My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
Because I could never vote for someone who thinks this simplistically.
Rudy Guliani on the midterm elections
Goddamn, I hope Barak Obama will run this election. Because I just can't stomach the idea of voting for Hillary Clinton.
Run, Barak, run.
Love,
Ben
Posted by
Ben Sutherland
at
11/07/2006 08:20:00 PM
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3 comments:
Seeing his smiling mug behind an endless parade of complete c**ksuckers nodding in agreement with the most incredibly insane things ever uttered was enough for me to take a raincheck.
I understand the campaign game, but he was enjoying it too much. Playing along too much. Clearly stomaching, if not enjoying, being part of the Ass Crowd.
Obama hasn't made me ill yet. That's a plus, I suppose.
He is a master showman (his Kenya trip was perfect political theater on every level) and his only skeleton appears to be some deal with a crooked Chicago contractor involving a strip of land adjoining his mansion. Yeah, Obama lives in a mansion. Imagine that. The audacity of hope, huh?
Hey, in good news... Rumsfeld is gone. He's gonna be replaced by Bob Gates, who was Bush Sr's man in the CIA and who once turned down another appointment opportunity because he knew the Senate would ask too many questions about his earlier role in Iran/Contra.
Oh, he's a Texan. Prez. at A&M, a Bushie school. Oh, and he is on the Board of the Parker Drilling Company, a Texas-based oil exploration firm.
So, we're making a positive change here. We go from Rumsfeld the Dumb to Gates the Sly.
Who better to handle tensions with Iran than a guy who used to help facilitate the trade of weapons to Iran in exchange for hostage releases? Oh, shit, we don't negotiate with the Axis of Evil, do we?
Who better to help formulate a rational and productive military policy in the Middle East than a TX oil man? Oh, yeah...
Okay, how about some REALLY good news? A dude with a crewcut is gonna be in the Senate. That is SO throwback. Go Tester!
CDB
Long live Hilary!
"I understand the campaign game, but he was enjoying it too much. Playing along too much. Clearly stomaching, if not enjoying, being part of the Ass Crowd."
Yeah, that was what was making my stomach turn, too, Carson. Reading his endorsements for Rick Santorum, who was one of the scariest Congressmen to thankfully lose was really nasty for me to watch, too.
Obama is a millionaire, unfortunately. Which can definitely fuck up one's vision. Although I'm learning these days a couple of things:
1) Middle class and poor people, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, often have some of the smallest, pettiest, most self-centered outlooks on life, depending who you're talking to. I don't trust anyone from any class, inherently anymore. It's all about individuals and independent thought and character (that last concept not being an absolute concept to me; but it is an important concept, I think, to tell the difference between those who give a shit about the human race and those who are faking for personal benefit).
2) The people who make it the rich and the privileged most likely to be elected President are the vast majority of dumbass poor and middle class folks who constantly demand these dumbasses rather than having some humility about what they don't know about policy and expecting people who know what they are doing better than both themselves and the dumbasses who clearly run. It's not academics or rich people who block that progress, because neither of them have voting blocks big enough to have any influence. It's poor and middle class people who have more votes but who don't give enough of a shit about elections to vote for people with some brains and some heart and to stop focussing so goddamn much on what they did 30, 20, 10, 5, and even 1 or 2 fuckin' years ago as some perverse calculus for who would best lead us right now. Rich political consultants definitely exploit these dumbasses, just like rich music producers and rich movie producers and rich ad executives exploit these dumbasses to make themselves wealthy. But ultimately, either the masses start expecting more intelligence out of their politicians (which is not happening soon; though a boy can hope that maybe the Iraq war debate might step up the conversation, some) or they keep getting rich people who spend their lives dedicated to winning power rather than to thinking about what they would do with that power, were they to have it.
As long as people vote for people who want the power first and the thinking second -- as they clearly did in this election; one of my first times that Democrats have won power and I have felt almost literally nothing except an appreciation of some kind of change, no matter how mindless -- then we will keep getting people who have money and ambition to win power first and think about what to do with it perhaps after they've gotten some taste for how to use it. And then again, given windbags like Robert Byrd, who sadly won reelection again, maybe they won't think so much even after they have the power.
So Barak is just a compromise of the lowest expectations for me, because at least he seems, at times, to care more about doing the right thing, at times, than just calculating for power. My big comparison point for Barak and Hillary was Katrina. While Hillary called for an investigation to pander to the victims of Katrina and her left-wing base and to do not a bit of goddamn good for anyone, Barak was talking about themes that would bring people together during a difficult time and trying to back Democrats off from going into a feeding frenzy when they sensed blood in the water. The second is more what leadership looks like, as far as I'm concerned, and the first is lowball politics that exploits the misery of others for personal political benefit. And I lost a lot of respect for Hillary during that time for it.
I have mixed feelings about Rumsfeld being gone. He had an autocratic reputation as Secretary of Defense, which didn't endear me to him, of course. On the other hand, he was easy scapegoat for both the President and Democrats for a war that was primarily a policy problem, not a military/tactical problem. Rumsfeld was not responsible for the screwup that has become Iraq. President Bush was. And Rumsfeld being gone is an easy way for the President to pass the buck for that one to someone who I think was genuine in his commitment to winning that war amidst a policy fiasco caused by a President who didn't want to be bothered by thinking and discussing and debating the idea so much before he went headlong into it because he was too convinced that he and his generals had answers with their overwhelming military force that they did not.
I don't wish Rummy any ill will because it wasn't his fuck-up, primarily. It was the Presiden't fuck-up. And this gives him an easy way to say, "The guy responsible for the fuck-up is gone. Now we're going to really kick some ass." Which plays to a lot of dumbasses who still believe that they can force a solution on Iraq (which, of course, they can't) rather than doing the hard thinking that so many of them are afraid of for how to create a sustainable democratic government and a workable political compromise between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds.
Until we do that, we can fire as many Secretaries of Defenses as we want to. It still won't do any goddamn good. Not unless we get our heads of our asses and stop pretending that thinking that just backing out of this goddamn mess is going to somehow get it out of our hair. Which it clearly won't. Can't you hear the Iraqis a year from now if the troops pull out.
"You Americans come in here and fuck-up our country. You condescend us and act like somehow all that needs to happen is that you have to force us to solve the problem on our own -- like you're really working on this problem as hard as we are; which you clearly aren't, because most of you giving such cheap advice do it from behind a computer terminal rather than braving Baghdad as the Iraqi political representation must do to resolve this situation. And your liberal leadership has the fuckin' gaul to say that we better fix the problem or we're in big trouble. Fuck you you fuckin' lameass pussies. Go solve your own fuckin' problem you fuckin' dickheads. And leave us the fuck alone. By the way, kill the American infidel."
Yeah, not quite the recipe for success in Iraq, I don't think. And a really arrogant position for Democrats to be taking. If I were an Iraqi, I would be spitting on Democrats' mothers' graves for that shit.
Yeah, I don't think that the biggest difference is going to happen with a new Secretary of Defense. The biggest difference is going to happen perhaps with some breathing room before the next election and Democrats and the White House developing sustainable and well-thought policy ideas -- because, remember, the Sunni, Shia, and Kurd representatives and their insurgent brethren are, ultimately, the ones who have to buy-in to any compromise negotiated; so we're going to need plenty of ideas until we happen on one that they're going to embrace as their own -- for a political compromise to navigate the country into a sustainably democratic future, of some kind.
That's the only way out of this mess. There is no other alternative. Democracy was created as a sustainable path to avoid the kinds of civil wars that Iraq may be experiencing right now. Every other path is going to mean more of the same that's turned Iraq into a overboiling volcano of sectarian conflict. No military victory can replace that kind of political solutions. General Casey recognized that, wisely. And he was right.
And Melissa. Hillary can suck my balls for the cynical politics she engaged in during Katrina. Anyone who uses someone else's catastrophe as a springboard into the 2008 Presidential election deserves to eat shit, as far as I'm concerned. And I don't give a shit what her last name is.
Those are my happy thoughts for the day:).
Love,
Ben
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