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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"...maybe you can help us find out who the real Obama really is besides what we already know about him finding out how to hate America from Ayers' knee and Wrights' knee and other joints."
Hey, terK? Really quick, off the top of your head- list five things you love about America. Five positive attributes. I'll give mine in a second.
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Hey, Telly? Over the past 48 hours or so, you've invested a truly impressive amount of time, energy and page-space to the denouncement of those opposed to McCain/Palin as being childish and immature. But what about those who ostensibly share your views? For example- would you characterise terkoy's comment above as being mature, or immature?
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Okay: Five Things Raise Up Loves About America:
1.) Its children
2.) The self-correcting ingenuity of its implementation
3.) Its resilience
4.) Its natural splendor
5.) Its manifold eccentricities
Telly, you care to get in on this? I can't promise we'll all be signing Kumbaya together; I'm just curious to see if there's any overlap at all.
The core of the Religious Right is Evangelical and they are waiting for the Rapture. They think that having Sarah Palin in a position of real power will help bring it quickly. They may be right.
This article hits the nail on the head as far as the Republican Party of today is concerned. Ever since Reagan, the Republican party is no longer a conservative party, nor a liberal one. It is the party of religion, plutocracy, and false populism. However, Sarah Palin is just the newest development in this trend. Ronald Reagan was the one who started it. The Republicans hail him as the archetypal conservative, but he was the most wasteful spender in American history, who built an army that was never used to grandstand against a dying nation. The Soviet Union was defeated by American universities and businessmen, not American weapons. Read one page of history and you can figure that one out.
But Reagan was happy to turn America from the largest creditor to the largest debtor in the world while claiming that he ended the Cold War singlehandedly because he knew that many people would notice the latter and not the former. They'd only notice that now they were temporarily paying lower taxes and ignore the debt. The deficit today is largely paying for Reagan's deficit, but no one seems to care so much. Deficit spending, irresponsible tax cuts, reckless warfare, and government invasion of our rights are not conservative ideals, but the tricks Republicans use to get elected and stay in power. James K. Polk, The man who founded our treasury, was no liberal, and the man who depleted it was no conservative.
I could vote for a man like the John McCain of 2000 if he were opposed by someone like John Kerry (although I would probably support Obama anyway, because I believe in people who can think and in people who can change their minds, not to mention in universal health care), but the Sarah Palin pick proves that he is now just another modern Republican who will do anything to get into office.
The Republicans have convinced many in America that socialized healthcare is somehow a violation of their rights, when in fact in most European countries it provides cheaper, more equitable, and more efficient service than our private insurance. They cut funding for education again and again and now want to abandon it for private school vouchers when they find that underfunded public education deosn't work. Health care and education are two areas where the market *cannot* provide for everyone, and only the most ardent ideologue could fail to see this. In Europe, I am considered quite conservative, and in America, a liberal, but that is only because Republicans have altered the definitions. A conservative is now a Republican ideologue and a liberal is anyone else. However much I dislike fair trade and over-regulation, I'm proud to call myself a Democrat if a Republican is the alternative.
"So we have a generational calamity. What of the perpetrators? You wave your hands vaguely in the direction of "feel-good politics," "cheap grace" and a "collectivist yet profoundly self-indulgent fantasy ideology", but what do mean? Please provide specifics, or at minimum, make an attempt to do so."
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Too many children, not enough grownups. This will do as well as anything for the proximate cause. A mere matter of quantity over quality. Those whose job it was to maintain order and enforce rules were unable and in some cases unwilling to do so. Teens began to rule. Could the consequences have been a surprise? Out with the Reality Principle, in with the Pleasure Principle. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. If it feels good, do it! Don't trust anybody over 30! Make love, not war! And so forth. Bad language, bad dress, bad music, bad manners, bad behavior, bad attitude, bad thinking. Of course the bulk of it was inauthentic and crowd- and peer-driven as well as heavily guided and encouraged by businesses big and small, legal and illegal that profited from selling the teens whatever they wanted to feel good and look cool. Epater le bourgeoisie became the order of the day as transgression -rebelling against mom and dad- was elevated into paying professions.
The New Barbarians were here. Unlike the old barbarians they were not interested in learning and acquiring from the superior culture they conquered. Instead they wanted to destroy or at least disregard the past and all its works and start anew. This made college, among other things, a good deal easier and simpler. Movies and TV and pop culture replaced traditional canonical subjects and authors. Scandalous and titillating jargon-laden subversive theories were imported from a ruined post-war Europe and deployed to legitimate every sort of moral and intellectual vice as they made simple nihilism and anarchism presentable to the multitudes.
This was all very exciting and also felt good. It permitted people to do whatever they desired to do and to regard themselves, not as scoundrels and losers for misbehaving, but as heroes and champions of a higher principle. Simple self-indulgence and heedless hedonism became the higher duty and a positive mark of election. Arrogance, contempt towards one's elders and betters, dismissal in advance of matters one neither understood nor cared to learn about, avoidance of military duty, careless thinking, reliance upon emotion and sentiment, distaste for factual knowledge, hatred of the limitations imposed by religion and indeed of all limitations. . .
More Rousseau than Marx I am afraid. But because there were no grownups left to assist the teenage generation in growing up the result was developmental arrest of an entire generation. Grizzled, grey, rheumatic and shuffling they may become - at heart they remain what they always were, teenagers in love with themselves and their silly notions.
Nothing all that mysterious or complex here, just your ordinary, run of the mill, routine revolt of the masses with everything that implies.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
