Follow up from the last one

Okey...after this we'll be back to normal fjord programming, I predict roo-vs-cow exhibits will be forthcoming...

So I ran out of time on the last post, and had one further point I wanted to get to. Here's a couple of lines from "Generation of Swine" that struck me.

"The legacy of Ronald Reagan will be different from those of the other three gents in that famous Egyptian photograph...Richard Nixon was a crook, Gerald Ford was a shameless fixer and Jimmy Carter was an awesome bungler who gave once-proud political values like "decency" and "honesty" a bad name."

and there's this...

"Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there's not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the 80's. In addition to a huge and terminally crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool."

Now, the first bit was pretty dead on, and stands the test of time. The second...well Clinton squared up the "crippling national debt" in a couple of terms, (course a couple terms of Bush Jr. and we're worse off than before) and say what you want, the U.S. hasn't been a "second-rate power" since we got the bomb, and won't be until China decides to call in our debts and every OPEC nation dumps the dollar for the Euro. And I don't know if the problem was ever really solved, but I don't hear about acid rain at all.

But the last line of the second part, "...any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool." Well, that deserves a little analysis.

There is a consistent theme in conservative politics that is always at the fringes of anything they do. It says government is bad, government doesn't work, and government should be smaller and do less. Now, how does someone accomplish this when there are so many stakeholders in a gargantuan democracy like the U.S.? You destroy anyone who has a belief in the opposite, and parade liars and fools in front of the citizens over and over until people stop listening - and just tune the bastards out. Of course, after years and years of conservative policies the government isn't smaller - it's steadily grown larger and larger, but it sure does do a lot less. (see New Orleans/Katrina)

The success of this movement since Nixon, has been to eliminate the belief that government can do anything for you. It's really good at making well connected people rich, and protecting them from legal reprisals (see Kenneth Lay) but for helping the average shmoe - look somewhere else buddy. Hell, the U.S. public learned that lesson long ago...it's practically instinctual now.

To be fair, far more than half of this change occurred with large numbers of Democratic Senators and Reps, and even a fairly successful 2-term Executive. Why? Well, lets just say lots of those Democrats weren't exactly liberal, and had no problem rolling along with the zeitgeist since it made them and their pals rich. There was one fellow that really upheld a lot of my beliefs and did a lot of good fighting for something close to truth, justice, and the American way. His name was Paul Wellstone, and for a little nerdy goofball he was a bad-ass.

A little while after 9-11 he was killed when his small plane crashed. There was an investigation into the accident, which uncovered no evidence of anything other than some mechanical malfunction. But I often wonder what he would have said and done over the last few years, and how convenient it was for our current crop of leaders (on both sides) that his voice was silenced.

Now, there's no evidence at all for my speculation. But as I mentioned in the last post, at a certain level politics is a game that is played really nasty and really dirty. After all, the D.C. Madam actually gave instructions to her lawyer in case she was found dead of "an apparent suicide," which strangely enough, she was.

So in conclusion, let me ask a simple question.

What are you doing to fight the terrorists?

There's a war on, youknow...