We're screwed this election. Get over it and start planning how to float some half way decent politicians for congress. Actual people with integrity and a plan that doesn't sound like rehashed miss-matched crap from the last thirty years.
Wilderness. Learn to love it. Learn to love our new government overlords. learn to love high gas prices, inflation, increased government spending, deficits that have our grandparents rolling in their graves and government run health care programs that start looking like and acting like health mills. Let me tell you that the people I get to talk to every day want that government spending and government health care more than we do not.
They want someone to take care of them and everything else because life is just too damned hard. Pilgrims that crossed oceans to colonize wilderness, cut off from all support but their own intrepidness, pioneers that crossed the prairies and lived in sod houses are myths to these people. To modern citizens in this nation, that history is not the history of hard working survivors who created this country, but of idiots not much more advanced than cavemen.
We have come to the point in our lives when we we no longer consider that hardy, self made man and woman as something to revere. Instead, we are self-congratulatory to the point of obscenity that we have "overcome" this necessity of a hard-scrabble life. Self reliance to these folks is getting up to the alarm clock in the morning and pressing the microwave button to warm up instant coffee.
If you doubt that, you have only to look so far as the visceral reaction to Sarah Palin. It isn't that Palin is an idiot or has no experience what-so-ever. It is that her experiences, including that self-reliance and rejection of government hand outs, to the point of shooting moose for dinner, is completely and unutterably foreign. More foreign than a black president with a "funny name" who associates with all sorts of political radicals and lives in the exclusive Hyde Park. That is normal in today's world.
These people think they have been working hard and putting money into the government all this time and should get something out of it as if it was a business they invested in or a producing factory. Government is no longer seen as a simple method to organize laws and set basic boundaries to validate an existing "good society" that produces everything that it needs in the private sector and only wants defense to survive and thrive.
Government has become the mother and father who punishes and rewards. The mother and father who is expected to provide us with food, shelter, clothing, education and jobs. The mother and father who will bandage our wounds and teach us the "right way". We don't need prayer or reliance on a higher power. We need only to fill out a form and apply to our local government office.
This is no longer the nation that simply wanted the opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". We are a nation of whinging children who expect to be given everything.
That, my friends, is why McCain is losing. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with some idiot in the audience with a freaking monkey or some lady calling Obama an Arab. People want to be taken care of. End of story. They fear the loss of their comfortable life either through economic disaster or from too many fights with the barbarians at the gate. They simply want the grain to keep flowing and barbarians to take what they want and go away. They cannot reconcile that you can't have both.
Obama is promising the impossible. Mainly that, once he is elected, the government will take care of "the people". They won't be sick. If they do get sick, the government will cure them. They won't have to juggle two or three jobs. If their children don't behave, the government will put them in programs to rehabilitate them and teach them to be respectful and productive adults. Everybody is going to get a college degree. We won't have to worry about defending ourselves or spending money on the military because we will simply speak from the podium of moral authority and all human kind will suddenly no longer worry about their own ambitions or fears, but will become flower waving talkers of peace. This is the current polities definition of "leadership".
What you have to fear here isn't that Obama will suddenly turn the country socialist. He won't because we already are; a significant reason why people don't see his associations with Ayers, et al as "bad". What we have to fear is the extremes. Either Obama delivers on all of his promises, radically changing our nation or Obama fails miserably and people lose complete faith in our system of government. Translating the failure of socialist policies to the failure of democracy.
I make no predictions about "revolution" as so many are want to do. We have righted ourselves too many times before. But, people are comparing this time to The Great Depression and they have no real idea of what hardship means. What would people think about a real depression and not just this simple recession?
I shudder to think.
We are going to lose for this reason and this reason alone: McCain cannot give the people what they want and won't promise to do so because he doesn't believe in that type of government. Simply put, McCain cannot be a Republican, small government, fiscal conservative and be a socialist at the same time, regardless of how hard he tries with populist promises of buying people's mortgages outright.
People want socialism, even if they have no idea that's what they are asking for, and that is what they are going to vote for in this election.
Wilderness. Learn to love it. Learn to love our new government overlords. learn to love high gas prices, inflation, increased government spending, deficits that have our grandparents rolling in their graves and government run health care programs that start looking like and acting like health mills. Let me tell you that the people I get to talk to every day want that government spending and government health care more than we do not.
They want someone to take care of them and everything else because life is just too damned hard. Pilgrims that crossed oceans to colonize wilderness, cut off from all support but their own intrepidness, pioneers that crossed the prairies and lived in sod houses are myths to these people. To modern citizens in this nation, that history is not the history of hard working survivors who created this country, but of idiots not much more advanced than cavemen.
We have come to the point in our lives when we we no longer consider that hardy, self made man and woman as something to revere. Instead, we are self-congratulatory to the point of obscenity that we have "overcome" this necessity of a hard-scrabble life. Self reliance to these folks is getting up to the alarm clock in the morning and pressing the microwave button to warm up instant coffee.
If you doubt that, you have only to look so far as the visceral reaction to Sarah Palin. It isn't that Palin is an idiot or has no experience what-so-ever. It is that her experiences, including that self-reliance and rejection of government hand outs, to the point of shooting moose for dinner, is completely and unutterably foreign. More foreign than a black president with a "funny name" who associates with all sorts of political radicals and lives in the exclusive Hyde Park. That is normal in today's world.
These people think they have been working hard and putting money into the government all this time and should get something out of it as if it was a business they invested in or a producing factory. Government is no longer seen as a simple method to organize laws and set basic boundaries to validate an existing "good society" that produces everything that it needs in the private sector and only wants defense to survive and thrive.
Government has become the mother and father who punishes and rewards. The mother and father who is expected to provide us with food, shelter, clothing, education and jobs. The mother and father who will bandage our wounds and teach us the "right way". We don't need prayer or reliance on a higher power. We need only to fill out a form and apply to our local government office.
This is no longer the nation that simply wanted the opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". We are a nation of whinging children who expect to be given everything.
That, my friends, is why McCain is losing. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with some idiot in the audience with a freaking monkey or some lady calling Obama an Arab. People want to be taken care of. End of story. They fear the loss of their comfortable life either through economic disaster or from too many fights with the barbarians at the gate. They simply want the grain to keep flowing and barbarians to take what they want and go away. They cannot reconcile that you can't have both.
Obama is promising the impossible. Mainly that, once he is elected, the government will take care of "the people". They won't be sick. If they do get sick, the government will cure them. They won't have to juggle two or three jobs. If their children don't behave, the government will put them in programs to rehabilitate them and teach them to be respectful and productive adults. Everybody is going to get a college degree. We won't have to worry about defending ourselves or spending money on the military because we will simply speak from the podium of moral authority and all human kind will suddenly no longer worry about their own ambitions or fears, but will become flower waving talkers of peace. This is the current polities definition of "leadership".
What you have to fear here isn't that Obama will suddenly turn the country socialist. He won't because we already are; a significant reason why people don't see his associations with Ayers, et al as "bad". What we have to fear is the extremes. Either Obama delivers on all of his promises, radically changing our nation or Obama fails miserably and people lose complete faith in our system of government. Translating the failure of socialist policies to the failure of democracy.
I make no predictions about "revolution" as so many are want to do. We have righted ourselves too many times before. But, people are comparing this time to The Great Depression and they have no real idea of what hardship means. What would people think about a real depression and not just this simple recession?
I shudder to think.
We are going to lose for this reason and this reason alone: McCain cannot give the people what they want and won't promise to do so because he doesn't believe in that type of government. Simply put, McCain cannot be a Republican, small government, fiscal conservative and be a socialist at the same time, regardless of how hard he tries with populist promises of buying people's mortgages outright.
People want socialism, even if they have no idea that's what they are asking for, and that is what they are going to vote for in this election.
Welcome to my world. We have recently had a "nothing" voted in as a replacement Prime Minister here in Australia due to a subservient press and a desire for a government that would provide all the above. A do nothing, that has done nothing since coming to power except swan around the global stage pretending that he is important. That, and implement a whole lot of new "watch" programs to look like he is doing something.
All we can hope is that he craps in everyone's nest so bad that he only lasts one term!
I hope you can do better than that, but current conditions don't portend well.
It's the Credit-Card, Instant-Gratification, don't-confuse-them-with-facts culture that grew out of the New Left and Counterculture of the sixties, into the 'me decade' seventies, and blundered right along through the eighties and the nineties and their obsessions with non-crisis crises. When everything is a "Crisis", eventually (as the Wolf noted while eating the sheep) Nothing is a crisis.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."
I'm afraid we're almost there.
"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain the you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
This is the foundation of the past 30 years of Democrats' inculcation of the victim mentality in America.
What I find intersting in my world is that many, most, even, of the younger folk I work with (20's-30's) with no military background to them, college graduates most of them, are not happy with Senator McCain, but they're appalled by Senator Obama.
And interestingly enough, some of the crusty old warriors I work with are toying with the idea of voting for Obama. Figuring giving Senator Reid and Madame Speaker what they want is probably the quickest way to take back the Congress.
FDR...three terms. If he had not have died, what then? We are talking about a guy who was giving the farm away to the citize4ns and then we ended up at war. I really think that, had this man lived, people would have tried to vote for him for a long time, if you know what I mean.
However, in this particular case, the other party's leadership is already on what I consider to be the very Left edge of the political spectrum, and that party's nominee is on the Left edge of that, with clear ties to Marxist terrorists and other unsavory characters who have made no secret of their disdain and hatred for the kind of America I would prefer that we maintain.
After seeing the long-term and serious damage that 8 years of a "moderate" Dem - Clinton - did to critical institutions of the American government, I just can not understand how ANYONE can be blind to the probable damage that someone like Obama could do, and I can not understand how ANY mature, responsible voter could EVER think about voting for Obama. The American public is about to cut off its nose to spite its face.
Unlike Leftists like Alec Baldwin, Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, et al, we "right-of-center" Americans can't threaten to move elsewhere. Where would we go? There just aren't any options for us, as the rest of the world is tilted their way.
Are we just to give up and abandon all hope, and learn to live in that kind of system?
Welcome to the election of 1860. We have already sown the seeds of the next civil war, and the fighting will commence shortly after the election.
Oh, states will not be leaving the union, per se, but social groups and local areas might well use a de facto seccession, but I am afraid there is no turning back and that there will be bloodshed, perhaps more than anyone here can contemplate.
Although the left bears the lion's share of the burden for the coming disaster, the right has it's villain's as well. Nothing short of a complete overhaul of the legislative branch, the repealing of many of the laws and systems enabling the socialism engine that is driving much of it, and draconian measures for a press that refuses to tack the course of objectivity will suffice as a first step.
The "Chicago Experiment" is nothing less than a political version of the "Andromeda Strain" and it will kill everything in the nation, turning it into a thugocracy if we cannot stop it.
There. I need more coffee, and a long walk. Sigh.
[quietly walks through room with the Prozac spritzer, puts away all the ammo and sharp objects, spins shut the vault door...]
Gad, we're an unhappy bunch this morning!
Say goodbye to any form of media that has the "objectivity" to publicize information critical of the tyrant and its regime.
After that, I'll probably need more than a Prozac spritzer. LOL But I'm confident that I'll get the "re-education" I need, or I'll at least be treated for my "mental health issues" under Obama's universal healthcare system.
You were going good until there. We do not need draconian measures for the press. We need to invest in the best and most prominent methods of media. We need to learn guerilla propaganda techniques. If there is one thing I have learned watching the war for the last seven years, it is about insidious, guerilla propaganda and how to use it effectively.
As is said "freedom of the press only belongs to those who actually own a press".
I wish I had the money to start up my own paper. I surely would. However, I think Lincoln had the correct idea when he jailed some editors and shuttered some newspapers that were printin articles supportive of the Confederacy.
Sorry if you find it offensive, but I would not shed a tear if the NYT went up in flames and was burned to a complete pile of slag and ashes. It is a travesty of journalism, and is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the enemies of this great nation.
The truth of the matter is that the majority of our media in all forms are so far in the tank for the left that they risk exceeding crush depth and imploding. Guerilla press and propoganda is all well and good, but it can only go so far. The only way that I can see the current crop of papers and television networks being saved is if we could get enough conservatives to buy up the stock and oust the leftists who are presently in charge.
Forget the Prozac... just issue me bourbon rations... :)
And by the dint of their volunteer work, they're happy to give of themselves and their money - but they'd rather choose to whom, for what.
They aren't the kind of young adults who would balk at giving some money to Project Valour-IT, under the logic of - "That's something the government should do."
I feel like I am being pushed into a time machine to send me back to my Soviet life... The country has changed so much in the last 10 years... I am not sure if you, guys, really notice it but for the person who came from where we are heading now, this socialist tilt in the people's mind is scary...
at least, when I was in the Soviet Union, I had a choice and a hope - work hard to get myself into the States. What do I do now?? Spend all my money on the guns and ammo and can food and find a hut somewhere in the mountains??
Well, if the "One" does get elected, we can look forward to enjoying that old-time Soviet collective experience. I heard the Soviet economy best described by an emmigre who described it thus : "We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us."
Buck up! It's not over. My Bad Boyfriend has been down before. Don't count him out - especially on the Navy's birthday.
Now is the time to redouble efforts. You must call and email and talk to whoever will listen to you.
I think it's most appropriate to recall the words of Captain Lawrence - "Don't give up the ship!"
The Republicans' claim to be lovers of small govt is undermined by their attitude to "defense" which is anything but defensive. The same Americans who say they don't want govt interfering in their lives have no problem with Uncle Sam setting curfews for adults in Iraq.
There's nothing small - or fiscally responsible - about the GOP view of military spending, which seems to expand indefinitely under GOP rule, with no thought given to the tax base or economy that's being asked to sustain it. Budgets go up every year, regardless of threat, and only electing a Democrat seems to slow the process (sometimes).
Republicans invariably leave vast deficits (like Reagan and Bush) that Democrats must then pay down. Republicans then whine about the Democrats' taxes. But what would Republicans do? Push the deficit into a deeper and deeper hole, never adressing the debt, until one day the US finds itself bankrupt. Bankrupted by Pentagon Big Government.
PS It won't be Obama who's remembered for the biggest nationalisation of US businesses ever, but GW Bush. I even hear the Government is getting into insurance and the mortgage business. There's a socialist in the White House!
Actually, there are socialists in congress. The majority party. I believe they are called Democrats.
Damn good thing you put "sometimes" because I almost fell over laughing.
The same Americans who say they don't want govt interfering in their lives have no problem with Uncle Sam setting curfews for adults in Iraq.
That is probably the lamest argument I have ever heard in my life. Even Jefferson and Adams promulgated spending on defense that the country had to borrow and pay back. I believe Adams called the Navy "wooden walls". I think the entire point that you keep missing, my friend, and you hope to comfort yourself with is that defense spending is not even a tenth of our social government spending. Not even a tenth.
And, I would rather spend a little to defend the whole, than spend a lot to favor a few.
The local police set curfews for adults in the US -- helps control the riff-raff with weapons.
In Iraq, it also helps control the riff-raff with weapons. And the local police are taking over more of that task.
On a different note -- Welcome back!
The deficit that was left by Reagan brought the Soviet Union to the knees and led to the liberation of the Eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics, not to mention my own family, who are now our staunch allies in the war on terror. I think those were the money well spent and we will get them back three-fold, just give them some time. Remember, it is a long-time investment, not day trading.
I do not mind spending my money in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe these are the money being well-spend, too. I want other people to be free, like me.
I am not a happy camper with the bailout and nationalization of the banks and insurance industry and that scaries me, too... However, it is not the President who pushed that bailout down our throats, it's the Congress who voted this thing through and loaded it up with pork up to the gills... Remember, it's the Congress that makes the laws, not the President (at least for now)
Or a post-modern liberal arts major. LOL
Even if you *are* convinced then what's with the Henny Penny? Whinging about socialism etc isn't helpful for a stronger America. You guys need to build a strong Republican side to help balance the Democrats, this is the reality of politics and why your constitution is so good; balance.
Build a strong opposition if you really do despair to lose you will need it with the Democrats in double power, but save it for after the election.