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I currently find myself at a loss for which of the two major political parties in the United States currently disgusts me more.[*] The Republicans are evil bastards... but astoundingly effective. Meanwhile, the Democrats, whilst quite the lesser evil, cannot actually manage to get anything done anymore. Despite holding both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Oi! With significantly slimmer majorities -- including a 50/50 tie in the Senate -- the Shrub was able to accomplish far more with far less effort.
Honestly, I am utterly astounded at the fact that a Republican minority can hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage to giving more money to billionaires. Cuts that, I might add, are favoured by a majority of Congress and, according to polls, the public. Amazingly enough, they can even do this all whilst loudly proclaiming themselves to be fiscally responsible deficit hawks. Indeed, the audacity of the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, blew me away when, after defending tax cuts for billionaires, he then goes on to talk about what spending cuts will be needed to offset the cost of extending federal unemployment benefits!
Honestly, people voted for these jokers? I find it difficult to even take them seriously!
Yet somehow, after creating a major recessions with their economic policies, these are the people being brought back to power. I certainly don't want them to have it, though goodness knows that the Democrats sure don't deserve it because they don't have a clue how to use it! Unable to pass popular legislation with double majorities? Incompetent. Not to mention being stupid enough to wait until after the midterm elections to even tackle an issue that could have easily won them political credit going into the midterms. Imbeciles!
Considering the current political landscape in the United States, I find that lines from the poem The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats spring readily to mind:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Not that the Democrats are "best" in most things... but at least in the context of a two-party legislature they are. Leave it to the US Congress to remind me how good, relatively speaking, things in the UK still are -- even with the accursed Tories doing their best to run everything into the ground.
As things fall apart, I can only hope that another of Yeats's predictions from the same work will soon come true: "...anarchy is loosed upon the world..."
[*] As an Anarchist, of course, I strongly disapprove of the entirety of the US political structure and would dearly like to see it overthrown. That said, for the purposes of this post, I am accepting said structure as the reality of 2010.
[ETA: I love Paul Krugman! I really really do! His editorial on the above sums up exactly what I have been hoping against hope will end up happening. Thank you, Paul! I want to marry you and have your babies! Seriously, why is this man -- a Nobel Economics Laureate, no less -- not the Secretary of the Treasury??]
Honestly, I am utterly astounded at the fact that a Republican minority can hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage to giving more money to billionaires. Cuts that, I might add, are favoured by a majority of Congress and, according to polls, the public. Amazingly enough, they can even do this all whilst loudly proclaiming themselves to be fiscally responsible deficit hawks. Indeed, the audacity of the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, blew me away when, after defending tax cuts for billionaires, he then goes on to talk about what spending cuts will be needed to offset the cost of extending federal unemployment benefits!
Honestly, people voted for these jokers? I find it difficult to even take them seriously!
Yet somehow, after creating a major recessions with their economic policies, these are the people being brought back to power. I certainly don't want them to have it, though goodness knows that the Democrats sure don't deserve it because they don't have a clue how to use it! Unable to pass popular legislation with double majorities? Incompetent. Not to mention being stupid enough to wait until after the midterm elections to even tackle an issue that could have easily won them political credit going into the midterms. Imbeciles!
Considering the current political landscape in the United States, I find that lines from the poem The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats spring readily to mind:
Are full of passionate intensity.
Not that the Democrats are "best" in most things... but at least in the context of a two-party legislature they are. Leave it to the US Congress to remind me how good, relatively speaking, things in the UK still are -- even with the accursed Tories doing their best to run everything into the ground.
As things fall apart, I can only hope that another of Yeats's predictions from the same work will soon come true: "...anarchy is loosed upon the world..."
[*] As an Anarchist, of course, I strongly disapprove of the entirety of the US political structure and would dearly like to see it overthrown. That said, for the purposes of this post, I am accepting said structure as the reality of 2010.
[ETA: I love Paul Krugman! I really really do! His editorial on the above sums up exactly what I have been hoping against hope will end up happening. Thank you, Paul! I want to marry you and have your babies! Seriously, why is this man -- a Nobel Economics Laureate, no less -- not the Secretary of the Treasury??]
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don't even get me started
I am so ranty just thinking about it. I really should not have asked, I would still be blissfully unaware.
Anyway. Thinking on it only gets me wound up about stuff I can't control. Instead, I shall once again look upon my holiday yak stickers.
For they are filled with win. (Also, it's really only because I'm going to bed that I'm putting my head in the sand on this one. When I've got the full force of an entire day ahead of me I can rant for hours on this topic. HOURS.)
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Re: don't even get me started
I hope you slept well, hon, and if you want to rant away, go right ahead!
It really just dumbfounds me to watch this going down. Especially the way that the Republicans twist and spin everything about. Gods, I'm bloody fuming watching it. Why didn't the Democrats force this vote -- in which the majority of the public agrees with them -- before the election? Then they could have gone to the polls loudly proclaiming how the Republicans voted against keeping their taxes low. Why didn't the president actually take to the airwaves to push for his own plan?
Honestly, with a minority in both houses of Congress, these bastards still manage to control the legislation. It's amazing...
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Never a truer word spoken.................
And just don't get me started on 'the coalition' :o(
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As for the coalition? I had been feeling pretty negative about them for months now... but US politics currently have me thinking that they aren't so bad, relatively speaking.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that we are not speaking relatively. And, on an absolute scale, they are pretty durn rotten, too.
Feh. Ireland's bankrupt. I wonder what prospects in Canadia, New Zealand, or Australia are like.
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Plus they have lovely weather and are charming people.
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In the UK, the cost of a university education has tripled.
In the US, the same Senate Republicans that, just days ago, insisted on giving away hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthy just blocked about eight billion dollars for health aid to workers injured in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th 2001. Un-fucking-believable!
I have to say: Crete is looking better all the time...
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I have no love for the Tories, not one fecking whit.
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I must confess to being out of touch with Canadian policies. Would you care to elaborate?
Alas, if Canada is out of the loop, then the options are rather dwindling. What have we left? Australia? New Zealand? South Africa??
Also, just to be rather explicit, I've no love for the Tories, either. Just in case that wasn't perfectly clear!
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Quite to the contrary of making a positive endorsement, Yeats was rather taken in by the smear campaign that ended up equating "Anarchy" with "chaos" or "nihilism". In the early twentieth century, this was very much an active effort as Anarchist and Anarchist-leaning organizations, like the I.W.W., were rather popular and relatively powerful.
However, this journal belongs to me, and not to William Butler Yeats. As such, I consider myself to be at liberty to imbue those words with the meaning that I would ascribe to them. Make sense?
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ZOMBIE YEATS!!
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Uh, oh! Now I'm a little afraid to go to sleep! I don't want Zombie Yeats coming back and nibbling on my brain for revenge! Eeeeeep! :-D
(To say nothing of eating my eyes... as that would just be unreasonable! *chuckle*)
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*ducks and runs for cover*
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So, if you're W and you want to start wars and cut taxes for rich people, congressional committees, moderate senators, and what have you are far less likely to hit the breaks than if you're a liberal who wants to reallocate resources for the benefit of the less powerful.
The amazing thing about institutions that help a lot of people is that in any democratic system they're hard to get rid of. Maybe the Republicans would love to toss Social Security out, but they'd get tossed out on their arses if they tried. Similarly, if Thatcher in her heart of hearts wanted to get rid of the dole and the NHS, she knew she'd just lose the next election and have everything reinstated by Labour, anyway.
What's nice about the Westminster system is that getting institutions started in the first place is so much easier. A PM with a majority has a lot of power to actually do things. A US president is always fighting with Congress, because there's always some jackass Senator who needs to let the people back home know he/she is a "real moderate" and not a rubber stamp for the President.
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Now much of this is posturing, of course, but there is a nugget of truth in it. Cloture and filibustering were not implemented as a means of making all legislation require a sixty percent supermajority to pass. Filibustering should be a relative rarity.
Of course, that hasn't kept those same Republicans from becoming the "Party of No" that has filibustered relentlessly. Indeed, they are still the minority party and have thwarted both the majority, the President, and the will of the public on blocking tax breaks to the middle class until they could also procure them for the billionaires. Feh.
As you so neatly put it: The system is broken. But only one side seems able to truly take advantage of said brokenness. It will be, ah, interesting to see what happens when the Republicans re-take the Senate, possibly in 2012. It's not hard to predict what a sea change there will be in the rhetoric of the filibuster.
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They're like Charlie Brown, always believing that this time Lucy really won't pull away the football.
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I really just don't get it. The President is obviously a smart guy. What's he playing at by consistently ignoring his base and pandering to people who have explicitly said that they want him to fail?
At this point, I would not be particularly surprised to see a challenge arise in the 2012 Democratic primaries. And, to be quite honest, I would welcome it!
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I think that Yeats quote is too often true. But YOU seem to be fighting the good fight with passionate intensity. I don't know you well, but I admire you.
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Also, thank you for your kind words!
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The Old Guard Republicans have shown that they do not care for the common man, the deficit, or popular opinion. All they want to do is reward their narrow base. To do that, they are willing to "compromise" by giving the Democrats more from the public trough. These actions are exactly what the "Tea Party" was pledge to change.
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The "Tea Party" / Republican alliance seems to be a tenuous one. With any luck, there will be backlash fracturing the connection that reverberates into 2012. For as much as I cannot stand the damn Democrats, the Republicans are proving themselves to be considerably worse. This is not something I would have seen as true a decade ago... but there has been a sharp tack to the [further] right in the GOP.
[*] Would be nice if the Democrats could remember to give a care for their own power base at some point...
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"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
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It just boggles my mind how the Democrats rolled over on this. They didn't rally a fight -- on an issue where they enjoy widespread popular support -- before the midterm elections. They didn't use the bully pulpit of the President to take to the airwaves and carry their message forth. There is so much more that they could have done to win this.
Heck, they could have threatened the so-called "nuclear option" to do away with the filibuster. Goodness knows that the Republicans nearly did just that over far less!