Help! We political wordsmiths are in urgent need of help from lexicologists!
The Republican presidential primary has gone so far out, so beyond accepted boundaries of civic and civil behavior, that we’ve run out of nouns and adjectives to describe the extreme weirdness. Terms like bizarre, loopy, a circus, grotesque, burlesque, and freak show just don’t do justice to what’s going on, so we need lexicographers to provide new and more-graphic words for us.
From the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, American politics has never been an endeavor for the delicate – it’s closer to a demolition derby than to a game of badmitten. But, still, the Slur-Fest and hate-mongering of the campaigns being run by Trump, Rubio, Cruz, Daffy, Sleepy, Dopey, Curly & Moe are extraordinarily excremental.
Who could’ve thought that in 2016 a major party’s contenders for the presidency – not the presidency of some Phi Kappa Bubba Fraternity, but of the US of A – would degenerate into wholesale racial and religious bigotry, cartoonish xenophobia, crude misogyny, tabloid conspiracy theories, mocking of the disabled, and schoolboy taunts about each other’s sweating, wetting of their pants, and the size of their body parts?
Worse than an embarrassment, their asinine antics are preying on people’s legitimate anger about being knocked out of the middle class by today’s power elites and being consigned to a future of poverty. To distract America’s hard-hit majority from looking up at these moneyed elites, the GOP’s candidates are telling us to look down at “them” and to fear, hate, and denigrate everyone who’s “not like us.”
A politics that convinces people that their lives can be better by making other people’s lives worse is a path leading straight down into the hell of an American fascism.

Why would anyone celebrate  the “joy” of war?

War is hell.
Unless, of course, you happen to be a global corporate peddler of rockets, drones, bombs, and all the other hellish weaponry of military conflict. In that case, war is literally “manna from hell.” So bring it on! Indeed, it seems as if Beelzebub himself is in charge these days, with US military forces enmeshed in at least 135 countries in 2015 alone. Plus, such chicken hawks as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are maniacally beating their flabby chests and screeching for even more military adventurism.
This perpetual warmongering is music to the ears of the CEOs and big investors of the war machine, for it means a windfall of perpetual profits for them. In a rare admission of their war-profiteering ethic, a group of major military contractors spoke late last year about how splendid war is. In leaked tapes of speeches at a wealthy investors conference top weapon makers exulted about the spreading horror of ISIS and escalating wars in the Middle East and Africa.
Hailing the rising conflict in Syria and Turkey, for example, a Lockheed Martin honcho enchanted the potential investors with the happy news that Lockheed’s profits would enjoy “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that [war’s] environment and [sales] of our products in [that] theater.” Raytheon’s CEO chimed in that his corporation was upbeat because of “a significant uptick for defense solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East.” And all of these masters of war celebrated the joyous news that Congress had just delivered a $607 billion dollar budget to the Pentagon – meaning more sales and more profit for war investors. “We think we did very well,” exclaimed one.
Many go to war and die, but a few go to war and thrive. So, see, it balances out.
“Weapons Makers Caught on Tape Celebrating the Financial Benefits of ISIS and Syrian War,” www.alternet.org, December 7, 2014.
“How Many Wars Is the US Really Fighting?” www.TheNation.com, September 24, 2015.