Enough of the folksy passive-agressive hocum

About Iowa and sweater-vested shit-froth, money runs politics even more than ever before. Mitt Romney spent over $110 a vote last night and nobody in the major media will say a word about it. As is so often the case Charles Pierce says it best:

This is the beginning of a watershed election in the history of the country. It is the first presidential campaign that we have had since the turn of the last century that has to be contested while everyone involved has to cooperate in the fiction that the whole process isn't completely for sale.

I watched this happen in Iowa over the last three days, and I continue to be astonished why this isn't the only story being told. This is something epochal. It is something that happens very, very rarely. It is the dawn of the age of thoroughly weaponized money, encouraged by every branch of the national government, most especially including the judiciary. Remember back all those years when Barack Obama looked down at the justices from the podium in the House chamber and read them out for Citizens United, and Sam Alito shook his head and mouthed, "Not true" visibly on TV?

Not true?

In Iowa, Mitt Romney's super-PAC outspent the actual Romney campaign by a 2-1 margin.

Not true?

How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

It moves forward now. A staggered frontrunner who has shown himself to be the best one of them at fighting on this new terrain, and an outright Papist nutter who thinks the states can and should ban birth control, and who loves all human life, except those lived happily by his fellow citizens who are gay, who he believes need to remain second-class citizens. Both of them confronting each other in a system that has become so sodden with anonymous corporate money that it would make liars out of the most sincere politicians who ever lived, which these two guys certainly are not. There is nothing to stop it. There are no sensible politicians who willingly would disarm themselves first. The election of the next president does not belong to the country any more. But we will pretend that it does. We are very good at that.

And this one is even better.