This Is Sheldon Adelson’s Election
There are a few universal conversations at large political events: Who’s sleeping less, transportation woes, etc. But each event also has its own unique conversation, and for the fifth GOP debate, at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, it was this: “Who just bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal?” The guess was usually the same: Adelson. Even if it was wrong, it was right. All of us — the hacks, the candidates, the entire American discussion — were in Sheldon Adelson‘s world already.
The question came up repeatedly because the purchase was so odd. The new owner was listed as an essentially unknown company, who, as it turned out, paid $40 million over market value for the Review-Journal alone, omitting the other papers it had been bundled with in a previous sale.
Tagging Adelson with the purchase made sense: He’s already a casino mogul, a Vegas institution, and as someone Forbes lists as the eighth richest person in the world, he could afford to overpay for a mouthpiece. Besides, he already founded a newspaper, the Israel Hayom, whose journalistic relationship to Benjamin Netanyahu is less impartial than Scientology’s public relations team is to David Miscavige.
At the same time, it seemed superfluous. The Adelson world was all around everyone, in many ways quite literally. The event was housed in his own resort, in an ersatz European opera house that was only one small part of what is probably a monument to a Northern Italian vacation he once went on. Figuratively speaking, once the debate began, there was no doubt whose territory we were in.
Republican fear-mongering has a proud tradition. Communists in the State Department “lost” us China, a nation we never had. Communists in Hollywood were infiltrating your brain. Feckless Democrats stabbed us in the back over Vietnam, ruined college and womanhood, and they’re rebooting all your favorite movies and shows with people who look like the help. The left has allowed so many fifth column elements into this country that you could use them to erect a dozen Parthenons with enough leftover to replace the Great Colonnade at Apamea if Daesh ever gets around to destroying it.
But this ostensible foreign policy debate took things to the next level, achieving a constant bloodthirsty victim/murderer schizophrenia that surpassed Rudy Giuliani figuratively reenacting the prom scene from Carrie at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Daesh’s attack in Paris and their supposed connection to two Muslim assholes who armed themselves and got famous American-style were the supposed inspiration for the chorus on stage, but after that it was just the same notes screamed as loud as possible.
It was hard not to hear the echoes of Adelson’s world, in which everything is divided into a binary opposition of such chauvinistic fatuity that the Middle East map could be redrawn to depict Israel and Not Israel. The elemental reality of other peoples, motivations and the lived history of American involvement in that region being drowned out by rhetorical appeals to kill ’em all before they kill us all is not much different from a man who considers Palestine a “made-up nation,” that “the purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel” and that Netanyahu’s repeated demonstrations of collective punishment are just right-on. It’s the same mentality that conflates two Southern Californian shitheads into an existential threat to over 300 million people over 3.8 million square miles of continent and islands that must be stopped at any cost.
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