— by Polydamas
We here at The Cassandra Times are, among other things, avid students of history, the classics, philosophy, and politics. The analysis and predictions that we present in this website are based on our years of academic study, voracious appetite for reading books, understanding of human nature, life experiences, and knowledge of game theory and economics. We are not affiliated in any way with the federal government and have no access whatsoever to classified information or to government employees. We do not belong to any fringe organizations. We are just non-conformist libertarians with the intelligence and the knowledge to read between the lines and to uncover patterns that others do not see.
That said, we believe that the conventional wisdom among political commentators and prognosticators that the Democratic Party will lose seats in Congress in the upcoming November election is completely wrong. On the contrary, we believe that the Democrats will maintain their numbers in the House of Representatives and in the Senate and may even increase them.
The conventional wisdom is that discontent with the past two years of the Obama administration will result in a massive loss of seats in the House of Representatives and loss of control of the Senate for the President’s party. After all, there is ample historical evidence that disenchantment with the second term of a lame-duck President causes voters to switch over to the other party. Certainly, the second term in office of President Barack Obama has been fraught with one scandal and one pratfall after the other.
Now, if it were not for the mainstream media covering up for the massive missteps of a liberal, post-modern, multi-culturalist President playing “look, Ma, no hands” behind the wheel of the federal government, voter discontent would be much higher for the Democratic Party. Put differently, if it had been a Republican in the White House who deployed the Internal Revenue Service against his political opponents and allowed an American Ambassador to be murdered in Benghazi, Libya while coordinating secret arms deals with America’s enemies, his impeachment would have been certain. Likewise, a Republican President, who suffered such a massive collapse of his foreign policy so as to encourage the spread of radical Islam throughout the Middle East and Asia, while stabbing long-term allies in the back and weakly appeasing belligerent enemies and rivals, would have been lambasted on a daily basis by every newspaper and talk show and roasted alive by his political opponents. If a Republican President’s administration was exposed by Edward Snowden for its National Security Agency’s unprecedented surveillance on American civilians, an independent prosecutor would have been unleashed on the administration, and indictments, convictions, and incarcerations would soon follow.
To be certain, even without a complicit mainstream media in their corner, Democratic administrations and candidates have always been far more tenacious and dedicated to doing whatever it took to achieve their political objectives than the bumbling and pusillanimous country club and Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans. Democrats love governmental power and are single-minded and tireless in pursuit of absolute power, which is a reason why they win, by hook or by crook, almost all close elections. Because they are so accustomed to winning close elections with the aid of massive voter fraud and trickery, Democrats were absolutely shocked that Al Gore was not victorious in the 2000 presidential elections.
Since the 1960s, Democrats have been thoroughly tutored by radical Leninist organizer Saul Alinsky on how to exploit to full advantage any Republican weaknesses by showing the latter to be hypocrites who do not live up to their stated principles. Alinksy’s teachings in “Rules for Radicals” have been the subject of Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s college thesis paper at Wellesley. Similarly, after graduating from Columbia University, President Barack Obama worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago for the Gamaliel Foundation which was affiliated with the Alinsky organization, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and, after graduating Harvard law school, served as legal counsel for ACORN, another Alinsky organization. President Obama even taught Alinsky’s principles to community organizers.
Over the past two decades, one of the favorite election-winning strategies of Democrats has been the “October Surprise.” The “October Surprise” is a stealthy maneuver which Democrats use to attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat just before a November election. In the Alinsky spirit, Democrats excel at opposition research and wait patiently for the most opportune time to expose any embarrassing apparent hypocrisy which may be lurking in Republican closets in order to severely damage Republican candidates in the eyes of voters. Because Republicans pride themselves on their allegiance to law and order, any revelation of a crime by a Republican candidate is highly sought after even if that crime is minor and many decades old. Republicans extol the virtues of the family, which means that they are highly vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy if they are exposed for having extramarital affairs or are closeted gays. The effectiveness of the “October Surprise” lies in the inability of Republican candidates to effectively counter the devastating effects of such revelations — even if they are completely false — when they are made so close to the elections.
A few examples of past “October Surprises” are instructive. In 1992, only four few days before the presidential election, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh decided to indict Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for his role in the “Iran-Contra” affair in order to tarnish President George H. W. Bush’s re-election campaign, which he lost. On the eve of the 2000 presidential election, Democrats operatives leaked to the press that Republican candidate George W. Bush was arrested in Maine 25 years earlier for driving under the influence of alcohol.
A week before the 2004 presidential election, the New York Times exposed the looting of close to 380 tons of high explosives from the Al-Qa’qaa facility in Iraq in order to portray the Bush administration as incompetent. A month or so earlier that same year, CBS News and its anchor Dan Rather attempted to discredit President Bush’s service record as a pilot with the Texas Air National Guard 30 years prior by using forged, word-processed documents that could not have been created using an early 1970s typewriter. More recently, in late September of 2o12, a fundraising speech made by Republican candidate Mitt Romney, in which he criticized the 47% of Americans who did not pay federal income taxes, was secretly recorded and released by the press in order to discredit his candidacy in close proximity to the elections.
An “October Surprise” can also be a crisis that benefits leftists. In the words of Rahm Emmanuel, former political consiglieri to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and the current mayor of Chicago, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” (http://youtu.be/1yeA_kHHLow). The reason that leftist liberals, socialists, communists, and radicals love crises is because a catastrophe or a crisis allows a political leader to override the normal mechanisms of society. For example, under the normal conditions of life, people are committed to maintaining their own private property separate from other people’s property. A person who, without permission or voluntary trade, takes away things that do not belong to him or to her would be considered a thief and, if physical force was used, would be considered a robber. Leftist liberals, socialists, communists, and radicals yearn for catastrophes to happen because they can then proclaim that “we are all in this one boat together” and can use the power of the government to loot the private properties of the so-called “Haves” to distribute to the so-called “Have-Nots” and, thus, to buy the allegiance of the “Have Nots” for what becomes a permanent regime change.
In 2008, President Barack Obama rode into the White House on the wave of financial crisis under which the federal government took over Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, General Motors, American International Group (AIG) Insurance, and essentially nationalized large companies and industries. The nationalization was in a fashion that would have would have gladdened the heart of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas who, in 1938, nationalized the assets of American and British oil companies in Mexico to form the government-run Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX). Superstorm Sandy in late October of 2012 allowed liberal politicians and media outlets to proclaim that the people need to cede even more sweeping emergency powers to a big central government to combat crises of these nature.
Notably, once the federal government, the various state governments, and county and city governments acquire new powers, they never give them up and the citizenry never gets them back. Each new assumption of power serves as legal precedent for a subsequent assumption of power. The emergency powers assumed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War were invoked by succeeding Presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the Great Depression and for World War II. The plethora of three-letter government agencies that he created in the 1930s are still around today and wield substantial powers. President George W. Bush cited the same precedents in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Department of Homeland Security will only grow and arrogate more powers to itself.
Now in 2014, we at The Cassandra Times believe that Senate and House Democrats in this year’s election will benefit from the “October Surprise” known as the Ebola epidemic. If President Obama thinks that it would be advantageous to him and to his Democratic Party, he can suspend the November 4, 2014 elections. If so, the grounds that will be given will be “for national security” because the polling places bring together many people into a confined area which could cause the Ebola virus to spread. On the other hand, President Obama does not even have to explicitly suspend the elections. All he needs to do is to have Center For Disease Control director Dr. Thomas Frieden appear on television to reassure the American public that voting is “perfectly safe” but that the government “cannot guarantee anyone’s safety” and to “use every precaution” or whatever. Since no one in America possessing a modicum of logic believes any of the obfuscations perpetrated by the Center For Disease Control, few people will brave the threat of Ebola to vote publicly at the poll. Of course, the American public will not risk exposure because they know that they live in “Flyover Country” and will not have access to the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp from Mapp Biopharmaceutical as the company will be busy for the foreseeable future producing and earmarking all supplies of the drug for America’s elite class, the inside-the-beltway bureaucracy, the Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, and their families under the rubrics of “continuity of government” and “national security”.
We at The Cassandra Times predict that voter turnout at the poll will be at an all-time low, thus, the elections will be decided by mail-in ballots which will be the vast majority of the votes that are cast. For the Democratic Party, which prides itself on doing whatever it takes to win, an election whose votes are dominated by mail-in ballots is like the house’s chances at a casino.
We should remember that the United States Postal Service is a branch of the federal government whose employees overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Centralized mail processing takes place in the larger cities and metropolitan areas. We can be sure that sacks of mail-in ballots from the big cities will be counted scrupulously because the big cities consistently vote Democratic. All it would take to flip the 2014 elections to the Democrat column in selected states is a relatively small number of dedicated-to-the-cause postal workers and Democratic Party activists in key districts who would secretly dispose of sacks of mail-in ballots from wealthier suburbs and from rural areas, which consistently vote Republican. In the extremely unlikely event that these postal workers are ever found out, arrested, tried, and convicted a year from now on election and mail fraud, President Obama could always count on the Attorney General’s office not to prosecute them.
We are calling this shot before it happens because a number of very smart and crafty Democrats in Washington, who are expert masters in the strategies and tactics of Saul Alinsky and his followers, already know exactly how to pull this off. This “October Surprise” will allow the Democrats to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to defy the conventional wisdom and narrative, and permit a Democratic-held Congress to support the agenda of Obama administration for the remainder of his term. We hope our prediction does not come to pass, but, unfortunately, we can almost always count on the Elmer Fudds of the Republican Party to lose close contests and to squander the liberties of the American people.
