History Repeats

August 25th, 2014

A week ago, I made the case that Republicans should not be rewarded for trying to turn the country to crap so people would be unhappy with Obama and vote Republican more:

When one party is merely lame and unwilling to act forcefully, but the other party is going batshit insane, you don’t vote for the batshit insane people! When a president has gone too far trying to accommodate diehard hacks bent on ruining the country to make that president look bad, you do not reward the ones who have driven us into the ground just because they can make you unhappy. …

Rewarding Republican politicians for any reason is the most disastrously insane solution anyone could possibly dream up. They are dying anyway; put them out of their misery now before they add to the astonishingly catastrophic devastation they have already wrought upon this nation. The sooner we stop their policy of ruin, the more we can salvage.

I just saw a post along almost exactly the same lines come up on my “This Day Past Years” list. Two years ago, I made effectively the same case:

The key point: Republicans have been far more destructive to the economy, even openly stating goals which work against economic recovery, again openly admitting their goals in this are to gain political power.

The answer to this is not to reward them with more power.

The answer is to give that power, definitively this time, to Democrats, even just for two years, so we can see what Democratic policies would reap without Republicans poisoning everything.

Unfortunately, the American people will probably wind up giving the GOP even more power.

At least, if they do, and if Republicans take control of the Senate, it won’t make too much difference. The Senate is hardly passing laws at all right now, and the president still has his veto power. Democrats would still have the filibuster, which Republicans will no doubt immediately vilify once again, as always completely unabashed in their barefaced hypocrisy.

So the Republicans will have a few more committees to investigate their fictional “scandals.” So they’ll have a few more podiums from which to rant. Otherwise, things will stay the same—and conservatives will continue to call it Obama’s fault.

At some point in the future, demographics will begin to undo what Republicans have done with gerrymandering and Jim Crow. The problem is, what will be left of the nation by then?

With all that we will have lost by then, at least we’ll have the comfort of knowing that conservatives are certain that it was all the Kenyan Socialist’s fault.

  1. Troy
    August 27th, 2014 at 05:15 | #1

    ~30% of this nation are nuts

    http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-crazification.html

    and ~50% are pretty slow

    fortunately, there’s significant overlap so the GOP doesn’t have an 80% voting bloc to work with.

    I had hope that Japan had smarted-up when they went with the DPJ, but that’s just a smoking crater now, same as 20 years ago when Mori got axed by events.

    Still, I think my investment in Japanese 25 years ago is not going to be a mistake.

    The “Japan as #1” dream may have died, GDP-wise in the 1990s, but they’re #1 by this measure:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_position

    and that’s actually more important I think.

    I can’t see the future all that well, but the same motivation that got me to go to Tokyo in 1992 is working again.

    The Ferguson stuff is the usual BS that has erupted here and there from time to time, and I wonder how much worse things have gotten for the lower tiers here now compared to twenty years ago.

    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=IAs

    shows that if we had the economy of the 1980s, we’d have 14 MILLION more jobs in mfg, information, construction, and retail.

    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=IAu

    shows Japan’s working-age population is back to where it was 30 years ago, while the US’s is nearly 50% larger than then.

    Meanwhile we’ve really cut the guts out of our economy thanks to globalism, automation, and the wealth extraction that moves trillions from the 99% to the 1% via rents in housing, healthcare, etc.

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