It’s been a tragic week in politics. Not a single new candidate emerged for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination. This puts our new election based economy in jeopardy. The tendency of the rate of candidacy declarations to fall over time seems to have been born out.
The inevitable collapse of our economy, and adoption of a wasteland raider centric society is imminent, which means it’s time to start hoarding gems and precious metals.
Gems like this week’s pair of candidates! You may soon be chased for hundreds of miles by neo-feudal militias intent on stealing what scant resources you carry, but with the warm memory of these political saints you’ll never feel alone.
Kirsten Gillibrand – Senator, New York
Kirsten Gillibrand is that unique combination of cynical and opportunistic that so many of the other candidates I’ve covered aspire to, but are simply too fucking stupid to ever achieve. This might have something to do with being the middle child born to lawyer/lobbyist parents, or maybe the elite private boarding school she attended (which today costs over $50k/yr), or perhaps it was the undergrad at Dartmouth and JD at UCLA.
Maybe it’s her work experience at a white shoe law firm defending Philip Morris, or her subsequent defense of the her firm’s partners when they were accused of perjury while defending Philip Morris.
It’s even possible it was her time working as general counsel for Andrew Cuomo during his tenure as HUD secretary, or her close work with Hillary Clinton during the future senator’s 2000 campaign.
Ultimately it doesn’t particularly matter where she picked up her tendency to shift with the winds, and ignore anything remotely resembling principle in an effort to advance her status and career.
She was elected to Congress in 2006, representing the NY-20 district on a conservative platform. Her tenure in the house was defined by her membership in the Blue Dog Coalition, and all the politics that entails. She had a 100% rating from the NRA, opposed sanctuary cities and drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants, and pushed to continue forever war on the Armed Services Committee. When Hillary Clinton was given the spot as Obama’s Secretary of State, of course Gillibrand was appointed to fill the senate seat.
True to form, Gillibrand immediately started strategically shifting her positions leftward knowing the more conservative stances that worked upstate wouldn’t appeal in NYC. It worked, and she won the special election in 2010, and re-election in 2012 and 2018.
In the time since, she’s put her finger to the wind, and taken up ever more progressive causes. She saw her mentor Hillary Clinton’s centrist Third Way as the sinking ship it was, and started jettisoning her conservative ballast. She now claims to support Medicare for All, a Federal Jobs Guarantee, campaign finance reform, and a whole host of other broadly popular policies she would have rejected out of hand a decade ago. She never passes up an opportunity to get screen time supporting the liberal cause celebre, but her belief being genuine is, frankly, laughable.
The amount, and frequency of her superficial “evolution” points to a savvy, and deeply cynical, political operator.
One that has absolutely no chance of winning the nomination, but is going to be a fixture in American politics far longer than any of us would like.
Bill De Blasio – Mayor, New York City
Bill De Blasio is almost universally loathed, and for good reason. Over the course of his political life he’s spent his time alternately disappointing or enraging New Yorkers. His trajectory is a familiar one of radical (or radical adjacent) politics gradually being sacrificed in a Faustian bargain for personal political power.
Born to parents accused of communist sympathies De Blasio’s early life seemed promising, but like so many his brain was poisoned during undergrad at NYU and postgrad at Columbia. His masters in International Affairs is particularly suspicious on that count, as the same program he graduated from has produced psychopathic luminaries at all levels of the Department of State and in the intelligence community.
Not yet wholly deprived of principles or a conscience, De Blasio took a job out of graduate school working for a non-profit delivering aid to the victims of the contras in Nicaragua and openly identified as a Democratic Socialist. Sadly, Bill was not content being a no-name non-profiteer, and soon started dipping his toes into electoral politics.
At first he started out working campaigns, and quickly ascended the ranks in NYC. First as a mayoral campaign volunteer, then congressional campaign manager, a HUD regional director, HRC’s senate campaign director, City Councilman, City Public Advocate, and finally Mayor.
Even a cursory examination of De Blasio’s political history reveals a consistent pattern. At each level he campaigned to the left, and moved further to the right. The higher he has risen, the more of what once seemed genuinely progressive rhetoric has proved to be little more than that, rhetoric.
His opponents, of course, hate him. His constituents hate him. His own family, probably, hates him. But, if he’s just another bog standard centrist Democrat masquerading as a firebrand liberal, why is he more widely hated than every other dipshit with similar politics?
That lies in two open secrets not widely circulated outside of New York:
Bill De Blasio seems to hate animals. He probably prays for their death. For their extinction. It’s likely nothing brings him greater joy than seeing the light fade from their terror filled eyes as they breathe their last. From time to time he can be seen clenching and unclenching his hands. This is almost certainly when he relives his gruesome murder of beloved groundhog Staten Island Chuck (Charlotte, actually). A crime he may have directed the Staten Island Zoo to cover up.
He may also be reminiscing about the beautiful deer that had come to the city in search of a mate. New York’s denizens fell in love with the scrappy buck that he later had detained, and executed. While officials claim the animal died “from stress” while in custody, they’ve never responded to accusations that hand prints suspiciously similar to the Mayor’s were found encircling the noble buck’s neck.
The other insufficiently publicised scandal is much more tame. It turns out that De Blasio was routinely taking what can only be described as legal bribes for favors. A classic pay-to-play scandal wherein donations to his PAC or campaign mysteriously resulted in favors being done for those who made the contributions. No-bid contracts, sweetheart leasing deals, expedited permitting and approvals, zoning changes, and a host of other “services” were provided in what even the US Attorney’s office considered to be an explicit quid pro quo. Incredibly, because all of the quid was received by De Blasio’s campaign, rather than as direct personal benefit, only those who made the donations were ever prosecuted.
The corruption was so explicit that the US Attorney’s office actually had to release a statement explaining why Bill De Blasio was not prosecuted for accepting bribes. This is especially galling in light of De Blasio’s public and vociferous opposition to Citizen’s United, and strident advocacy for campaign finance reform.
The most important thing to know about Bill De Blasio is for the right price (donation), he will almost certainly kill your neighbor’s dog with his bare hands.
Only Three Weeks
That does it for this week. Hopefully when your marrow is being consumed from your still living body you won’t feel any pain, or regret, for yourself. Instead, it will be for the future one of these two could have had, if only you’d voted for them.
The first debate of the race is fast approaching, June 26th and 27th. That gives us just three weeks for even more, and even better, candidates to get in the race. Either way, we’ll have you up to date, and ready in time for the rhetorical bloodbath the last week of June. Treasure these psychopaths’ candidacies while they last, their campaigns might not make it to July!
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.