Comments on: They Don’t Care

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:09:57 +0000

That quote from Terry Pratchett’s novel “Monstrous Regiment” on the sidebar is a good summary of the basic problem of all true believers. If you never question, you will never notice any errors in your thoughts. If you believe that the end justifies the means, there is nothing you will not do to achieve the end.

Watching John Dean at the Watergate hearings left me with the impression that he was someone who had experienced a major shock to his basic worldview and core beliefs. I really felt that here was a guy, a lawyer, who discovered that the President of the United States, his boss, didn’t accept the rule of law. That has to be extremely disorienting to someone who was convinced that he was working for the good of the country. All of your idealism killed in a very short time and your life in ruins.

I wouldn’t doubt that he had visions of a Federal judgeship at the end of the “yellow brick road”, and then he looked behind the curtain.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:23:52 +0000

As another who perceives things as beginning to fall apart with Reagan's reign, but who sees the actual causes as extending a bit earlier, I have a couple of books to recommend, both, curiously enough, with titles containing the word "conscience": first, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, in which The Shrill One explains in some detail how the neocon movement established itself and perverted some of America's most necessary institutions, and John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience, not a mere slur, but an attempt at an explanation of the fundamental difference in personality and character between the most hidebound "conservatives" in our government, and the rest of us. Warning: Dean's book is long, tedious and repetitious... a lawyer's book, for sure... but insightful enough to be worth the trouble. .-= last blog ..Nothing To Say, And Not Saying It =-.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:56:39 +0000

I never understood Watergate. He was in no danger of losing. Other than the war, which was finally winding down, he had a good record to run on. I had issues, based on changes he was making to the military, and left the military after 8 years, even though I really liked what I was doing, but there really was no overwhelming opposition to him.

He got things done, and many of them were very good and necessary things, like the 55mph speed limit, which made the cross-country trips a real pain.

I really hated Kissinger, for reasons I can’t go into, but he was a royal PITA if you fell into his area of interest.

Even under jerks, the system once worked, and now it’s broken.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:51:00 +0000

Crap, I've even been pining for Richard Nixon recently. Just how deranged is that?! Thing is, Nixon was a vile, venal little man, but he was not an idiot, he lived in something approximating reality and knew that the answer to the ghetto riots was not to simply send in the Army and kill lots of Americans and thus instituted much of the safety net that Clinton dismantled in the mid 90's, and he knew how to get sh*t done. Pell Grants? Nixon. EPA? Nixon. EEOC? Nixon. Title IX? Nixon. Then there's his going-to-China, and detente' with Brezhnev, and so forth, all of which helped ratchet back world tensions. As for Vietnam, yeah, he kept our troops there way too long for political gain long after everybody knew that the U.S. was not going to win and should just declare victory and go home. But I never claimed he was a saint, just that he wasn't an idiot. Oh sure, he was so crooked that he needed a corkscrew to get into his pants in the morning, and was a nasty little man altogether, but compared to any recent President... sigh! How bad is it when Richard by-god Nixon makes you wistful?! .-= last blog ..Thought for the day =-.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:57:29 +0000

It was never this bad prior to Reagan. Everything started coming apart when he was elected. I’m not saying that his election was responsible for it, but from 1980 on the system stopped responding to reality. The media began its decline, the politics got really petty, the stupidity just flourished.

The Clinton years were an out-and-out circus. That’s when the hissy fits became a normal part of Congress.

We used to have a functional government. I didn’t always like what it did, but it was capable of getting things done. Not so much anymore.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:39:34 +0000

It is like the end of the Roman Empire, as the infrastructure that supported the city of Rome was crumbling and the thoughts of the Roman elites was all focused on... uhm, which one of them was going to be the next emperor? WTF?! The US political elite, like the Roman elite before it, has abandoned mundane concerns such as maintaining the fundamental infrastructure needed to keep the empire running, and instead is engaged in ridiculous internecine power struggles utterly divorced from reality with no goal other than power. "Death panels" indeed, you betcha. .-= last blog ..Thought for the day =-.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:20:04 +0000

In reply to Steve Bates.

As someone who lives in the same situation, Steve, I share your pain.

There are more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida, and yet we have one Blue Dog Senator, and the Chief Financial Officer as the only statewide Democrats, and the Republicans control 65% of both houses of the legislature.

It’s amazing how “democracy” works in several states.

I don’t suspect that the loss of that satellite will go down all that well with Texans living on the Gulf Coast, but it will be popular with the base of the Republican Party.

Actually, she isn’t as embarrassing as Bill Nelson who has the gall to call himself a Democrat.

I would love to see Kendrick Meek as our second Senator, but I don’t think Charlie Crist can be stopped, unless Rubio destroys him in the Republican primary.

We really do know that there are pockets of Blue Texans, Steve. We just get carried away.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:02:57 +0000

Thanks a lot, guyz ‘n’ galz. It’s not as if all Texans are politically identical… CJ, would you want me to judge you based on what Ahnold regularly announces? (May you get the rain you need, in just the quantities you need it… your political incivility notwithstanding. 🙂 )

Senator Kay is a pretend moderate, and she has a lot of people fooled. She will probably be the next governor, because the Democratic Party here doesn’t have its act together to win any major race in a state in which it is de facto the majority party.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:06:42 +0000

It looks like the Bay Area will get the worst of it, but it will get windy and damp. Tuesday looks like the probable main event. Melor spun up to a category 5 so it sucked up a lot of water, and there are two tropical systems off Baja to push more moisture North.

By: cookie jill

cookie jill — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:09:25 +0000

Yeah…rain is on it’s way. We need all we can get of the stuff…just not all at once.

The County/City/Feds have been hydromulching the mountainsides (looks like big splotches of plastic grass) The planes have been going back and forth for what seems an eternity. Let’s hope it helps hold the mountain/foothill areas up…I’m not holding my breath, though.
.-= last blog ..Parent company of Yogurtland gets sued =-.