Walpurgis Night: Politicians Celebrate Their Halloween

Edwin A. Sumcad, PAR Columnist:

   I want to entertain you with a Halloween satire and parody. I hope it doesn’t scare the wit out of you. Walpurgis Night falls on April 30, the night when witches have fun riding their broomsticks. It is the night we confront the powers of the supernatural. It is similar to Halloween when the underworld boos frightened humans out of their cuckoo nest. U.S. Political Halloween In the United States, politicians had already started celebrating their Halloween before the 31st of this month of October. As you can see, hell broke loose. For, it is the time they “raise hell with something to cause harm, disruption, or damage” to the public. [1]
      For example, we have a government shutdown right now. Republicans in Congress wanted a government blackout because of Obamacare – I mean ObamaScare. They don’t care if as a result life is screwed up. That’s why Halloween week is always nostalgic to me. Halloween is October 31st, which is also just about four or five days before Election Day in the U.S. Although this short period of time between Halloween and Election Day is frightening, at the same time it is also exciting; it is like the last ten-second-bell in boxing for presidential candidates to fire their last salvo -- their state-of-the-art treats or tricks, to win the verdict of the voting public.
      The American public remembers vividly what happened in the 2008 presidential election. In the final “10-seconds” of presidential round so to speak, Obama knocked out rival McCain with his horrifying treat or trick punch. The verdict went to Obama winning the electoral votes by 52.9% to McCain’s 45.7%.
    McCain was as tricky and hideous as Obama was, but hey, that was an unforgettable political Halloween Day in the United States, the dark Fright Night of nocturnal creatures that frighten Halloween buffs. Obama, the winner, proved to be not only cleverly inexplicable but also very scary. Think about it: Obama had this frightening story of egalitarian wealth redistribution that makes the rich wet in their pants.
   American capitalists always fear that Obama would turn the country upside down and with it goes their fortune, power and control of society. Now that Obama is president, he is a political warlock that he promised himself to be, and scarier than ever before. Look how he frightens the faint-hearted with medical bills paid by higher taxes [damn that Obamacare], bailout binge, giant bureaucracy and burgeoning out-of-this-world government spending, while turning the country into a welfare state.
    The “change” Obama dreamed of – a legacy of “The Dream” of his socialist father – I suspect, is to rename this country Socialist Republic of America. Is there any doubt that the prospect of this happening is startling and petrifying? Most frightened Americans perceived that in a class war, Obama would level off the status and social standing of all Americans in America where there will be neither poor nor rich. Americans will live in a classless society of the Socialist Republic of America.
Today millions of Americans are still paralyzed with fear because of Obama’s geopolitical Halloween tricks. This class-leveling is just one of them. Then presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s Halloween jargon was more anecdotal although no less scary. McCain speechified that Obama was a ghost with ghost-like promises … elect him president and he will disappear like Gaspar the Ghost, from his world of promises to help the poor.
    Republican buffs put words in McCain’s mouth saying that if Obama “kills” corporations with multiple and retributive taxes to raise revenue for his trillion-dollar government spending because as a Marxist socialist he hates the rich, big taxpayers will leave the country. Millions of jobs will be lost, and Obama nails the “Middle Class” to the Cross of penury, and consigns “the poor”, to a grinding poverty. In Greek mythology, Hades, the god of the underworld, then rules the country.
    It was really a good try, boys.
    Anyway, McCain’s punch line which he had hoped would have knocked out Obama was: Obama is a political chameleon who does not openly scare you. In straight talk, I scare you. In this contest as to who between the two of us scares you most, I am the scariest Halloween candidate you want to vote. That was McCain’s scary tale in Halloween just prior to Election Day. Now we still hear him, but no longer louder than a drop of a pin.
The problem with McCain was, immediately prior to Election Day, the threatening pro-Obama polls of victory hanged like the Sword of Damocles over his head. The great Republican Roman orator and statesman Cicero describes the Sword of Damocles in his Tusculan Disputations as something dreadfully foreboding, like a rapier that hangs by a thread over one’s head that could snap anytime without any hint or warning.
   It did … The thread snapped and dropped on McCain’s head and like the guillotine of the olden days when aristocrats literally lost their heads, cut the neck of his Democrat-Republican Party. The truth was, McCain ran for president as a Republican, but actually in his campaign he was a Democrat. The Republican voters found him to be a phony Republican, and the Democrat electorate found him to be a fake Democrat.
     McCain therefore could be described as a political troll, all right, but like the nocturnal bat that is neither beast nor bird, he was not totally perceived as genuinely murderous or apocalyptic enough to win the public nod as the scariest of them all.
     Nuisance candidates during the 2008 presidential campaign also showed their Halloween antics. Like Dracula they came out bravely under the sun daring to be pulverized to dust by cosmic radiation. They were indeed turned to dust and swept not to the dustbin of history but swept only under the rug hoping to come out again when the next presidential wind blows. They lived up to the literal meaning of perennial candidates that never lose – never lose the desire to run as a public nuisance.
     The point of their relevance why I have to mention their annoying participation in the 2008 presidential election is the fact that they gave Obama and McCain a run for their money as to who among them was the most annoying candidate in the eyes of the American public.
  From the geopolitical sector, Ralph Nader is on top of the list. A never-win scarecrow candidate, he keeps on trying to become president until he dies or when the frightened crow turns white, whichever comes first.
    Evangelical rivals are tough competitors too who joined politics’ underworld creatures of the third kind. On record, the religious front has an army of those political dryads running for president.
  I’ll just pick Chuck Baldwin at random, a political pastor moonlighting as a radio host of Florida who is an everlasting presidential candidate not necessarily of but only for the Constitution Party. Chuck always sends his targets including me an e-mail trying to convince all and sundry that he was the hope of the fatherland once elected president. Then he asked for money to make that happen.
   Claiming as a champion of morality, the thought of an evangelical candidate begging for money to secure himself in politics drops my jaw to the floor. I was in a shock that in the eyes of the Lord what Chuck was doing was a biblical sin perhaps worse than that debauchery which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by a rain of fire and brimstones.
   But the looniest of them all that mainstream Americans fear the most in the lineup of never-win everlasting presidential candidates was Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. He was always a presidential candidate since the first Pilgrim ship Mayflower landed in Virginia, possibly at Cape Cod, just to give you an idea, a metaphor of time reminding you how long ago that was.
     Paul’s dream when he is president is to abolish the Federal Reserves, put an end to taxation, obliterate the United Nations from the face of the earth, defund the nation’s national security program which to him infringes on human rights, including the stoppage of security-check in the airport; to eliminate TSA and the FDA, and declare into law the right to drink unpasteurized raw milk and eat uninspected milk products and farm produce as an absolute freedom of the individual. 
  Can you show me a perennial non-electable presidential candidate extremely menacing than this “oddball” from Texas? We can live in a ghost house and survive the haunting, but I doubt if any of us can survive Ron Paul’s America in a world without international order [no United Nations] in this Armageddon-threatening nuclear age; a new America without a central bank, without revenue, no national security, but with a lot of freedom to drink raw milk and die of Salmonella, E-Coli and Listeria, also a lot of liberty and freedom to die in the hands of local bombers, murderers and serial killers.
     To him 911 was the fault of America, not of Jihad terrorists that killed more than 6,000 innocent civilians in New York.

     Political Halloween in the Philippines

    But in the Philippines, every day is a Halloween Day of Corruption. Dark shadows of evil gather together and celebrate Halloween not just on October 31st but every day except on November 1st which is All Saints Day. Groteque-looking monsters whose moral DNA had been altered by corruption the most fearsome of which are the Undead in the graveyard of Philippine politics are said to be resting in All Saints Day.
     Unlike in the United States, Filipinos don’t have to wait from 4 to 5 days following October 31st before the final 10-second- bell of Election Day rings to get the shock of their life. Horror stories of the Celtic people centuries ago are the most spine-tingling scream-fear of moral depravity and corruption in the Philippines run by Political Dynasties also called Political Vampires that suck the lifeblood of the nation for years.      In the August 19/13 issue of the Philippines & Asian Report, I warned Philippine residents to brace themselves with a tsunami of corruptions coming their way before President Benigno Aquino III finishes a corrupt and corrupting six-year term in office. [See “Fanatics, Corruption And The Slaying Of The Undead”, [PAR, August 19, 2013]. Even as we speak, massive corruption already weighs heavily on the back of the Aquino administration. Many expect the Aquino administration to collapse under the heavy weight of indescribable anomalies.
    The pig-fat I was referring to in the previous edition of this column which was yummy-yummy to every salivating Congressperson and Senator is by law called “Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF]”, also notoriously known as pork barrel. Parasite politicians who prepare and pass the yearly Appropriation Act [Budget] into law for their benefit, had fattened this largesse from P24.79 billion [2013] to P25.24 billion [2014] for the gluttons of Congress to feast on. Every Senator would get a bite of P200 million out of this pig-fat, while Congressperson will share P70 million each supposedly earmarked for development projects in their respective districts. The pig-fat-subsisting members of the 15th Congress numbering 287 added more open mouths to feed in the coming 16th Congress totaling 292 Congresspersons in all.  
     Luckily, the Senate did not produce more PDAF “crocodiles” in their ranks. True to my latest warning of a tsunami of corruption in my previous column, right now a massive pig-fat investigation is underway. Spot-lighted is the P10 billion pork barrel syphoned by members of Congress through a bogus intermediary named JLN Corporation owned by Janet Lim-Napoles. To steal a pork barrel, Janet reportedly acted like a “pimp” between her Dummy Corporation and corrupt members of Congress.
    A “pimp” is described in the dictionary as a person soliciting for hookers or prostitutes.
     This woman reportedly solicited customers in Congress to engage the services of the JLN Corporation she owns. JLN would handle projects for the Senator or Congressman to be funded by their pork barrel. But the allocated pork barrel fund bounces back to her client politician, allegedly charging only a marginal amount of “fees” from 10% to 15% of the whole cost of the project/s. These are reportedly “ghost projects”, and the money goes back to the politician in a clandestine under the table transaction. The woman had become an overnight millionaire. A cover-up investigation is conducted by the Aquino administration. Janet surrendered personally to Noynoy, and detained under protective custody in a military camp pending investigation.
     It was like surrendering to a Godfather, opponents opined. Some politicians and accomplices involved had also reportedly fled the country. It is presumed a cover-up investigation because the public is aware that the president himself is behind the emergence and even the increased amount of pork barrels. Since Noynoy knew that pork barrel in the Philippines is one of the major causes of corruption, he would have made a move to abolish instead of patronize it. But his “daang matuwid” and “there is no poverty if there is no corruption” slogans for the transparent and honest government he was boosting about, were just façade, a cover-up.
    Obviously President Noynoy is not striking out pork barrel but instead protecting it for the politicians he is reportedly in cahoots with. As president, Noynoy himself has a “P1.3 trillion” pork barrel. [2] In comparison, the staggering amount makes the pork barrels of politicians in Congress appear just like peanuts in size.
    Not quite known to most if not all Filipinos is the fact that they have elected to office a pork-barrel-president! But the public haven’t seen a gigantic tsunami of corruption coming yet. Watch out for the P399 billion infrastructure projects that the Aquino administration proposed for the year 2014. This will rise to P820 billion [approximately 5% of the GDP] by the year 2016.
    Whose pocket will bulge and break at the seam filled with bribes and kickbacks, is currently a betting game among wagers of doom. Payback-time or the day of “hanging” will come when the heavy load of corruptions breaks the camel’s back so to speak, or when the pressured Aquino resigns or like a Samurai under Japan’s unwritten Code of Conscience, commits a disembowelment with a sword [hara-kiri], whichever of these terrible ending comes first.
      I said it once before in my previous column – and here I say it again – this is for the next EDSA mob to decide. In comparison, U.S. political Halloween is David to the Philippines’ Goliath. It is so scary because a bloody Hail Mary [EDSA III] is just around the corner. #

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access PAR October 21, 2013.