned that "democracy" will be suspended if Trump wins, even as her Democratic Party provides an avalanche of lethal arms to Israel, which it uses to pitilessly exterminate a defenseless civilian population in Palestine while unilaterally igniting a regional war in the Middle East, both policies in flagrant violation of human rights law, supposedly an indispensable working part of said democracy. Back at home, Harris's party works aggressively to deny ballot access to independent parties calling for peace via an arms embargo on Israel, an explicitly anti-democratic stance that is beneath contempt.

This is at the heart of what Harris's vice-presidential candidate Tim Wals claims is a "politics of joy" now uniting Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and everyone in between, a broad coalition of "truly optimistic people," says Wals. 

Ah, yes, optimistic people, just what we've been lacking.

Isn't it comforting to know that neo-cons who butchered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians a generation ago are now optimistically united in joyful lethality with liberals and neo-liberals, all dedicated to ending Trump's "existential" threat to "democracy," so that they, not he, will get sole credit for enabling Israel's wholesale extermination campaign in the Middle East?