Well, couldn't pass on the Jon Boehner dig. Yeah, I work towards achieving the American Dream, too. Last I checked, everyone does. I believe we disagree with how to get there, and this disagreement would hardly make him my enemy even if he thought I was. Partisanship is weird, almost like a mania. I don't understand it, but I 've written about that before. How much money was spent in this year's mid-terms? Some estimates approach $4 billion. Let's see......we have a relative few millionaire Democrats and millionaire Republicans spending VAST sums of money in order to obtain and wield power over us peasants (whether you know it or not, you are one; and if you think you're not you definitely are) who have to work for a living and make sacrifices in order to raise families and pay bills. Sounds like oligarchy to me. You don't know what it means? Look it up.
So these millionaires and their PACs or supporters spend half of 2009 and nearly all of 2010 trying to either: a) convince you they're good for the job/country, or b) scare you into voting for them because the other side's SO scary. Guess which option seems to work better? You bet, our old pal Fear. People are right, we're getting dumber as a nation (get it? a bad sentence, and one of many but I get to think I'm smart simply because I recognize the grammatical errors of my own sentences) and it shows in the ads we've been forced to watch for months.....they all appeal to the emotion - the heart - and almost never the mind.
Well, duh, you're thinking. We know all this. E.J. Dionne says it better (it's true).
So Republicans control the House, and some of those Tea Party folks were elected. What I found interesting about this election was that - for all the breathless media coverage of Sarah duh Palin and the Tea Party wingnuts she backed- the far right candidates that received so much attention were defeated. Joe Miller, Sharon Angle, and Witchie Poo come to mind.
It's not like this election was a referendum on duh Palin, but she was certainly out there being the Head Cheerleader for some of the crazier folks in the Tea Party. Are they truly crazy? Eh, I wouldn't know. Sometimes I've had a thought or idea that I would muse upon and decide later that I was crazy to have ever thought that. And my wife would tell you I've said nutty things, but no one ever had a camera and recorder on me because, like I said, I'm a peasant and no one cares what I say.
I think the GOP's victories this year were a response to ineffectiveness on the left. The left is crazy, too. I don't care for liberal mouthpieces Bill Maher or Keith Olberman for the same reasons I don't care for Limbaugh or DoucheBeck: none of these guys are crazy, mind you, but they're extreme in their views. Maher's oft-aired clips with Witchie-Poo included his pronouncement that praying to your God was akin to wishing on a star -he gleefully mocked the exercise of one's religion and made it sound childish and stupid. He's entitled to his views, hell, you might agree with him, but I don't think degrading and ridiculing people about their faith is an effective communications technique. It's just mean and base. And not very funny.
I don't buy into the idea that this was an election based solely upon deficit spending. My memory isn't that short and I'm not that stupid. Republicans had no problem running deficits from 1994 to 2006. I think that issue resonated for some people and not others. All of this talk about controlling spending is specious nonsense until the day when a coalition of the willing address Defense and Entitlement spending.
You can cut back on National Parks and the FDA all you want, but you're getting nowhere until you start looking at Defense, Medicare, and Social Security.
In 2006 the Democrats took control of Congress on a supposed "wave," that supposedly existed. As I recall, they said they'd bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. They said they'd pass healthcare reform. In the process, some of their candidates called President Bush and Gen. Petraeus "traitors." Turnabout being fair play in 2010, President Obama is being called "the worst President in history" by some. This type of behavior would have been ugly and shameful a generation ago. Now, we all yawn. Anything goes, the tar flies fast and loose.
Well, I guess it does if you only watch cable news. It's the Land of Outrage and Breathless Predictions. THIS is Wrong. THAT is Wrong. THEY are evil. blah blah blah.
I think my America's different than those seen on TV or heard on talk radio. People work. They raise families. They spend weekends running around to various kid-related activities and maybe (if they're lucky) they get to sneak a movie into the schedule. I heard Jon Stewart's speech on Saturday about the Lincoln Tunnel, and it was an entertaining anecdote. And I agree, on those weekends when I run around from 7 am till whenever, I'll let the cars with Obama or Palin stickers into traffic ahead of me - we all work together. The rest? Well, some folks really sweat it. I can get worked up over it sometimes, too. But mostly, it's all static.
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