> The fact that [Ventura] a professional wrestler - perhaps the only
> class outside of used car dealer less trusted in the US than politicians
> (in fact people enjoy the fake soap-opera camp) cannot be a counted as a
> factor that worked for him.
I might have thought at one time that Mr. Dees had at least /some/ tenuous connection to reality, but I no longer have to give him the benefit of that doubt.
Can you honestly say with a straight face that Mr. Ventura's job as an entertainer had /nothing/ to do with his getting elected? And I suppose Clint Eastwood became mayor of Carmel on the strength of his zoning plans, and Sonny Bono went to congress because he had some good ideas on the economy? Was Shirley Temple really the best candidate for ambassadorship to Ghana?
In modern American politics, name recognition matters, and money matters, and ideas are a distant third if that. This is the natural and inevitable result of that moral perversion we call democracy: give the majority the power to rule everyone, and they use that power to enforce mediocrity upon us all at gunpoint. It is not possible to work "within the system" to dismantle the system. Since democracy itself is repugnant, it must be replaced. My preferred method of doing that is non-violent "underthrow": either simply leave and start society somewhere else, or else acquire sufficient economic power that the government becomes impotent and irrelevant. E-commerce has potential for the latter, so I am enthusiastic that might happen. But if neither of those work--if the democracy tries to force you in line with its guns-- then free and honest people have no choice but to shoot back.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC