I wish I still had all my old emails from 1999-2000 where I made arguments against voting for George W. Bush. Over and over again, I argued that Bush would be a total disaster for this country, that it was insane to elect someone totally ignorant of world affairs, that his election would threaten women’s rights and shape the Supreme Court for a half century. I predicted that world events would not remain relatively tranquil; I said he would unilaterally invade Iraq.
But I didn’t predict the near total destruction of lower Manhattan and New Orleans; nor did I predict that Bush would fail to respond to the biggest disasters in our country’s modern history. How could I know that he would be worse than my Cassandric predictions? Had I known he would read a children’s book while Americans jumped 105 stories to their deaths, or that he would play guitar while New Orleans drowned, I doubt anyone would have believed me.
If I had told my conservative friends about No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Presciption Drug Benefit, or the size of the federal deficit, they would have called me a loon.
Bush has been worse than I predicted. Much worse.
Most of it was foreseeable, but the incompetence of the entire administration has come as a shock. The lack of any allegiance to traditional conservative ideas on the size and scope of government has been a jolt. What we got with George W. Bush was the worst of both worlds. We got crony capitalism without any respect for fiscal restraint or civil liberties. We got hawkishness without diplomacy. Looking back, I knew it would be bad. I didn’t know it would be this bad. And yet, most people thought I was being an overwrought, partisan, hysteric. What do they think now?
Who could have known?
What still shocks me is that my GOP father still insists a Democrat (any Democrat) would have been worse. All I can do is wonder at the complete disconnect with reality that Bush supporters live in.
Steven, again I want to wish you a happy birthday as well. Please do take extremely good care of yourself in DC. Just know that I will be with each of you in spirit…God’s speed.
I do not think anyone could have predicited anything like what we have gotten from this administration!!!!!! I knew they were full of insanity but to let them hold the purse strings and to have total control of us is mindboggling. Not only the loyal gopers but the whole of America. I do not understand the whys of things…why they got the power they have to do the damage they ahve done…I am stunned but am saddened to the response of most Americans to be stoaic on this matter.
I agree that no one could have predicted how bad Bush has been. I have watched him since he ran for Texas Governor in 1994, and I disliked and distrusted him from the first. It has always been clear that he was a lightweight being pushed forward by moneyed conservatives primarily because of his father’s name.
But I looked back at Reagan, and he was also an ultra-lightweight who didn’t do too much damage because the Republicans still had sensible people in office like Dole. I didn’t realize that the Goldwater revolution and the conservative movement (especially the social conservatives) had replaced the older WW II generation of leaders with total incompetents. [Seeing Dan Quayle I should have suspected.] Even so, Rumsfeld seemed bright and experienced, Condi seemed bright, and Cheney and Powell were experienced.
What I didn’t really realize was the power of the NeoCons and the level of insanity that Bush, Rove and Cheney would demonstrate. Nor did I expect that they would – or could – run a government by lies and secrecy. That was completely unknowable.
I am still amazed that the conservatives want expressed values and ideology, and ignore results. Bush still prays, listens to God, and doesn’t interfere with business so he is alright, no matter what a disaster he has created. It is merely government, so he couldn’t have done any better – right? Results? What results?
That is the real difference between them and us. We think government is accountable for results, and intent, while not unimportant, is less important than effective outcomes.
My dad once told me that the Republicans so totally screwed up the government in the twenties that America would not trust them with undivided government ever again. But he died before 1994. They may have done it again.
We can hope. But no one could have predicted it.
Rick, yes I too was watching Tx politics. Saw that Bush could not do much hard due tothe democratic congress there. he was just a figurehead, or so I thought. I started to understand more clearly as soon as rumors came about him running for our President. I was simply stunned to this from the gop. But then you had to look back to the other elections that the gop had under their belts…the players in those administrations and their roles up on which the built such a hold.
The bush family has been bad for over such a long time that ppl forgot the maneuvers that they played while arond. Now when it comes to george, he has never been in control, just those who control him…from home to the WH and all inbetween.
PPL of the USA just really did not konw that much about them till it was toooooo damn late IMO. NO one sees to do their homework. I have been sick at heart and in other ways, since I learned the facts, way before 1997.
I moved to TN back in 1987 and it has not been a place to learn much except the way they still want to fight the civil war all the time, according to me, anyhow. Seems like they cant get boyond this way ot thinking. Racism is definately down here…not so predominent as one would think but the undercurrent is there. The democratic is as week in my county as it could possibly get. I live in a so called red county. A blue dog democrat is my rep in congress, We will have yet another blue dog democrat run for senator from congress. Talk about hands being tied!!!!! I just want to spit so hard at their faces I can taste it. Letsw not get into Frist and Alexander, let alone thompson the actor. I just want to puke with TN politics for the most part.
Yeah, my daughter, her husband and my granddaughter, and my ex-wife and her husband all live in McMinnville, TN. They’ve been trying to get me to move there, but I’m a big city boy from way back. We had a double bill with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson here in Fort Worth about two months ago. Beats anything out of Nashville.
The politics there suck, but I’ll put Texas politicians up against those Tennessee politicians and and twenty-five drooling idiots and Texas will still win. The right-wing churches took over the Republican Party here over two decades ago, and with Bush you actually see one of the better examples of what we have here. Senator John Cornyn, the least popular Senator in that body is another example. Makes me (almost) wish Phil Graham and Dick Armey were still here. Instead we now have Tom DeLay and several Republican nonentities yet to be drafted. Oh, and Gov. Big-hair Perry, the ex-Texas A&M cheerleader recruited by Rove, together with Senator Kay Hutchinson, the ex-Texas U Cheerleader and ex-TV blow-dry blond newscaster (best job she could get with her law degree.)
If we are lucky, the evacuees from New Orleans will register and vote Democratic. Might make some differences.
I feel like you. I wish I had my old notes and e-mails from that time period.
The minute I heard about him, I was worried. He’d only had one job in government. He was inarticulate. He was raising a huge campaign fund fed by all of his father’s oil/big biz cronies.
It was astounding to hear — this is really true — from anti-whaling activists, clear back in 1998 and 1999, that they liked him for president.
Their stated reason was that he’d create an envirionmental backlash, just as Reagan did when he made James Watt secretary of the interior.
(I later found out that — and this is as much my hunch as it is fact — that they were mostly anti-Indian treaties, and so were actually more Republican than Democrat.
That they could trump the decimation of the environment with their anger at Indian treaties — and profess to LOVE WHALES — was grotesque beyond comprehension.)
I was SO worried about Bush that, when we had the presidential primary vote in Wash. state, I voted for John McCain. (Al Gore was a shoo-in on the Democrats’ side, and I prayed that maybe enough Republicans would prefer McCain to Bush, but they didn’t, in Wash. state.)
But, also like you, I could have NEVER imagined what Bush would do to this country and to the world.
And, I’ve told the progressive types who loathe Al Gore and John Kerry that, if Gore had become president in 2000, we’d have NEVER BEEN ABLE TO APPRECIATE HIM … because we’d have never known what we would have missed. Gore would have been pilloried for a host of other things, and beset by a GOP-controlled Congress, and his presidency would have been an agony. The populace would have despised him, in due time, without ever knowing what he’d kept them from living through.
amen to that!!!!!!!!!!! Susan, I am afraid youare right in your capituation on that one.
Bush surprised me at no time, except perhaps those 7 minutes on 9/11. An apple does not fall far from the apple-tree. Poppy Bush demonstrated it all: socially disconnected; aggressive proponent of corporate interests, especially sensitive to oil industry; played up with religous conservatives. The younger Bush only tries to surpass that.
……….and the shame of it all is, that is continues as we speak.
Like most everyone else here, it was clear to me that Bush would be a disaster ifinstalled in the White house. And like the rest of you, I too had underestimated the scale of destruction that would be wrought in his name.
What’s most chilling is that the worst effects of this regime are yet to come, and those catastrophic effects will outlast their term of office by decades.
And if a Democrat is elected in ’08, he or she will get blamed for the economic catastrophe whose seeds were planted by the addle-brained fuckup from Crawford.
I’ve advanced the idea in several places recently that given the scale of the betrayals we’ve experienced at the hands of the prominent Democrats we have today that it may be better for the country if a Repub wins the White House in ’08 and that Repubs retain their dominance of congress in ’06.
My reasoning is that I believe we still need more people to accept the truth of the fact that the Repubs are the ones who “own” the responsibility for the disasters this Bush regime has inflicted upon us; that even though cowardly Dems were complicit in going along with them, that it is the Repubs and only the Repubs who are the architects and implementers of these massively destructive policies.
And while this shift in public awareness is evolving, we can use the time to purge the Dem Party of turncoats and self-serving phonies and elevate some real Dems to take their places.
Certainly I’d prefer to see real Democrats rise up and win elections and begin to take back the country, but I nevertheless believe there still needs to be even more disenchantment with the Repubs before enough people will be supporting enough real Democrats to begin to turn the tide. (And how do we get rid of shitbirds like Lieberman and numerous others if we can’t field strong candidates to challenge them in primaries.)
The Republicans still have over 13 months to continue to screw up this nation so badly no one will trust them for a generation.
Trust them. They will do it.
But never underestimate their ability to consolidate power even further, and realize their totalitarian dream of permanent one-party rule. How many more right-wing Supreme Court Justices can we take, for example? What would this country or the world look like after a generation of their continued rule?
It would be nice if we could replace Lieberman with an actual democrat.
It was appalling that Bush was handed the Presidency in 2000 by the Supremes. The really baffling thing was that people really felt “more safe” with Georgie boy and voted for him again in 2004. The worst is that still to this day that anyone in their right mind still love and support this national idiot.
People who are “in their right mind” don’t feel safer with Bush as Imbecile in Chief. It’s the people in the grip of “denial” who “think” they’re in their “right mind” who still believe they’re safer with this gang of psychopaths at the helm.
When I look back I see the same thing. As someone who was raised in Texas and whose (right wing fundamentalist) family still lives there – I saw what we were getting ourselves into.
But here’s what has surprised me. I thought all of the big guns behind Bush (ie Cheney, Rumsfeld, and … god help us…Powell) would be smart enough to make them really scary. Now, especially after their ineptness in Iraq and Katrina, I think it might be their ignorance and lack of ability that makes me afraid.
The problem with Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and the rest of the gang running the Bush regime is not so much that they’re ignorant or lack ability; it’s that their ideology is dysfunctional and insane.
The fact that they’re so infatuated with their own ideology only makes it worse; they’re delusions as to their own infallability only accelerate the destruction.
I had some idea of how dangerous their ideology was from the beginning. What I was trying to say was that I thought it was going to be the combination of ideology and competence that meant trouble. But it turns out that its actually the combination of their ideology with their incompetence that is causing so much destruction.
I understand what you’re saying. However, I happen to believe that what’s happening in Iraq is not a matter of BushCo incompetence, but is, in fact exactly what they wanted. I never bought into the idea that Cheney and the neocons wanted stability in Iraq. I’ve thought from the start that by keeping the violence going in Iraq would allow them the pretext for keeping a huge military presence in the region with the specific intent of causing more trouble and creating more instability. If stability broke out in Iraq, how would they be able to justify keeping the troops there at these levels to make it easier to support upcoming military aggression against Iran and elsewhere?
By and large I think the Cheney gang has pretty much just what they want in Iraq.
Dead on analysis here too.
And note; nearly all the oil is still in the ground regardless of what or who is still left standing on the surface.
And from another angle, the power of the US to police environmental degradation world wide is greatly diminished. So now we have present day Robber Barons running rampant world wide with little to no oversight.
I forgot to add this.
Clearly there’s plenty of incompetence in this regime. As someone said, the Bush regime can rule but they can’t govern.
But the incompetence revealed as the product of their self serving cronyism masks a deeper and more inimical scheme which as the forefront of their entire agenda, namely the looting of the economy and the annihilation of almost all social programs for the disadvantaged.
Great points. And you’ve just ignited my dilema all over again. I don’t know why I spend so much time wondering about this. But it seems important to me to figure out if its their competence or their incompetence that I worry about the most. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m convinced that all of this is really coming from Cheney. And he’s such a hidden figure. I know everything they do is grounded in his evil mind, but I just can’t get a read on him personally.
Maybe this idea will help you find a solution to your dilemna.
The primary danger from the Bush regime centers not so much around how well or poorly they do what they do, but rather around the question of what they want to do and are willing to do.
In short, the ideology that drives them is the central problem. If the ideology advocates for so-called “pre-emptive” military aggresion, then whether they’re good at it or not, the problems that inevitably arise from this sort of aggression are going to manifest anyway. If the ideology calls for the looting of the economy to benefit the oligharchs, then even when they have to respond to a natural disaster by spending billions, they will make sure that this spending further enriches their big business friends at the expense of those who really need the help.
So, they’ll not “do the right thing” with regard to the restoration of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast not because they’re too incompetent to do so, but because, in the end, they really don’t want to. With Iraq, education, health care, insurance, the environment, it’s the same rubric. They simply won’t do what we reality based people know is right because their insane ideology forbids it.
You’re probably right. It must be the therapist in me that tries to imagine what they say to each other when they know that no one else can hear. Do they actually script this stuff – or are they winging it? We can certainly rest assured that its all been sanitized by the time we hear about it.
It’s their ideology that makes them incompetent. If you want someone to run government effectively, you don’t choose someone who not only doesn’t believe government can do anything useful, they also hate it for its efforts.
That ideology and dislike blind them to the very actions they need to take to operate government effectively.
If they get close enough to where they can institute a totalitarian dictatorship, I wouldn’t depend on their “incompetence” to protect us. They can be very competent in doing those things they believe in.
Indeed, and very concise! Thank you!!
I, too, railed against his election in 2000, and against any and all repubs and DINO’s in 02, and 04. His re-election very nearly drove me to leave the country…and, in fact, the jury’s still out on that step. So far I have committed myself to taking back the country and the government and once again returning it to the people.
It is cold comfort that many others besides you and I saw the potential for disaster. I, like you, never expected the gross negligence, corruption, manipulation, and incompetence to be on such a massive scale.
If we, ie: progressives/liberals, do not take control of congress in 06 my hope for the future will be grimly compromised. It reminds me of Yogi’s response to “Hey Yogi, I think we’re lost.” he said“Yeah, but we’re making great time!”
Peace
Going out on a limb here. I voted for Nader in New York in 2000. I knew Gore would carry NY regardless and hoped to boost the viability of third parties with numbers. I never dreamed, really!, that the American people would be so blind as to make that election close enough for Bush to steal it. I have long since come to the conclusion that it was pre-arranged. Just like 04 when I voted for Kerry, who I really liked, but was frustrated with for his lack of killer instinct. Even so, with all that I felt was wrong and dangerous about Bush, I could not have foreseen just how catastrophic he would become for the country. Nor would I ever have dreamed that the American people would lain down and given up their freedoms so weakly.
I have a friend who works for J&J. He was flying back from a business meeting and was sitting by a woman who was high up in the repug. party and they obviously were talking about politics and the up coming election…this was 1999, late in the year of. She said it was wrapped up and in the bag. I think he was told right then and there it was going to be a fix.BTW, my friend is a moderate republican and said he does not like the bush family at all…but I am very sure he voted for him anyhow…
This is how our politics works nowadays!!!????? Why is this???? I was so blown by this admission on his part…I could not believe my ears. The rest is history, as paul harvy would say ..who is a republican..
If you think you might be seen as overwrought, consider Mother Nature. Katrina is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Global warming means we’re very likely in for another four or five centuries of the same. Or–with a climate snap–even worse.
yep, don’t look now but there’s two more tropical storms in the Caribbean. One projected to move into the gulf. Not good news but not unexpected.
yup…I am watching this carefully. the leeves have got a bandaid on them now…what would happen if a catagory one or two hit in the same area now!!!??? God only knows what would happen to things…and it keeps going and going just like the energizer bunny..
Paul, don’t look now but it may already be too late. Global warming may have already passed the tipping point.
Maybe I should change my name to “Cassandra.”
The reality is that 1990 may have already been too late. We should have been taking serious action way back then. Instead, we’ve let ourselves be fooled into accepting an absurd line of logic, like a rube in a game of 3-card monte.
The proper standard for action was not “let’s wait and see if there’s really a problem.” That’s not how you think when your car is out of control and headed into a blind intersection with the light against you.
You want to gain control of the car, slow down, and stop before you enter the intersection, regardless of whether there’s any oncoming traffic or not. It’s just that simple.
But, then, considering that Laura Bush killed her ex-fiance in a very similar manner, I guess it all makes sense in a French farce mixed with black comedy kind of way.
I think you are asking the question of the moment.
What do folks think of George Bush now?
One thing that has happened since Bush’s reelection and the Senate going 55-44(+1)….is that Bush and the GOP are defined evermoreso, as you point out, by their record.
ie. Not in relationship to anything else.
In some ways, the 2004 election campaign was a chance for the GOP (a last chance? a final chance? a distorted chance? a manipulated chance?) to define themselves simply as NOT their opponents…to beat Democrats over the head with 9/11, Swiftboats, gay-baiting, flip-flopping….to smear and dodge accountability.
Can they do that now? Will that work?
Social Security, the delay of the Estate Tax repeal…Bush’s humbling with Katrina seem to indicate no.
I spent 2004 writing on the theme of the end of Republican dominance and pushing accountability as the main Democratic theme. I was wrong. We failed…not just with the Presidency, but with the Congress and many state houses as well.
But the underlying basis of that critique of the GOP did not go away. Nor did the “work over” that John Kerry gave George Bush in the debates. Is it possible to slay a giant, but only watch that giant fall months later?
What is going on in the minds of the voters? What makes them vote for Bush and his GOP brethren?
That’s the crux of the matter. I’m not sure the answer is pretty. A nation where so many voted for Bush and the GOP knowing, as you said, all that they stand for…is a nation that is not thinking about the same issues we are. I think many hard core GOP voters are simply lost to conventional discourse. And frankly, that situation has real perils.
Fwiw, I wrote a piece on dKos that addressed trying to reclaim the middle and isolate those hard core GOP voters. As hard as I find it to run this flag up again…
accountability and the end of GOP dominance are on the table again. God help us make it stick this time.
I have been hearing some gopers saying they voted for bush twice an dnow are sorry they did..is that just emotion or when things start to settle down will they fall back into line with the party? bewiltering to say the least…
I am left with ZERO confidence in the integrity of our election processes. When I dare to dream that it’s possible for Democrats and/or Progressives to take back one or both houses I get this sickening, heartsinking feeling that it will be a re-run of 00 and 04.
I believe, and have for a long while now that the only way we can turn this around is through resistance, on the streets. I mean, can anyone truly say that they see the Democrats attacking now when Bush is obviously as vulnerable as he’s ever been. I’m not confident that they have it in them anymore and that is the most disturbing part.
we need examples of who is doing it right. This IS a big issue.
I wrote to booman a month in response to a comment of his on dKos and said.
“Booman, I disagree with Wayne and Bev, I can’t lie, I think they hurt the cause…but, in that context, who are the people who are doing election reform right?“
We need to hold up positive examples. That is one of the most powerful political arguments…the better mousetrap.
I agree two fold. It IS the biigest issue and Wayne and Bev absolutely hurt the cause but there were many others who didn’t have their baggage who were similarly dismissed and all efforts by the John Conyer’s of the world have been summarily blocked by the Republicans. I’m thinking we are in for another fuckin.
When people see a lot of things going wrong, they begin to distrust the system and want to go back to basic values that have stood the test of time. Distrusting the system includes distrusting the experts and those who predict better or worse outcome. All that matters is trusted values.
Bush has sold those values, and his base has bought them. As far as they can see, things are no worse now than they were during the Civil Rights movement, Feminism, the Anti-war movement and all the social changes of the last 40 – 50 years. The government and the experts have brought these things, so why should they trust government or the experts? Results were bad, they continue to be bad, and the only solution is a return to tried and true values and ideologies.
As Democrats/Liberals/progressives we have seen most of those things getting better, not worse, so we are looking at the results of government. It used to work better than it does under the Republicans.
My best bet is that approaches the essence of the differences.
I think that many, like me, are sorrounded daily with people who are not the political junkies that we are. I often try to watch for what – of all the possible themes and stories out there – get through to them. I think this is why things like plame, gannon, downing street, etc just don’t have any impact. But the unrelenting devastation of Iraq and Katrina do get through to them. Most people don’t know anything about Roberts – or Brown for that matter. But they know that soldiers are dying in Iraq and that too many were lost in New Orleans because the government response wasn’t there. I think Rove is aware of this, and really doesn’t sweat the small stuff. He knows that most people only pay attention to the themes (WAR ON TERROR) and not the inside stories.
First off, we’re 25 years into a massive propaganda program in a nation that has no public square, where only a handful of pro-Administration owners of private communication facilities have the ability to speak to the people.
They’ve created an entire virtual Republican world where progressivism of any sort is unthinkable, where there have been no good examples of it seen in recent memory.
That is our “first off.”
The question about Bush’s image comes 25 years after the fact of the establishment of this visible world of political. It has only a little to do with the question about Democrats’ prospects.
The R propaganda program works so well, here, that I can fairly accurately predict which news source a person gets their info from based on their virtually word-for-word renditions of R talking points, particularly with those listening to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
The only counter point we have to that is the Ed Schultz show, Here
pretty much what a disaster Bush would be. He was not a new thing, after all, but a culmination of pressures that had been clearly revealed by Reagan, and before him, the likes of Nixon, J Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and their many powerful allies.
And yet I could not have believed that the American people would prove so stupid, weak, gullible, and cowardly as they did — how damn EASY it was for these brainless windbags to grab the country and turn it into their private treasury and hunting ground. That part I’ll never understand, and that part is what stymies me in trying to see a way toward a truly better, or even sustainable, future for this nation. I keep looking for a path but in the end find myself in the same old place: the breakup of this nation into small enough parts that real democracy might be tried in some of them.
If you read any of the excellent books that describe in detail the methodology and mechanics of how cults manipulate the minds and emotions of recruits and followers, you will quickly see how EASY it is for clever propagandists to dupe large masses of people on a national scale.
BushCo launched the biggest PsyOps campaign against the psychological autonomy of a national public since Hitler launched his against the psyche of the German citizenry.
Our challenge now, (as rational, fact based people), is to help the victims of this propaganda machine overcome their resistance to being able to admit they’ve been duped. Once they can accept that there’s no shame in being fooled, then they can begin the journey back towards reality; their minds will increasingly become more open to the truth, even when that truth might be unpleasant.
and I knew for certain that it would come to this point, because the biggest part of what was being done was the erection of a Halloween theme park virtual nation in which the average reasonable person, statistically, would not be able to know what was going on.
Nixon tried to influence and rein in the press. But beginning with Reagan we saw the aggressive dismantling of it through corporatization, overloading with fraudulent sources, and outright confiscation.
Since the U.S. effectively has no public square, no way for the voters to be contacted without using the private media properties of Republicans, and no Constitutional provisions for information rights that are remotely adequate to the age of realtime media, it’s normal for our system to select criminal and defective types like Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II.
These choices are the only likely choices for voters in a political system where the opposition is barely able to make contact with the voters.
Never,ever, in my worst nightmare, could I have imagined the clusterfuck that is the Bush Maladministration.
I will be 50 next month,so I have seen Vietnam,Watergate,BCCI,Irangate, the S$L fiasco, Chile, blah blah,on and on. But never ALL of that and more and more every damn day. I wears me out,it truly does.
Happy Birthday to you! [singing]
from Sidney BC Canada
Hey Booman, you are welcome in my country anyday.
Thanks for your public service against a truly evil regime that effects the whole continent and the world.
“I want to do good.” Jack Nicholson, in “The Border“
You’ve done good.
s.
.
Until 2000 – the first few documentaries about Governor Bush during the primaries. My gut feeling told me this is BAD business. One of the moments that triggered me was GWB’s explanation, he never considered a pardon for the death penalty of persons sentenced by Texas Justice. The cold sense in his statements and the improbability that Justice is always right, convinced me Governor Bush was bad news for America.
The stolen election in Florida and the SC decision, gave me the feeling we’re in for bad weather and lot’s of storms. My disappointment has been the Democrats in Congress, their voting performance was rated for their re-election and with their own constituents in mind. The Democrats lacked unity and a sense of what’s good for the nation and truthfully, with world leadership in mind, what is good for and the responsibility of the U.S. in the World.
Katrina disaster is also a demonstration of failure in our system of democracy, poor performance in advance of a hurricane disaster everyone knew was to unfold, and unbelievable misery and deaths for America’s fellow citizens once the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast.
How can we lead the World, when the U.S. can’t demonstrate free and honest elections at home?
Washing Away
– SPECIAL REPORT from THE TIMES-PICAYUNE –
▼ ▼ ▼
.
Don’t let poll numbers influence your activism for the party of your choice. In the latest European elections, all poll predictions have been way off! There are many voters who are undecided and this swing vote will determine the election result on ELECTION DAY!
See the preliminary result in Germany today.
The voters are disenchanted with politicians, do not trust the present leadership, and are knowledgable for the recent weeks perhaps a few months. The electorate forgets much what has passed and vote for a short term vision based on the looks and promises of the candidates. Incumbents will have a more difficult time to get reelected, people have a tendency to vote for change when clarity of program is offered.
The swing vote will decide the result ifor the Mid-term in 2006 and Election 2008.
▼ ▼ ▼
Doesn’t it seem to be just getting worse and worse? Doesn’
t it seem like there is no end to this? That this is perhaps a new beggining of something really awful, because this isn’t just Bush it’s a whole segment of the country that has supported him and where is he going? Where is he going TO?
I hope Cheney and Rove and Bush get indicted by Pat Fitzgerald. But what if he doesn’t do much indicting?
IT seems like the momentum of history is on their side, these are their times. Historically something is happening world wide. Fundamentalism and this kind of perverse conservatism you mentioned is a world wide phenomenom. THere seems to be some historical force operating here.
I’m looking for cues that signal and end. But I don’t see any.
At the time I had no idea he’d be as bad as he has turned out to be. I voted for Gore and tried to convince others to do the same, but in retrospect I wish I’d done much more. That was part of my motivation for being deeply involved in 04. I wanted to be able to get up on the day after the election and know I’d done my best.
On the subject of email, I did go back and look over the many letters and notes I sent in the run up to the invasion of Iraq to check and see how my thinking had evolved since then. I found that it hadn’t changed much. It was mostly a matter of my worst case scenario suspicions coming painfully true.
Happy Birthday Booman! Thanks for this wonderful forum!
An account in The New Republic of Bush and friends sitting around a map of Arlington Texas and making picking properties to condemn, in addition to what they needed for their new stadium, made me wonder what capitalist ideologue vetted this candidate.
It was at that point that I realized how perfectly distilled is their reliance on the marginalization of critics.
Anyway, Booman, it’s a good time to mention I’m very grateful for your existence, and would consider it generous of you to go on for a long time.
First, a very happy birthday to you, BooMan! Secondly, unfortunately for much of the population, a cursory look at a candidate is good enough. You are apparently better informed than most. However with such knowledge, you had a better idea of what could unfold. Others would believe such things to be the subject of fantasy.
I’ve spiraled back — on a higher arc but on the same side of the circle, so to speak — to where my mind was at in 1999. A year ago, for the first time in decades, I proudly declared myself to be a Democrat. Now, I’m back to hating ALL politicians. They don’t work for us and that’s the facts.
O, some of them line up with our interests from time to time because it serves their re-elections. Some of them are honest seekers of the common good. I think of Waxman, Conyers, Lewis, Kuchinich, even — not too many names come to mind. Really, it’s only the weirdo’s and mavericks that I half-trust. The rest are working for corporate interests, not mine. They are owned by Those Who Rule and we’re just so many peons to be manipulated and intimidated.
The American Democratic Experiment has been a relatively peaceful interlude for the Owners of the Planet. They succeeded in dividing the masses and turning them against each other. None of
Them has been killed since the French Revolution except by accidental involvment in various lower-level confrontations.
Nevermind. I’ve had too much wine and am showing off my tin-foil headgear…
There is nothing more appealing than a woman with shiny, crinkly headgear :o)
I wish I had known you then — didn’t blog, wasn’t very political, well, was very political, just not active, had a 1 year old, was a single mom, working 3 jobs and going to school — but even then, I could have told you them exact same things. In fact, any Texan who was around for the 8 years of Bush and his idiot cabal could have told you that you didn’t want W doing to the whole nation what he managed in Texas (and of which we will feel the effects of for the rest of my lifetime), and that yes, it would be this bad…
It sure does suck to be right.
Could we have come up with a more depressing thread for your birthday Boo!! I’d like to take a moment to think about how much worse this would all feel if we were experiencing it without access to the pond. So Boo, thanks for making all of this craziness at least partly tolerable. I’d like to celebrate all of the years of your life that led you to doing this. And wish you many more!