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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
...I have begun telling people that what is needed now is a second party movement.
Oppositional parties are essential to representative democracy. The "gridlock" built into the system serves a valuable purpose: to prevent elected officials from making drastic changes without the tacit, informed consent of the people.
But of course, that no longer exists in American polity. The good cop/bad cop routine being pulled by the Republicrats is stale and transparent: the GOP pushes for some outrageous infringement of civil liberties or economic freedom; the Democrats pretend that they're going to oppose it at all costs; and, within a couple weeks, the "opposition" completely capitulates and the new legislation (Patriot Act, FISA, $700 billion of corporate welfare, the Bush bankruptcy bill, et al) passes easily and with hardly any real debate at all.
We all see this pattern, yet we're all caught chasing out tails, doing the only thing we've been taught to do: point irrational fingers at "the other side."
We, the People, need to get a grip.
My question to them: If she can't handle Katie Couric, then how will she handle Putin? I seriously doubt a wink and 'you betcha' will work.
Okay, stop right there. You know how Cocktailhag and I feel about Putin. The very thought that she might flirt with Vladi is, quite frankly, abhorrent. He wouldn't even deign to meet with her.
You can disagree with their views all you want, but the fact that someone has different priorities than you doesn't make them dumb and irrational and you smart and rational.
I am not one who thinks there is a problem with partisanship qua partisanship, à la Broder. At the same time, I hate the culture war and how it divides Americans who have much in common, in terms of economic issues, civil rights etc.
Yeah, there's narrowness and stupidity all around us, but there's also honest disagreements, and people just trying to live their lives. I'd like it if we could all (also talking to myself here) remember that more.
</kumbaya>
Those man dials rose hard to almost explosive levels when the little vixen simpered and twitched for her audience.
Coffee-snortin' funny. Thanks for that.
The very thought that she might flirt with Vladi is, quite frankly, abhorrent. He wouldn't even deign to meet with her.
Agreed, but Dubya thought giving Angela Merkel a backrub was a good idea. He was lucky Merkel understood the boundaries of restraint and high-level protocol and refrained from decking him as he so richly deserved.
You and Cocktailhag can rest assured, Putie would eat her up and spit her back out. Without swallowing. ;-}
This was a fine post. I posted similar, and similarly furious, thoughts about the VP debate last night (at signature), although I really appreciated your pivot to the larger point about GOP rule. Also, when I wrote my post last night, I had in mind the David Brooks Syndrome about which you so poignantly wrote, but I couldn't remember it specifically. I've since updated my post with a link to that very insightful piece.
Every bit as salient and significant as the perniciousness of this consolidated Republican control of government for much of the current decade has been the media's wholesale applauding of every exploitative and catastrophic GOP policy and thematic frame, even well past the point where most of the population had turned on those policies and themes.
That is the current national scandal, which also portends significant trouble for an Obama administration and Democratic majority going forward - that the establishment media has manufactured for themselves a sickly lens of "ordinary American attitudes" through which they can project their own stupidity, often along lines unfavorable to liberal ideas. The tendency of the media to use this highly disingenuous and lazy technique - coupled with an inevitable heightening of the Republican Smoke Machine of Outrage and petulant resistance to Democratic government - will be the two greatest obstacles to any attempt to recover from the vast landscape of destruction the GOP has wrought on our country.
Dear Mr. Greenwald,
Thank-you for doing the footwork in this intensely rich article. It has bothered me for years how the Republican rhetoric has manipulated facts and then appears to represent the average American in spite of empirical evidence to the contrary. As the polls increasely tilt towards an Obama win, my faith has been restored. People are hurting and putting two and two together.
I have a couple of degrees, and like so many other people in California I have been downsized. Currently I'm working in a restaurant that primarily caters to wealthy Republicans. As I go about my service job(waitperson), I get snippits of conversations from these patrons. My deduction? Most don't have a clue about the struggling middleclass, these customers are extremely lazy intellectuals who live in a parallel universe. They raved about how terrific Palin was and could of cared less about her qualifications. Golf and me first, pretty much. This mindset is a result of free wheeling deregulation and a complete dismissal (lack of representation), of the middleclass for the past 8 years. "The Regular Voter".
I don't expect radical financial improvement when Obama gets into office. It will take the first term to get things on track. Yet the one thing I expect Obama to address in his first term is health insurance.
In conclusion, Obama has brought civility and truth back into the political spectrum and it doesn't illude the middleclass, it inspires us. I'm keeping the faith, He's gonna win!!!
Ondolette - i still don't get it why a grown-up promotes a 'do nothing plan' because he believes in the fairy tale of a little boy crying wolf - while his friends complain that nothing had been done before and if a 'the sky is falling guy' rants against a 'the sky is falling mentality' because it's not about national security - but about the economy that's... well... definitely 'awesome'!
This is very deprecatory, and a little ad hominem for a grown up, don't you think?
You haven't really argued against the null option, you've only disparaged it. I guess the difference is, I was making an argument based on evaluation of options, and you are making a political argument, or possibly just appealing to authority.
Tell me very directly, what happens now in the bailout plan, from start to finish, in very realistic scenarios. Then tell me, again very directly, what happens in the 'do nothing' plan, from start to finish. Or are you arguing that I shouldn't have a right to ask where my money is going when you spend it?
Absolutely nobody argued that we should shore up financial institutions and simultaneously, since it is the correct time for harsh medicine, construct regulations and reign in the ability of the institutions to create bad debt. Nobody. They only argued we should shore them up. We've been shoring up failed Reaganomics for many years here, nobody ever is willing to say it doesn't work. It happens to be a fact that doing nothing is causing lenders to be more circumspect. Since the problem is bad loans, you would do something to help them to be less circumspect. That's what increasing liquidity means.
I read a fascinating article on how the debt crisis was affecting the little guy with the mom and pop business on Main Street in our local paper. They interviewed a woman who suddenly had to meet much harsher terms for her business loans at the bank. To wit, she was now being asked to put up her house and her bank account as collateral for the loan.
She was asking for $400,000 to start a pet day care center in her house. What do you think, pieceofcake? A half a million dollars to start a franchise taking care of peoples dogs, and in the market when things were running right - as opposed to our current crisis economy - she would have had to put up nothing against the value of it? Gee, that's so frozen up. I don't know what this world is coming to. My perpetual motion machine business that only needs a couple of mil to get started is possibly doomed!
Oh, and the next example was SUV dealers that couldn't afford to bring new merchandise to their lots. SUVs are selling like hot cakes, right? Before the crisis started, in early September, they were saying that sales of them was down so low and so slow that nobody wanted to take them in trade.
So now what? They are ready and waiting to receive $700 Billion of taxpayer money like manna from heaven, with absolutely no restraints on the behavior that caused the crisis. If that sounds like a success to you, then spell it out. But until you do, attacking my maturity is hardly a sophisticated economic argument.
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"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
