All of the airings managed to allow the candidates to restate the same fucking talking points that we'd heard since, oh, January? We discovered that Obama is collected and thoughtful, that McSame is a crankly old man who apparently comes onstage with a full Depends, given the way he fidgets and wriggles, The Palinator can memorize a GOP talking point provided that it has little words and doesn't require any math skills and that Biden is a smart guy with a razor for a tongue.
And any of us who've been paying attention didn't know this...when?
Sigh.
It's beginning to look like Obama is going to get the turd put in his pocket this November. I don't envy him. The fiscal and policy sins of the past eight years are coming home with blood on their hands, and with the Great Recession growing like a thundercloud and with a deficit the size of Chomolungma already looming over him Obama will not be able to do much FDRing to ameliorate it. Add to that the already-viral GOP narrative of how this election will be stolen by ACORN and muslims and cunning negroes and how Joe The Plumber is gonna get screwed and the Wrath of the Rushzomboids is gonna make an impeachment for a blowjob look like carebears, fairies and ponies gambolling in RainbowCloudyFairyLand.
The next four years will be ugly, and I think we will all be unpleasantly surprised at how poorly our nation behaves under stress and deals with failure. I think that when the history of these times is written the Second Bush Era will be looked on as the watershed, the final break between the United States of promise and growth and power and the sour, divided, bitter polity that began declining into an angry turpitude...
...and then the Plorg arrived...
WASF.
I'm tired of politics. To me the choices are clear: Obama, for all his flaws and hokey messianic baggage, at least represents hope that my country can turn away from the awful slough of corruption, war and oligarchy it has been headed the past eight years; McSame is...more of the same.
I would it were bedtime, Hal, and all well.
I'm going to stop talking about all of this until after November and, instead, share some thoughts about things that make a peaceful place in my heart. We've been enjoying a colorful Northwest autumn, and kindergarten is a big adventure. We've enjoyed some good new books and a movie or two. I'm fascinated by the return of Lance Armstrong to road racing. The fall soccer season is in ful spate and the MLS year is drawing to a close. There's a couple more decisive battles for October, and Little Miss' bedroom is finally getting close the where we'd like it to be. So I'm not saying that I won't revisit politics until the hurly-burly's done. But it may be a while.
10 comments:
I with you...as soon as Obama is elected...and *if* he turns things just a quarter off our current course that in itself will be a grand enough event for me to go back to my studies...and forget the past eight years.
I never thought of you as Falstaff before. It sorta fits. Sorta.
And, yes, I've been wondering what you thought of Sir Lance-Never-Leave.
I am also with you on ducking politics. I've managed to avoid all four debates and consider myself well ahead on that basis.
Policy (as in how we can get out of this mess) is another matter, but I'll certainly let you take the lead in discussions because I find your pictures and discussion of life in Oregon very interesting.
Sheerah: I, too, would like NOT to live in interesting times. I'm afraid we may not get the choice.
YK: There lives not three good men unhanged in Portland; and one of them is fat, and grows old.
More on Sir Lance in a bit.
Pluto: Before I leave the subject I do want to say something about this year's "ballot measures", both for what they say about our experiment in direct democracy and the state of our State itself.
"Sheerah: I, too, would like NOT to live in interesting times. I'm afraid we may not get the choice."
/groan
I want it to end...please, interesting? I'm done with interesting.
Well, Chief, I, for one, found the debates—all four of 'em—most informative and valuable. They confirmed the thesis I've been propounding for some years now (recall the old Intel Dump days?) that the modern Republican Party is well-deserving of suffering the same fate as the unlamented Whigs. This party has hit the self-destruct switch and will hopefully fade into history before it does any more damage to our nation. What else would one say when the party's own presidential candidate is running against it?
Our old friend Charly Gittings always had it right. This is a party of criminals. Criminals enabled by various rednecks, under-educated patriotic Americans and rich folk whose only allegiance is to their wallet.
Charly has always focused on the overtly criminal acts such as war crimes, violations of the Constitution, etc. Although he's right, I find other crimes against the American people, crimes that may not ever be prosecuted, but crimes nevertheless. Republicans led our nation into the dire financial straits in which we find ourselves. Yes, many Democrats climbed on board, but Republicans were the prime movers in the biggest robbery in history. Then we have the selection by the ultimate liar and sell-out, Mr. Straight-Talk Express himself, of a barely sentient human being as the person to be a heartbeat away from the awesome powers of our presidency. Oh, and of course, in what appears more and more to be a futile effort to hang onto power, they are using racist tactics and phony terrorist associations, all to get the American people to continue wetting their pants.
Yeah, we're all tired of it. But we've got to stick with it, doing whatever we can to get that stake firmly in the heart of these people. Now is not the time to give up. This beast has turned out to have multiple lives before. We must slay it. I'm old enough and figure to have enough $$ to make it to the end (also got out of the market months ago), but there are a lot of younger people, family and otherwise, I care about. In fact, I care about all the young people. And I'm ashamed of what we've done to them.
Slay the beast. Turn 'em all out. Moderate Republican? There are no moderate Republicans. Sheer, go back to your studies, but never, ever forget. Forgetting is what gets us into this kind of shit. Pluto, do not duck politics. By doing so, you play their game.
Publius: "the modern Republican Party is well-deserving of suffering the same fate as the unlamented Whigs...What else would one say when the party's own presidential candidate is running against it?"
I agree: the GOP is intellectually and morally bankrupt. They've got nothing; their "agenda" consists of tax cuts, guns, gays and abortion. Guns are a state and local issue once you get below the full-auto level, gays and abortion are no business of the federal government's anyway (other than to enforce the rights enumerated in the Constitution) and we can see pretty clearly where the tax cut thing has gotten us.
But, damn, Publius, I knew this before McSame opened his mouth back in January. I can see his voting record, I have lived with the man in the Senate for much of my adult life. The reasons these damn debates were so painful to me was having to listen to the platitudes and the outright lies that Obama and the moderators had to let pass. I KNOW this stuff was gonna come from McSame and from the GOP, I know because it's all they DO have. But it's no less frustrating to have to listen to it.
What REALLY frustrates me is that I'm not sure that, short of another Civil War, this is ever going to stop. There is a segment of the public - about 30% based on the polls - that is just not ever, NEVER, going to accept anything but the red-meat, torture, riches for the rich, war and tax cuts, Palin-McCain-Bush-Cheney version of "America".
In a horrible way, the coming Great Recession may be what it will take to knock these people back into the wilderness for a generation, as the original Depression knocked their grandfathers out there for a generation. But I don't want to live through it and I don't want my kids to live through it, either...
So I guess my feeling is that I'm not exactly giving up politics: I'll work on the Democratic GOTV campaign this year like every couple of years. I just wrote the local paper on one of the more egregious GOP-faction ballot measures up this year. But I just don't feel up to dissecting and discussing this any further. We know what we need to do. We realize what will happen if we DON'T. But from here out all "discussion" gets us is more opportunity for the GOP to spew its hatred, racisim and traitorous venom. It's time to stop arguing with these mooks, and time to sharpen the stake to drive through their fucking vampire hearts.
You guys are way to hard on yourselves (and your country).
The internet is going to change politics forever (it's just going to take a generation or two, i.e. at the pace that laws change, not technology)
The fundamental problem you have is that you live in the oldest representative democratic system.
It was the first prototype and has a lot of flaws the founding fathers couldn't have predicted.
Things like a broken Attorney General system, a goofy voter registration system and a two party check-and-balance system which encourages graft and log rolling. The very high rate of incumbents being re-elected isn't an accident, it is by design.
Most more modern democratic systems have learned from these mistakes.
I predict a serious overhaul of the system in the next 50 years.
"We're voting for the n***er."
ael,
A great story--don't that say it all? I'm gonna have to write something about that p.o.v. with which I am well familiar.
Would that I had a bit of Ativan or Navane, I could be as cucumber cool as Obama. (Oops, I didn't mean that as any racial slur, as of the phallic Washington Monument or Leaning Tower of Pisa sort, which never actually occurred in any video.) Whew...almost lost my credibility there.
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