Is It Over Yet?
Bob Somerby is just about the last rational big time blogger left. People have lost their objectivity and honesty as this campaign continues. The level of hate from both sides is staggering. There are plenty of crimes and more than enough lying to be investigated without formerly sane and reasonable people succumbing to paranoid delusional states.
You do not hate your enemy. If you hate your enemy, you cannot understand your enemy, and s/he will beat you. After you win, you can afford hate, but not during the war. Hate clouds your thinking and you make mistakes.
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…Mrs. Jack K. and I didn’t move to Canada in 2000, nor did we move there in ’04. We won’t look into expatriation if McCain pulls out a win on Tuesday, either. While the Mrs. has a well-practiced habit of turning off the radio or changing the TV channel if George W. Bush is talking (I suspect this has something to do with her being a biologist, but I’m not certain…and something akin to ‘hate’ may be involved, judging from her comments), I have to confess that I don’t actually hate any of these people. I am disgusted by their policies, behaviors, and actions, but that’s not the same as ‘hate’…
On the other hand, I’m not a big-time blogger, so my investment is more personal than political…
I don’t know where the fix is going to come from; it’s fun to pick at the other side, but the political atmosphere has become so poisonous that the whole idea of winning and controlling has supplanted any understanding of why you should want to win. …
I’m as partisan as the next person and I put up with a lot of garbage being a liberal in this neck of the woods, but get a life people. These are politicians. I don’t want to live near any of them. I have to put up with town officials, hell my Mother was on the town council for a while, but whoever is elected isn’t going to fundamentally alter much anytime soon.
There are thousands of political appointees who have to be replaced and thousand of crimes, large and small, that have to be investigated. It took 8 years to get into this mess, and it will take more than 8 to get out if people really start to work in earnest in January 2009, which I don’t expect to happen.
No one knows what either of these guys is actually going to do, and there certainly hasn’t been any concentrated effort to find out. I fully expect to hear a major gasp in January when whoever gets a look at the real books of the country. I’m guessing that auditing will be a growth industry for some time to come. I hope all those newly minted MBAs are paying attention in accounting class, because those are going to be jobs with a future.
At this point I just can’t believe the trivial crap people are fixated on.
We really need to have a serious look at ways to shorten the election cycle because the current system is a monumental waste of money and time. The rest of the world does this in a couple of months, not years. The candidates were expecting national security issues and got blind-sided by the economy.
McCain’s whole appeal is national security, so he lost as soon as the economy took the center stage. If he hadn’t been such a total jerk lately, I would feel sorry for him. He would have been a pretty good candidate in 2000.
That said, I think this long election cycle is the only reason Senator Obama has a chance of winning. Think about it. A half-black junior senator from Chicago, running for President. It’d be like the Rev. Jesse Jackson running for President — a joke. But the process has been so freakin’ long that people just got used to thinking of Obama as Presidential timbre. And the more I hear from him, the more I think he’s the best candidate in the race. Not perfect, by any means. In the end he’s a Chicago machine politician. But that’s not necessarily a *bad* thing. The Chicago machine does make sure that the potholes are filled and the streets kept clean. If you think the “Obama has cooties!” contingent have jumped the shark, I can’t imagine that it’d be any different if Hillary were the candidate, and with her history it would have been a lot harder for her to claim to be the candidate of “change” when the economy came into play. And let’s not even think about Edwards and his love child :-(.
So in this case, at least, the process seems to have worked. Not perfectly, but as someone who is basically conservative I’m not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because John McCain’s whole campaign this past couple of months has been, “my opponent has cooties”.
– Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin
The economy changed everything about this election. No one was really ready to run on the economy, and it shows.
It has just been going on too long. This is like the 1980 election with Ted Kennedy running against Jimmy Carter for months. If the economy hadn’t tanked we might have had the same kind of result – apathy that resulted in Reagan.
The elections are too long and too expensive. Hundreds of millions going to media companies is not my idea of a good investment in government. Florida doesn’t have its primary election for all of the state offices until August, and that’s soon enough.
Uhm, holding up the State of Florida as your example of good government is like holding up George W. Bush as your example of a good leader. Just sayin’ :-).
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
“my opponent has cooties”
john mccain has more cooties than obama, wright, ayers, and khalidi combined. mccain might still have more cooties even if you throw rezko into the mix, but i’d have to think about that one.
… holding up the State of Florida as your example of good government …
since when has campaigning = government?
Speaking of hate… I *KNEW* I shouldn’t have mentioned Coultergeist last week! 😉 LOL Seems it finally deigned to slither out of it’s slime pool. LOL
C&L:
I was was wondering what rock Ann Coulter was hiding under.
BTW, Obama’s Grandmother passed away from her cancer. It seems that the press around the World are more interested than the US media. That’s hate for you.
Our ABC had a report:
Tearful end to Obama’s day, McCain still campaigning
That headline says it all. You can see that McCain, and the Republicans generally, truly epitomize hypocrisy. I could hope that Americans are sane and intelligent enough to realize that finally… But I wouldn’t bet $1 on it.
Yep, Hate. It’s now as American as Apple pie used to be, and rapidly becoming the global way. *shrug*
I don’t know, Badtux, with only a 60 day session for the legislature, Florida still manages to pass its budget on time 😉
I had to give up Cooties, all of the legs got broken in moves. [Now that’s an obscure popular reference.]
Kryten, haven’t you heard that using their real name is one of the ways you invoke demons. You need to be careful about that.
They did cover his grandmother’s passing, but as a breaking news item when it was announced. It will take them a while to write an actual story as they are so busy annoying people trying to get on with their lives by stopping them and asking election questions. They would get nervous about presenting a story in the eve of the election as editors would have to decide if it was prejudicial to McCain. The “fair and balanced” thing is a real PITA.
These are media conglomerates, not news organizations, so everything has to be approved by the legal department. Fortunately no major figure in the entertainment world has been arrested, and there are no young white women in peril or the election would be totally dropped to cover that 24/7. In general the US media has the attention span of a three-year-old on a sugar high.
we never had those as kids, but all our friends did.
Ours were courtesy of a great-great aunt, who thought we needed “store bought” toys.