Political leaders, with the notable exception of most Republicans, focus on the major problems our nation faces. One of the biggest is climate change. It constitutes reason and science with attacks on climate change & new technology—Most Americans have no idea about the giant impact on green energy that the Inflation Reduction Act, signed a year ago, is having: new jobs, new investments; eventually over $400 billion will be spent.
Unfortunately, such long-term achievements do not garner much attention or boost short-term profits for media sources. Voter emotions and political attention is elsewhere.
Again, voters are drawn by emotions and opinions they garner from varied news sources in a media with agendas. Most media, being the possessions of giant corporations, are drawn to profit, and political candidates focus only on the path to victory.
The hard truth is that presidential elections in our very imperfect democracy boil down to electoral votes in perhaps 6 battleground states and only cater to such regional interests.
Arizona is one of those, one won by Biden by a razor-thin margin in 2020, garnering all 11 electoral votes. There the abortion issue has been heightened by Arizona’s latest Supreme Court ruling, which looked deep into our history, in fact, over a hundred and fifty years ago, to enforce an archaic abortion law.
Arizona candidates for the US Senate – Past Fox News Host, Republican, Kari Lake and public servant, Democrat, Ruben Gallego — could not be more different. And for several reasons they are somewhat in the middle of 2024’s presidential battle.
Ruben Gallego hardly looks like the fierce Marine warrior who served six bloody months in Iraq in a battalion that sent home 48 flag-draped caskets, nor does his countenance reveal the fiery temper occasionally displayed in his post-military jobs, seemingly a product of PTSD.
Ruben’s background story is the ethical opposite of the fraudulent dishonesty of Kari Lake whom he is opposing for Kyrsten Sinema’s Arizona Senate seat in November. While Lake was a political chameleon from Iowa, going with the dominant political force, a Democrat with the Obama’s rise to power, then, the Trump loyalist bandwagon as his fortunes rose, Gallego’s life was more of a struggle.
Ruben’s parents both were teen immigrants, his father from Mexico and mother from Columbia. With early family struggles, Ruben pursued an education and military duty after 9/11. Lake, sought the limelight and self-promotion and pursued political notice from Trump late in his term as president. Being considered as his running mate, she has purchased more than his notice. Even three years after Trump’s insurrection attempt, Lake still professes the Big Lie that Trump won in 2020, and that she won the governor’s race in 2022.
In our two-universe news world – one right-wing and full of vitriol and lies, providing support for Republicans, the other moderate or left-leaning in the mainstream. Political appearances are made in either – Lake mainly on Fox Spews (officially called News) and Gallego on MSNBC or CNN. The former feeds the Trump-base nonsense and conspiracies; the latter provides mostly truth, their chasm constituting a dual universe of bifurcation.
Arizona is a battleground state, very important in the electoral college vote. Adding to polarization is the right-wing-dominated Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to enforce an 1864 law criminalizing nearly all abortions. In a Republican majority (16R, 14D) state Senate and a (31R, 29D) House, a repeal of the archaic law failed, assuring its repeal will be petitioned on the November ballot.
Past narratives of Gallego and Lake also dramatize their deep divide: January 6th, 2021 saw the main characters in entirely different pursuits.
Ruben, the Marine veteran Arizona representative in the House, leaped on a table and took charge of other panicked lawmakers during the violent insurrection, advising them on tear-gas survival, this while assessing his own defense options, namely, the use of a pen to disarm weapon-carrying rioters.
Contrarily, Lake was an evening anchor for KSAZ-TV (Fox 10 Phoenix), building a required right-wing credential there while sharing COVID-19 misinformation on social media, in tune with Donald Trump, rejecting COVID-19 mask laws, debunking CDC policy, and name-dropping bogus COVID meds like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, thus vying for enlistment in Trump’s fascist cause. Like Trump and her fellow Republicans, she took no apparent notice of these lies leading to a higher death toll among Republican adherents.
Meanwhile the means of her political rise, Donald Trump, feeling comfortable with his incited bloodletting, was heralding news coverage of his mob’s assault on the Capitol and decrying their surfeit of deadly weapons. In turns, Trump was viewing television, cheering on, and envisioning a government overthrow which he incited.
Even years after the assault, alternative universes continue, the dark one increasingly normalized by equivocating, for-profit news coverage and timid treatment by truthtellers on the other side, not to speak of tainted justices installed by a Trump regime, all supported by Dark Money, and most confirmed by a radicalized GOP.
Billionaire money built this court which helps to delay Trump’s accountability through criminal trials, one trial, intentionally stalled by a group of six Republican members of SCOTUS and the other by a single loyalist, a Trump-appointed judge in Florida.
Day by day, American democracy displays no stiffness of control. MAGA evils seem to waft through both universes, eager to make it one dark, controlled world, the disruptive force of Donald Trump roaming free.
Like an old Western script, this wily, evil man continues to stiff-arm accountability. In billionaire rallies, MAGA Don makes promises of riches to the well-heeled whose MAGA tax breaks are expiring.
“When I’m elected, they will return,” he promises them.
Likewise coddled and bribed, SCOTUS6 jurists, installed by Federalist-Society dark money, are financially boosted by billionaire money to help provide corporate-friendly rules, such as restricting nonwhite voting and stifling rights.
All – brainwashed and bribed — are willing to surreptitiously support Trump’s costly defense against many crimes committed during his first term of office.
The next election is almost reminiscent of, perhaps, a final showdown, in a narrative of good versus evil: Ruben one of the good guys defending Biden truth and justice against the force of evil, led by a blackhearted con man, Donald Trump, with a whole party of loyal, corrupted followers only concerned for their pay, revenge, and personal comfort.
The problem is in modern scripts, the good guy does not always win because the majority is otherwise deterred: the army of the poor, too strapped with multiple jobs and debt or too perplexed; and the more privileged too complacent, too uncaring, or too petty.
