corrente

The Times does indeed do some good reporting this week. Turns out that Rove spent a good chunk of his $170 million on building an Amway-like organization. It's a multi-level marketing system to sell Bush that sounds horribly like a Bush news conference: Everything is scripted. It also sounds like a creepy cult of personality: Volunteers do it because they "love Bush" and his "beliefs", not out of Republican party principles (to the extent there are any left) or policies. (Why is it that the SCLM portrays "hate Bush" as a threat to civil discourse, and "love Bush" as something normal? It seems to me that loving any politician, of whatever stripe, is far more dangerous.)

Anyhow, the whole article is well worth reading—the social terrain reminds me a lot of Stepford Wives, and the build environment of the burbclaves in Neil Stephensen's Snow Crash: "The Mews at Windsor Heights," "White Columns," and so forth. Anyhow, right at the end the article, Republican coordinator Betty Kitchen, not know what she says, says it:

"We just have to get some people to get more people. We just have to get this pyramid under way.''
(via The Times)"

Yes, folks: It's a pyramid scheme. And if you follow the money in a pyramid scheme, where does the money go? Right to the top, to the ones who got on the gravy train first. And who gets screwed? Why, the ones who come in last, before the bubble bursts. And who would that be? Why, the voters.

Yech. Read the whole thing.

And readers? Having read the article, what do you think? If Bush wins, we'll be living with this machine for years to come.