Is this nugget:
"It seems the election choices are going to be one enormous shit sandwich. We only get to choose whether we eat it on white or whole wheat."
The comment was on the MArooned blog, it was written by the author of the Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver blog.
However reluctantly, I agree with the Ambulance Driver on this one. It's not that I like the Republicans one bit. I think that George Bush is indeed the typical Republican politician, he is hell-bent on bringing back the Gilded Age, as was his father and Reagan before him. I have believed for a number of years that the Republicans want to destroy the middle class and to get back to an economic system where there is a small class of professionals, a group of rich and uber-rich, whose mostly have inherited their wealth, and a very large class of people who are living the "nasty, bruitish and short" lives of the poor, nonunionized and uninsured, who are almost guaranteed to die on the job, because they will never be able to retire and their best option will be to be turned into Soylent Green. (OK, I made the last part up.)
You see this in the number of college Republicans who have gone off to fight in Chimpy's Wars, a number that is probably statistically close to zero. (Sacrifice is for the little peepul.) You see this in the persistent efforts of the Republicans to use inflation to roll back the minimum wage, to destroy any welfare benefits and to demolish Social Security. It is all about enriching themselves at the cost to 90% of the population.
Do you really think it is any accident that Bush's "economic expansion" has mainly benefited the wealthy? Do you think it is any accident that the days when a family could have a decent life on the wages of a single factory worker started to vaporize almost 30 years ago? Do you think it is an accident that working mothers are no longer a rarity?
Frankly, the Democrats need to distinguish themselves from the Republicans in this regard. The Democrats need to do a far better job of pointing out that in the "us versus them" polarization of the Republicans, the "them" includes most of the people who are voting Republican. The Democrats need to make it clear that by their persistent use of gay-bashing and Black-bashing and Latino-bashing, the Republicans are enticing middle and lower-class whites to vote Republican, which is certainly against their economic self interest.
Maybe we can start with this bumpersticker:
Has Your Job Been Outsourced? Thank a Republican!
But until the Democrats start drawing some clear distinctions and start standing for something other than "We aren't Bush", Ambulance Driver is right: The 2008 election is going to serve up a selection of shit sandwiches.
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3 comments:
Unfortunately, that bumper sticker isn't true. One of the biggest advocates of globalization in the past two decades was President William Jefferson Clinton. Outsourcing became big under Clinton. The WTO and "most favored nation" regimen that opened our shores to a flood of overseas-manufactured crap and finished the destruction of our manufacturing sector was started by Bush I, but Clinton heartily embraced it. About the best you can say about the Democrats is that they're evil, but they're a *competent* evil, one that'll fleece us gently rather than butt-rapin' us harder than a kinky Assemblies of God preacher rantin' about the evils of Teh Gay while sending our boys and girls off to die in one useless war after the other.
It's a sad indictment of American politics that the money men who really rule our country give us a choice of electing evil, or really REALLY evil, while the two candidates who most represent the values of Americans -- Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich -- have absolutely no chance of meeting in a Presidential race. Democracy my ass. When our candidates get selected by money men rather than the people, it's no more democracy than the old Soviet Union where the candidates got selected by the Communist Party rather than by the people. We defeated the Soviet Union, only to become them. Sigh.
I'm voting for the Democrat in the next election, simply because "merely evil" is better than "really, really REALLY evil". But damn, I wish we had democracy in America...
"Unfortunately, that bumper sticker isn't true. One of the biggest advocates of globalization in the past two decades was President William Jefferson Clinton."
Very true; both parties are guilty of screwing up the job situation in this country.
"I have believed for a number of years that the Republicans want to destroy the middle class..."
I have seen that from both parties; the Republican party is trying for an aristocracy, and the Democrats are aiming for Socialism, which is just another form of aristocracy, where the government people are on top, and the peasants are on the bottom; no middle class.
Both parties are looking for the same end result, the only difference is who is on top, and who is on the bottom.
Uhm, Bill Clinton was the best Republican President of the past twenty years. Alan Greenspan even said so. Pretty much all of his policies were meant to enrich wealthy people at the expense of the middle class, and he did not propose any "socialist" programs. Please note that countries that do have these so-called "socialist" programs, such as France, do pretty well on economic comparisons when you compare them to countries that do not have these "socialist" programs, like, say, El Salvador. Have you ever been to France? Did you notice all the middle-class people there? You hardly had any poor French citizens or any really rich ones either, just a very, very large middle class. If that's what "socialism" does for you, that's what I want for here!
(Note: There *is* an underclass of poor people in France, but they're almost all non-citizen illegals from North Affrica, sorta the Mexicans of France).
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