Ohio Low Down

Here’s a status report on the election “irregularities” in Ohio. It’s pretty ugly stuff, kind of a mini-Ukraine. Given the closeness of the result, the reasonable course of action would be to hold another election. But that won’t happen because of the way US politics has institutionalised control of the voting process by the dominant plurality party… in this case the Republicans. I also noted from the report that pretty much every substantial office is reserved for the appointment of declared Republicans (mostly) or Democrats (less so) in a weird system of state-proscribed two-party oligarchy that reminds me of how the Communists structured their political systems throughout the Eastern Bloc for maximum stability and resistance to change. They maintained an illusion of choice by also reserving public but generally insignificant slots for members of the officially sanctioned minority political parties (usually something along the lines of a “Farmers’ Party” or “Peasants’ Party”). This may presage the role of the Democratic Party in US politics for the next decade or so: the GOP’s tame poodle, fitting perfectly the role of an Emmanuel Goldstein pseudo-resistance group to GOP hegemony. It’s quite odd and definitely ironic as hell that the 21st century US now increasingly resembles mid-to-late 20th century Eastern Europe.