You Get What You Deserve
All indications now seem to point to Republicans picking up at least 4 or 5 Senate seats and who knows how many House seats come the midterm elections.
Let me see if I understand the causal chain correctly:
- Republicans spent the last eight years in power trashing the economy, starting quagmire wars, and generally mismanaging things so badly that most people agreed they sucked
- Obama elected because people want change
- Obama and Democrats get to work addressing major problems: economy, health care, etc.; early results were startlingly good as stimulus sharply reversed job losses, and large majority wanted some form of health care reform
- Republicans throw biggest hissy fit in memory, rage with over-the-top histrionics, throwing about outrageously obvious lies like “Obama’s creating death panels to kill your grandparents”
- Republicans throw 100% of their weight in obstructionist effort to grind business to a halt for the openly stated reason of wanting the president to fail so they can gain politically from it
- People respond by thinking Obama is doing a bad job and reward Republicans with election victories and more power
Whatever low opinion I had of Joe Voter just dropped through the floor. I know that the Dems have been more than a bit weak-kneed and ineffective in doing what they’re doing, but at least they were intent on doing well for the country, and no matter how bad they may have been, they are far more preferable than what the Republicans have to offer. It’s as if the people have completely forgotten about what happened the past ten years, and like gullible saps, are willing to believe just about anything the right-wing propaganda machine feeds them. I mean, really, does anyone believe that giving Republicans more power will result in more action being taken? Exactly the opposite: get ready for Obstructionism on Steroids as the GOP sets its sights on taking the White House in 2012.
If Americans are so astonishingly stupid as a group, then I suppose we get what we deserve.
>If Americans are so astonishingly stupid as a group, then I suppose we get what we deserve.
ayup. McCain got 60M votes and they’re still with us.
Obama hasn’t done much for the 20M or so liberals like us, right? Relaxing medical marijuana enforcement, a slight triangulation on Iraq & Afghanistan, not starting a war with Iran. Wahey.
It’s all BS though. Much of the press establishment is outright getting its angle from the Republican Party like Pravda.
The stupid people outnumber the smart people here. It’s democracy’s central failing, something that, unfortunately, Hitler liked to joke about in his dinner conversations.
The signal statistic for me is that only 14% of the nation will agree with the idea that evolution alone is responsible for mankind as we are. 45% believe man poofed into existence in paleohistorical time, 38% want to inject god into evolution via ID.
With that degree of belief in magical processes, it’s no wonder how easily fooled the masses are.
Going to UC and then heading off to Japan, I was in a bubble about this until just a few years ago. It’s not quite depressing, just astonishing. This will not be our century.
The question is: are we witnessing the onset of the decadence of the American nation?
All processes in nature are cyclic. Imagine a spring attached to the wall – if you pull it, it will move towards you as you exert your strength to pull it more and more. Then, when it finally slips out of your hands it goes fast towards the wall, bounces again toward you and back and forth and… – with diminishing amplitude until the friction will dissipate the energy and it will come back to equilibrium.
For me it’s only natural that americans fall back for republicans – they knew them for many years, and they were accustomed to them. Now the democrats took power and sudenly everything went wazoo – they want the stability back so they vote for last accustomed thing they remember.
No logical reasoning will sway their feelings and the feelings are what makes them do it. Succesfully attach bad feelings to the republicans and they’re fried.
Unfortunatelu republicans have it down pat and do it all the time to democrats. All feelings, zero reasoning. People turn off at first sign of reasoning – it makes them think and they are unaccustomed to that. They are accustomed to the feeling-in-the-guts politics and if democrats won’t adress that powerfully, they will fail.
KEEP IT EMOTIONAL, STUPID! (KIES) rule…
I’m afraid that I really believe that is so. Reagan began the downfall of the country back in the 80’s, when he dug us into a deficit hole that seemed deep at the time (trivial by today’s standards), but more importantly made such deficit spending stylish, even desirable if it meant that the rich could cash in. Remember the huge tax cuts, the increase in military spending, and the corporate welfare that culminated in the savings & loan scandal and bailout? (Remember two names from that–Neil Bush and John McCain? Foreshadowing…) All that was the setting of tone. He widened the gap between poor and rich, but more importantly made greed an acceptable quality. That he dumbed things down and made it seem OK by folksing things up was a lesser sin, but no less a sin. But his greatest harm was to set us on a path to debt and plutocracy, while education was de-prioritized and divisiveness became vogue.
Bill Clinton, for all his other faults, almost pulled us out of that. Sure, the Internet boom was a big factor in that, but had Dubya been president during the same time, then no way in frakking hell would he have balanced the budget like Clinton did. Clinton started us back on the right path. Enter Dubya to knock us back down and deliver a near mortal series of blows.
The 2000 elections were the last easy chance to save the nation, a chance lost because Bush’s cronies stole thousands of votes in Florida (the bogus felons list, the tampered absentee ballots) in a state where only hundreds decided the national election. Gore, while not a perfect president, would probably would have caught 9/11 where Bush fumbled it; he would never have gone to war in Iraq even if 9/11 had happened; he would not have given away trillions to rich people in tax cuts; he would not have deregulated the banking system to allow it to collapse like it did. Add those up and you’re looking at trillions saved (added to the trillions earned from the Internet boom, which would have died early were it not for Gore’s legislation in the late 80’s). Gore would most likely have kept our heads at least barely above water, if not actually started paying down the debt, which by that time, was already bleeding us dry of hundreds of billions per year in interest payments alone.
But instead we got Bush, or really Cheney. They first gave trillions to wealthy people and corporations with a series of tax cuts. Trillions more went to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The economy took another hit after 9/11, again costing us who knows how much. Then the banking crisis probably cost us a few trillion more. And now we have trillion-dollar deficits, which the right-wingers shamelessly blame on Obama.
Obama was out last chance. Had he been able to work with only stony indifference from the Republicans, he still could have pulled us out of it. But instead the Republicans fought a scorched-earth strategy, producing exactly that. They have so viciously and earnestly attacked this president that they have taken away his ability to function reasonably. They have successfully sabotaged our ability to come back from the pit of debt and despair they have buried us in, all so they can win more elections and wring what little value there is left from what is quickly becoming a shell of a country. While Bush stabbed us in the gut to make us slowly bleed to death, the GOP today has deliver the coup de grace, severing the jugular in such a way as to ensure eventual death.
Like Rome, America will continue to be powerful for a while. I hope beyond all reason that there is some way we could come back from the brink, but considering what the right wing has shown us it intends to do–shell out the nation of all its value when they are in power, disable us from functioning when they are out of power–I simply don’t see how it is possible.
The nation will take a long time to fall, as all giants do, but it is falling, to be sure. I mourn the loss of this our last chance to repair the savagery done, and I despair what could have been but now is lost to these criminal thugs.
This is part of the reason I am now reluctant to look at politics: I see it more and more as being unsalvageable, and it hurts to watch the nation I love being so destroyed, pitted, perverted, and impoverished by these unspeakable scum.
^ my thoughts, too.
Well, except for the “criminal thugs” part. That’s Olbermann speak. Conservatives aren’t thugs, just sociopathic idiots whose limited perspective and downright selfishness make them reach the wrong policy decisions on nearly everything.
I wish Japan was more vibrant, like it was when I was FOB there in 1992. China is on the move now but it’s like Japan’s worst, x100, without anything really any better AFAICT. Canada is nice but rather arctic. Europe might be an option but the nicer places are also arctic. Singapore might be the best of China but more sensible, but too equatorial. Oz and NZ are also options, if a bit isolated.
America might be sliding down the tubes but maybe it won’t be so bad. NAFTA and the general looting of the past decade CAN be reversed. It’s difficult with the media on republican repeater mode, and 20-30% of the population actively hoping for governmental failure, but there’s still 30-40% of the population that can coalition with liberals. So there’s hope.
I was last in Tokyo in 2002, for a week. Can you do a post comparing the Tokyo of now compared to say 1995?
Retail looks to be a lot better, with Costco, but there’s still probably a lot of hassle involved compared to the friction-free experience here in the Bay Area.
Rents seem to be down a bit compared to 1995. Housing is way down. Still kinda expensive inside the Yamanote, but I see some nice houses in Shakujii for $400K or so. Low interest rates (4% I think) on a 35 year loan make this cheaper than rent I would think. Wonder how crowded the morning rush is now. Probably worse than the 90s?
We are watching the U.S. totally and rapidly collapse. It is all self imposed. It’s mind boggling. This past week the supreme court piled on the avalanche. These people are supposedly intelligent. It’s hard not to believe that high ranking Republicans weren’t aware of where their policies would lead, but they pursued them anyway. If the Republicans get their mits on power again, we will be looking up to Brazil in 8 years after they finish. Mark my words. This is going to happen. It almost can’t be stopped, and if it could, the Supreme Court ensured that last week.
I’ve never thought the future so bleak. My God. I hate living in Korea. But America is a rapidly sinking ship. It would take a massive miracle to reverse the self destruction.
For myself, I see the fork in the road was Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky. Every parent that was forced to explain to their children what a blow job was was irreversibly angry and took it out on Clinton and the Democrats in the 2000 election… never mind that the media didn’t bat an eyelash at putting this infront of children every chance they could. Clinton’s Presidency was one of the most successful in history. Gore should have walked into the presidency. If he had, the situation would have been entirely reversed.
Luis, a lucid, thoughtful comment -and quite unacceptable. In defeat, defiance: you don’t roll over and play dead. Decadence is the result of a state of mind more than anything else. I remember the times when “an American pessimist” was an oxymoron.
Just in terms of living conditions from the perspective of non-Japanese? I don’t have time for a post at this moment, and would probably compare the 80’s to the present, so here’s just a bit right now.
First, there was no Internet worth speaking of back then; now, the Internet infrastructure in Japan is great, with 100 Mbps for about 4000 yen a month. Very good situation there, making downloads, Skype, and other web activities not a problem at all.
Transportation: harder for me to say, as I ride my scooter or bicycle about 96% of the time, and almost never commute by train. Come to think of it, I mostly rode scooters in the 90’s as well. The only time I didn’t was on the Chuo Line, and that’s always jam-packed.
Retail is nice–between Costco, FBC, Amazon, and better selection in Japanese stores, you can get a lot more than you used to–but still not as much as you might want. I need more sugar-free foods, and they’re *very* scarce here. In Japan, people just eat traditional foods and it’s healthy; I am looking for low-calorie, low-sugar substitutes for food I am used to, and there’s just no call for it here. And some foods are still alien to Japan–like Kool-Aid, for example, I love the On-the-Go sticks but nobody sells them here.
Buying a house is definitely cheaper than renting (and you get most of the value returned), which is why Sachi and I want to do so. We’ve just started looking right now–I was planning to post on it soon, in fact. We figured that if we got a 20-year loan (if it were 35, we wouldn’t finish paying it until we were 80 years old!), and paid about 80% of our current rent (plus some “atami-kin,” or down-payment), we could get a place that costs about 4500-4800 man yen (maybe $540K).
I guess I don’t see a lot of the changes as they happen gradually here, but if you ask about a specific area, it might dredge up my memories and I could comment on it…
@Luis
Just was curious how things have changed living & working on the westside since the NCB days, whether Tokyo has gotten more livable.
I left in 2000 but am pretty sure I’m coming back this decade.
Great speech, great demeanor, great countenance. No Carter’s malaise, no running to the hills, no decadence. He can take it and he can roll with the punches: he is not intimidated. No question about his leadership qualities. And that is what is needed.