With recently-turned-Republican Donald Trump and still-not-a-Democrat Socialist Bernie Sanders leading the latest primary polls from New Hampshire, America is not only getting what it wants, but what it deserves.

Trump and Sanders represent the full-on caricaturization of politics that seems like something straight out of a Hollywood comedy starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifinakis. Unfortunately, they are all too real — the inevitable product of our shallow, reality-show society that currently favors boorish behavior and snake oil salesmen of a Socialist utopia that can be achieved if we just tax those evil rich people and corporations a little more.

What Trump and Sanders are proving is that you can get a lot of people to show up to see you say something stupid, or to promise you a bunch of free stuff. The anger at the system of crony capitalism is something both Trump and Sanders are tapping into — an anger that is more than justified — but neither is actually qualified to fix the problem.

Trump, a self-identified crony capitalist, is part of the problem. He explained his donations to the likes of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats as something all business people do: spread the money around to all the politicians and cash in favors no matter who is in power. Nobody may be able to buy him with campaign donations, but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t be sympathetic to his business partners and wealthy friends when they come calling.

Sanders is a self-identified Socialist who does not make the connection between the size of government and its relationship to crony capitalism. The bigger the government, the worse the crony capitalism. Growing government and bloating the regulatory state is the reason big corporations can wield so much influence: they are the only ones who can afford to play the game. In other news, the leading Democrat candidate, Hillary the Inevitable Part II, has finally been forced to turn over her private email server and her attorney has likewise handed the FBI a couple thumb drives full of State Department emails that probably contain hundreds if not thousands holding classified information. It’s worth noting that several former government employees in recent years, including former CIA Director David Petraeus, have been charged and convicted for either holding classified material at home, or failing to ensure its secure storage.

She has also filed a sworn affidavit with a federal judge stating she has turned over all work-related emails. Should that turn out to be false, she and her husband could hold the ignoble distinction of each possessing a perjury conviction. At least the media has finally come around to covering the email story now that the FBI is investigating, but you can forgive them for that as they’ve been too busy ignoring Planned Parenthood in favor of more sympathetic stories about the tragic demise of Cecil the Lion and Hitchbot.

These are truly bizarro times we are living in, when the Environmental Protection Agency causes a massive mine waste disaster, the Pentagon cannot secure the emails of its Joint Chiefs from Russian hacks, and the President and Secretary of State are twisting arms in Congress on behalf of Iranian theocrats.

Speaking of our Iran deal “partners,” the Russians, it turns out they have been violating the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty for at least five years, and we’ve known about it yet done nothing.

This is the same Russia that hosted Qasem Soleimani — the head of Iran’s vicious Quds Force responsible for hundreds of American deaths — barely a week after the deal was announced. Soleimani is barred from traveling outside Iran under the U.N. sanctions Russia is party to, but hey, what are ya gonna do?

Any opposition to the Iran deal is only coming from “warmongers” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, (according to moveon.org) or those who make common cause with the chanters of “Death to America” (according to Obama).

We learned in the last week that China — another Iran deal “partner” that is also responsible for pilfering the sensitive personnel files of some 22 million Americans who applied for government jobs — has been reading Cabinet officials’ private account emails since at least 2010. In the case of the Cabinet officials — and in particular Hillary Clinton — it is tragic that in their quest to keep their records away from the U.S. Congress and Freedom of Information Act requests they have instead shared them with any foreign-state actor that can execute a simple phishing scheme.

Meanwhile, ISIS just slaughtered another 2,000 Christians in Iraq, riots and unrest are spreading around the nation in protest of the police state, the budget deficit swelled in July by 58 percent from a year ago, and the stock market is sinking on China’s latest currency war and the looming interest rate hikes that threaten to pop yet another equities bubble.

And the media is obsessed with what Trump may or may not have said about Megyn Kelly’s time of the month.

– Alaska Journal of Commmerce, Aug. 12