Just a rant.
Originally Posted on January 19th, 2008:
Since my unfortunate sick leave, while reading through the news and flipping through the channels, I’ve had one recurring thought: What a sad, sad state of affairs. People just don’t get it.
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We have a recession on our hands, and Bush is asking for a tax cut for businesses while ignoring the blatantly obvious truth: To make money, businesses must make sales. People are not purchasing right now not because of some abstract concept of “consumer confidence,” but because they have no freakin’ money! Believe me, I’d love to purchase a new car, a 60-inch LCD TV, several new computers, a $900,000 house, a private getaway house, stocks and bonds, as well as donate to a hundred charities and sponsor a presidential candidate, but I don’t have the funds to even begin saving for the least of these. Why? Gas. Electricity. Health insurance. School. Low wages… and I’m nowhere near the poverty line.
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People still find Hillary Clinton appealing. Nevermind the money and support she got from the healthcare industry for her silence after her universal healthcare proposal as First Lady. Nevermind supporting something then calling Barack Obama “naive” or “inexperienced” for suggest the exact same thing (thank you internet, bloggers, newspapers and video archives). Nevermind conveniently claiming Jewish roots right before an election with a large Jewish voting population (oh, PLEASE!). It’s as if her advisors check the polls every morning to see which way the wind is blowing, then brief her on it before she goes out to tell the country what it wants to hear. Not that there’s no place in government for Clinton, just not the White House.
And what about her trying to break “the highest glass ceiling?” Isn’t Obama doing the exact same thing? The first female president of the United States, the first African American president. What a way to benchmark our cultural progress as a nation–it’s a novelty, folks. What should matter is where they stand on the issues, their history, and where they intend to take our country during their time in office. Those are the only things that matter in this race.
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People are still single-issue voters. Abortion is number one. “Forget every other evil the candidate wants to wreak upon us, if they’re Pro-Life, I’m pro-them!” Save your fight for later; think of what is good for the country right now. “But saving our children and protecting the sanctity of life is more important than any other issue.” How noble of you… and how completely useless. It’ll do no good if they’re born into slavery on a planet consumed by war and greed.
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The idea that a military man should be in charge because it’s a time of war is obsolete indeed. On the surface, it seems to be sound logic. Now, however, is the time to move past that. We need to be less of a war country and more of a peace country. We’ve flexed our muscles and buried our enemies. What else do we need to prove? The question to ask is who would benefit from continuing to wage war. Follow the money, find the answers.
Another question we need to ask ourselves is how we do we want to be remembered? The mightiest warriors? The fiercest civilization of our era? Why not the kindest? Why not the most benevolent? It doesn’t mean we must concede to our enemies, but it does mean we need to identify who our enemies are and whether some of them live among us–and I’m not talking about the terrorists.
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The Republican candidates are claiming their conservative credentials. Every damn one of them. But how conservative are any of them? In the past seven years we’ve seen an unprecedented expansion of government. We’ve employed a foreign policy more invasive and interloping than has ever been seen by any previous administration–and the “small-government conservatives” consistently endorse and defend it. We have religious people defending candidates who support pre-emptive war and the death penalty and denouncing homosexuals as less than human while shouting from the pulpit,”Judge not, lest ye be judged,” “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” or “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!” and sport bumper stickers that say “No Jesus, No Peace; Know Jesus, Know Peace.” Then, after church, they head down to the gun shop to kill “God’s creations” for pleasure rather than need. What? Why do they talk of being victims of modern persecution when they’re persecutors themselves?
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John McCain claiming that before granting tax cuts, we need to “stop the spending!” Non-Limbaugh conservatives (as ol’ Rush has quite a distaste for McCain) support this and blame so-called “liberal social programs” which account for a meager percentage of our tax dollars. McCain, meanwhile, condones cutting the budget before offering tax breaks to the elite while supporting a 100-year occupation of Iraq, which will cost untold trillions of dollars. The two simply cannot be reconciled.
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Fox News downplaying the economic recession while conservative pundits blackball others for calling it such. Sure, when you look at the numbers, the economy looks great! The Dow Jones Industrial Average is still above 12,000 (as of now) which was unprecedented a mere decade ago (as I fondly recall the jubilation as it reached and surpassed 10,000). It’s great that the top 1% is doing well–really, it is. Unemployment is down, which is also great. But most workers still aren’t paid a livable wage and are gouged all to hell on what they do earn. The elite are thriving while the rest of us are suffering or struggling to stay afloat. That, to most people, is not the definition of economic stability, let alone economic prosperity.
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People who think their straw-man arguments and examples actually discredit an entire ideology and the like-minded people who buy into it. Neo-Conservatives had a good run. They did. They took the House and the Senate while Clinton was in office, then held onto it until late 2006. In every instance, every possible aspect of their policy has failed, fallen flat on its face. Actual conservatism, however, may still have its merits, but what we’ve seen since Bush took office is corporatism, imperialism and corruption at its worst. As some of the GOP presidential candidates have parroted: The Republicans went to change Washington, but instead, Washington changed them. This couldn’t be more true.
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Neo-Cons claiming to be “moderate” or that they represent “mainstream America.” This is probably the most important point I have to make in this rant. Listening to the radio one day I remember one Justice on the Supreme Court who is considered by some to be one of the more liberal members (can’t remember which one) saying he’s a staunch Conservative, and that it shows “how much the rest have moved to the right.” The fact of the matter is, unlike Limbaugh and O’Reilly claim, the modern Republican party is on the fringe, not the so-called “left.” In fact, when you look at the non-partisan site, politicalcompass.org, you can see for yourself where all the candidates rank. Notice that only two candidates are left-of-center, they are nowhere near a nomination.
That’s right, not a single leading contender on the Democratic side qualifies as a “Liberal.” Even the much-maligned, ultra-evil, liberal hippie pinko commie lesbo tree-hugging spawn of Satan herself, Hillary Clinton, is the second-most conservative of the bunch, and by a considerable amount the most conservative front-runner of the bunch. The only side that even attempts to be “moderate” is the Democratic side, and even they’re far from “Leftist.”
Now take a look at the leading GOP candidates, as indicated by the red dots. The current leader among them, Mitt Romney, is right up there in the “Authoritarian Right.” This is known in other political compasses I’ve taken as the Fascist sub-quadrant. Go ahead and click that link, I urge you to read the whole thing. Pay special attention to the “Significant Correlations” section. So much for being freedom lovers, eh?
(Chef Kevin — when I say historians will someday look back and say there were signs pointing to where we’re headed, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.)
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The fact that the educational system under the Bush Administration has been more about testing than about results. Shouldn’t this be the other way around? Since when did we give in and decide that we’d rather spend our time benchmarking our spiraling failure than delivering the kind of quality education that speaks for itself? What has No Child Left Behind gotten us? More tests. What have those tests shown? That we’re getting worse. Nevermind Bush’s claim that the test scores are better by “our standards” (though he admits they still pale in comparison to international standards).
Mr. Bush, that doesn’t mean teachers are able to give students a quality education. It means they’ve gotten better at preparing them for arbitrary tests. The students aren’t learning more, Mr. President. They’re just getting better at taking them.
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And that’s that.