I have come to believe that this election will be a referendum on the intelligence and maturity of the citizens of the United States.
If after seeing McCain's aberrant behavior, the constant, blatent, in-your-face lies, Sarah Palin's empty brain, and the horrible damage done to this nation by the Republicans as they've been in charge for so many years now, unfettered in their agenda by even the opposition party, people still put McCain (and potentially Palin) in the President's chair, then "we the people" flunk this test.
Of course, this is all more complicated than that. But I don't care. My last post about potential political ads represented my frustration with all of the above, particularly with the lies told by McCain and Palin over and over. They really think they can do that and get away with it and I fear they are right. Our press is a joke. Worse than that, they are in the GOP's pocket while simultaneously the GOP has everyone thinking that the press is pro-Democrat. Such masterful PR and political prowess deserves applause. Right before a bullet to the brain. Then again, it only works because there are enough dumb people out there, or not dumb, but RWA's (Right Wing Authoritarians). People who will vote the exact opposite of their own economic interests just for the sake of voting for someone they want to "have a beer with" or who pretends to follow the same imaginary sky being. I've often wondered these days what our political scene would look like if we only had non-RWA voters. And non-psycho lefties as well. (Because the wacko-left, while never all that much of a worry because they are less well-funded and far less organized than the lemmings on the right are just as bad as the RWAs in putting ideology over reality. One need only read such blogs as Twisty's or certain samplings on Shakesville or Alas or Violet Socks to see some examples of that - the latter has devolved into rabid Obama bashing and Palin-worshipping, all while pretending that she doesn't want the GOP to win just to spite Obama).
I go into the left as well as the right simply because I'm tired of all of the ideologues and empty bullshit rhetoric. I crave reasonable conversation with reasonable people. Fortunately I do get some of that in person. It is too bad it is next to impossible to find anything like that on any media outside of a handful of blogs (well, that I know of - I know there are millions of blogs).
So I crave reasonable conversation with reasonable people. People who aren't ready to take offense at every word, who aren't dripping with contempt with anyone who disagrees with them, people who don't use stupid buzzwords to shut off debate (be they from the left or the right - "liberal (when used by right-wingers), "-isms", "privilege", "blame-america firsters", "tax and spend", "death tax", and tons of others I'm too sleepy to think of now - Maybe I should put up a whole post about the words I'd like to see avoided like the plague.) There's a plan.
Anyone for some reasonable, if sometimes heated, conversation? Breakfast is on me.
Reminder
12 years ago
7 comments:
Fortunately, our lunch table is pretty progressive and ready to deconstruct everything. At length. Repeatedly.
Sometimes I even find myself wishing we could just talk about a football game or gripe about students like people in every other department.
Yes, other topics can be interesting, too. (Though not football! ;))
But tis the season. I kinda think in a Democracy, right before an historic election, it is our duty to talk about it and debate it - truly debate it, rather than just yelling talking points and bullshit.
What is the consensus of your lunch table about the issues of the day?
Well, we're pretty sure we should just take that 700 billion and split it among all US-citizen-adults, pay off huge chunks of what is on these companies' ledger sheets as potentially bad debt (our student loans, credit cards, auto loans, and mortgages), and "stimulate the economy" by buying stuff and saving the rest.
But I guess ideas like that are what you'd expect from the English department. We save nitpicking about policy to the Civics guys and skip straight to righteous indignation.
Yes, I'd rather have my own piece of that 700 Billion dollar pie. Let's try trickle-up economics for a change.
Righteous indignation seems too tame with what has happened the past eight years. The GOP leadership needs to be tried for war crimes and for illegal wire-taps. Instead, we'll get more of the same.
I really wish I knew enough about economics to see why that wouldn't be a good idea. Many, many people at risk of defaulting on their loans could just pay off their mortgages, cars, student loans, and credit cards, then go out and buy things with actual cash rather than credit--seems like that's a much more solid investment than bailing out the industries that made this mess in the first place.
I'm afraid you're right about your initial point, that if McCain wins, "we the people" will have failed an essential test. The trouble is, the members of "we the people" who didn't vote for him will also be stuck with the results, which I find depressing.
By the way, the trouble with erin's wish to give everybody a piece of the $700B - is that there isn't enough of it to make a difference. I'm not even sure there's enough of it to get the banks going again; this week's Economist leader notes that Goldman Sachs alone had a TRILLION dollars of "assets" teetering on top of $43 million in "equity". The Economist thinks there are $62 trillion worth of credit-default swaps out there, with no central record of who owns what; and until that gets cleared up, the economy will be in the dump.
But I do think it's time to try trickle-up economics.
Trickle up sounds nice. Give everyone in the nation $3,000 and I think that would be money better spent than the bailout (and costs similar, too).
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