Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Pffffffft

Looks like somewhere between worst case scenario and just plain shitty.

Feels like 2002 and 2004 all over again.

Booman puts it best:

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/11/4/153121/770

A taste:

This election is structurally tilted toward the Republicans, but anyone who's been paying even a modicum of attention should have ditched the Republican Party long ago. They'd know that if they weren't selfish, scared assholes, or if the media would focus on policy once in a blue moon rather than process and the horse race.
I don't even care if you agree with Democrats either rhetorically or on their record. They are many things, but they aren't crazy. They aren't filled with hate. They aren't trying to disenfranchise voters. They don't do things that will ruin the country's credit rating for no good reason. They actually listen to scientists.
People don't vote in this country. Why should they? What they're told about the candidates is less interesting and relevant than what they're told about their fantasy football players. This candidate over here thinks that the United Nations is going to take over this country and ban bicycles? Never mind. She's a rising star. She has charisma. That's all you need to know.

I am not just mad about the likely results tonight. I'm mad that this election was drowned out by the dumbest imaginable bullshit. I'm mad that the Republicans were able to hide their record of unprecedented obstruction and lunacy behind wall-to-wall coverage of some woman going for a bike ride with her boyfriend in Maine.
I'm angry that people are so disengaged and uninformed, but I don't blame them. At least, they are not primarily responsible because they are victims of terrible leadership. The Democrats are too passive. The Republicans never stop lying. The media doesn't do substance. The Courts give all the power to the demagogues and their funders. The legislatures gerrymand the districts into complete uncompetitiveness. Even when we elect someone on a platform we like, the system doesn't allow them to try out their ideas, and then we blame them for ineffectiveness. So, now we have a stupid, uninformed, malleable, scared populace that sees no hope and either disengages or bases their decisions on the most idiotic bullshit.
Two countries are going to the polls today, and one of those countries is overwhelmingly white and pissed off about the very existence of the other country. The Republicans continue to drive this wedge between us and we're going to see the results in how people vote in urban and rural Wisconsin or Georgia or Massachusetts.
One party has its problems, but the other is actively making us worse people who live in a worse country every single hour of every single day. And they are going to be rewarded for it.
And the press is going to treat this as the reward for savvy.
It's not savvy. It's just brokenness. It's a result of so many failures that I cannot even list them all.
We could have had hope. Our elites didn't want hope.


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