the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

There will always be wars, disasters and things that come about with little or no warning, or method of aversion. I think what makes 2012 feel worse than, say, 2004, is that all this shit going on while the world teeters precariously on the brink of total economic collapse, which we all see happening (like climate change) and yet which the government (and, hell, most voters) seem to think can just be debated and argued into safe submission.

The world has been ending since 2800 BC.

I just wonder what I would have thought in the 70s, watching gas shortages, inflation, 18% interest rates, major American cities going bankrupt, rivers on fire, etc. and whether there was any hope of improvement.

as George Carlin said, "the world" vs "humanity" xp

I'll tell you what I thought in the late '70s: "Hey, we got rid of Nixon, and the government gave me a big grant for college."

I just wonder what I would have thought in the 70s, watching gas shortages, inflation, 18% interest rates, major American cities going bankrupt, rivers on fire, etc. and whether there was any hope of improvement.

http://www.bilerico.com/2011/02/Ronald_Wilson_Reagan_Cowboy_Poet.gif

The world has been ending since 2800 BC.

― Convert simple JEEZ to BDSMcode (Austerity Ponies), Friday, June 8, 2012 11:37 AM (13 minutes ago)

pretty otm afaict. the whole system relies upon selling us over and over again the belief that the world is about to end. not to be a dithering, equivocating blame-both-sides hack about it, but there's very little daylight between the left + the right when it comes to convincing constituents that the sky is falling (in the spheres of environment, religion, economics, politics, war, intellectualism, etc). i'd vote for a guy who said: "little that we do matters, and if we survive for another thousand years* no one will remember our names"

*itself a complicated question depending on a lot of factors we can see + can't see, and depending on a whole lot more than just who sits in the oval office for 8 years. tho i will admit that a psycho with nukes is def a big threat to humanity's survival and i have voted in the past based on who i think was less likely to spark a nuclear war.

Considering developments, you should consider who is less likely to aim drones at Americans without considerations of due process.

the least important election of your lifetime: 1789-2012 american general election thread

assuming the US is publishing history books in even fifty years, the best you can hope for is a paragraph about drones in the giant glossy "New Warfare Technology" pullout (that teachers never get to bc it's too recent history and there's too much to cover re WW2)

don't really have the history or the logarithms to contribute to/this but i just wanna give a shout out to the ~interconnected & disconnected global context~ for our present moment. since last year it does feel p novelly vertiginous to look at Syria (& likewise) or Japan or Afghanistan and Pakistan or Russia, &c.

i am still on a downer since the geoengineering article in the nyer, too.

i wish i hadn't italicised novelly, i know things are always complicated & maybe just worse when you're paying attention

Considering developments, you should consider who is less likely to aim drones at Americans without considerations of due process.

Eh, there are plenty more Americans.

Prez facilitating star-chamber assassinations transparently is next-level shit.

The transparent part is the only thing next-level about the US Prez ordering hits.

some grim hilarity in that the very belated senatorial "pushback" on all of this is not about arbitrary imprisonment and assassination but about exactly how and for whom those things are leaked. working the press is our prerogative!!

yes Viceroy, no one talked about Kennedy doing it til about 15 years later bcz it was thought an unseemly thing for the Leader of the Free World to be doing.

diff b/w 2004 and 2012: in 2004, we had a Republican in the White House, and non-Republicans could project their hopes (correctly or not, lol or not lol) on the Democratic candidate. in 2012 we have a Democratic President who played on those hopes to get elected 4 years ago, hasn't lived up to those hopes and (to some) has overstayed his welcome -- and the Republican is even worse.

don't try to convince me otherwise, that's why 2012 seems even worse than 2004.

^^^ agree with this.

tbh i think bush, cheney et al getting away with everything -- no impeachment, no post-2008 repercussions -- was the most demoralizing development of all.

eisbaer otm

yeah, I'm with J.D., Obama's decision to "look forward" was extremely demoralizing. Also, a lot of people on Obama's team are shitbags like Geitner and that doesn't really help me feel warm feelings.

I'm not trying to be an apologist, honestly. But the sort of person who posts on a message board such as this is such a tiny sliver of the country at large. The idea that the first black president would begin his term (in the midst of an economic crisis, no less) by putting the previous administration on trial just seems chimerical to me.

especially if he wants to commit many of the same crimes.

All he needed to do was make the decision. Others would have done the actual work of investigation, writing briefs, filing motions and so forth. So, it was only a matter of having the will to do it. It would have spooled out for at least nine months without any further intervention on his part and mostly behind the scenes.

But put aside the constitutional issues of challenging the previous administration; he did not even give the green light for aggressively investigating and indicting the culprits in the financial industry who caused that same economic crisis. Again, it was only a matter of will, not his personal involvement after the initial decision was made.

I've made this point before, but I guess it all comes down to the idea of "wants to." I you believe that, there's nothing I can say to prove otherwise. But I have always attributed Obama's actions/non-actions with regards to the military and Wall Street to his acute awareness that he is a Republican bogeyman cubed--black, a Democrat, and an Ivy League egghead. So he has tried, from the outset, to glide past and around those two areas with as few sudden movements as possible.

He will live with the consequences in terms of how his presidency is viewed 50 years from now. And, of course, he's ended up being that bogeyman anyway--Republicans heap all the caricatures onto him no matter what he does or doesn't do. Which justifiably maddens anyone who wishes he had acted other otherwise in the first place.

I am guessing that one of the things that angers Morbs and aero is a suspicion of how much of a free pass history is going to hand the first Cosby president.

what Bush/Cheney did was worse than what Reagan and Nixon did, but the precedent of Reagan and Nixon totally getting away with what they did is pretty strong. The Justice Department going after the Bush administration full bore for torture/spying/etc. would have been a huge political clusterfuck. Of course it would be the right thing to do, but I think in the scale of moral crimes committed by the Obama administration it's pretty minor.

Andrew, I'm pretty close to the aero/morbs side of the spectrum, and I give waaaaaaayyyyy less of a fuck about how history will view things like extrajudicial killings than I do about the fact that the president is ordering extrajudicial killings.

I mean, I get that political discourse is by it's very nature geared towards the academic/horse race, but we are talking about actual people being actually killed, and that bothers me a lot more than how Obama may or may not be viewed in 2050.

The Justice Department going after the Bush administration full bore for torture/spying/etc. would have been a huge political clusterfuck. Of course it would be the right thing to do, but I think in the scale of moral crimes committed by the Obama administration it's pretty minor.

lol are you fucking kidding me

by all available evidence Obama has continued if not perfected Bush-Cheney policies of shoot first ask questions later

he Justice Department going after the Bush administration full bore for torture/spying/etc. would have been a huge political clusterfuck.

who cares? Worrying about the Political Consequences only concerns Cokie and the Sunday morning brunch crowd. To me it would have redeemed any administration to see Bush's crimes unveiled, hour after hour. I know Nothing Will Get Done, I guess, if you consider the metric by which DC does its work, but we have a long history and that's what The Long View is for. Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon was one of the grossest mistakes made for the sake of "bipartisanship"

lol are you fucking kidding me

...by all available evidence Obama has continued if not perfected Bush-Cheney policies of shoot first ask questions later

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i think matt's point was that, relative to the obama admin's list of crimes, the fact that they didn't prosecute the bush admin is small potatoes.

Our job as liberals -- in the same way the so-called Tea Party operates -- isn't to worry about "clusterfucks." Our job is to push and push and push and push a Democratic administration into doing as much as we want as possible. "Political clusterfucks" are irrelevant to me -- that's Barack Obama's problem.

i think matt's point was that, relative to the obama admin's list of crimes, the fact that they didn't prosecute the bush admin is small potatoes.

so he says

...into doing as much as we want as possible. "Political clusterfucks" are irrelevant to me -- that's Barack Obama's problem.

Leaving aside whatever Obama has or hasn't done, don't political clusterfucks automatically make what's possible less possible?

not necessarily. dramatic action tends to generate controversy, but often results in substantial change.

We all go around in circles and say things we've said a thousand times before. I'll stand by something I wrote on some thread a year ago: in terms of bringing the Obama din to a close, Romney will be a relief. (For me, anyway--for a while, at least.)

Yeah vindicating a seething mass of racists will be a big relief

Not what I meant, of course.

That's ok, just being a dick.

I am, I mean.

If it's any small consolation, I imagine Romney will have the people on the right who most hate Obama back to something approximating seething before too long.

He'll turn out to be a black guy

http://cdn.eurweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/romney_philly_charter_shool2012-wide.jpg

"You're just the right height, son."

In horse race news, 538 turned on the national model. O at 62% to win.

Pretty interesting. It's a very tentative 62%--the "nowcast," as he says, with a forecast of something much closer. Silver was a model of precision in 2008, although his own bias was in sync with the electorate there--not sure if that matters or not. One number does strike me as almost laughably improbable: 11.3% for an Obama landslide (defined as a popular-vote margin of 10+ points).

I stand corrected. 62% is his Nov. 6 forecast; his nowcast gives Obama a 77% chance of winning. Don't see it myself.

silentmajority.wav

apathetic40percent.midi

Andrew, I'm pretty close to the aero/morbs side of the spectrum, and I give waaaaaaayyyyy less of a fuck about how history will view things like extrajudicial killings than I do about the fact that the president is ordering extrajudicial killings.

This would be an excellent point if I'd said it was the only or even the main thing that annoys.

Transparency's a bitch, isn't it. Were we better off when our leaders were doing criminal things - and they were all doing criminal things, and always have been doing criminal things, just like lots of people - but we didn't know it? Or only suspected it?

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/09/biden-drenched-by-children-with-super-soakers/