From the Archives: Economic Anxiety May Decide Crucial Election

Editors' Note: The crucial midterm elections, with democracy hanging in the balance, are but two weeks away and we're seeing a lot of coverage of things like ... the high price of gasoline and Snickers bars, not to mention endless horse race stories about the likely effect of unpopular leaders.  Was there any other time when a vital election was covered by obscuring the real matter at issue?  We took a deep dive into our 252-year archives and fished this out:  (In a future issue, we'll look at what happened after the election.  Spoiler alert: it turned out badly!)

Adv. - WIN A FREE MEAL JUST BY PICKING RAGS FOR 14 HOURS!  KIDS OK! ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻      November 1, 1932                   LATE CITY FINAL★★★                        PRICE: TWO CENTS ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ By Margot Oater Berlin Correspondent By Cable to The Massachusetts Spy With the crucial German election only a few days away, economic issues are taking a front seat in the minds of German voters, weary of high unemployment while fearing a rise in inflation.  The National Socialists and Social Democrats are both vigorously competing for votes, in some cases by putting forward claims not supported by evidence. The National Socialists are campaigning on economic anxiety Chancellor von Papen accused the National Socialists of trying to “stab the Government in the back” while negotiations in Geneva around war reparations are continuing, although he cited no basis for that claim.   For his part, the charismatic populist National Socialist party leader, Adolf Hitler, has accused his political opponents of being tools of international Jewry, again without factual support. But the charges and counter-charges are being ignored by most voters, who are most concerned about German's bad economic situation.  And Hitler's party is making hay with the charge that the current depression in Germany is caused by the indemnities imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty.  Some critics note that depressed economic conditions prevail in other countries including those who receive those indemnities, like Britain and France. And some Germans, tired of the endless wrangling between the two extreme parties, are considering Bruening's Center Party, which seeks a third way between right and left and wants to move Germany forward together. Concern is also rising that elections may be disrupted by extremists on both sides.  In October, Nazi brown shirts were arrested in Silesia on charges of terrorist activities intended to disrupt Reichstag elections, which Nazi party officials were quick to dismiss as a “witch hunt” and “Jew news.” A recent dispatch from The New York Times described the current election campaign as “lively” and informed its readers that informed German observers now believe that “the Nazi movement has seen its best days” and that the National Socialist party has “lacked something of its former drive.” The Times report also downplayed the seriousness of the Nazi threat to seize power by force and violence, assuring its readers that the German Government “is prepared to use the Army against a Hitler attempt to seize power.” German voters appear not to regard any potential threat to German democracy as a top-tier political issue, focussing instead on kitchen-table issues like unemployment and possibility of a recurrence of the ruinous inflation of the 1920's. “I'm really concerned about the economy.  I haven't been able to find a job in months, and I'm more worried about keeping wurst and pretzels on the table than I am about all this scare talk about the end of democracy,” said Prenzlauer Berg housewife Margot Schneider-Gruene. “We need to get the economy moving again and I think this Hitler fellow will be good for business confidence, ” said Potsdam undertaker Teodor Kreuz. The New York Times, Oct. 23, 1932 On the other hand, backers of the Social Democratic Party express concern that Hitler, if given any power at all, will make himself a dictator and unleash a wave of mass violence against political enemies and Jews, whom he has made a focus of his campaign.  Some of them even make far-fetched accusations that a National Socialist government will send its political enemies to so-called “concentration camps” and even “burn down the Reichstag.” Long-time bipartisan observers of the political scene dismiss those concerns.  “The average German voter has no time for extremist threat or predictions of disaster.  In my focus groups, voters are telling me they are looking for leaders who will reach across the aisle and propose bipartisan solutions to the economic crisis,” said Frank Luntz. The election may turn on the decisions made by undecided voters who feel “politically homeless” in the current environment, according to Frankfurter Allgemeine columnist Rolf Wetterdas. “We are looking for someone who will stand up for Christian German values like increasing the birthrate of Aryan children, although we are appalled by some of the rhetoric we are heaing on all sides,” Wetterdas wrote yesterday in his influential newspaper column. The liveliness of the campaign, featuring stormtroopers rampaging through the streets of major German cities yelling party slogans through bullhorns, has caught the attention of foreign visitors to Germany. “I'm very impressed by the very strong, very beautiful National Socialist campaign.  Germany needs a very powerful man to take over and make Germany great again.  I hope that someday we'll have a President like Adolf Hitler,” said Queens property owner Fred C. Drumpf. Material from The New York Times News Service was included in this dispatch.

News from Zontar: Key midterm races

Editors’ Note: Every so often the Spy Deep Space Desk gets a transmission from the mysterious planet of Zontar, located in the Remulac galaxy millions of light years from Earth. The planet is apparently populated by a race of intelligent alien life forms whose communications, while largely incomprehensible to those of us here, may shed some light, however dim and distant, on the thought patterns of these bizarre creatures. In the spirit of cosmic understanding, we present a recent signal received from – [They get the drift – Ed.]

By Dan Balls
Zontarian Post Political Editor

With the midterm elections in the United States of Zontar only four weeks away, it now appears that the result will turn on closely contested elections in key states. 

Our Zontarian Post Political Team has had its ear to the breakfast specials in key diners across the USZ and reports on these critical races, all of which could go either way.

Georzhia: In this key state, the Democratic incumbent, Albert Schweitzer, is a Nobel Prize winning physician and priest who has spent his life providing health care to the poor and underprivileged in his state.

The Republican candidate is not an astronaut

His opponent is former Georzhia football star Herzhel Raver, who has caused concerns among Republican pros due to his sometimes bizarre antics on the campaign trail.

In his only debate with Schweitzer, Raver claimed that he had been a policeman, an astronaut, and a movie star, and to buttress his claims, donned sunglasses, a space helmet, and a tin star.  Raver's campaign has also been dogged by allegations that he has neglected and abandoned his 87 illegitimate children and paid for multiple abortions for women he had impregnated, although he has frequently claimed that abortion is murder.

His defenders cite his exuberant personality: “He's just bubbling over with life and he wants to share it with everyone,” said his campaign manager Shaw Vellingit.  “In any event, if you want to stop the radical Socialist Democrats from allowing hordes of aliens from the Tudarc system to destroy the USZ way of life, Raver's the man.”

In rural Georzhia, patrons of local diners are sticking with their bacon-fried sausage and their candidate.  They cite Raver's strong support of Republicanz leader Donald Drumpf.  “He's pro-Drumpf and that's good enough for me,” said average Republican mom Phylliz Zhlafley.

Arizona: Unlike Georzhia, there is a real astronaut on the ballot in Arizona: incumbent Senator Zach Boom, perhaps best known for a daring rescue of a sick astronaut from the International Space Station in the midst of a Borg attack.

Threeway, at left, has been dogged by her past.

Boom is opposed by well-known TV personality Tessa Threeway, who has announced the winning lotto numbers in Arizona for years.  She has launched fiery attacks on Boom, whom she calls “an enemy of Christian civilization and a pedophile,” without providing any evidence to support such accusations.

She also has attached herself to former President Drumpf and urged him to retake the White House, by force if necessary.

Although she styles herself a guardian of family values and opposes abortion, birth control, gay rights, and any sex education in the schools other than her trademarked slogan “Hit It With A Shoe,” her campaign hit a bump when it was revealed that in addition to her lotto career, she has spent many years as a porn star, including her long-running video series “Tessa Tongues Tuscon.”

While Boom has been careful not to directly attack Threeway, some moderate suburban women have been turned off by the idea of being represented in the Senate by an adult film star.  On the other hand, the disclosures may have helped widen her lead with Arizona men who say that they appreciate a candidate “who has nothing to hide.”

Zoo Hampshire.  Thousands of parsecs away on the ice planet Zoo Hampshire, there's another close race between incumbent Senator Thereza Mutter, the Democrat, and her challenger, former Space Patrol Admiral Bat Guano.

Is Gen. Guano too extreme for Zoo Hampshire?

Mutter, who had formerly served on the USZ Zupreme Court after a distinguished career as a professor of Constitutional Law, has had to confront Republicanz charges that she is “pro-murder” because she once defended someone accused of a crime.

However, Guano has faced criticism for being “too extreme” for ZH voters due to his propose to execute women who have abortions and to drown undocumented aliens from other systems in the deep waters of Lake Rufkinkiddinme.

Further footage of Guano having a private dinner with the USZ's chief alien enemy, the twelve-tentacled supremo of the Sybaron system, Zadomir Putin, may have damaged his campaign.  The video shows Guano handing over a large envelope and in return getting a bar of Sybaronite Gold from an obviously pleased Putin.  

Guano's defenders have called the meeting “purely a social dinner,” and said that any true USZ patriot would bow down to Putin in exchange for galactic peace.

However, Guano is helped by the rising price of energy crystals in ZH, which are needed over the winter when temperatures fall to within a degree of absolute zero.   Some pundits believe that pocketbook issues like these will be more important to shivering ZH voters than a distant meeting involving people of whom they know nothing.

Pennzylvania:  This race looked to be among the best Democratic pickup opportunities until Republicanz managed to recruit the superstar of magnetic healing, Dr. Drownit DeVil.  Dr. DeVil, known for his ubiquitous appearances hawking his curative magnets, stumbled out of the gate when it became known that he had never set foot in Pennzylvania until he announced his candidacy.

The Republican candidate killed these puppies

He is opposed by long-time Pennzylvania Gov. Whit Provalone, who first gained fame by leading the hapless Ziladelphia Igglez to their first Galaxy Bowl championship.  Later Gov. Provalone led the fight to provide free health care and cheese steaks to all Pennzylvanians, ensuring his popularity.

In recent weeks, the campaign has been jolted by revelations that Dr. DeVil had killed and tortured hundreds of adorable  puppies in testing his magnetic healing devices.  Gruesome footage showing the agonized yowls of the animals has been prominently displayed in Democratic TV ads airing across the state.

In response, the Republicanz have launched their own ad blitz blaming Gov. Provalone for each and every felony committed in the state over the past eight years.  The ads, featuring tag line “Protect people, not puppies” are thought to have resonated with swing voters in key suburbs and smaller cities.

Where the Republican candidate killed a man

Zevada: The final key race is in this desert planet, known for its wide-open acceptance of pretty much any vice known to the galaxy.  The Republican candidate, Zhonny Cazh, has a carefully-cultivated image as a hard-drinkin' hard-fightin' country boy, which has played well with independent-minded Zevada voters. 

However, Cazh's campaign was stunned by accusations that during his years as a cocaine addict, which ended three months ago, he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.  The Democrats have made the case that this should disqualify him from serving in the USZ Senate, but Republicanz have rallied around the tousled candidate.

“He has sought forgiveness and embraced Jesus Christ, and that's the important thing. Also he was suffering from a concussion at the time.  We need to focus on the real issue in this election, which is the menace of radical Socialism, and not on trivia like how many murders Cazh may or may not have committed,” said Republicanz operative Charles Manson.

In Search of the Elusive "Moderate" Republican, Ch. 82,537

By Jenny Herk
Florida Correspondent

Having heard of recent reports of a sighting of the rare and possibly mythical moderate Republican, we donned our white rubber go-go boots and headed off into the trackless swamplands of central Florida where the beast is supposed to be.  Sure enough, one may have been spotted:

Who is this great champion of higher education, this Ben Sasse?  He's a graduate of Harvard College.  He got his doctorate at Yale.  And for decades we've been told he's the voice of thoughtful Third Way conservatism and a Solon of great integrity. Here's that perennial font of conventional wisdom, CNN:

Sasse presented himself as a sober conservative, critical of both parties and the three branches of government for failing to live up to their responsibilities. A frequent critic of Trump before, during and after his presidency, Sasse has given voice to a conservative critique of the lack of civic virtue.

“Many years of corroding our constitutional order have contributed to the polarization and the viciousness that are poisoning our politics more broadly,” Sasse said in his opening remarks Monday. “We all know that our civic health and our civic life is not healthy.”  

Let's not even ask what the f***  that even means.  Instead let's turn to the mother lode of both-sides pontification, Chris Cillizza: 

Instead Sasse is trying to forge a third way – Bill Clinton smiles wryly – between those two extremes: A candidate who believes in traditional conservative values and thinks T**** has strayed at times from them but not someone wholly motivated by their hate for this President. 

Whilst chomping on his favorite Chevy Chase sopprassata sub, David Brooks back in 2017 said:

For Republican senators, it’s harder. Their consciences pull them one way — to tell the truth — while their political interests pull them another way — to keep their heads down. Some senators are passing the test of conscience — Ben Sasse, ... 

Those interested can read Mr. Brooks's full list of Republican conscience-test passers in the light of their behavior over the past five years.

Here's an adoring 2021 tribute from the Associated Press:

When Ben Sasse heard that GOP activists in Nebraska were primed to censure him for insufficiently supporting Donald Trump, the Republican senator didn’t try to talk them out it. Instead, he punched first....Sasse ripped fellow Republicans for following a “cult of personality” and “acting like politics is religion.”

It’s the no-apologies approach Nebraskans have come to expect — and even appreciate — from their junior senator, who perhaps more than any other rising Republican leader is cultivating anti-Trumpism as his brand.  

Have we found it, the elusive moderate Republican, thought to have become extinct with the retirement of Ed Brooke? Are Gator fans (and we never hear from you!) rejoicing?

Um, not so much.

According to The Gainesville Sun,

A presidential search committee on Thursday announced it had selected Ben Sasse, a Republican United States Senator from Nebraska, as the sole finalist to lead the University of Florida, a provocative move after more than a year of controversy at the public university over academic freedom and accusations the Board of Trustees has politicized the cherished state institution.

Is this the elusive moderate Ben Sasse?

Above all, secrecy was key to Sasse's elevation.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law earlier this year making applications for college presidential openings confidential, effectively cloaking the process in secrecy until the very end stages. From the outset, it was clear that the law was intended to give crucial cover as Florida's benighted college boards considered overtly political candidates for the lucrative, powerful positions heading the state's universities. 

Or as we used to say on Beacon Hill after a state rep's nephew was appointed to a no-show job, “After a worldwide search...”

The Gainesville Sun continued:

The UF search committee, headed by Rahul Patel, a member of the Board of Trustees, claimed its search was "exhaustive," but it did not explain in any detail how such a process could have landed on Sasse, who possesses limited experience in higher education and accumulated a divisive, hard-right voting record in the U.S. Senate. Nor did the board bother explaining how secrecy best served the process. In the past, the minor inconvenience that an applicant would need to disclose their interest was considered secondary to the public's right to have a full view of an important hiring decision. No more: Sasse was permitted to walk away from his Nebraska constituents under cover of darkness, alerting them only after the goose had been cooked.

Maybe we need to look a little harder at this supposed Third Wayer.

To ensure the health of our civic, Sasse joined every single Senate Republican in denying so much as a hearing to President Obama's highly-qualified Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland on transparently hypocritical grounds (as we shall see) and then voted to let the corrupt grifter fill the seat with hard right mediocrity Neal Gorsuch.  He then soberly and thoughtfully voted to ram through the nomination of Brett “Here it is, wanna touch it?” Kavanaugh despite serious unanswered questions involving the nominee's perjury and sex crimes.

Then, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg finally succumbed two months before the 2020 election, Sasse had no problem disregarding his previous stance against election-year nominees by voting for Spooky Handmaid Amy Coney Barrett.

Again let's consult The Gainesville Sun:

One change Sasse will immediately bring to UF's executive office is a right-wing political philosophy deeply hostile toward gay rights, women's reproductive health, equality and academic freedom. In the Senate, Sasse enthusiastically backed Donald Trump's three Supreme Court appointments, all of whom are laboring to engineer a puritanical society that would be unrecognizable to incoming and current students.

More recently he voted against superbly qualified appellate judge Ketanji Brown Jackson because, frankly, who give a s*** why? 

Sasse continues the tradition
of great Florida educators

At least with that Harvard AB and Yale Ph.D. he must be a bright boy, right?  Guess again:

Supporters of Sasse's bid pointed to his intellect as his ace in the hole, a claim difficult to evaluate since the search process was secret. Rob Bradley, a former state senator from Clay County and staunch DeSantis ally, called Sasse "brilliant," and other advocates pointed to an essay on higher education Sasse wrote for The Atlantic in May as evidence of his intellectual heft.

Sasse's essay is a broad argument against student debt forgiveness — an inflammatory message to send to aspiring and current Florida college students. The piece also broadcasts Sasse's dark view of higher education as a system that is "failing our students on a massive scale," an odd argument from the likely next president of UF, an incredibly high-performing institution.

Sasse's turgid, buzzy prose does not reveal the mind of an education reformer but that of a wishy-washy dilettante. Sometimes he says very little ("we need dynamism — not status quo-ism — in higher education"). At other points he merely repackages bland ideas into Ponzi-like sales pitches: "As important, we will need a broader base of wise, gritty learners. We cannot build what we need if we assume that the developmental experience of every 20-year-old will be the same." (Sasse might be shocked to find no one at UF assumes the developmental experience of every 20-year-old is the same).

To sum up, he's an intellectual lightweight who realized he was going nowhere in national politics as long as the Former Loser Grifter had the Republican Party chained up and ball-gagged.  Given the crookedness of the authoritarian DeSantis regime in Florida, it's a safe bet that his new job was a grift [Surely, gift? – Ed.] delivered to him by minions of ol' Go-Go Boots Ron in exchange for providing a sheen of intellectual respectability to DeSantis's Amsterdam-like ambition to impose his form of dictatorship on the United States.

If moderates like Ben Sasse can attach themselves to an anti-democratic bigot like Ron DeSantis, can our wonderful Never FLG Republican allies be far behind?

Let's see what David “Axis of Evil” Frum thinks:

Others disagree, but in my opinion, a DeSantis GOP nomination in 2024 represented a much better outcome for the whole country than a Trump return. Maybe you don't like DeSantis's manner or record, but he's a recognizably normal US politician. If defeated, he'd go peacefully. 9/x

— David Frum (@davidfrum) August 15, 2022

So the bad news is that once again our search for the elusive moderate Republican has crapped out.

The good news is that it's clear that supposedly principled conservatives like newly-minted Gator Ben Sasse and former Iraq War flack David Frum have shown their true colors. And those colors are as pure white supremacy [Surely, white? – Ed.] as the boots worn by their new crush, wannabe dictator and Nancy Sinatra cosplayer Ron DeSantis.

"Getting" the Republican Joke

By Izzy Stone
Washington Bureau

Last Sunday, Carlos Lozada in The New York Times explained the hidden story of Republican loyalty to the Russian-owned corrupt criminal racist bigot who has led the party for the past seven years – it's all a joke:

the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for. 

Indeed, the big joke has been at the core of the Republican Party since the election of a washed-up B-movie actor in 1980, who ran for President by attacking “welfare queens” and intoning in his best radio-announcer baritone that the most dangerous words in the English language were “we're from the government and we're here to help.” 

Speaking of the dangers of government workers sent in to help, let's check in with the stricken southwest of Florida, ravaged by an utterly foreseeable natural disaster that Republicans have spent decades denying to please their fossil-fuel dark-money benefactors (another hilarious joke!), where FEMA personnel have been working nonstop to rescue and succor the hurricane's thousands of victims on the Florida coast:

Gee, they look like they're trying pretty hard to help.  What did St. Ronald of Bitburg know that the rest of us didn't?  Oh, wait, that was part of the joke.

Washington has always been a pretty cynical place, but there's a difference.  Democrats come to Washington to do stuff: provide health care, combat racism, protect the environment.  Republicans come to Washington to reward their benefactors, promote bigotry and racism, and entrench the rule of rich white men from generation to generation.

That doesn't sound too good for Republicans, which is why they work so hard to pretend that you can't take governing seriously:

Miller lingers on this game — the amoral world of tactics, messaging and opposition research, the realm of politics where facts matter less than cleverness and nothing matters more than results. He once thought of it as winning the race, being a killer, just a dishonest buck for a dishonest day’s work. “Practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns just by throwing down their trump card: ‘It’s all part of the Game,’” Miller writes. He has a nickname for the comrades so immersed in the game that they are oblivious to its consequences: the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans.

Promoting the Republican Big Joke has been a time-tested method for mediocre white men (and the very occasional and very shameless person of color) to cash in.  

Pat Buchanan, staunch Republican

We were in Washington when St. Ronald of Bitburg rode into town bringing scads of money-grubbing Republicans with him, eager to take government jobs that would lead to lucrative private-sector lobbying or finagling gigs.  It was nice work if you could suppress your gag reflex.

But Lozada is on to something when he notes that Republican whack jobs propagating the Big Joke weren't just cynical:

For Hemmer, the Republican Party’s evolution from the party of Reagan to the party of [the FLG] began with Pat Buchanan, the White House aide, television pundit and authoritarian-curious presidential candidate who “fashioned grievance politics into an agenda,” she writes — a program that emphasized identity, immigration and race as its battlegrounds.

Pat Buchanan? He's been dropped down the Republican memory hole, like (but for different reasons) George Bush or Michelle Bachmann, but he was a fierce and omnipresent presence in Republican politics and media for decades, starting with his work for crooked Dick Nixon.    He even gave the keynote speech at the 1992 Republican Convention, in which he sounded the themes of white supremacy and paranoia that animate the Republican Party today.

He was even a commentator on MSNBC and known as a charming colleague.  It was surely all a Big Joke, everyone thought.  Except he

8. Argued that Poland and the United Kingdom had it coming in World War II. Buchanan seems to suggest in a 2009 column that World War II — and all the atrocities that accompanied it — was really the fault of Poland and Britain, for refusing to engage in diplomacy with Germany. ...

9. Dabbled in Holocaust denial. Pat Buchanan danced alarmingly close to denying key facts of the Holocaust. In a 1990 column for the New York Post, he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk (whom he later compared to Jesus Christ)... by accusing the survivors of misremembering all of it: “This so-called ‘Holocaust Survivor Syndrome’ involves ‘group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.’ Reportedly, half of the 20,000 survivor testimonies in Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered ‘unreliable,’ not to be used in trials[…]The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.”

10. Argued Hitler was an individual of “great courage.” That’s just one of the quotes that the Anti-Defamation League attributes to Buchanan in their compendium of offensive remarks from Buchanan over the years. In 1977, he qualified his labeling of Hitler as racist and anti-semitic by adding that “...His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” 

In fairness, he never said that Hitler could paint an apartment in one afternoon, two coats.  He got s**tcanned anyway.

Now we get to the heart of the artichoke.  Some Republicans are purely cynical opportunists who correctly see the chances for grift.

But, and we remember this from the days of St. Ronald, an alarming number only pretended to be cynical.  It turned out that once you got to know them, you realized that they weren't cynics; they had ideals.  Ideals like white supremacy, subjugation of women, and permanent enshrinement of white plutocracy.  They were true believers.

That's the punch line of the Big Joke.  When Stephen Miller beats on the bureaucracy until it accedes to his hateful plan to pull immigrant babies away from their parents permanently, it's no joke.  When Sullen Sam Alito boasts about making 12-year-old girls bear their rapists' children, he's not kidding.  The cruelty, the sadism, the racism he embodies is real.

And if you don't understand that basic truth about today's Republican Party, you just aren't in on The Joke.