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thatcrazycajunConservative pundits George Will and our own local paper's Jim Wooten have writings published today that fairly cry out for a liberal-Democrat response.
Will, seeing that the famous Ronald Reagan query "Are you better off now than you were four/eight years ago?" is getting asked more often to the obvious detriment of his party, is seeking to blunt its impact by widening its focus. In his syndicated column today, he rightly points out that the answer has to do with a lot more than solely economic indicators, in which context it is too often used. Divested of his usual verbal profligacy, his gist is: There are intangibles to be considered that can't necessarily be measured in dollar figures and bar graphs—how many years you have left, what good and bad things have happened in your life, what you have or have not learned.
It's entirely understandable that Will and other conservative Republicans want to divert attention from the Junior Bush economy in this Presidential election year. Unemployment? Job creation? The stock market? The deficit? All far worse under the GOP than under Bill Clinton (who, I leap to remind you, left a federal budget surplus that BushCo replaced with deficits as far as the eye can see and debt our great-grandkids will still be paying off, most of it in the hands of China and other hostile foreign powers). See this handy set of graphs for details. Health care? Poverty? All worse. More uninsured, more poor, health care costs still higher. Again, here's the proof. Housing market slumping, home values plummeting, mortgage defaults and bank failures rising.
Stipulated that the answers on those intangibles are indeed as many and varied as the 300 million-plus citizens of these United States. But by almost any non-economic measure of the things that matter most to the largest commonality of them, the answer to Reagan's question is the same as on the economy: not merely "No!" or even "Hell, no!" but a resounding "FUCK, NO!!!"
National security? Russia has invaded Georgia; Iran has nuclear weapons or is so close to having them as makes no diff; North Korea has them already; China is still oppressed and largely poor, for all the pageantry of its just-concluded Olympic Games; Pakistan has nukes too and is an unholy mess; Israel still has enemies on all sides lobbing missiles and sending suicide bombers into its territory; our troops are still getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; and our nuclear plants and ports are still not adequately protected against terrorist bombs or munitions smuggling. And Osama bin Laden is still at large, seven years to the fucking day after the thousands of deaths he masterminded.
Civil liberties? Disappearing. Gutting of habeas corpus. Warrantless wiretapping (and retroactive immunity for telcos who aided same). Guantanamo. Attempted muzzling of the press on Iraq casualties. "Free speech zones" at the national party conventions, miles away from their intended audience. Strip-searches at airports. "No-fly" lists.
Quality of life? More homeless begging aggressively. More of our kids getting shot to death in their schools and churches by armed nutcases or slowly fed to obesity. More development and less green space, more traffic congestion, more pollution.
Science and tech? Our national science agencies are being ordered by this President and his minions to bowdlerize their data when it doesn't fit their radical right-wing ideology. We still lag the world in technology innovation, as Tom Friedman points out in his own column today.
Education? Whole school systems are losing their accreditation and our kids still fall at or near dead last in test scores compared with the rest of the world. No Child Left Behind would be a farce if its consequences weren't so tragic.
Any way you slice it, the answer to "the Reagan question" does not bode well for John McCain. To borrow his Democratic opponent's phrasing, that's a debate I'm more than ready to have.
Meanwhile, Wooten proves in his Sunday column that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is doing exactly what she was chosen as McCain's running mate to do: excite the GOP's religious-moralist and "movement" conservative base in a way McCain himself has never been able to accomplish. Jimbo uses lyrics from Loretta Lynn's old song "One's On the Way" to illustrate how Palin and her family are more like the average American than like the celebrities and power-brokers in Washington.
Well, leaving aside the bare fact that the family of Alaska's most powerful elected official necessarily has concerns that the "average" family doesn't, simply by virtue of that official's celebrity and power—like, oh, say, whether to use that power to get rid of a state employee who's making trouble for a relative, or whether to use that family's children as props to score political points on the national stage—ideologically Mrs. Gov. Palin also does not share the values of a majority of American families, as revealed in nonpartisan political polling data.
Most Americans. even those who feel abortion should be largely against the law, do believe that at least some exceptions ought to be allowed in the cases of rape and incest, or a medical threat to the mother's life. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans believe that embryonic stem cell research, even with its moral and ethical problems, is at least worth some funding. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans know that drilling for more oil will not have any immediate effect on our energy costs, or solve our long-term problem of dependency on polluting, often foreign oil. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans understand that "creation science" (or its more recent successor, "intelligent design") is something that should be discussed in schools, if at all, only in social studies or philosophy courses as a political phenomenon, not in biology or science courses as a credible alternative to evolutionary theory. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans accept that the question of whether global warming is in fact real and caused by human activity is, among reputable scientists with data on and knowledge of the subject, largely settled in the affirmative. Mrs. Palin does not.
I could go on, but this is getting far too long and I have other things to do. Suffice to say that Wooten and his ilk are the only ones to whom someone like Sarah Palin and her family could seem like "one of us."
Will, seeing that the famous Ronald Reagan query "Are you better off now than you were four/eight years ago?" is getting asked more often to the obvious detriment of his party, is seeking to blunt its impact by widening its focus. In his syndicated column today, he rightly points out that the answer has to do with a lot more than solely economic indicators, in which context it is too often used. Divested of his usual verbal profligacy, his gist is: There are intangibles to be considered that can't necessarily be measured in dollar figures and bar graphs—how many years you have left, what good and bad things have happened in your life, what you have or have not learned.
It's entirely understandable that Will and other conservative Republicans want to divert attention from the Junior Bush economy in this Presidential election year. Unemployment? Job creation? The stock market? The deficit? All far worse under the GOP than under Bill Clinton (who, I leap to remind you, left a federal budget surplus that BushCo replaced with deficits as far as the eye can see and debt our great-grandkids will still be paying off, most of it in the hands of China and other hostile foreign powers). See this handy set of graphs for details. Health care? Poverty? All worse. More uninsured, more poor, health care costs still higher. Again, here's the proof. Housing market slumping, home values plummeting, mortgage defaults and bank failures rising.
Stipulated that the answers on those intangibles are indeed as many and varied as the 300 million-plus citizens of these United States. But by almost any non-economic measure of the things that matter most to the largest commonality of them, the answer to Reagan's question is the same as on the economy: not merely "No!" or even "Hell, no!" but a resounding "FUCK, NO!!!"
National security? Russia has invaded Georgia; Iran has nuclear weapons or is so close to having them as makes no diff; North Korea has them already; China is still oppressed and largely poor, for all the pageantry of its just-concluded Olympic Games; Pakistan has nukes too and is an unholy mess; Israel still has enemies on all sides lobbing missiles and sending suicide bombers into its territory; our troops are still getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; and our nuclear plants and ports are still not adequately protected against terrorist bombs or munitions smuggling. And Osama bin Laden is still at large, seven years to the fucking day after the thousands of deaths he masterminded.
Civil liberties? Disappearing. Gutting of habeas corpus. Warrantless wiretapping (and retroactive immunity for telcos who aided same). Guantanamo. Attempted muzzling of the press on Iraq casualties. "Free speech zones" at the national party conventions, miles away from their intended audience. Strip-searches at airports. "No-fly" lists.
Quality of life? More homeless begging aggressively. More of our kids getting shot to death in their schools and churches by armed nutcases or slowly fed to obesity. More development and less green space, more traffic congestion, more pollution.
Science and tech? Our national science agencies are being ordered by this President and his minions to bowdlerize their data when it doesn't fit their radical right-wing ideology. We still lag the world in technology innovation, as Tom Friedman points out in his own column today.
Education? Whole school systems are losing their accreditation and our kids still fall at or near dead last in test scores compared with the rest of the world. No Child Left Behind would be a farce if its consequences weren't so tragic.
Any way you slice it, the answer to "the Reagan question" does not bode well for John McCain. To borrow his Democratic opponent's phrasing, that's a debate I'm more than ready to have.
Meanwhile, Wooten proves in his Sunday column that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is doing exactly what she was chosen as McCain's running mate to do: excite the GOP's religious-moralist and "movement" conservative base in a way McCain himself has never been able to accomplish. Jimbo uses lyrics from Loretta Lynn's old song "One's On the Way" to illustrate how Palin and her family are more like the average American than like the celebrities and power-brokers in Washington.
Well, leaving aside the bare fact that the family of Alaska's most powerful elected official necessarily has concerns that the "average" family doesn't, simply by virtue of that official's celebrity and power—like, oh, say, whether to use that power to get rid of a state employee who's making trouble for a relative, or whether to use that family's children as props to score political points on the national stage—ideologically Mrs. Gov. Palin also does not share the values of a majority of American families, as revealed in nonpartisan political polling data.
Most Americans. even those who feel abortion should be largely against the law, do believe that at least some exceptions ought to be allowed in the cases of rape and incest, or a medical threat to the mother's life. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans believe that embryonic stem cell research, even with its moral and ethical problems, is at least worth some funding. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans know that drilling for more oil will not have any immediate effect on our energy costs, or solve our long-term problem of dependency on polluting, often foreign oil. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans understand that "creation science" (or its more recent successor, "intelligent design") is something that should be discussed in schools, if at all, only in social studies or philosophy courses as a political phenomenon, not in biology or science courses as a credible alternative to evolutionary theory. Mrs. Palin does not.
Most Americans accept that the question of whether global warming is in fact real and caused by human activity is, among reputable scientists with data on and knowledge of the subject, largely settled in the affirmative. Mrs. Palin does not.
I could go on, but this is getting far too long and I have other things to do. Suffice to say that Wooten and his ilk are the only ones to whom someone like Sarah Palin and her family could seem like "one of us."
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 07:31 pm (UTC)Of course, in most cases, you're preaching to the converted, and tearing the blinders off those who just don't get it is not our job - they need to do it for themselves.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 07:31 pm (UTC)*Carter's economy sucks! Vote for Reagan!!
**Well, perhaps the economy isn't as perfect as one might prefer, but, really, there are more important things in life, and you aren't some kind of Philistine, now are you, and so pay no attention to the mess behind the curtain....
no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-07 08:12 pm (UTC)I'm not convinced that it's "most" Americans; certainly a good number of rational ones know this. But there are a sizeable contingent of nutjobs who really-o truly-o believe that not only was the world created in seven days, but that we all must be taught this as science.
Pfui. I'm going to wash my hands, for even having TYPED those words.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-08 03:48 am (UTC)Reality has a definite liberal bias, but too few people in this country spend all that much time in reality. The media pundits, doing the bidding of their corporate overlords are all too busy to relay Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's talking points to actually report the news.
I am cheered somewhat by Obama's GOTV voter registration groundwork, and the reports during the primaries of unheard of turnouts for Democratic caucuses in almost every state. I am also hearing a lot of Republicans saying they are going to vote for Obama, people who have lost faith with their party, like Susan Eisenhower. So, yeah, there are plenty of ignorant people out there who think McCain is actually telling the truth instead of lying every time he opens his mouth, but I think most people with any brains at all can see that we desperately need a change in Washington and McSame isn't it.
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
Date: 2008-09-08 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-08 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-08 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-08 11:03 pm (UTC)