Feel the desperation

Posted on October 16th, 2008 by ecthompson md

Die-hard conservatives who have won just about everything over the last 27 years are now feeling very, very desperate. This is why we’ve felt the tone of the McCain campaign turn away from the issues and focus on personal attacks. Some conservatives are despondent; others are mad. There are those who believe the country will go down the tubes if a Democrat gets elected president.

Short of chaos breaking out in every street in every town, how can the country be further down the tubes? We have over $10 trillion worth of debt. The Republicans have doubled our debt over the last eight years. We are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending over $10 billion a month and really have nothing to show for our efforts. The median income of Americans, adjusted for inflation, has yet to rise to the level seen in the year 2000.

Almost every major initiative that George W. Bush and the rest of the neo-conservatives have inflicted on America over the last eight years has been a complete failure. No Child Left Behind, George W. Bush’s grand education proposal, is a disaster on multiple levels. It is a poorly funded state mandate. The basic premise of the idea that testing equals knowledge has never been proven. In my opinion, No Child Left Behind was a ruse to dismantle the American education system. An under-educated populace is easier to control. This is just my cynical opinion, of course, but the bottom line is that there is no evidence that our children are learning more.

The environment is considerably worse off now than it was eight years ago. The president’s initiative Healthy Forests was designed to aid the logging community. His Clear Skies initiative has increased our air pollution and not decreased it. The Environmental Protection Agency has become a joke. The Superfund was designed to benefit tax polluters. Those funds, which were supposed to be used for major clean-ups, are utterly depleted. See what happens when you don’t enforce the laws and there are no fines?

Under President Bush, North Korea has been allowed to develop four to eight times the number of nuclear weapons that they had under President Clinton. Iran, which had little or no nuclear weapons program is now clearly moving towards developing nuclear weapons. The one thing that we can say is that Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States or to his neighbors. In hindsight, Saddam Hussein was adequately controlled under UN inspections and by our no-fly zones. Saddam Hussein was no threat to the United States and was little or no threat to his neighbors. The sanctions worked.

Every single segment of Americans, excluding the most wealthy, is worse off now than they were eight years ago. Unfettered Republican policies have decimated this country. Yet conservatives hold on to the notion that the Republican party has the solution to this disaster and that Democrats are going to destroy the country. All I can say is when this country is better off in four years (not fixed, but at least improved), I hope that these Republicans will be big enough to stand up and say, “We were wrong.” That’s all I ask.

Tags: Domestic Issues // 3 Comments »

  • http://labjazrevisited.blogspot.com/ Joseph Cane

    Abraham Maslow said that if all you have is a hammer,
    then every problem looks like a nail. This may in part explain some of the conservative republican responses…. Regardless I think that it is highly
    possible that Obama will win… and so will the US

  • margaret

    If Obama wins the republuicans aren’t going to go down easily. They are already setting up Ohio and Florida for voter fraud in huge numbers. Just because alot of people want to actually vote this year and are registering they assume they are all cases of fraud. Unless this is a huge landslide the recounts are going to last for a long time. I don’t trust voting machines. Even in Ohio they have gone back to cards.

  • cris

    Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights. In the space of a month and a half, this candidate – who we don’t really yet know very well – reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least eight key issues:
    • After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.

    • Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.

    • Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

    • Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn’t mean it.

    • From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.

    • For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.

    • Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.

    • During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers – but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.

    • After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position.

    Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.

    As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters. One wag even called him the “black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.

    Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue – oil drilling – exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.

    The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.

    Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of “gradual adjustment” to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change.

    Republicans can drive a truck through the gap between this elite opinion and the need for ordinary people to afford the journey to work

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