Obama's Biggest Enemy

It's not that the Republican candidates make Obama look good. 

It's that the Democrats made Obama look bad.

That is the main hurdle Obama faces in 2012. At this point the Republicans are an irrelevant sideshow.

A lot of the objections to Obama are objections to what certain people in Congress and the Senate did. That includes "Obamacare." Obama made a big mistake by notching his belt on that. He should have staked out the center early, reigned in Pelosi and others, and avoided identifying himself too closely with any product of the legislature.   He has stayed close to the center most of the time.

Despite being shot in the back by his own party, Obama is doing pretty well. So far. Figures on the economy will be getting better, which Obama can -- unjustly --take credit for, and at the same time will take away the strongest campaign issue from the Republican candidate. So as Obama grows thanks to economic circumstances beyond his control the Republican candidate will weaken.

Obama is responsible for none of the economy and half the deficit; whether that will play in Peoria is up for grabs.

The Republicans have two issues, the economy and the deficit. Every other Republican plank is a losing plank according to polls.

"Obamacare" is none too popular. Yet most Americans feel a need for some kind of healthcare legislation. So attacking "Obamacare" can be a losing proposition. The winning position is to attack the bill as it stands and promise changes--but the Republicans are more or less precluded from doing anything positive on healthcare. They painted themselves into a corner on healthcare. "We will find a way to kill it" is all they can say.

Then we have a weak crop of GOP hopefuls, all subjecting themelves to the usual cannabalism and taking mostly positions that may be popular with some Republicans but are losers among all voters.

The GOP nomination. I've compared this to a horse race where they all go out slow and the best horses lose their edge and any horse can win. Romney is still the best horse and been in longer than anybody else, but with all these poll leaders and Romney looking like he can't put them away, it makes him appear really weak. And he is too darned colorless. He needs to show strength and decisiveness without being stupid.

Most of the time when you show strength and decisiveness in order to show strength and decisiveness you get stupid.  

In my opinion, Romney has made a mistake by painting himself as conservative and by attacking the administration on the Iraq withdrawal. Typical Republican quicksand. Romney has tried to campaign for the general election but he also has moved to the right in order to secure the nomination. The Republicans deviate so much from the nation as a whole that quite possibly one cannot secure the nomination and remain at the center. Huntsman is an example; look where he is now.

Part of Romney's problem is that the Republican party has no vision. There is no golden city on the hill that Republicans can aspire to. For Republicans, everything is restrictive on individual choice and liberty or favoring a tiny minority over the majority, or a yearning for a mythical past. Not only do Republican stances on most issues go against the majority but they lack a positive popular goal to generate enthusiasm. All Republican energy is negative energy. Which you can see in the posts of some Republicans on here.

The Big Circus

Checked the caller ID of my business phone a minute ago. Call from "Newt 2012." I am still on some Republican call lists because I voted in the 2000 primary--for McCain. When I take the calls I try to explain reasonably politely that I do not vote for Republicans. That if no Democrats, libertarians, Greens, Anarchists, National Socialists, Socialists, Communists, Whigs, or Labor Party candidates are running against a Republican for an office I leave the ballot blank.

I am open minded to the extent that I will listen for a little while to what a Republican candidate has to say, but that is in order to try to benefit whoever is in the opposition. Also for entertainment value.

There's a lot of entertainment value to be found in the Republican Party these days.

Meanwhile, in the shark tank, consie talking heads are turning their guns inwards on Newt Gingrich. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70178.html They would prefer the honorable monogamous Mitt Romney.

Who, if he were truly honorable, wouldn't be associating himself with Republicans.

Treatment of These Heroic Happy Dead Brought Home for Burial

"heroic happy dead" is a line from the e.e. cumings poem "next to of course God, America" where a pompous politician is giving a hackneyed version of the Gettysberg Address with all the usual buzz words.

So.  It seems we don't treat our military dead a heck of a lot better than those who dug the mass graves in Bosnia.  

So what?  

Here's what.  From my posts in a Talk Lubbock thread.

Dead is dead. It is not logical to fret about whether all body parts of your loved one are in the casket or urn or whether somebody elses are mixed in or are there instead. Those were my sentiments concerning those graves that were moved up near Chicago way: so what?

It is only a question of respect and of due care. And of hypocrisy and lies, since the remains of U.S. soldiers are claimed to be so carefully honored, which is a crock anyway. Empty propaganda. "We honor your sons and husbands and fathers so much that we pay them little and curse them and kick at them during boot camp and send them off to die for no good reason but once they are dead, we are very considerate of the integrity of their remains and spare no expense to bring them back as whole as possible." Shit.

If I went somewhere and died or was killed, I'd just as soon be buried or burned there or left to rot on the roadside. It's appropriate, poetic, to lie where you fall. Used to be the common lot of all soldiers.

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The problem is, we shot ourselves in the foot. We need those happy heroic dead to use as a recruiting tool. That's why this is so bad, not because of the soldiers or their families or hurt feelings.

Live soldiers are too likely to be homeless or to have a problem with D & A or psychosis or complaints about Agent Orange or some obscure caustic or infective substance found in the sand dunes of Saudi Arabia. Dead soldiers do not talk back or disappoint or talk to the press later. I mean, sure they're dead and maybe it was because of mistakes theirs or ours but we can spin that. Do all the time. Rearranging the facts is only one of the functions of the Pentagon and DoD.

All that ponp and ceremony over dead soldiers is a recruiting tool. It gives old soldiers who ought to know better the chance to talk about patriotism and sacrifice and the costs of freedom (never mind that invading places on the other side of the globe has not a fucking thing to do with our freedom) and it gives young soldiers and prospects the achy weepy feeling of courage and resolution and flag-waving that so impresses their otherwise apt to be neglectful girlfriends and/or wives and friends.

So when corpses are not treated with absurd ceremony and respect, it makes us think, "our government doesn't care, they are using us" and so they are and have been so many times in the past, when we have gone to war because of a politicians mistakes or ambition or plain foolishness.

They don't want us to know that we are just pawns they push around on a checkerboard the size of the world. We don't want to know that either, or rather to be reminded of it, obecause it makes us feel so small and makes our lives so meaningless. We willingly join in the big deception. We want to be deceived. We beg to be included in the deception.  We'll even help write the script.

Next time you listen to the GOP pseudo-debates, keep yore ear tuned to see which of those bastards has plans for you and your children on some battleline they deem significant to them. And let me tell you, some of them do have plans, for yore money and yore offspring's lives and blood.

Basically, We're Screwed

Bob Schiffer made a couple of closing comments today worth thinking about. He said that governing has become a short interval between campaigns, and that if competitors go after each other tooth and nail, they kill not the opponent but the sport (actually he used the Burger King and McDonald's analogy).

Campaigns have been getting longer and longer. Earlier primaries, would-be presidential candidates beginning their run two years or more before elections. I remember when the primary was in May. Isn't that plenty of time for the nominee to campaign before November? If in the days before the internet, before cable television, television itself, even before radio, May primaries were thought to be fine, why is it different now?

Politics is close to the NFL as the national blood sport. In money spent and taken in it exceeds the NFL (my guess). Campaign spending has created a whole new industry in the economy, an industry of fund-raisers, pollsters, campaign managers and staff, advertising agencies, media. Is that healthy?

When the president was sworn in January 20, 2009, attacks were continuing by those claiming the president was not constitutionally quaified for office; those were not just a handful of cranks but were joined by probably 5% of the population. After a month or so, other attacks began with loud resolutions to replace the president in the next election. Some of course were urging removal by other means. It was a very short honeymoon, 30-days max.

How does all this affect governing? It hurts it.

1. It makes for a more divisive, disagreeable relationship between parties. It means that any incumbent hoping for re-election has to take every action with an eye to a far off campaign, and that the disloyal opposition is always on the attack. All of which we have seen, are seeing. A hamstrung Congress.

2. Always campaign skills are not the same skill-set needed to do the job. The best potential president, for example, did not run or was eliminated at an early stage and certainly never got to the point of nomination. We are left with the smooth voices, the pleasant faces and bodies, tha ability to say what is profitable to say. (In Romney's case that may not be enough.)

3. When there is a winner (I hate to use that word here; maybe "loser" would be more accurate, the loser being the one elected, except that the real loser is the citizenry) he takes office moving his campaign staff into the White House where they advise on every decision, making every presidential term a perpetual campaign. Just as we have created a whole industry to manage and advertise and report on campaigns, we are actually being governed by campaign managers under new titles.

4. In the legislature, the bigger part of an incumbent's job is glad-handing supporters and courting lobbyists and campaign contributors. All decisions are made with a view to money and votes.

What can you do about this? A single six-year term for president is one thing.   Single four-year terms for the House.   Moving all primaries to a later date is another. Limits on campaign spending. All of which would require constitutional amendments.    Fat chance.

Basically, we're screwed.

There are Republicans and then there is Right

Somehow conservatives and Republicans have co-opted the word "right," as in "right versus wrong."   Which perverts the meaning of the word.    Much of the time -- well, most of the time, I was only trying to be polite-- those describing themselves as being on the "Right" are way out in left field.  If anyone deserves to be called lefties, it is they.  Round-the-benders.

Remember that rat movie, where the exasperated actor -- who still gets a lot of TV parts btw -- shrieked to the villain, "You made me hate myself!"

The Republican Party makes Republicans who try to do the right thing hate what they have done and think up excuses for why they sought to do the right thing.

For example, Huckabee was a rather liberal governor, but became radicalized when he ran for president. The very reasons why he ought to have been a good choice for president the party defined as heresy and forced him to recant.

Romney, similar situation. He tried to do the right thing and it is coming back to haunt him in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Republican politics.

Gingrich, similar. Here's an account of one of his missteps that ought to be a plus for him. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/gingrich-accepting-gore-invite-lands-on-love-seat-with-pelosi.html   Wanna bet?

I might add to the list what Gingrich said recently about illegal aliens. What Perry said about educating the children of illegal aliens.

But that issue is not a matter of the heart as Perry put it, but of common sense. What else can we do? Illegal aliens are here, some 10-11 million of them according to a new poll, about 60% of whom have been here for 10 years or more, and many have children, many of those children born here, which means they are American citizens even if their parents are not.

What do we do, seek out and deport the illegal parents but keep the citizen children? Where? How?

Do we have the legal right to deport citizen-children because their parents are illegal?

There are so many practical reasons why we cannot find, detain, process, and deport ten million illegal aliens. Money, manpower, legal complications, crowded dockets.

But tell that to the Republican hard core.  If you are close to right in the sense used by Webster and you are a Republican  running for nomination, you painted a target on your back. 

Campaign Fraud?

NOW folks in Atlanta who knew the Cains are coming out of the woodwork and telling about Cain's marriage and infidelities.  

Was Cain playing a joke on all of us?   Taking supporters on a ride so he'd have a neat story to tell the fellas at the club?  That's how it sounds. 

When a candidate lies and supporters give money based on those lies, isn't that fraud?   Can't campaign donors sue Cain?  Weren't crimes committed?

I was taken in too, not that I would have voted for him based on what I thought he stood for.   But those who donated real folding money ought to get reimbursed, from Cain.