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The Actual Factuals About the Democratic Loss in the 2010 Election
BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE
In President Obama’s own words, the Democratic party received a shellacking in the midterm elections, but what’s amazing is that he still doesn’t seem to understand the reason why. He seems to have bought into the Washington punditry that the Democrats lost because unemployment was at 9%, and historically the party in power loses seats in congress during the midterms. Those things might have contributed to the loss, but he’s completely missing the real reason why so many Democrats were voted out of office.
The actual reason that Democrats were turned out of office was because they deviated from the reasons they were voted into office in the first place. The voters made it clear in the two previous elections that they were fed up with the Republicans, and they believed Obama’s pledge that the Democrats were going to bring in an era of “change that we could believe in.” They were excited by that pledge. But once the Democrats were given the presidency and the largest majority in congress in a generation, they immediately turned into Republicrats. Their turncoat behavior angered independents because they felt lied to. It also made the Democrats look weak and unfocused to the people who were on the fence, and it absolutely disgusted the Democratic base.
President Obama took too many of his campaign advisors into the White House with him. These people are not about governing. They’re constantly in campaign mode, so instead of advising the president to simply adhere to the promises that got him elected, they’re continually triangulating to position themselves for the next election.
A lot of us were disgusted by that because it made us feel manipulated – after all, progressives are progressive because we’re not dumb, so it’s insulting to us when we feel like we’re being “handled.” So when the campaign finally began in earnest, and the Democrats came around with those very same rousing speeches that we bought into the first time we were bamboozled, they were counterproductive, because they only served to remind us of how disgusted we were over being lied to in the 2008 election.
But obviously the administration is so mired in the fallacy of beltway wisdom that all they can see is from one campaign to the next. So let me put this in campaign terms and maybe they’ll get the point. How successful do you think you would have been if in the 2008 election you would have gone out and made the following stump speech?
“If elected, I promise to circumvent the rule of law by instructing my attorney general to let Bush and Cheney off the hook for their war crimes so we won’t upset the Republicans and energize their base. I also promise to allow the Republicans to water down all legislation, even though we understand that they’re not going to vote for it in the end. And finally, I promise to never counter Republican lies in order to relate the truth to the American people.”
Maybe I’m politically naive, but I don’t think Obama would have gotten very far with that message, but that’s exactly what he did in his first two years, so I can’t see for the life of me see why the administration is so shocked that their base didn’t turn out to defend the Democratic Party.
On the other hand, if the president had walked through the door and kept his mouth shut – as he should have, since the attorney general is suppose to be independent – freeing Attorney General Holder to investigate and then charge Bush and Cheney for lying to congress to take the nation into war; illegally attacking the sovereign state of Iraq; the conflict of interest, misuse of funds and corruption; the torture, killing, and displacement of a million people, among other war crimes, the Republicans would have been so busy trying to cover their butts that they wouldn’t have had the time to cause so much trouble.
Yes, it would have ignited the Republican base, but it would have also energized the Democratic base, in addition to most young people, who tend to believe in Justice. It would have also done more to protect this nation from terrorism than all the bombs in our arsenal, because it would have sent a message to both the Muslim people, and the world, that the American people stand for justice.
Now that would have been a change that we could believe in, and the American people would have rallied around the administration, if for no other reason than having the courage and integrity to put the rule of law before political considerations.
But it seems that this administration still hasn’t gotten the point. The new congress isn’t even sitting yet and they’re already sending out signals that they’re ready to compromise on adding four trillion dollars to the national debt to give billionaires a tax cut.
If President Obama caves in again, he’s done. He’s playing right into Republican hands, because, you see, the Republicans have made it clearly obvious that they’re not really interested in the issues. Their main objective is to make Obama look weak, because they understand what’s most important to the American people – a strong leader.
So if Obama continues to cave in, he’s going to end up the most brilliant, charismatic, and beloved president ever to be voted out of office after his first term. Because the bottom line is, the American people want John Wayne, not Mr. Rogers.
Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=60527
Posted by Eric L. Wattree on Nov 15 2010, With 0 Reads, Filed under Government, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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YOU CAN SPIN THIS FOR ETERNITY BUT THEY GOT THE BOOT DUE TO THEIR ARROGANCE-FROM THE PRES AND HIS ADMIN TO THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS. THEY TREATED US LIKE THEY KNEW BETTER.
ARROGANT BASTARDS!!
DENNY ( I’M REAL gordie)
BAREFOOT BAY, FL
That may be true, Denny,
But what, now we’re going to trade them in for fascists?
There’s was a silver lining to this election – first, the Blue Dog Democrats, or as I call them, the republicrats were devastated in the election; and secondly, two years of fascism is surely going to wake up the American people.
You want to talk about arrogance, how about Republicans who ran on bringing down the national debt but insist on adding 4 trillion dollars to the debt to give billionaires a tax cut. They’ve told the idiots who supported that that will create jobs, but hese people are too dumb to realize that if that was true we’d be overflowing with jobs now since those very same tax cuts have been in effectfor the past eight years. So where are the jobs?
The whole political process in this country is a sham and a shame. It is a false system designed to play the left and the right off each other, and to make people think they actually have a voice and a choice. Look at what Obama has done. It is nothing more then a continuation of what Bush started which is what Clinton started (NAFTA)which is what Bush I started. They say different things but it is the same old bullshit. The goal is consolidated power for the uber elite so they can create their one world totalitarian system. Locking us all down firmly under their heels clipped and chipped. Smart people such as yourself need to wake up and see it for what it really is. It will not get better until we truly CHANGE it.
Democrat + Republican + Independent + Libertarian = Same Damn thing!!!
Hey Cpt.
I’ve written articles on that very subject – the prospect that they’re playing a game of good cop/bad cop with us – thus, the pressure on Obama. I see the political class as one entity.
[...] the original article at Veterans Today Tags: About, Actual, Democratic, Election, [...]
The Democratic senate and house leadership is eliteist and arrogrant. While they simmer over gay issues, the average people are out of work and pissed off because they don’t have a job and no one is doing anything about it. When you reach the point where you are the high and mighty, it makes a hellva crash when you land.
There’s something very odd, I find, with the idea that someone who is adamant about getting jobs created chooses to empower a party which advocates a down-sized public capacity to anything to improve the situation, a party which openly expresses ideas suggesting it would have been best to allow the US economy to implode, though it would have put vast numbers of Americans in depression era conditions for years, while those most responsible for the financial mess would not only have not suffered at all, they would come out much better off in the end. Do people seriously think a global financial disruption of the magnitude of the one that began in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration, can be corrected by some magic bullet in two years time? Or, are we facing a very motivated minority in the US which refuses to be governed by an administration it doesn’t identify with? Are we dealing with jobs, or anarchy? I’m not bothered if it is anarchy, but it needs to be called by its true name. When Hamilton worried that a small political faction, focused on disrupting governance, or bringing the government down was a danger to the nation, Jefferson responded that he would trust American intelligence to be adult enough to know when it was the time to remove the rotten apples from the barrel. In my area of Northern California, the most vocal of the dissidents are retirees, and I suspect a good number of those owe their pensions to government connected work following the build-up of national infrastructure after World War II. Most of the salaries in my area are directly tied to local, state and federal government work. When we wonder where the beef is, we ought to consider that it might be sitting between the ears of some, no doubt, very sincere loud-mouths. I’m with Jefferson with Jefferson— it’s near apple sorting time.
Plus it is not giving the billionaires a tax b reak, it would be maintaing the same tax level as before.
You’re dealing in semantic spin, SE8.
It would extend the biggest tax cut for the rich in the history of this country. Thus,by extending it, that’s ANOTHER tax cut for the rich. The bottom line is, if the tax cut is extended it will add 4 trillion dollars to the national debt. As a result, social security and medicare will have to be cut for 98% of Americans in order to benefit the top 2% of the people.
David,
They’re “simmering” over people’s rights, and I’m sure if it was your rights being “simmered’ over you’d think that it was the most important issue in the land. But we all tend to be self-serving, don’t we?
And by the way, the only reason there’s no jobs is because the Republican party is fighting job creation tooth and nail. You see, they have a vested interest in making sure that you’re miserable until the 2012 election.
Mr. Wattree’s commentary shows passionate intensity without showing any clear historical basis for his perceptions. If he’s advertised an access to a better understanding of what’s beneath the spin, as he claims, the contract has not been honored. By what sources of history did he ever get the idea that our Constitution foresaw a democracy in the form of a plebiscite decided between the president and someone’s idea of ‘public-opinion”?— some sort of un-Foxed pure cry from the streets.
Ours is a representative democracy. Popular opinion can, and should make itself felt by way of representatives in congress; but, for very good reason, representatives do not act by a mandate from their electorate, they act upon their conscience, and are judged by the electorate at re-election. Of course, at the outset of our history, the president was not even elected by popular vote.
Factually speaking, the balance of powers between branches of government has been affected rather dramatically by events. The growth of the media has given public opinion, however representative, a power to influence public policy in ways that could not have been anticipated in the beginning. As messy as this may have made things, I’m still convinced public opinion, and opinion-forming work needs to be encouraged, as much today as ever; as long as raw opinion is still required to be processed by our democratically instituted decision making process. I certainly would defend Mr. Wattree’s decision to engage a dialog on the issues.
Another huge change to balance of powers devolved out of WWII. The decision to maintain a very important standing army (military-industrial-congressional complex à la Eisenhower) had at least two very big implications both economically and militarily.
The decision was made after the war to give the US the means to have a major voice in deciding how the period of serious postwar chaos would be restructured, and an important voice in negotiating how the lessons of WWII would be best put to use to build upon a clearly globalizing world. Military technology and hardware can never be assured by the commercial, commodity based processes of a free-market, so the federal government, like it, or not, became an economic parter; today, our globalizing economy depends much more on all forms of partnering than it does upon out-dated ideas about ‘pure market forces’, or ‘socialized planning.’ The highway and telecommunications systems, the power grid and space exploration all were funded under national defense.
Investing in a standing army was a political decision based on the call, and I think rightly, that the US had to be strong, economically and politically, to continue to assure the maximum control of each individual American over his destiny. The body-politic in the US has not yet sufficiently informed itself of events to see that: in the same spirit, it was impossible for either G.W. Bush, or Mr. Obama to allow the US economy to implode in 2008. As for Eisenhower, the issue was inextricably tied to national defense and the ability of the US to push globalization in ways that would serve, not most importantly the USA as a state, but individual Americans, in their individuality. Nothing has changed.
Political pundits who suggest an economic ‘cleansing’ would have been salutary, are either romantic idiots, or they are serving a hidden agenda. Such ‘cleansing’ may be of use to a very low-level basic commodities market of the sort that existed 250 years ago, but not the highly integrated, complex, interdependent economy we live in today, and which, by the way, assures us a material security, as individuals, never possible in a former, even marginally competitive economy.
I’ve travelled all over the world, so I’ve seen how people do things elsewhere. We don’t have to let the economy melt-down to understand what that might be like. We can take a ticket to India, or Russia, or China, or even Europe, and see for ourselves what happens when people decide things differently. When pundits tell us how awful things are in our imperfect situation, judging by some ideal picture, tell them to show you some actual place in this world, or in any former world, where things were they way they want to see them. Travel, in this regard, has made me very humble— and I count myself a liberal progressive, though I don’t like pinning labels on myself.
A second big change regarding our political system of check and balances has to do with the institution of the presidency. As many have observed, since WWII, the office of the president had retained many of the powers of the Commander in Chief meant to expire after the cessation of hostilities. Some suggest, this failure to return to peacetime authority has been purely political, but that’s a strange manner to evaluate the position the US has, and may well wish to continue to have in the postwar world. Except regarding terrorism, those powers are no longer operative within the US.
The original arrangements of power, were predicated upon the assumption (which reflected the reality of the moment) that the US was a functionally isolated economy, and polity, from the rest of the world. Dealings were written in long-hand and communicated with mail services depending upon horses and sailing ships; most production was agricultural, and the greatest percentage was dedicated to suppling basic human needs; wars were conducted with mostly loud canons and wearing socially correct gentlemanly garb; many people died routinely of disease, or even minor accidents and many in child-birth. States everywhere, especially, in North America, had the protection of mountains, deserts, lakes, glaciers, rivers, prairies, etc., and the added protection of technically self-restricting methods of war and industrial production that could not do much harm to the environment.
World War II itself destroyed any illusions about the destructive potentials of modern warfare, or the isolation of nation-states in the world. The Tea people, incredibly, deny that the situation of the US has changed since Jamestown, or they think it’s possible to return to such a ‘state of purity.’
The presidency has shaped itself to postwar reality. There’s nothing political about it, save the enormous pressure on the president to favor US economic interests outside the US, from US based exporters, and from US based businesses wanting a stable global marketplace in which to do business. Institutionally, the president has supreme authority over US relations beyond the US borders; congress controls internal matters. Well, the war moved the center of gravity of what effectively controls the prospects and destinies of US persons outside of the US borders into the world— where congress has no authority, save to approve treaties.
Of course, the fact is, this does not make the president a tyrant. Even outside the US, where he has unrestrained powers by law, the president serves as a champion of US interests in the world, and a delegate in international decision-making bodies. With some appreciation of the kind of chaos that could have prevailed after WWII, current institutions and practices have held up pretty well. Those who suggest tweaking the constitution, or discovering the John Wayne, Providential Leader, just haven’t spent enough time in the history section at Amazon, assuming the local library has been forced to close.
So, is there any real bed-rock beneath all the spin perfect-storming about the social-networks (and, so what)?
Well, though some may find this very strange, the most revolutionary changes we are facing at the moment are to do with people’s perceptions, not with anything so tedious as “reality”, or fact. The mass of experience informing public opinion today has virtually no moral connection to the events and experiences of WWII, i.e.., wasn’t there directly (in philosophy, a moral sense cannot be generated out of another’s experience). United in experience by the war, and alienated from the very different reality experienced during prewar childhood and adolescence, the war generations were able to completely dominate all political discussion after the war and impose their preferred conceptual arrangements, until now.
The first open challenge to that generational domination of thought and discussion was during the ’60′s, over Vietnam. It ended, as we know, with a painful split between thinking people on both sides of the generational divide, and it cut the Boomer cohort in two, dividing those who would say their mea culpas and accept a servile position in the power structure, from those who would not deny themselves their right to be guided by their own critical thinking, and consciences. The omelet of history is made with broken eggs; we the excluded didn’t die, we just changed course and kept the brains working, evolving and creating. Reagan performed a simple coup d’état by attacking argumentative youth and offering the war generations a long feel-good break. Neither history, nor the world stopped moving at the same time. The result of this dialog lobotomy is, not coincidentally, that the healthy process of idea-exchange took a time-out. Whole areas of the brain turned to green-cheese. Kids who didn’t see anyone thinking, assumed that to be the norm, or the fashion, going orbital, into relation-fusion on the networks. Who can blame them? It’s hard to make mental death appear living.
So, I think the Tea ‘uprising’ and the mid-term elections, and John Waynes and the need for manned-up Obamas is all pretty superficial. Any ideas here have been drowned in the pillow-fight battling of attitudes. Americans are getting a much needed historical correction in their thinking, and they’ll be much more interesting to talk to soon, I have no doubt. Mr. Wattree, let’s do keep the conversation going— time didn’t‘ t really stop. Call me Big Ben.
Michael,
If there was a point here I completely missed it. I also missed how your analysis relates to the article above, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, otherwise you wouldn’t have put so much effort into trying to make your point. But the one thing that was clear was that you were curious about the historical context in which my position is couched. Well, here it is:
In 1921 — eight years before the great depression — Republicans took over the helm of this nation for 12 years. During that time there were three Republican administrations, the first of which was the administration of Warren G. Harding. History remembers Harding’s administration for one thing more than anything other — scandal. It was during Harding’s presidency that the Teapot Dome Scandal erupted. His administration was considered the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States — until Nixon’s, then Reagan’s, and finally Bush’s.
Next, in 1923, came Calvin Coolidge, the president that Ronald Reagan is said to have most admired. Coolidge’s policies of large tax cuts, allowing business a free-rein, and his encouragement of stock speculation contributed greatly to the impending stock market crash and the great depression that was to come.
Then in 1929 Herbert Hoover came to power. During his administration the stock market crashed, starting the great depression. In spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3% with 16 million people out of work, the Republican, Hoover, just sat, thinking that the economy would eventually rejuvenate itself. During Hoover’s administration 15,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington demanding that they be paid what they were owed by the government. Hoover responded by calling in federal troops to throw these ex-servicemen off government property.
Finally in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal democrat, was elected overwhelmingly. He immediately surrounded himself with a group of the finest minds in the country, including Columbia professors Adolph A. Berle, Jr., Rexford G. Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, known at the time as the “Brain Trust.” After assembling these men and others he went about the business of developing a” New Deal” for the working class people of this country.
The New Deal had two components — one to help the economy to recover from the effects of the great depression, and a second component to give relief to the American people and to insure that they were never be placed in a position of total destitution again. To help heal the economy Roosevelt created programs that regulated business, controlled inflation, and brought about price stabilization; to bring relief to the people he signed The National Labor Relations Act which guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining, and he created the Social Security Administration to guarantee workers some sort of income once they became too old to work. He also signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which protected workers rights and set a minimum wage for workers.
With his New Deal in place Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this “bleeding heart liberal”, not only led this country out of the worst, Republican generated, crisis that this country has ever faced, but went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in WWII. He then ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known.
One would think that conservatives would have seen the light, but their passion to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes seems to supersede all logic. Therefore, from the moment that the New Deal went into place, conservatives have been determined to dismantle it. The closest they’ve come to succeeding started during the Reagan administration with Supply-Side Economics, or, “Reaganomics” — and the battle is currently raging in Washington D.C. as we speak.
Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan’s vice president to be, called it “voodoo economics.”
Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planed.
Instead of taking the money and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company’s assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 – 15 years before the Great Depression.
And what about Ronald Reagan’s promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit? By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president, but he also added more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what does the Republican Party propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals was their “contract with America,” a capitol gains tax cut — for the rich.
Due to the continued freewheeling fiscal policies of conservative Republicans, between 1986 and 1989, spanning the presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., the FSLIC had to pay off all the depositors of 296 institutions with assets of over $125 billion.
Then in 1988 Silverado Savings and Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $1.3 billion. It was headed by Neil Bush, brother of George W. The investigation alleged that he was guilty of “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” The issue was eventually settled out of court with Bush paying a mere $50,000 settlement.
Then there was the Lincoln Savings and loan scandal in 1987, involving John McCain. The scandal was very similar to the one that is currently playing out on Wall Street. He was one of a group of senators dubbed “The Keating Five” involved in a scandal by the same name.
In 1976 Charles Keating moved to Arizona to run the American Continental Corporation. In 1984, shortly after the Reagan era push to deregulate the savings and loan community, Keating bought Lincoln Savings and Loan and began to engage in highly risky investments with the depositors’ savings. In 1989 the parent company, which Keating headed, went bankrupt, and it resulted in over 21,000 investors losing their life savings. Most of the investors were elderly, and the loss amounted to about 285 million dollars.
After having received over a million dollars from Keating in illegal campaign contributions, gifts, free trips, and other gratuities, the Keating Five–Senators John Glenn, Don Riegle, Dennis DeConini, Alan Cranston, and Sen. John McCain–attempted to intervene in the investigation into Keating’s activities by the regulators. Later, they were admonished to varying degrees by the senate for attempting to influence regulators on Keating’s behalf. Charles Keating ended up being convicted for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, for which he received 10 years by the state court, and a 12 year sentence in federal court. After spending four and a half years in prison, his convictions were overturned. But prior to being retried, he pled guilty to a number of felonies in return for a sentence of time served.
Then came the George W. Bush administration that caused close to a million people to die uselessly in an illegal war in Iraq, robbed the American people blind, whose fumbling ignited the longest war in American history in Afghanistan, and whose greed came very close to sending the nation into yet another depression.
Now, after all of their repeated efforts to deplete the national treasury, they’re unanimously voting against every piece of legislation that the Democrats propose to repair the damage they created, and to bring relief to the American people. Then they have the audacity to claim that they’re doing it because they’re concerned about deficit spending.
They’re against affordable health care for American families; they’re against any kind of spending to put Americans back to work, and they’re against extending unemployment insurance to relieve the burden of America’s unemployed. What’s particularly telling, however, is they’re also against any kind of strong legislation to prevent the financial community (them) from being able to rob the American people in the future.
The fact is, what they really want is to maintain the status quo, and make damn sure that the American people suffer until the 2012 elections so they’ll have a chance to regain power and raid the treasury again. That’s their one and only agenda – period.
History is clear. The conservative Republicans don’t mind spending money, they just don’t want to spend it on those who need it — us. Remember, they’re the party of Alexander Hamilton, one of this country’s founding fathers who believed that only those who owned property should even be allowed to vote. He also said:
“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people…. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.”
Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-September 17, 1787).
So my point was, when Obama promised a change that we could believe in, most progressives saw that as a pledge to address the behavior above. Period.
So I hope I’ve provided the context you sought, because for the life of me I can’t figure out what my article has to do with the socioeconomic conditions of WWII. Your comment reads like it was written by a freshman college student trying to bullshit his way through a term paper. The point of writing is to communicate.
Gee. That’s so eloquent. It’s about time someone put the whole history down so that people can see it. I wish it were out there (in public) for everyone to read.
Thanks, B.A.
I don’t understand why the administration doesn’t do it.
Because ignorance, compartmentalized awareness and deep rooted cognitive dissonance serve the concerted agenda of both “Parties”, Eric. Sooner or later I hope you wake up to this reality.
Our entire political system is fundamentally and irredeemably corrupted and the only divide is top (few) and bottom (masses), not “left-right”, not “conservative – liberal”. Those latter categorizations exist only to keep the exploited masses fighting themselves whilst the top few carry on hand in hand toward the culmination of their incrementalist totalitarian agenda.
I will not disagree with a single thing you have said here(except for one), very well put I might add. However, until all parties Rep. and Dem. get their heads out of their a$$e$, we will be in the same place. While you and I may disagree on what their true motivations are, the truth is evident that both parties spend what we don’t have and do so at the expense of all of us. Until they reign in spending, the debt/deficit will continue to grow. We all understand the need to “stimulate” the economy, but you can’t keep spending to do so. If all of us operated our own budgets the way the government did, we would all file for bankruptcy. The difference is, we only affect our immediate family, they will affect the entire country, if not the entire world.
My one point of your statement to disagree with is with “conservative” Republicans. I am a conservative, I don’t consider them the same. Conservatives don’t agree with out of control spending by anyone. You may say that what occurred in November put the same cronies back in control, with a free will to spend. I will use the old addage, sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils. I feel this way whenever I vote, because I believe all politicians are or will be the same in the end, once in the Washington machine. The current, past and probably future generation of politicians have a belief that they know better than any of us “dumb” Americans what is best for us. They will continue to make decisions for the country based on what they say is best for the country, when in fact they are making decisions based on what is best for them.
In the end what I want is to have the same freedoms I have always had. I want to fund the government with the least amount needed to keep the country safe. I want as many people as possible to have a job. Where you and I will disagree as well is that I don’t want to work to pay for millions of Americans(or illegals) to sit at home in the same comforts as I, while not having to work. I do believe in fairness, and free handouts don’t seem fair for the long term. Short-term is fine, but far too many have worked a flawed system which actually promotes the need for the system, based on the old government spending system(if you don’t spend your entire budget, you won’t get more the next year).
I have truly been blessed to find this website. Ditto, to your response.
E => So if Obama continues to cave in, he’s going to end up the most brilliant, charismatic, and beloved president ever to be voted out of office after his first term.
T. => Smart, but not brilliant, charismatic to the brain dead, beloved to the dribble minds. But, like I said with Nixon, Clinton and now, Obama, he’s ours, at least for two more years. God hope we can control the damage, so we can get on with building a better America before it’s hopeless.
Keep writing E. Tom in Houston