Whiskey & Wry — voting

“Whatever else you do -- vote!” This common exhortation should raise suspicion. As the great American philosopher George Carlin observed, "'Bipartisan' usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out." It that's the case, whatever politicians urge you to do – don't. An evil donkey or an evil elephant? We'll take neither, thank you, as we have no interest in sanctioning the scam. Contrary to popular belief, your vote won't change a thing. Bureaucrats will still regulate business and sex, propagandize children, violate privacy, confiscate wealth, punish savers to bail out elites, bomb civilians, quash free speech, inflate the money...

Former Saturday Night Live player Janeane Garofalo captured the true tragedy of a possible Trump Presidency, “Yes, we can laugh at Donald Trump, but....you can’t….parody Donald Trump.” His self-congratulatory outlandishness erases the line between parody and reality. Another SNL alumnus, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, accepted her 2015 Emmy with the words, “What a great honor it must be for you to honor me tonight.” Then, she credited Trump for the quote, adding, “It’s getting trickier and trickier to satirize this stuff.” Political satire draws on three basic wellsprings. The first is to exaggerate and skew. But Trump is already exaggerated, from soaring towers to Barbie-doll...

“If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.”— Mark Twain, or Emma Goldman, or Philip Berrigan ... Take your pick!  What do Mark Twain and the anarchists have in common? Apart from being credited with the same quote, they knew the electoral process was a rigged circus. Because he passionately blended stand-up with anti-voting, comedian George Carlin was called a closet anarchist ... which would explain why he dressed in black. With a choice of “Donald v. Hillary,” non-voting is poised to soar and non-voters will be excoriated once again as "irresponsible." They need the Carlin Defense....

Boss Tweed (1823–1878) and his NY political machine, Tammany Hall, epitomized corruption through which the Boss gorged on taxpayer money and graft. More than anything else, he feared being ridiculed because there was no defense against weaponized wit. Thomas Nast – called the "Father of the American Cartoon” – made Tweed the brunt of relentless laughter through wildly popular caricatures of Tweed's bloated body amid sacks of cash. Bribery and threats could not deter Nash. Eventually, a weakened Tweed was indicted and fled to Spain; there, he was recognized from a Nast cartoon and extradited back to face jail. The...

In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange asserted that the whistle-blower organization has evidence that Hillary Clinton's State Department helped arm the Islamic State (a.k.a., ISIS): “So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department of State operates. So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria,...