The Press has Broken Our Presidential Elections

2016 Republican Presidential Primary Ballot

The United States Presidential Campaign is starting to ramp up. Republican Donald Trump is running his first ads of the election season, and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has been amassing a huge campaign money chest. We wanted to reprint this article that sums up how Americans got stuck with two unlikable candidates in the race for the Presidency. The piece was originally posted on September 18th, 2015.  

Well the idiots in the national media have gone and broken our presidential elections. Should we be surprised? They have had the duty to report on the news of presidential politics for over 200 years. They have rarely been competent, and lately they have become down right destructive. The national press just kept trying and trying to break our presidential elections, and 2016 looks to be the year that the morons will finally be successful.

Donald Trump will not be the next President of the United States. You would not know that by watching and listening to the half brained celebrity sycophants on the national news. Trump is hateful, opportunistic, and not very intelligent. He has locked into a loud base of the republican party who lives under the delusion of white male christian victim hood. The scholars on talk radio, and at Fox News, have been feeding the dangerous lie of white male christian victim hood for a very long time.

The people who subscribe to the idea of white male christian victim hood have usually been swept away from polite society. They are now taking hold because the never ending news cycles need a "balanced debate", but what these organizations really want is clicks and ratings. The news producers know that the idiots who subscribe to anti-science and racist ideas will watch, and read, the news that provides there own wrong confirmation bias. Since the media decided to act as an anti-intellectual institution, we now have to have discussions on women's health, global warming, and being human to the less fortunate. People, and our planet, are needlessly suffering because non-intelligent hatemongers are allowed equal footing on  the news.

The CNN epic Republican Debate was a showcase for the destruction the media is bringing onto society. Donald Trump irresponsibly linked autism to vaccinations. This line of thinking has caused a lot of damage, and real deaths. Nearly all thinking people hear about the vaccination / autism link and immediately tune the conversation out.  The moderators for CNN said nothing, because they know that the discussion of wrong science will bring the morons into CNN's viewership. The need to be on the absolute wrong side of the vaccination discussion has even captured supposed "smart" doctors like Rand Paul and Ben Carson. The media's never ending praise for Ben Carson's intellect looks incredible wrong now that the good doctor questioned the methodology, and effectiveness, of vaccines.

The anti-science of the Republican debate continued with failed CEO, and newest media obsession, Carly Fiorina outright lying about Planned Parenthood. In order to get in good with the people who can not think, Fiorina pandered by discussing a video that showed Planned Parenthood doing something incredibly unethical and illegal. This video does not exist. The moment she described never happened. CNN was once again silent. Allowing their newest superstar to lie, and hurt a lot of people with her lie, the media has decided that money is better than being responsible journalists.

The media's destructive wake does not end with the anti-intellectuals. CNN allowed a discussion to go on about how white Christians are more persecuted than an arrested Muslim teenager whose crime is being good at engineering. Leading this defense of poor white people is dog but not man lover Rick Santorum (sorry for cursing), inept Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and soulless Mike Huckabee. All three of these defenders of the white race were crawling over each other to embrace racial profiling and make sure religious hate is well defended. The constitution means nothing to these opportunists , but thankfully none of them have a shot at being President. We still have to hear their ignorance and divisive rhetoric because CNN cannot spell journalistic integrity.

I hope you are happy media. You wanted a great story, and you gave us the Trump Presidential Campaign. You wanted attention, and you have helped accelerate global climate change. You wanted wealth, and you have allowed us to not care for the neediest in our society. We gave you the privileged to report on our presidential politics, and you broke it into a million pieces because you have no idea how to care for the privilege.

Go to your room the media. Your mess needs to be cleaned up. We can do this with out you.

RD Kulik

RD is the Head Editor for SeedSing and the host of the X Millennial Man podcast. He encourages you to not watch any of the media (even PBS), they will only act out again if we give them attention. Let your ideas be heard, write for us.

Donald Trump and the End of a Center Right Nation

Our political compass has no direction

No matter how many times the political experts predicted the end of Donald Trump (see the many, many times I have said so) , the New York businessman is going to be the Republican nominee for President in the 2016 national election. This means we will have six more months of Donald Trump and his great ideas to make America great again. Six more months of the national press treating these ideas as credible ones. Six more months of the liberal pundits on HBO and Comedy Central being apoplectic about Trump's ideas.  We have six more months of Donald Trump's Republican Party. A party that can in no way claim to be conservative or center right. The days of a center right nation are gone.

Shortly after the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, the professional media class started to use the term "center right". Center right meant that Americans did not fully subscribe to the ideals of the far right or far left, but sat somewhere in the middle. Americans sat in the middle, but were leaning more to conservative ideas. The media class thought that Americans were moving away from supporting social safety programs, moving towards national defense, and wanted to slow down on changing excepted social norms. The term center right was used to make it look like the country still believed in the brand of conservatism that President Reagan and Bush II practiced. Barack Obama may have been elected President, by a very large margin, but the country was not willing to embrace the Democratic party's plans to implement health care reform and to scale down on military intervention around the world. 

The media was invested in the idea of the United States being a center right nation because of the disaster that was the George W. Bush presidency. By the end of 2008 the US was mired in an endless war with no real purpose, an economy that had crippled the middle class, and public confidence that was at an all time low. The media of the early 2000's was built to cater to Bush and the conservatism of John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell. The tea party had not been given a national platform in 2008. Fox News gained strength in the first part of the 21st century because they embraced the notion of being the "news channel" for the right. The other media outlets quickly raced away from journalism and into republican propaganda to try and catch ratings on the coat tails of Fox News. NBC, CBS, and ABC used their nightly newscast to gin up support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Journalism was replaced by ratings friendly war mongering. The same "fair and balanced" media were also defending the destructive economic ideas of the republican party. Story after story of a booming housing market were being fed to the Americans, while no one was talking about the obvious coming collapse. Vice President Dick Cheney made secret deals with the energy industry, there were no investigative stories until after 2008. The media was an accomplice to the bad policies of the Bush administration, and they wanted to cover their own rear ends. Saying America is a center right nation took the blame off of the media, and put the blame on the voters.

The idea of America being a center right nation was wrong in 2008, and it is wrong today. The Republican party may hold the US House of Representatives and the Senate, but that has more to do with shady manipulation of the electoral process and general incompetence of the Democratic Party. In 2008 and 2012, President Barack Obama easily beat his republican challengers. Neither of those races was even close. Obama still won with the media allowing the right wing to paint the President as a foreign born communist who hates America. Rights for the LGBTQ community have grown at a fast, and much needed, rate. The press keeps giving the bigoted side a voice, but the large majority of Americans are on the correct side of history. Hillary Clinton is having trouble sealing the deal on the 2012 Democratic Presidential nomination because most Americans are not supportive of protecting the wealthiest of our citizens at the expense of everyone else. The media has tried to marginalize Senator Bernie Sanders, yet here in the middle of May and Clinton is still not the nominee. America was not center right in 2008, and we have been moving further and further left since then.

Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee, the center right lie can finally be buried on the ash heap of history. The story surrounding Trump's ascension has centered around how much everyone got the New York businessman's rise so wrong. Even liberal darlings like Nate Silver and the people at fivethirtyeight.com have egg on their face. The real story should not be how wrong everyone was, but how in the world did the Republican party nominate someone who has held mostly Democratic Party ideas his entire life. Trump has a history of being pro-choice, pro raising taxes on the wealthy, and pro healthcare reform. The Paul Ryan's and Mitch McConnell's of the Republican party have used their entire careers railing against these ideals. Ohio Governor John Kasich could only win one state, and rarely broke 10% of the vote in any other state. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the poster boy of Republican obstructionism, only gained traction in the primaries once he was deemed the true Republican alternative to Donald Trump. No one in the classically defined Republican establishment could take Trump down. One could say that Trump's win in the 2016 Republican primary means that the GOP is becoming a center left party.

The rise of Trump is unfortunately not the rise of a center left Republican party. In hindsight it is very easy to see how Donald Trump was able to beat the rest of the Republican field. The blind hatred of the GOP towards Obama and the Democratic Party has created a lot of tiny fractures in the national Republican party. The tea party was built on blind racism. Radio and television personalities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity demanded purity in the philosophies of elected republican officials. The right wing worship of the founding fathers (most of them were slave holders) and the original Constitution (where African-Americans were counted as 3/5ths of a person) started to show the party as being unreasonable and not have the ability to properly govern in the 21st century. The national identity of the Republican Party was split into many pieces. The fiscal conservatives never found their candidate, and that hurt voting. Kasich, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush could never gain any unified support. The religious conservatives had incompetent buffoons as their choices. Former Governors Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and former Senator Rick Santorum were so idiotic even the media could not shield them. Ted Cruz was hated by most of his party, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson were so bad that they helped bring the GOP brand further into the dirt. The only unique option int he filed was Donald Trump. His persona appealed to the angry white man. His ideas fueled the racist, misogynists, and bigots, in the Republican party. Donald Trump was the only Republican in the field that had a voting block to himself. This voting block turned out in high numbers, and Trump was able to survive the cage match that was the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary. His victory is actually quite easy to understand, now.

A minority of the Republican Party was able to nominate a life long Democrat to be their 2016 Presidential candidate. White male christian persecution complex has replaced conservative social and economic philosophy in the GOP. Donald Trump may be a Republican now, but many of his ideas lean to the left. The professional media created Donald Trump, and helped destroy their own narrative of a center right nation. For better or worse, America is stuck with Donald Trump and his new Republican Party. For at least six more months.

RD

RD Kulik is the Head Editor for SeedSing. Hear RD and Ty talk about Trump and the 2016 Presidential election on the latest episode of the X Millennial Man. 

The Day After: Iowa Edition

Your up next New Hampshire

Now begins the end of our long national headache. Iowa has spoken and it's majority old white male population has decided on Texas Senator Ted Cruz and defender of personal home computer servers Hillary Rodham Clinton. Pack up your bags, we do not need to worry about anything until the general election on November 8th. The nation will make history on that day when we elected the first female President in United States history. This by no means is a statement of political preference, Hillary Clinton will steamroll Ted Cruz. The national electoral numbers favor the Democratic party nominee, and Ted Cruz cannot grow any new voters. Many republicans will not vote for the Texas senator who has made a career out of being an obstructionist and demeaning people in his own party. Thank the gods this whole affair is over. Iowa has spoken, the nominees are set.

How much I wish it was true that the 2016 Presidential campaign was complete. Once the votes are certified in Iowa, the annoying itch of Election 2016 is going to turn into a painful infected sore. The media has doubled down on their incompetence in trying to turn the election of the President into an awful reality show. The news out of Iowa was presented in two ways - Donald Trump loses and Hillary Clinton barely won. New Hampshire will be reported in exactly the same way. The press knows they get ratings when they talk about Trump's ascension and Clinton's struggles. Ratings are way more important than actual journalism. We deserve real journalism in respect to who we elected to lead the nation.

So did the Iowa caucuses actually tell us anything of value concerning the Presidential campaign season? Iowa is a valuable predictor for the Democratic party nominee, not so much for the Republican. Over the last twenty years the eventual Democratic Party nominee has won every Iowa Caucus.  In contrast only Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 (unopposed) has won the caucus. Go back another twenty years and the only Democratic Party nominees to lose the caucus are Bill Clinton in 1992 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. The only Republican nominees to win the caucus are an unopposed Ronald Reagan in 1984 and incumbent Gerald Ford eked out a victory in 1976. In the last forty years the Democratic nominee has won eight out of ten Iowa caucus where the Republican nominee has won five out of ten (two of those Republican wins were by incumbent Presidents who were unopposed in Iowa). If the Iowa Caucus did say anything about the 2016 election it is that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party nominee and the Republican Party is still in disarray.

The tight margin of victory in Hillary Clinton's win is something the candidate should be worried about. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders made a better showing in Iowa than expected. His near win is due to the great ground organization his campaign built in the Hawkeye state. Hillary Clinton dismissed Barack Obama'a ground game in 2008, and she never recovered. It does look like the former Senator and Secretary of State may be making the same mistake again. Bill Clinton barely registered in Iowa during the 1992 caucus, but still won the nomination and eventually the White House that year. His biggest opposition, Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt,  did not take Bill Clinton seriously as a candidate. The conventional wisdom was that Gephardt was the true democrat, and Clinton was not in line with the party's philosophy. Bill Clinton capitalized on the youth vote who felt disconnected from the old Democratic Party. This strategy helped sustain the Clinton campaign, and the out of touch Gephardt was eventually defeated. Hillary Clinton seems to be having the same Bill Clinton problem that Dick Gephardt had. Bernie Sanders is going right after the established DC Democratic Party machine, and he is winning the youth vote. Barack Obama has proven you can beat Hillary Clinton with this strategy. The Iowa Caucus did show us that Hillary Clinton is once again relying on the money from the old Democratic machine, and is quickly being seen as out of touch with the youth vote. She needs to be afraid of losing the nomination again if she does not start embracing the Democratic Party that sits outside of the DC think tanks. Iowa should be a wake up call to her campaign.

Ted Cruz's narrow win does not mean a thing. He won Iowa, like Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008. The Republicans in Iowa sure do like their candidates that have zero shot on winning the nomination. Bob Dole crushed eventual nominee George H.W. Bush in 1998. Republican Presidential nominee John McCain finished a distant fourth place in 2008. Iowa is completely insignificant to the national Republican Party. The New Hampshire Primary is a much better predictor for who will be the party's nominee. Since 1952 the eventual Republican Party Presidential nominee has won the New Hampshire Primary thirteen out of sixteen times. On the day after Iowa, the Republican Party is right where it was on the day before.

The beginning of the end that is the 2016 Presidential campaign has begun. The caucus goers of Iowa have spoken, and told us nothing. The Clinton campaign needs to learn from 2008 and not make the same mistakes. It does not look like they have learned. The Republican Party needs to not read that much into Ted Cruz's victory, Iowa rarely matters to their base. The 2016 election has officially started. Our long national headache is coming to an end.

RD Kulik

RD is the Head Editor for SeedSing and the host of the X Millennial Man podcast. He really wants some great writers to assist him with the 2016 election season - write for SeedSing. He also really wants to pay those writers - Support SeedSing.

The Constitutional Conservatives Have No Clothes

I am not interested in looking at naked republicans

Let me be the one millionth and first person to call out the hypocrisy of the "constitutional conservative" crowd. The ones who wrap their rhetoric around the infallibility of the US Constitution are some of the most unpatriotic Americans in our country's two hundred plus year history. They are afraid to call them selves republicans because the constitutional conservatives have built an unmovable, pure, ideology. There is no room for compromise in their feeble minds.

The latest news surrounding a bigot who refuses to grant any marriage licenses because of her hateful views on gay marriage has once again exposed the constitutional conservative charlatans. Kim Davis took an oath as an elected official to follow the law of the land, not the law of a god. She may now be a "born again" christian in fidelity to her fourth husband. In her brain, a god's law may be bigger than the US Constitution. That is ok by me, but it is not ok with the constitutional duties of her elected position. Kim Davis should not be in jail, she should be removed from her job. The details may not yet exist to remover her, yet I believe the means to remove her do exist. She took an oath to follow the law, she has broken this oath. She is unfit to execute the duties as clerk. There I just let Kim Davis be hateful and out of jail, and I used the US Constitution.

So Sean Hannity, Rick Santorum (sorry for the crude language), Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and any other self professed constitutional conservative, what is your solution to solve the Kentucky clerk problem? I understand you use the term constitutional conservative as  code for your white christian male victimhood. I understand you only care about the constitution when it can justify your misogyny, racism, and greed. I know you want to make sure that power can be consolidated into the hands of a small group of white men who can rule over like monarchs. Just please stop dragging the poor US Constitution in the mud with your ignorance and hate. If you want to live by the word of the King James Bible (a book manipulated by a rich white king), then I suggest you start forming your own theocracy. America does not need your hate and ignorance.

Over one million and one people know these constitutional conservatives are frauds. Unfortunately the national media will still treat their ideas as part of a credible debate. The media is broken, but the constitution is not. Kim Davis is constitutional unfit, and her conservative supports are equally unfit. There is no debate. Look away from the constitutional conservative crowd. They are marching through the streets naked in their white male christian victimhood.

RD Kulik

RD is the Head Editor for SeedSing and host of the X Millennial Man podcast. He keeps his pocket US Constitution handy so he can remember how many amendments exist. Have thoughts on society today? Write for SeedSing.