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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 13:20:10 :
In Reply to: Re: Sad to see it. posted by MoparNorm [99.10.160.35] on Monday, August 15, 2011 at 22:45:22 :
We've got the government that most of the people want. Look at the polls. People say, "Cut taxes. Cut the deficit. Don't cut medicare. Don't cut social security. Don't cut the military." All the programs people do talk about cutting are piddly little stuff that dosn't add up to any real money. We've got a "they owe it to me" society and nobody's gonna get elected by promising to cut anybody's "benefits".
I get just as disgusted by the right-wingers and the leftists. I listened to some right-wing loudmouth on the radio the other nigh (yeah I know I shouldn't) going on and on about how the new budget agreement is going to slash our national defense, leave us open to terrorists, plus a lot of stuff about Israel and why we should keep subsidizing them. Never mind that all the new budget is "slashing" is the projected rate of increase in those budgets. When I look at the GL website and I see 100,000 lbs of good running trucks being sold as scrap on the condition that they be "mutilated" before leaving the DRMO, when I see our government giving military R&D grants to Israeli tech companies that aren't available to US companies, when I see congress demanding that the Army and Navy maintain old bases that they no longer want (but are in somebody's district) or buy Buck Rogers weapon system that the generals themselves have no use for, I know there's plenty that could be cut out of the defense budget too.
Of course the lefties are worse, always whining about how if the Republicans had their way, our rivers would be sewers, our grandmothers would be eating dog food, and children would be starving in the gutter. Between the leftists saying "Don't cut this!" and the right-wingers saying "Don't cut that", any politician who cares about getting reelected knows that the only way to do it is to keep promising everything to everyone, and paying for it with funny money being created out of hot air and flatulence by the whiz-kids at the Fed.
What we've got is what we get for having had two self-obsessed generations in a row, now at prime voting age, who've never had to give up anything in their life. I'd like to think a competent and honorable Republican will appear in time to mount a campaign and win the 2012 presidential election, but I'm not seeing any that has anywhere near double digits in the polls. The Republicans' 2012 strategy appears to be to hope that a majority of Americans will hate Obama so much that they'll vote for anyone but. That's not going to do it, though. Incumbency has huge advantages. The man's been campaigning and fund-raising (at public expense) since the day he was elected. He now has all the Clinton people on board, too. Nothing short of a s.e.x scandal (the only thing that makes most Americans pay attention to politics) will keep him from getting re-elected. I wouldn't count on the Republicans taking the Senate either.
Okay, rant over. Back to work.
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