Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The meh of politics.
You know what's bugging me? The fact that I can't get worked up enough about anything right now to be bugged. Politics just seems so... so... the same as it's ever been... what's the word I'm looking for? It's so overwhelmingly, mind-numbingly, gob-smackingly stupid and inane, and they're all a bunch of lying liars with their pants on fire (well, they will be if I can ever find an inexpensive freelance arsonist), and it just seems like if I have to think about it for another whole year I'll puke so hard that stuff from 1987 will come out.
I hate Obama. I hate the Republicans. I hate the fact that those are the two choices I'll be presented with. I hate the fact that I won't vote for either of them. I hate the fact that I will read 10,000 times that Obama has done the best he could. Well, yes, perhaps he has; I hate the fact that he's an extremely conservative Democrat who ran on a left-of-center platform and duped the majority of us. Is he better than any Republican? Is Charles Manson better than Jack the Ripper? I don't know. I don't care. I wouldn't vote for either of them for president either.
I hate the fact that I've become so disillusioned and so jaded and so cynical and so detached that I'm willing to just let the rest of the country, at least the ones who actually give a shit about how the next election turns out, decide who will be the next president.
If the teabaggers and fundie conservatives are actually making sense to the majority of the Republican party, and if mainstream Republicans are willing to elect complete and utter morons to office because they're so stupid that they believe their party still represents family values and mom and apple pie, and they'll fix the economy given just a little more time; and besides, a little prayer in school never killed anybody, and racism and sexism are dead, and if the gays would just quit being so 'in your face' they'd make things a whole lot easier on themselves, then so be it.
And if Democrats are so terrified of Republicans that they will re-elect Obama, basically dark GWB-lite, then so be it. It's 4 more years of Republican rule, on top of the 12 we'll be coming out of, no matter how you slice it.
And this, gentle readers, is why I have backed off blogging about politics for the foreseeable future.
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The last left of center democrat to run for president was Johnson.
ReplyDeleteThe republicans wish to eliminate the Federal government, except for Defense, and return home rule to the states. I've high school classmates who openly advocate removing the franchise from women.
Yep. They've always managed to walk upright among us, and yet fairly recently with the advent of computers and social media have been given a platform from which to shout their ignorant, backwards, stupid, nasty, ugly, festering, moronic, imbecilic, retarded, selfish, unworkable, dickish, regressive, dated, idiotic, cretinous, half-assed opinions. This is part of the reason I'm letting the chips fall where they may in the next election. If they get their way in '12, that will finally wake the rest of the country up and there will be revolution, and that will get ugly. I'm firmly of the opinion that without major upheaval, this country will just continue on a slow, miserable slide to the same end, but in the meantime assholes like your misogynist classmates and the top 1% will continue to have the ride of their lives. Since I hate them even more than they hate me, I really would prefer to not see them happy. Or maybe I just need a cookie.
ReplyDeleteI'm finding this puerile pageant so overwhelmingly, mind-numbingly, gob-smackingly stupid and inane that at times I have to force myself to write a post about it. So, you've got company.
ReplyDeleteI share your disappointment, outrage and, with that evil provision in the defense budget, disgust, with Obama. Even so, your "let's bring this to a head" notion is more likely to fall through than materialize. I've heard people say that kind of thing in past elections where they were disgusted with Democrats. The revolution never happened, but a lot of radical-right Republican damage got done.
This, too, shall pass. If we can arrange for things to be less lousy between now and then, we should try. And when I say lousy, I'm talking long term. A couple more younger right-wing justices on the Supreme Court and it's going to go from bad to worse over a 30-year period. Gingrich wants to appoint as secretary of state the nut case George W. Bush made U.N. ambassador. Who Romney might appoint is the stuff of three-day headaches. The possibilities go on and on. Recall how much damage Bush did in eight years. Do you really want to double down?
Warner, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis and Al Gore are left-of-center Democrats. Not radical liberals and probably not as liberal as Johnson was, but they are left of center.
And with the exception of Gore, and I don't agree left of center but he is the closest, none had a chance of winning.
ReplyDeleteHumphrey should have been, but when asked during that campaign what his social agenda was responded 'We've passed it'. Which is true, but made it a lot easier to not go AWOL to vote for him. (long story involving having to register in person on a week day).
S.W. -- I didn't really start following politics closely until about 10 years ago. Until then, I knew I was Democrat, voted Democrat, and followed politics through the headlines and major news stories. I didn't have the Internet at my fingertips, nor did I have the interest to scrounge around any deeper for information beyond what I was presented with. My point being, you probably have much more extensive knowledge of past elections and the atmosphere or public sentiment involved with them at the time.
ReplyDeleteHowever, don't you think that we may be living in the dreaded "interesting times"? I never in my lifetime (and I'm no kid) remember such a major chasm between what politicians and the powers that be are trying to ram down our throats and what the public at large is actually asking of them or is willing to accept from them. I remember Vietnam and Watergate and the civil rights movement in the late '60s, but even those historical times of unrest don't seem to have been as deeply threatening to the country as a whole as a lot of the recent socially and economically regressive legislation being passed by this administration, and at the state level by newly-elected teapublicans. They are threatening our environmental safety, economic safety, health and well-being safety, and all of the social progress that has historically made this country the envy of the world.
Again, I never remember such overwhelming disregard for what the majority of the citizens in this country want from our government. Please chime in if you disagree, but this where my belief that the time has come for a true progressive comes from. Seriously, Obama has actually presided to the right, politically, of GWB in my opinion. I positively will not be voting for him again. Morally I would be a complete hypocrite when I chose his name and would be opting only for the lesser of two evils. I won't do it again.
I had just started college at the time of the Freedom rides, some of those never came home. An entire generation got sent off to a war nobody could explain.
ReplyDeleteWhat is happening now, in my opinion, is the white male my age sees his last chance to remain in charge. As I've said I've high school classmates who wish to disenfranchise women, those under 21, and most likely those who don't own property (code word for shiftless minority).
Look I wanted Obama to be a second reincarnation of the JFK of my dreams (I was 12 then, 16 when he died, he wasn't very good at politics, was lazy, screwed around a lot and didn't get much done). LBJ, who I hate with a passion to the point I would have voted for Nixon over LBJ and still would, was the one who passed all that legislation.
If you sit it out and the Republicans win again, that is 8 more years of turning the country back to 1929 again, I doubt we can survive another great recession.
Warner - I would never sit out an election. There are good Democratic state reps that need and have earned my vote here in Michigan.
ReplyDeleteBut, until enough people like me finally say enough is enough we'll continue to have this neverending bullshit. Obama got elected because he didn't have enough of a track record for people like me to see just exactly how conservative he truly was and how conciliatory and wishy-washy he would be in the name of bipartisanship. Truly, all I'm hearing from Democrats is that Obama needs to be reelected out of fear, because Republicans are worse than he is. Really, is that what we want to base our votes for the presidency of this country on? Fear? We should cast our votes for a man we don't like or believe in because his opponent is even worse?
Oddly enough, I've always considered voting outside of one of the two major parties to be throwing your vote away. It finally occurred to me that voting again for Obama would be the exact same thing for me - a vote thrown away on a man I don't even want for president anymore, who belongs to a political party whose members I now only support on a case-by-case basis of merit.
Really, I know losing a fellow Democrat from the party is hard to take at this point in time, but these last four years have made me realize that there just isn't that much difference between mainstream Democrats and Republicans anymore, and yet the Republicans have embraced their right-wing with great success. I'll take my place far to the left and try and keep my hopey-changey dream alive.
By the time it's my time to vote in primaries or even in the general election (California), the choice has been more or less done for me. It is hard to get worked up over which douchebag to pick when said douchebags are no longer on the ticket by the time it's your turn. VERY frustrating. I too am a Democrat, but I don't want to have to choose between Romney or Obama, I don't like either, I might as well sit this one out... I wouldn't mind voting for Ron Paul just to see what kind of president he would make. Can't fuck up more than the ones who are supposedly sane... that is, if he makes it that far!
ReplyDeleteHey Megan!
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's going to end up being a choice between Mittens and O'Nutless. I think the rest of the Republican field will crash and burn. Apparently god hasn't sent a host of angels to tell Sarah to run again. Huntsman is too sane for the Republican right. Santorum is batshit crazy and so far to the right that he makes average Republicans uncomfortable. Ron Paul might pull off it off and make it to the primary, but I really doubt he'd win it. Perry is just so stupid that I figure he'll forget he's running one of these days. I just don't really know out of the field of lunatics they've presented so far who they'll end up with. This was the party who thought Palin was VP material, so trying to second-guess their thought processes requires being insane, demented and delusional. Or horny and redneck.
I did manage to get excited about the last presidential primary, but that was because it was a nail-biter between Obama and Clinton. You can imagine my dismay at that nasty turn of events, but I hauled my ass out like a good little Democrat and voted for Barry anyway. Yay me.
" . . .until enough people like me finally say enough is enough we'll continue to have this neverending bullshit."
ReplyDeleteSaying no won't get you anywhere. It doesn't work that way. You have to do what movement conservatives did when they were taking over the GOP. You get into the party, at the precinct committeewoman level. You find one or more genuine liberals in your area who would make good county commissioners, state legislators, governor, etc., and if any of them will run, you push to get them on the ballot. You participate in your party's county and state conventions, maybe even the national one. You network with other progressives. You work on a phone bank or go doorbelling for particularly promising candidates. You talk your favored candidates up to friends, family, neighbors, co-workers and anyone else you can think of. Write letters to the local newspaper for your candidates and party. Keep blogging.
If you do any of those things, it can help. The more you can do, the more you can help. Sounds corny, but as you can see on the other side, it can be effective. If you see a conservadem getting into a state legislative race, try to get a liberal to run against him or her in the primary, then support that liberal. Same thing if you have a conservadem already in office. Even if you can't replace the conservadem, having a liberal challenge him in a primary could cause him to tack to the left. And keep in mind, every time you help get a liberal Dem elected at the local, county or state level, you broaden the pool of potential future candidates for the U.S. House, Senate and maybe White House.
When it comes to the presidency, it would help if there was one of more potent liberal pressure groups within the Democratic Party. Americans for Democratic Action was such a group, but I'm not sure it even exists any more. The last Dem pressure group to be effective that I'm aware of was the Democratic Leadership Council — a Republican-lite group whose motto should've been "If we can't beat 'em opposing 'em, beat 'em by being like 'em." Bill Clinton is a former head of the DLC, no surprise.
Warner, if you were to learn more about LBJ you might feel differently. Granted, his Vietnam War escalation was a monumental mistake. If it's any comfort, he knew that. It ended his presidency, ruined his legacy and quite literally broke his heart. LBJ was a rough-edged rascal. Yet he was capable of being incredibly thoughtful, generous and kind. He was exceptionally smart and probably the most skilled politician of my lifetime. There's no denying he was one of the most accomplished presidents ever.
ReplyDeleteI understand why LBJ got us involved in Vietnam. The reason was rooted in how Republicans had gone after Truman for "losing" China to the communists and the way Dems were tagged "soft on communism" by Republicans for a series of events, including Russia's getting the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, then intercontinental bombers. Plus Joe McCarthy's demagoguery. LBJ bought into the warnings of hawkish national security "experts" and the military that if South Vietnam were to be taken over by N. Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would be in the communist camp within a decade. He remembered Munich and what happened after that exercise in appeasement. LBJ wouldn't stand for SE Asia to go communist on his watch. Hence, the escalation and war that consumed him and his presidency.
But that's not the man's whole story. On the domestic side he moved mountains and worked political miracles. He also worked more and harder than any president before or since his time. Read up on LBJ. If you still hate him, fair enough. I have a hunch you'll come away with a mixture of great admiration and sad regret. The same things I feel about him.
S.W. Anderson, I know quite a bit about LBJ, he did a huge amount for the country. Currently reading Caro on his early years, will reread later years when I'm finished.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand Ed Rimmer, kid who lived next door, has only a name on a black granite wall. He and I went in the same day, I came home alive. [Note in all honesty the closest I came to serving in Vietnam were the Paris Peace Talks where I did communications.]