Not just because Thompson dealt with the same patty malice and inflated ruling class egos that reached their apotheosis in Donald Trump, but also because the man was a pro-football oracle:
The consensus among the 1600 or so sportswriters in town favored Miami by almost two to one... but there are only a handful of sportswriters in this country with enough sense to pour piss out of their own boot, and by Saturday night there was an obvious drift among the few "smart" ones to Minnesota, with a seven-point cushion... But in reality there were only about 400 writers willing to risk a public prediction on the outcome of a game that - even to an amateur like me - was so obvious that I took every bet I could get against the Vikings, regardless of the spread... Moments later, when the Dolphins drove the length of the field for another touchdown, I began collecting money.
~Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl
Thompson saw the pro-sports angle of national electoral politics back when it was just taking root. He rightly railed against it but he also played the game far better than the horse-race pollsters of the time - and especially better than this time. Because politics, like football, is much more about the feel and sheer intuition than wonky numbers. If you know the game in your blood, you can feel which way the momentum carries in the same way sharks can feel the Earth's magnetic field.
I saw this in a microcosm over the long weekend. I married into a traditionalist family with lotsa guys playing fantasy football and dithering over statistics. While watching the Dallas V. 'Skins game on Turkey Day, I called it by the second quarter for Dallas with a tight point spread. One cousin rattled off how there was plenty of time and besides Washington just needed to intercept a pass, grab a fumble, get some other unlikely reversal and then they'd win the day.
Dallas won. With a tight point spread.
I don't know how many yards who's been rushing or who did what last season, I just played the game in high school. Once you've been on the ground, dirt in your face and grass in your mouthguard, you understand the game on an instinctual level. Anyone who's played the game for real knows that feeling in the first half, "We're gonna lose this one," and can always recognize it when it happens to some other poor sucker.
Saturday, I called the Iowa V. Nebraska game in the Hawkeyes' favor before the end of the first quarter. Short version: Nebraska's defense was solid but their offense was the worst I've ever seen. Iowa had a tank running their ball. I checked the final score the next day: Nebraska 10, Iowa 40.
So when I said a few weeks ago Trump's infrastructure plan would be a Yeltsin-style fire sale to big business, I wasn't going off any numbers. No one had any numbers yet anyway, but I've been living in New York City for three and a half years. I've seen exactly how construction works in this city, or rather how it doesn't work at all. Huge sections of Brooklyn are still a wreck four years after Sandy because this big city's government is by and four the leeching class in the construction business. Once you've sat in on a few Build-It-Back conferences, you know exactly how a bloated bloodsucker like Trump will operate.
Just like Iowa and Dallas, I called it:
Since the plan depends on private investors, it can only fund projects that spin off user fees and are profitable. Rural roads, water systems, and public schools don’t fall into that category. Neither does public transit, which fails on the profitable criterion (it depends on public subsidies).
It's not that hard to see, once you've been on the ground. Here in New York, where the greedheads ruled even before Reagan, construction has been little more than welfare for rich white people. And here's the depressing part: DC ain't much different.
I've worked for contractors to both Medicare and the DOD. The two untouchable federal programs - no matter what Paul Ryan is blathering about - because they both serve to transfer tax-payer money to wealthy private interests. This is well-documented with defense spending - the greatest scam on Earth - but let's talk a little about how Medicare keeps Humana and other such vampires in business.
You know Medicare A and B? Also called Original Medicare, it was the first model rolled out under LBJ and covers basic hospital and some outpatient care. Very basic, just enough to keep the machinery of the human body functional enough to keep shuffling around and consuming. It's also the only part that Big Government actually pays for.
What you might be more familiar with is Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage. That was Clinton's baby and in keeping with his submerged-state neoliberalism it uses public-private partnerships to disguise the role of the state and enhance the appearance of the market. Every health insurance company that can afford a Congressman has a contract with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a guaranteed profit source as aging Americans require more specialized care and CMS will baby the private sector through every step of the annual bid process.
I personally fielded tech support calls for four years where well remunerated, white collar professionals from Humana and Blue Cross tried to game the system, get crooked and excessive payment plans sneaked through the approval process. Let me say that again - private insurance companies try to extract illegal payments from Medicare beneficiaries every year. They even get away with it, with how buggy and broken the expensing software is by April, and this has been the norm through both the Bush and Obama years. Medicare for twenty years, for all the good it may do for your grandparents, has been just as rent-seeking and ruled by the greedheads as New York City contracting and as Donald Trump's coming infrastructure boondoggle.
And liberals love it because it was Clinton's idea.
This is why average Americans never understood why Yeltsin was such a swine. He tried to do in a few years what the Reagan Revolution has taken over three decades to accomplish: not just the upward transfer of wealth through government-supported corporate rent-seeking, but the normalization of this parasitic behavior. The celebration of vampires like Trump and Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg as paragons of "free enterprise" because they make money off of what a socially-conscious government would do for free.
And that's why Trump isn't going anywhere.
Recount or not, the orange egomaniac will be inaugurated in a little more than a month. Protests and even riots will accompany this but American police are always eager to crack some heads. It'll be a great pressure release valve for both the outraged humanists and the pig-ignorant revanchists who simmered in their own stupid malice all through the Obama years. It won't change a damn thing.
Trump's economic plans are just Ryan's plans with the "Trump" brand stamped on top anyway. And Trump did very well for himself throughout both Republican and Democrat administrations because he is normal. Reagan and Ayn Rand made him the American Normal long before he started ranting about birth certificates and he has the shameless cunning of a New Yorker. I tell you, these people are all noise - bark with no bite, smarmy chumminess while they pick your pocket. He's also vain enough to be easily strung along by a GOP machine long experienced in handling other ridiculous figureheads all the way back to Nixon - hell, he's been buddies with one of the original Nixon fixers since the 1980s!
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| Right to Left: Donald Trump, Ivana, Roger Stone. |
There are few brights spots on the horizon. At least World War III has been pushed back by about a year. I appreciate that as it gives me time to get clear of the target cities. You should too, I hear Calgary is surprisingly sunny. Also, the stress of office will definitely be too much for a pampered priss like Donald Trump. The odds are about even he'll have a heart attack by the 2018 mid-terms if he doesn't get impeached by his own party. Not that the Republicans were ever his to start with - they were a convenient vehicle for his self-love project and now he's a convenient vehicle for the leeching class to squeeze some last drops of blood out of this desiccated country. As soon as he stops being convenient - and you know he'll do some impeachable shit in just the first week - he'll be out faster than you can say Black Iron Prison.
But the odds are even better he'll stumble through four years and get re-elected in 2020 when the Democrats run some other neoliberal dildo like Charlie Booker. I sure don't want that to happen but I can't shake that feeling I used to get in the first half: "We're gonna lose this one."
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