Thank you, don’t come again

Because I’m trying to cut back on political posting here, I haven’t had much to say about the American election and so I don’t think I’ve mentioned Vivek (“rhymes with fake”) Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical near-billionaire (worth nearly $900m, so not far off). You may have observed from his name that he is of Indian ancestry, his parents having been Brahmins from Kerala who moved to the US where he was born. And by virtue of him being obscenely rich, he decided he might as well run for the Republican candidacy. He has not been very good at this, and the other day he finally had the sense to call it off.

This is how “the Christian Onion”, The Babylon Bee, responded to that news.

Charming. The Babylon Bee was founded as an avowedly right-wing satire news site a la the Onion but with more of a religious angle; in their earlier days they were actually quite snarky about some of the idiocies of American Christian culture, but not so much now. They just seem to be mostly unpleasant now, and, frankly, kind of racist. Elon Musk is apparently a big fan. Vivek strikes me, at least from whatever stories I’ve seen about him, as a clown (I mean…) with a handful of actually OK ideas but a lot more that suck, and I don’t think he was ever seriously in with a chance, mostly on account of him being brown and Hindu. A monotheistic Hindu, but a Hindu nonetheless; the one god he believes in is still not the one God the Republican voters he was trying to attract believe in, and they would’ve been painfully aware of that. But, though he may be a kind of awful person, the Bee’s bullshit is still pretty out of line and unnecessary.

At the same time, it’s also the face of the party he was trying to represent. Obviously the Bee aren’t an actual branch of the GOP, but this racist nonsense represents the party nonetheless. This is what Vivek’s own party probably thinks he’s fit for; he might be a near-billionaire like so many of them, but he’s brown, and the Republicans are the party of racist shits in the 21st century. There’s talk that Drumpf might actually make Vivek his vice president which would be… something to behold, I’m sure, but even if it does happen, you know that deep down his party mates still believe that running a 7-11 really is all he’s good for…