What’s at Stake in 2012
In most elections, politicians pump up small differences into “issues” to distinguish themselves from the other guys. That won’t be a problem next year, as two contrasting visions of America emerge in a contest between President Obama and an unknown Republican who will embody theirs.
In 1960, there was a big debate over what to do about two small islands, Matsu and Quemoy, between mainland China and Taiwan. Nixon accused JFK of weakness by being unwilling to use nukes to defend those dots thousands of miles away.
Eight years later, something real was at stake. With Americans dying in Vietnam, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey by vaguely promising to end that disastrous war. He won, but it took him five years to do it.
Now, behind all the bombast, the political divide is as genuine as it gets. The clowns (pace Trump) are going offstage, and the knife throwers are coming on.
Enter Gov. Mitch Daniels, the “reluctant” candidate, to defund Planned Parenthood in Indiana. After urging his party to call “a truce on the so-called social issues until the economic crisis is resolved,” Daniels is making just such a move. He might as well have thrown in his hat with the announcement.
In the GOP new-face department, Daniels is behind Paul Ryan, the poster boy for heartless budget-cutting, whose charts and graphs conceal a regression to an America without a social safety net. Ryan’s “flim flams” and outright lies about deficit reduction will come to the fore if he is on the Republican ticket.
8 Responses to “What’s at Stake in 2012”
Republican dream ticket for 2012:
Rand Paul/Cotton Mather
What have we done with our sense of Future? What kind of future do these people forsee?
It is a broad brush I know, but they are the same as the “deniers” of all kinds. Nuclear energy is clean, environmental degradation is a hoax created by Al Gore, let’s drill in the wilderness just a few wolves and squirrels will be affected, the poor are poor because they are lazy and not real people.
Defund social services, cut medical support, defund public education and, Oh Yeah, let’s ensure everybody has the right to carry concealed guns to school, work and church.
David, some of these people seem infused with a sort of fatalistic glee – maybe they believe this is all a done deal, that they won’t be “saved” if they actually subscribe full-heartedly to godless concepts like science, free will, and democracy! Of course that POV isn’t appreciated by those who believe problems can be solved (even big ones) if we address them in common cause with honesty, logic, and vision… but of course that’s just crazy talk.
@JSpencer
Time is running out for solving these problems. And the future is looking grim as long as the loudest voices; the ones that seem to get the most exposure, control the discussion and will brook no compromises to move toward solution; are treated as the real voice of this country.
Republican dream ticket for 2012:
Rand Paul/Cotton Mather
Democratic dream ticket for 2012:
Barack Obama/Karl Marx
What have we done with our sense of Future?
We have followed the path of Weimar Germany.
Even as the Treasury issues more and more debt, there are fewer and fewer people willing to buy it…Pimco (which has now dumped US Treasuries) estimated last month that, under QE2, 70 per cent of the US Government’s debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve.
In other words, under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day, the federal government spends $188 million it doesn’t have, $130 million of which is “borrowed” from itself.
I posted that amazing number on another thread, too.
We are literally our own Ponzi scheme now, and that is without adding in the fake, non-funded Social Security I.O.U. fund.
I’ve already tried to explain, time after time, what the Trustees of Social Security and Medicare have tried to tell us all for so many, many years. It’s wasted. The same deliberate dunces who engage in global warming religion, see nuclear energy as the Devil, etc., are insisting on being in denial about the entitlements (or worse, support what the more lunatic Dems like Harry Reid, appealing to those dunces, say about Social Security, for example — it’s fine, do nothing to it for thirty years or more) don’t realize that the two major entitlements (and federal expenses and presences in the nation) will demand more and more from general revenues when the big deficits begin before 2020. (They’re so deliberately misinformed they don’t even understand it’s worse now that Social Security is running deficits prematurely.) They can’t face 25 per cent FICA taxes to make the entitlements solvent now to prevent problems also with the federal budget long before the exhaustion of the bogus “trust funds.”
It’s no surprise also that they insist on being deliberately ignorant (the real “denialists” in US politic) about the debt situation, a possible debt trap later, or the prospect of not only default (as with Greece) or bankruptcy when continuously issued and reissued debt no longer is bought (as with New York City in 1975), but higher interest rates long before then.