Sadly, I think the 2008 presidential election is heading down the same sick path as the last two. A ratings and sensation hungry media, a fickle and ignorant public, emboldened, well funded evangelicals and cynical gays and lesbians combine to elect the lesser of two evils as they say. Although I see a ton of Obama signs and bumper stickers around, the polls suggest a tight race. The media pounces on every tiny misstep of Obama's making him look inexperienced. For some inexplicable reason, his rapturous reception in Europe was blasted as a "miscalculation" and defined him as "unpatriotic". The Evangelicals hate him as he is multicultural and worldly. The VFW and evangelicals love Mc Cain because he is not black and got shot down. I agree with General Wesley Clark, being a pilot and a POW does not in and of itself make you worthy of being President.
After the debate with the evangelical leader Rick Warren, Obama was blasted as being "professorial". When it was suggested that Mc Cain had heard the questions Obama was asked and thus had time to prepare a response, his campaign and supporters on FUX News said "the insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous." Let Obama make reference to his race and the FUX people would go gaga.
If McCain is inaugurated, the world will further look at the US as irrelevant and leaderless. Bluster talk, threats and "support the troops" blather will continue. Emboldened by the blather, the evil in the world will continue to thrive.
Greg and I were talking last night that our beloved little Nicaragua is sliding into a festering nightmare. Like the US they have idiots in power doing what they can to isolate and destroy the truly intelligent and capable. We don't really want to live there as we once dreamed.
But is this place any better?
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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Like you, I don't see a positive future for the US in the next generation. After wasting trillions and an entire decade of American jobs, there's a lot of bad news for the next prez. And Obama's vaporous policies are unconvincing, thus leading to a very tight race in battleground states. Let's openly admit that McCain is a terrible alternative, too, since his solution is to keep shoveling cash up rich people's asses. But let me make a simple case against Obama, since his problem right now is that he can't win Hillary's supporters and his poll numbers have been going in the wrong direction since June 1st.
Here's a few of the problems we face:
(1) Peak oil will wreak havoc upon us all for the next 25 years as we struggle financially -- and more so politically -- to bring electric/hydrogen cars on the market. Every geologist laughs at all this bullshit 'drill now! drill everywhere!' talk. The last big oil field was discovered in 1972, and even the Middle East's big deposits are increasingly being emptied. But shhhhhhh, don't tell anyone or you'll be labeled a kook like Al Gore!
(2) The weak USDollar chains us down, and our own financial crisis will expand over the next few years. Japan has been in a slump for 18 years now. We're on year 7.
(3) Manufacturing jobs, and jobs period. We have no good jobs left in this country for the middle class. The repubs gave tax breaks to corporations not only to ship their jobs overseas, but ever more tax breaks to ship goods back into our Wal-Marts.
(4) "Education" consists of college presidents begging the populace to consider lowering the legal drinking age. Yea, that'll help. Stupidity is rewarded and glorified here (see Britney, W, anyone in the media, our justice system, etc.).
(5) Like it or not, immigration. We cannot absorb any more Mexicans into this economy. Controlled immigration is healthy; open borders leads to separation, resentment, and crime (you know, the kind where the Bush administration never worries about that whole I-9 business for employers). If businesses don't pay taxes, then the next step is banana republic.
(6) The next American president will have a seriously resurgent Russia to think about. We are a paper tiger and couldn't help anyone if we wanted to.
Russia's latest offensive into Georgia sought at least one goal: to gain hegemony over the last non-Russian-controlled pipelines delivering gas and oil from the Caspian Basin and Central Asia to the West. Like many historically minded Russians, Putin recalls how desperate the World War II-era Germans were to reach Baku and its oil fields. The lesson he’s drawn is that, instead of merely depriving Panzers and Stukas of gasoline, a reborn Russia can deny fuel to all of Europe in a crisis. Given that Kremlin-backed Russian energy interests have been able to hire a former German chancellor for a handful of Euros, it’s difficult to envision Europe uniting to diversify its energy sources: Europe is strolling open-eyed into energy slavery.
The essential point here is that Russia has a strategic vision, while the West does not. Forget the media, Obama needs to address this bleak future. Yanking McCain's rich-bitch chain about how many houses a fellow millionaire owns or Obama's "above my pay grade" remarks is fodder for jerks like Candy Crowley and Rachel Maddow and a waste of our time this deep into the 21st century.
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As nice as Obama's overseas trip was, Europeans don’t get to choose the US president. Somewhere along the way to the Obama presidency, somebody forgot to ask the American people.
And wouldn’t you know it, they insist on looking this gift thoroughbred in the mouth. Who’d have thought it? You present them with the man who deigns to deliver them from their plight and they want to sit around and ask hard questions about who he is and what he believes and where he might actually take the country.
However, Obama lost my vote when he didn't want to count the votes of Florida and Michigan and then was awarded some of Hillary's delegates in Michigan where he voluntarily took his name off the ballot! Bush didn't want to count votes either and even though Gore got 547,000 more, he sued all the way to the Supreme Court to stop the vote recount in Florida and we're still paying for it.
If the election remains "all about Obama" the less likely he is to win it. I've yet to be impressed with the guy. Like Bush, everywhere he's been in life, he's accomplished nothing he can point to. And just this past week, both the Univ. of Chicago and Harvard sealed his records for some weird reason. (As editor of the law review, he never wrote a single article for it! That's got to be a first.)
Oh well, I'm just rambling at this point.
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