Here's to perspective...

Chris Austin

Oakman wrote:

It would be somewhat amusing to watch the knee-jerk conservatives (which is not all of them, by any means) try to blame the Bush-Paulson bailout on Obama, if it wasn't so sad.

I am just waiting for the fat and stupid likes of Rush and his ditto heads to start chirping about how it happened after he was elected so it was obviously entirely his fault. It seems improbable but we seem to be living in a full scale kakistocracy so nothing should surprise me.

Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity. --Lazarus Long

Oakman

Chris Austin wrote:

but we seem to be living in a full scale kakistocracy

It is amazing how much that was great about the U.S. has been systematically pissed away by the ever-increasing idiocies of Washington during the last fifty years. I cherish a fond hope that Obama will somehow reverse the trend, but I am afraid that I must use 'fond' in the original sense of the word.

Jon Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface

BoneSoft

Mad Max, Water World, The Postman, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, hell even Tank Girl. I find myself, for unknown reason, thinking more and more about survival skills. I have this constant feeling that I imagine is exactly what rats feel on a sinking ship. It seems completely irrational to me, but it's there nonetheless. I keep thinking, what if it all really fell apart. My brain says that "it will never get THAT bad", but something else in me say "what if". However bad it does get, it ain't gonna be no picnic for a while.

Visit BoneSoft.com for code generation tools (XML & XSD -> C#, VB, etc...) and some free developer tools as well.

MrPlankton

Rob Graham wrote:

"conservative's" watch

Bush is not a conservative. The conservative response (and libertarian) would be to do nothing. 1987. Bush should of told Paulson to get lost (IMHO).

MrPlankton

Mexican boy: Viene la tormenta! Sarah Connor: What did he just say? Gas Station Attendant: He said there's a storm coming Sarah Connor: [sighs] I know.

Stan Shannon

Chris Austin wrote:

It seems improbable but we seem to be living in a full scale kakistocracy so nothing should surprise me.

Improbable?!! It is the inevitable result of allowing a society to become overly dependent upon government. Give any government enough power and it will become either corrupt,incompetent, or both. And you cannot prevent it by any amount of democracy. If you listened to Rush more, you would understand these things.

Chaining ourselves to the moral high ground does not make us good guys. Aside from making us easy targets, it merely makes us idiotic prisoners of our own self loathing.

MrPlankton

Well said sir.

MrPlankton

Mexican boy: Viene la tormenta! Sarah Connor: What did he just say? Gas Station Attendant: He said there's a storm coming Sarah Connor: [sighs] I know.

Stan Shannon

Except that it begs the question "rebuild what?" It assumes that there is some agreement upon what we are supposed to be rebuilding. The sad fact is that there is nothing to rebuild. Any material we could rebuild with is itself corrupt and unusable. What we should be looking at this as is an opportunity for starting over, not rebuilding. A new beginning.

Chaining ourselves to the moral high ground does not make us good guys. Aside from making us easy targets, it merely makes us idiotic prisoners of our own self loathing.

Rob Graham

That's precisely why the conservatives deserve nothing but condemnation for this. The chose social conservative bigotry over everything else, sacrificing even their core principles of small government and fiscal conservatism for what are essentially religiously motivated beliefs. You are no different that the Taliban.

Rob Graham

Damn straight it's your fault.

Stan Shannon

Rob Graham wrote:

That's precisely why the conservatives deserve nothing but condemnation for this. The chose social conservative bigotry over everything else, sacrificing even their core principles of small government and fiscal conservatism for what are essentially religiously motivated beliefs. You are no different that the Taliban.

So, you are saying that traditional American society was always the equivalent of the taliban? When precisely did we change to something different, something you seem to approve of?

Chaining ourselves to the moral high ground does not make us good guys. Aside from making us easy targets, it merely makes us idiotic prisoners of our own self loathing.

Stan Shannon

Rob Graham wrote:

Damn straight it's your fault.

How? Who the hell exactly were we supposed to vote for who would have done anything differently?

Chaining ourselves to the moral high ground does not make us good guys. Aside from making us easy targets, it merely makes us idiotic prisoners of our own self loathing.

Rob Graham

No, just your imagined version.

Rob Graham

The failure precedes this election by at least two, if not more. The Republican Party has not selected a small government fiscal conservative candidate since Reagan. And the answer to your question is likely the candidate I chose: Bob Barr.

Stan Shannon

Come on, Rob, be honest. Was there not prayer in public schools? Was there not religious inspired 'blue laws' in every corner of this country? Did not religion play an enormous role in the politics or our society through out most of its history? Now, godammit, did that make our society like the taliban or not? You made the alligation, now answer the fucking question. When did we change?

Chaining ourselves to the moral high ground does not make us good guys. Aside from making us easy targets, it merely makes us idiotic prisoners of our own self loathing.

Rob Graham

I agree. However, since it is the Republicans who claim the mantle of conservatism (but mean ONLY social conservatism), it is they who will inherit the blame. And Bush/Paulson/Cox are not alone in this. The bailout could not have passed without the support of many Republican congressmen and senators. Now, of course, it's too late for anything other than a squeaky "we didn't mean that" whine from them.

Stan Shannon

Rob Graham wrote:

The failure precedes this election by at least two, if not more. The Republican Party has not selected a small government fiscal conservative candidate since Reagan.

I agree completely. I didn't vote for Bush with any sort of grand expectation that he was going to be a movement conservative. There are no movement conservatives to vote for. But I did believe that he would have to throw we conservatives a bone or two in the form of supreme court justices so I voted for him. I had no expectation of getting anything else conservative out of the man. He is obviously a guy who thinks that we need bipartisanship and compromise in government. I knew that going in.

Rob Graham wrote:

And the answer to your question is likely the candidate I chose: Bob Barr.

Was he on the balot in 2000? In any case, I don't vote libertarian. Libertarians are not conservatives. They are as anti-Jeffersonian as the liberals are.

Chaining ourselves to the moral high ground does not make us good guys. Aside from making us easy targets, it merely makes us idiotic prisoners of our own self loathing.

Oakman

Rob Graham wrote:

The Republican Party has not selected a small government fiscal conservative candidate since Reagan.

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by fiscally conservative. To my way of thinking, Reagan ran as one, but in office he chalked up what was at the time - though small potatoes by today's standards - a gigantic deficit, while raising taxes (under the guise of tax reform) quite a bit. Eisenhower actually balanced the budget 3 years out of eight - something no other post-war president has done.

Jon Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface

soap brain

Stan Shannon wrote:

You made the alligation alligator

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Oakman

Rob Graham wrote:

Now, of course, it's too late for anything other than a squeaky "we didn't mean that" whine from them.

Of course. Pointing the finger at the other guy seems to be one of the few things that all politicians do well. Picking the pockets of the tax-payers, likewise appears to be something conservatives do equally as well as liberals.

Jon Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface

Rob Graham

Roe V Wade. That was when one single religious principle became so overwhelmingly important to conservatives that they became willing to sacrifice all else to find a way to overturn that decision, and to insure that the high court would never again venture that way. When republicans took religion from the local to the national, they became theocrats and ceased to wear the mantle of Reagan and Lincoln. And as this election demonstrated, not all of American society changed with you. It is not America in general I am comparing to the Taliban (as you would assert), just the Christian religious right that owns the Republican party, and has determined the nomination of every national Republican candidate for the past two decades.