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Sunday, January 17, 2016

Cruz Control

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -- President Lyndon Baines Johnson

From the "couldn't happen to a nicer guy" file, it seems that 'murka's Favorite Comb-Forward, upset at someone approaching his yuuuge poll numbers, has decided to turn up the heat on noted immigrant Rafael Edward Cruz, Junior. (Bonus fun:  If you like Junior, you'll love Senior.)

Perhaps the most hilarious part of this is Chump's threat to file suit against Cruz for not being native-born:
When I file suits, I file real suits.
Yeah. Sure he does. Does George Stephanopoulos not have access to The Google, the better to challenge Chump's idiotic assertion with something along the lines of, "Really? Can you specify one of your lawsuits that didn't get tossed out of court, that was actually successful? What the hell is wrong with you?". That sort of thing.

You'd think with the hundreds of hours of free publicity Chump has been given over the past six months, someone along the way would have challenged one of his dopey statements with some energy. I mean, these are tee-ball sorts of sayings Chump trucks in, very easy to refute and throw back at him.

The guy is a liar and a fraud, an abuser of the bankruptcy laws, a welsher of deals, a non-repayer of loans, a serially-failed entremanure. He has managed to sell an image of success that is largely untrue. He produces nothing:  he slaps his name on shit, pretends to fire people who don't actually work for him, and owns a beauty pageant. I will bet you $100 that you don't know a single straight adult man that watches fucking beauty pageants, not when porn is free.

Give Chump some credit though, his response to Cruz' cheap "New York values" shot was, while opportunistic, pretty solid and seemed sincere. Not that anyone will take it up, but it also provides a chance to consider what "values" Cruz purports to embody, that are so much better than whatever these "New York values" he scoffs at are supposed to be.

This is a common reflexive trope among rustic types, both the real ones and the posers like Cruz. Like any huge city, New York has its problems, and runs at a constant, unrelenting pace that can be intimidating to people who live in the sticks. Speaking as someone who was born and spent early years in Los Angeles, but has since then lived in a rural area of Northern California, I can see the pros and cons of both perspectives. There seems to be an innate fear among rurals that urbans look down on them, sort of a paranoia of elitism.

But the reality seems to be very much the reverse. The fact is that people who live in the city, when they come to the country, tend to be respectful and curious about things, especially when it comes to agricultural production. Many of them come to appreciate the slower pace of life, and end up retiring in rural areas.

The most reactionary and spiteful types tend to be angry, broke-ass rednecks, who view immigrants, minorities, and gays with disdain, unless the members of those groups know their place. They view the cities as hotbeds of violent crime and constant chaos -- and they certainly are those things, as well as economic and cultural powerhouses that generally display a fecundity of entrepreneurialism and innovation that Spittle County can only dream of.

Most small counties tend to be run by very small groups of people, usually members of families that have been there for five or six generations, and have built up a dominating business concern in the area. They have a vested interest in keeping things small and monocultural, and so it is an event when a Starbucks or Walmart goes up out in the sticks. Most of the smart kids, unless they're from one of the power families, leave for college and never come back, leaving an imbalance of McJobs, and 90 IQ drones to push the buttons at those jobs.

The easiest way to keep those drones from realizing that Mayberry is in permanent stasis is to distract them with the usual "social conservative" arglebargle -- Meskins takin' yer jobs and wimmins, fags gittin' hitched, and such like. People are starting to come around to all that and know better, but there still are not enough jobs that people can live on, so they still need to be angry about something. Enter know-it-all libruls who think they're so fuckin' smart and want only to steal your guns and tax you to death. Meanwhile carpetbagging bidnessmen have bought up every plot of arable land, planted almond orchards, and punched 900' wells in a five-years-and-counting drought, because the county solons don't want to be seen as telling "small businesses" what to do.

Better yet, if you're a grifter with a gift, you can work the Jebus racket into incredibly lucrative scams on the local taxpayers. Not content with being the state that spawned noted marriage hypocrite Kim Davis, Kentucky is letting Creation "Museum" huckster Ken Ham extend his Jebus-rode-a-dinosaur mumbo-jumbo into a taxpayer-funded Noah's Ark attraction. Even better, the local taxpayers, whether they believe in this nonsense or not, are being forced to underwrite the bond. Every employee within 1.25 miles of this fucking joke will have a 2% tax levied on their wages to pay for it.

New York City has almost twice as many people as the entire state of Kentucky. Do you think that even a single one of them would trade their "values" for Kentucky's? New York City is a hub, a magnet. People head there from around the world to change their lives, make things happen. Nobody embarks on a life- or career-enhancing move to Cletus County, Kentucky. The people who are there are stuck. They have no means, no options, and they are unequipped for life outside the holler.

Providential thinking underpins all of this. It's a first cousin to the mentality of the lottery player -- sooner or later, you're bound to have a win, because karma and Jesus. Similarly, if we just let "small businesses" have tax deferments for creating their shitty jobs, deplete or pollute the water table, and pray for rain, sooner or later something will come along, because something always does. And if they don't, it's your fault for not praying hard enough. Remember, Tinkerbell dies if you don't believe.

Those are the "values" Cruz is talking about, whether he'll admit it or not. He may not even realize it, because like George W. Bush, no matter how much he pretends to be a Texan cowboy, he's really just another Ivy League asshole gulling the rubes into thinking he's One o' Them.

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