Do We Have a Rigged Election in a Rigged City?

The Palazzo hotel—dawn over Vegas on debate day.

You wouldn’t know it watching television news, but Las Vegas isn’t particularly crowded on debate day.  You can pick up a room at Caesar’s for a mere $169 (via Expedia) and if you’re willing to go only slightly down market to Bally’s, you’re in for 99 bucks, down from $319.

Is this a harbinger of things to come?  Is everybody just “turned off”?  Of course Sin City is known for its low-ball hotel rooms, priced down to lure gamblers, but things are surprisingly quiet, a far cry from Vegas madhouses like the Consumer Electronics Show.  Maybe they should have put up billboards in L.A.: “Big Debate Discountzzz in Vegas!”

Speaking of “rigged hotel prices,” the question du jour is whether Donald Trump will make a big deal over a “rigged election” at tonight’s debate.  The smart set is telling us that’s a bad idea—Trump would be branding himself as a premature poor loser, sorehead Donald. And maybe the audience would regard it that way. At least they’ll be told to.

But Trump does have a point.  Our elections are rigged.  We just don’t know the degree.  But let’s explore.

James O’Keefe has done a public service with his Project Veritas videos exposing all kinds of voting skullduggery by the Democrats initiated by a collection of lowlife scum out of a bad Mafia movie (one of them married to a congresswoman!). Heads are already rolling as at least some Dems are in panic mode, worried that connections will be made to the top and the deniability will morph from plausible to implausible.

But what does this add up to? Aren’t these just pathetic small-timers working on the margins?  That’s how it’s being spun anyway.  That, however, is a lie. You don’t have to look any father than JFK’s victory in Illinois.

Nevertheless, the rough stuff is the least of our election problems.  The old fish-o rots from el top-o, as we can see from even a light perusal of the Wikileaks.  (As an aside, what if Assange et al. are deliberately holding all their best stuff for after election?  Think about that!) We now know just to the extent Republican candidates are surrounded.  Forget the usual suspects in Hollywood and the networks, the real Mr. Bigs are running the Democratic campaigns and through them our elections.  I mean, of course, the old Godfather George Soros—mentioned over fifty times in the Wikileaks so far—and the new Godfather, call him Michael Corleone, Google’s Eric Schmidt. Who controls more of our lives than Schmidt?

But it goes further.  Since over ninety percent of the news media tilts Democratic, it’s almost impossible for a Republican candidate, any Republican candidate, not just the irascible Trump, to get a fair hearing. The voter, even and especially that coveted low-information voter, is inundated by a completely skewed zeitgeist.  That any of them can see their way through this is a minor miracle.

What we live in is effectively a Dictatorship of the Newswoisie. (I include Soros and Schmidt in this Newswoise because, as has been said before, “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.”)

So back to Topic A:  Do we have a rigged election in a rigged city?  Sure.  The problem is that the not always articulate Trump is boxed in, unable to say what he thinks without being assaulted and smeared to such a degree that the truth is again squelched.

We all may be better off spending the debate at the craps tables.  At least there you have half a chance. (Well, maybe not quite that much.)