In answer to Nate, I haven’t given up hope but I definitely need to do a few laps around the casino. The SCOTUS ruling on corporate funding of campaigns has put me in a deep funk, and I’m feeling like I’m surrounded by morons and weaklings on all sides..especially in DC. At some point, you get the feeling that human nature being what it is, giving advice or voicing your opinion is kind of pointless. But, hey, Nate’s right. You can’t stay demoralized.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I called my congressman and it sounds like they’re all running around like the stick figures in that little “Oh, Noez” cartoon people used to post at GOS. When they’re panicking even more than we are panicking, it doesn’t look good.
you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, vis-à-vis the scotus ruling. it’s gonna get very ugly in the states as well, it’s already started here:
Colorado GOP to sue to lift campaign money limits
better take advantage of the free drinks while you’re lapping the casino…you’re going to need them.
You literally can’t stay demoralized, BooMan. — because neither human character nor human emotion are static. There’s always a color change.
Remember the Bush years? We eventually experienced a respite from despair — even the despair following the reappointment of Commander Bunnypants in ’04. This is what our nature strives for. We make it happen because we refuse to stay still.
Getting screwed by bloodthirsty, barely intelligent, mouthbreathing corporate tools is to be expected.
Getting screwed by supposedly progressive, supposedly liberal, supposed allies who are either so incompetent and stupid so as to take the breath away, or so deeply dishonest so as to shake one’s faith in the entire “democratic” project since 1970….
is depressing and dispiriting.
When your enemies hit you, you get fired up to hit back.
When your allies betray you, it’s pretty damned easy to give up and go home.
When your allies betray you, it’s pretty damned easy to give up and go home.
If you have one.
What I meant to say is that it’s literally impossible to stay there. Not even if you’re dead.
Just as it’s impossible to stay fired up continually.
IOW, this too shall pass.
It might just help the emotional wrenching to take time to properly recognize one’s allies, to refrain from investing emotionally until that investment proves absolutely, and repeatedly, to be worthwhile.
What hurts most is probably not the betrayal, but the mistake.
And yet people are still determinedly making excuses for them.
Precisely because of an emotional investment ..
It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that one of the biggest problems with the U.S. political system is that most voters make their decisions based on emotion rather than rational analysis. This time even I did that. When I found myself inside the booth in front of the ballot, I changed my mind at the last minute and voted for Obama for the 100% emotional reason that it was so awesome to be part of breaking the colour barrier at long last, and because on top of being black, he is an intelligent, likable, and eloquent fellow, which in and of itself was a huge step up. But at least I knew I was making an emotional decision, despite realistically low expectations, and anyway, he is still black, he is still intelligent, he is still likable, and he is still eloquent. And he is still a politician.
All voters always make their decisions on emotion rather than reason. We all make all our decisions on that basis: reason is normally used to justify our emotional decisions.
Mind you, I’m damned if I can think who else you’d have rationally voted for in the last election.
There are three possible ways that I see at the moment to get around the SCOTUS decision.
Obama campaigned on “change you can believe in” and governed as “As much change as entrenched interests can stomach without threatening to destroy my presidency.” Regardless of whether you thought this was a horrible idea from the start or a pragmatic approach, the game is up and Obama and the dems have to go back to the drawing board. Now a year into that approach, losing a seat that should be one of their easiest to defend, the dems are rightfully soul searching about where it all went wrong.
I’m hopeful over the weekend after a few stiff drinks they’ll stiffen their nerve and realize that the only card left to play is populism. Working closely with entrenched interests to produce real reform is always going to be a bit ugly, and with the opposition party hammering you the whole time its impossible. To avoid massive losses in November, Obama’s and the dems’ “hail mary pass” is to do what they were elected to do in the first place: fight entrenched interests to enact real reform that helps ordinary americans.
You ARE surrounded by weaklings and morons on all sides. You are human and you are American. When it comes to weaklings and morons it doesn’t get much worse than that. So what else is new?
I think the source of the deepest, longest pain is having to face up to what’s been true for some time now: The system we are saddled with doesn’t work and cannot sustain us without revolutionary change, and the system is rigged above all to prevent revolutionary change. Some of us thought Obama, though far from revolutionary, might light a way around that Catch22 — well, not so much him, even, as what his election seemed to imply about what we can do sometimes. Right now we’re not seeing that path. We might as well believe it exists, though, because at least it’s something to do. That’s about as much hope as I can summon just now. I guess it will just have to do.
For anyone who was a Whiskey Bar regular I give you Billmon’s rewrite of the pledge of allegiance:
I pledge allegience to the Shares
Of the United Corporations of America
And to the empire on which it stands.
One company, under mammon,
With capital gains and dividends for all shareholders
The new generation spokesman, courtesy Network23. Can’t wait to see the sponsor list on my ballot . . .
“You can’t stay demoralized.“
Why not? It seems like the only rational thing to do as things just get worse and worse and worse.
Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissenting opinion: The majority’s position “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”
Apparently the Shell Oil Company, headquartered in Netherlands, can pump some of its billions in profits to fight clean air in the USA, for just one example.
Which ultimately means that a foreign government could funnel money into a multinational in order to try and influence our elections, right?
A foreign government, al Qaeda, any fucking body. US elections are now world-financed elections, according to the Supremes. Free speech for anyone in the world to participate in financing (buying) US politicians. Welcome to the new world of “freedom of speech AKA money”. Is this what the framers envisioned?
If I were the executive of a Chinese corporation right now I would be very interested in the new opportunities afforded me by the fucking stupid American Supreme Court to buy US politicians.
Just like there are hundreds of firms organized to outsource American jobs, which they have been very successful at (unemployment went up in all fifty states plus DC last year), now there will be firms set up to outsource the funding of US politicians. Count on it.
My only hope at the moment is the notion that perhaps things have to get so fricking bad that progress arises out of the ashes. Maybe we have to implode as a nation before we work up the courage to embrace real political transformation.
“You can’t stay demoralized”. I’ve been demoralized since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. Brief outbursts of hope have been quickly quenched by the activities of our elected representatives and their chroniclers in the media. This last brief outburst of hope (the election of a black president in my lifetime) has been almost completely overshadowed by the Republicans emptying out the Treasury on their way out the door, the Democrats not only giving them a pass on the criminal activity of the Bush administration but also failing to accomplish anything other than extending their wars and their usurpations of power, and the media “coverage” of it all starring Sarah Palin, Walnuts and his sidekick Joe Lieberman. Now that the Supreme Court has mandated fascism and health care is dead, I’m taking the rest of the month off to write checks for Haitian relief.
I would think that outburst of hope would have been extinguished mainly because the election of a black president in our lifetime only resulted in more of the same. In a way, it’s kind of right, too. There’s a really big racist aspect in expecting a black president to be different, whether for the better or the worse, from all the other white guys who have held the job. :o}
ARREST AND/OR IMPEACH THE 5 U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICES WHO VOTED AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND FOR THE CORPORATIONS OF OUR NATION!
Treason.
Traitorous.
Fascism!