I pointed this out before-one of the key elements of Teabag strategy, if it can be called that, is based on a numbers game. Getting all of their folks out-who really don’t represent a majority of Americans-and keeping the rest of us at home. America has one of the most miserable voting percentages in the free world. It was what happened in Delaware-and in New York. And it will happen elsewhere if the “silent majority” does not stand up to this stupidity once and for all.
Plus-thanks to the Citizens United decision, they have access to an almost unlimited pool of resources. The result has been a five-fold increase in independent expenditures from the previous midterm elections in 2006 and a disclosure rate less than 50% for independent expenditures including a funding source. This has made following the trail of money in politics this year exceedingly difficult.
Its clear though, that the money is being spent and lots of corporate money is being “laundered”-witness the flow of foreign money into the hands of the American Chamber of Commerce.
“Well, the Democrats did the same thing-what about George Soros?”
What about him? He’s being far outclassed by companies-who are using the resources of their shareholders, many of whom are invested via mutual funds for purposes that are anything but “businesslike”. Does not matter which party does it-its not right. However please note that Republican donations are seven times those of Democratic ones:
Republican Third Party Groups — $43,664,661
Democratic Third Party Groups — $6,658,236
Colorado — Dems: $1.1 million / GOP: $7.6 million
Washington — Dems: $1.5 million / GOP: $4.2 million
Missouri — Dems: $794k / GOP: $7.2 million
Kentucky — Dems: $47k / GOP: $1.7 million
The reasonable man has to get off his ass this year and vote.
Borrowing a line from my Candian Counterpart,
“The selfish and stupid voters are largely to blame for that, but no one’s going out of their way to tell them what’s going to be necessary to educate them on what needs to be done, either.
If America’s going to go the way of the Soviet Union, it may as well have cute girls who can’t masturbate or balance a checkbook at the helm as it happens. If nothing else, it will make for great TV.”
If it were up to me, all campaign finance laws – including foreign donations – would be abolished forthwith. bribery, as you may have noticed, is already a crime, what with it being specifically mentioned in your constitution and all.
I wasn’t kidding about what you quoted, Skippy-san. All of the money in the world wouldn’t matter much if there was an informed voting public out there. I don’t really blame the politicians, the 527s or Fox News and MSNBC all that much. Pandering to the stupid is easy, and how often do you see anyone doing something hard when they don’t have to? The responsibility lays squarely with the public who let this happen because they’re so swept away with whose going to get kicked off of Dancing With the Stars.
The Democrats would be getting crushed and the GOP would be nominating certifiable morons even if the Citizens United decision went the other way. Establishment Republicans fucked everything up when they were in power and Obama clearly over-reached in his first two years, just as the House GOP did in ’94-95. What’s happening now has very little to do with money, corporate or otherwise.
Populism is hardly a new phenomenon in American history, although it has traditionally been on the left rather than the right. The only difference is that it never got very far because voters were engaged in their own civil discourse. That isn’t happening now.
So William Jennings Bryan did win in the end, silver money will be good and evolution bad. I just can’t see how the Chamber of Commerce is at fault for that.
yeah, that damn non masturbating witch will ruin the senate.
See montage of that sage of the senate Robert Byrd.
Now thats what a peoples rep should be.
who gave a trillion $ to Wall Street and the Unions?
I don’t think it is simplistic as SS makes out. Sure the average American voter is stupid-but it does not help when there are decreasing ways to improve on the level of voter education. Cable News-nope, because they gave up on informing the viewer a long time ago ( Fox never even bothered to try).
But the idea that foreign countries like Bahrain can buy the American Chamber of Commerce is just a little over the top. The Chamber should be sticking up for AMERICAN busonesses-instead it is defending the right of BIG business to ship American jobs overseas. ( Which might be Ok if one of them was mine-but its not happening).
Who gave a trillion to Wall Street-people in league with the Republican party. And as for unions-the flow is the other way around-so unions can do what they are supposed to do, get the best deal for their members.
Wall street gave 63% of it donations to dems in 2009 and the previous years 52-56%.
never let facts interfere with hyperbole.
Stupid Americans?
check out Brains for Britain.http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1237975
I guess the good news is at least they can’t vote in US elections.
Tie my democrat down sport, tie my democrat down!
Tie my democrat down sport and don’t let the little bastard vote!
How does your diseased mind imagine that the tea partiers are preventing the democrat supporters from voting? A little over the top don’t you think?
wasn’t it the one who point blank refused to obey the election laws and deliberately disabled credit card donation tracking to the campaign that would preclude unlawful giving? Just a lying little scumbag.
I never said they were preventing anyone from voting-what it says is that without the rest of the “real people” voting, those assholes win.
They’ve repeatedly taken out electable incumbents and are running people who have no idea how a bill becomes a law, which somehow supposed to make them “you”
Come to think of it-given the average intelligence level of the average fat pig belonging to the tea party-that may be right.
Curtis;
Skippy san is a good man…except that when he gets an idea’ fixee’ nothing will change his mind.. the tyanny of dead ideas syndrome..most of us have this,,we get to a ‘tipping point” in our thought process where the limbic system takes hold and dominates the pre-frontal cortex..where our ‘reason” center lies…Can’t fight it, except if you are a devout Buddhist monk, who can actually change their brain chemistry.
fascinating stuff….
Its the way he feels about women, tea party etc etc.
But I love the debate anyway…
Richard true-up to a point. My ideas are the right ones. Its a curse being smarter than the average American-but it is one I gladly bear.
It’s those “dead ideas” that will provide the antibiotics for a diseased country.
All those who deny the past are doomed. Repeat.
And 49.99~8% of Americans are smarter than the average American.
Your elections aren’t going to change in any real way until most Americans stop viewing them as some kind of game show. Conversely, it’s the quality of candidates that you have that encourage the view that it’s a game show. For that I blame the primaries instead of campaign finance laws.
Look at the presidents and senators America had before universal primaries took effect in 1960 and look those you’ve had since. Notice a difference? Keep also in mind that modern campaign finance laws weren’t established until after Watergate and affirmed by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo
Serious people can’t win primaries because serious people don’t tend to vote in them. That’s true in both parties, but more true in the GOP. Get rid of the primaries and you get rid of a huge chunk of the problem.
Yes, I’m saying that the “smoke-filled room” should come back.
Theodore Roosevelt financed his entire 1904 campaign with a few hundred thousand dollars that was contributed by a small group of monopolists. After he won, he fucked them with anti-trust laws. How could he get away with that? Well, he didn’t have to answer to ignorant shitheels in the Iowa caucuses who demanded that the government make them rich, tall or smart. Harry Truman went so far as to jail and threaten to draft unionized workers, mostly because he didn’t need their support in 1948’s largely non-existent primaries.
SS
Wow! How did you learn so much about how f*cked up America is?
But the smoke filled room is not coming back until enough Teabaggers are made to experience real pain-be it physical or economic. Me? I’m voting for the physical option-starting with Sarah Palin being run over by a bus.
I’d also argue that you “pre-1960” arguement is slightly skewed, since FDR messed up the sample size.
Ah, but FDR never really ran in contested primaries. There were also a string a shitty presidents after the Civil War, too. But nothing like what there’s been after 1960.
Richard,
The party only gave me 100 zip ties. I’m not sure how I’ll keep the vast electorate docile, peaceful and at home as we surge to sure and certain victory in the polls. Perhaps my sword will finally come in useful but I’ll probably have to put an edge on it after 20 odd years. 🙂
I get a kick out stalin up there. Shitty presidents after 1960? The peanut was super shitty but Nixon and Reagan were OK.
Yea, that whole Watergate thing and losing Vietnam had nothing to do with Nixon-eh what?
Thanks to Nixon-Republican politics is as screwed up as it is today. He laid the seeds for the current dysfunction. Read Nixonland sometime.
I actually admire Nixon, Ford and Bush 41, although none of them reach the stature of Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt or Lincoln. If you separate the post 1994 personality cult from his actual accomplishments, Reagan was a better than average president. But when modern presidents suck (Carter, Bush 43 and Obama), they suck in such staggeringly bad ways that they can only be compared to James Buchanan.
I also disagree with Skippy-san’s points about Nixon. There was nothing in Watergate that most of Nixon’s predecessors didn’t do first and often. Nixon’s only problem is that he did them all at once and he got caught. He wound down Vietnam – an inherited war – the best he could given the political realities. Let’s say that Iraq falls to pieces next summer. Would that be Obama’s fault or Bush’s? On the other hand, if you want to hit Nixon for destroying Cambodia in the process of winding down the war, that’s hard to quarrel with.
Although I’m mystified that a firebrand like Curtis has anything nice at all to say about Nixon, the president who created the EPA and affirmative action by executive order, instituted wage and price controls, tried to pass a universal health care bill twice and toyed with the idea of creating a guaranteed minimun income. If curtis doesn’t watch out, he might start sounding like a communist.
Acttually we agree about Nixon (me and SS)-I just wanted to point out the simplistic logic behind Curtis’ argument. Nixon would be a RINO by today’s GOP standards as would Reagan-on both foreign policy and domestic policy. Don’t forget Reagan presided over a very large tax INCREASE.
I’d argue a few points about Vietnam-if any thing the mining of Haiphong and the renewed bombing of the north were bringing N Vietnam to its knees-but just like in Iraq there was no usefull government in the South to take advantage of it. But the 1972 campaign points out conclusively that had the military not been so hamstrung by McNamara et al- they could have handed Ho Chi Minh his ass.
I do think though that Watergate created the seeds of today;s generation Democratic incumbents and also allow some pretty stupid laws to be passed. ( Like allowing women at the service academies).
In all honesty, I’ve never seen Curtis agrue anything oter than the most simplistic positions possible. He reminds me of a guy who used to comment at my place named Mook. He’s great at regurgitating talking points, but piss-poor on things like history, critical thinking or anything that might involve reading a book not published by Regnery.
Reagan was, at heart, a political pragamist was at least somewhat responsible. You see that in contemporary books (as opposed to the fictional biographical portraits of Reagan being born in a fucking manger) like David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics and Lou Cannon’s books. By 1982, he knew that the ’81 tax cut was too big and took half of it back in subsequent “revenue enhancements.” People also forget that, as governor, Reagan passed the biggest tax increase in California history until the time and the most liberal abortion law in America.
As to Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong and the Christmas bombings were designed to bring the South – NOT the North to the table. Hanoi was fully prepared to signed the Paris accords, but the Thieu government in Saigon wasn’t. There are innumerable Nixon biographies that point this out.
I also doubt that, in retrospect, Ho could be beaten, regardless of the military circumstances. Consider him the Taliban of his day. History is pretty clear that an ideologically driven revolutionary will almost always win in his own country when faced with an enemy that isn’t sure what it’s fighting for or why. Vietnam was predicated on the draw in Korea, JFK’s self-inflicted humiliation at the Bay of Pigs and a fatally flawed Domino Theory, and little else. There never was a political or military rationale behind it that made any sense.
Finally, the women’s liberation movement evolved independently of Nixon, who along with Ford, never had a congressional majority in the first place. So I strongly doubt that “allowing women into service acadamies” had anything at all to do with Watergate, especially since it happened fifteen years after the fact. But Watergate did precipitate things like modern campaign finance laws and the War Powers Act.
Allowing women into the service academies is a personal issue of mine-and I think that one reason that the law was passed was because so many liberal democrats were in Congress in 1975. That had directly to do with Watergate. The end result is that the Academies are wasted shells of their former selves.
Thieu was not ready-but that’s not becuase of the mining and bombing. What they did was stop the 1972 offensive by making it impossible to re-supply the North. SAM missile inventories in particular dropped. Thieu actually probably had a reason to be concerned-the peace accords left N Vietnam troops in the south. Kissinger basically browbeat him back into submission with promises of aid that Nixon was not able to deliver in 1974. Watergate made him importent and a Congress feeling its oats had constricted his ability to act.
There’s a school of thought, and a rather credible one, that suggests that Thieu was never going to fight the war on his own. And why would he, so long as there was an American government willing to fight it for him predicated on the domino theory that Thieu himself was more than willing to promulgate.
Thieu’s fatal flaw was that he never appreciated the American domestic political pressure to withdraw that had been building for nearly seven years. Of course, not being a product of a democracy himself, there’s a reason that he didn’t understand it, but it still doomed him.
But it is interesting that you think that South Vietnam was abandoned when it should’ve been and Iraq and Afganistan are being held on to when they shouldn’t be. Those three wars aren’t as dissimiliar as one might think.
Let’s go to an earlier part of this thread.
I don’t think it is simplistic as SS makes out. Sure the average American voter is stupid-but it does not help when there are decreasing ways to improve on the level of voter education. Cable News-nope, because they gave up on informing the viewer a long time ago ( Fox never even bothered to try).
Frankly, who gives a shit about the media? Anyone who relies on them is too stupid to be counted on being informed in the first place. The Hearst chain created cables news decades before television was even invented. A country that isn’t interested in its own history can’t be long expected to survive at all.
I’m told fairly frequently that I know more about American history than most American do, as if that’s something that I should be proud of, and it really isn’t. In fact, it says a lot more about most Americans than it does about me. I’d be pretty humilated if a non-academic American knew more about Canadian history than I do.
But the idea that foreign countries like Bahrain can buy the American Chamber of Commerce is just a little over the top. The Chamber should be sticking up for AMERICAN businsses-instead it is defending the right of BIG business to ship American jobs overseas.
Given how often the American government has involved itself in foreign elections, either overtly or covertly, I don’t really see how Americans have a sensible reason to bitch about foreigners interjecting themselves in theirs, do you?
If foreign governing parties like Japan’s Liberal Democrats and Italy’s Christian Democrats could spend years as wholly owned subsidiaries of the CIA, why can’t foreigners overtly buy your parties?
Asking who gave Wall Street and the unions trillions is asking a question that misses the point entirely. The real question is who created the circumstances that made giving Wall Street, the Unions and Fannie and Freddie trillions necessary in the first fucking place?
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2924580120070702
well, this is from 2007 but it seems Americans aren’t the only dumbasses when it come to their own history.
Last time I was in Canada was in Vancouver. Remember going to a strip club(SS, great looking ladies by the way) and I asked the waitress what she thought of Americans.
“Americans tip, Canadiens don’t ”
‘nough said.
I have a great photo of a snow covered tree in Stanley Park in the early morning.
Richard,
That might be specific to Vancouver. I’ve never heard that complaint from a waitress here in Toronto.
And yes, we have the best strippers in the world!
I lived in Japan- I think you are very wrong about LDP.
My reference was Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. The Agency thought it would be a good idea to battle Japanese communists with their very own political party, so they built one up around Nobusuke Kashi and Yoshio Kodama, who had previously been jailed as war criminals. Kishi had even signed Japan’s declaration of war against the United States.
(See pages 133-139)
Myh waetres at the IHOP teld me that both SS and stolin are complete fucking losers.
Seriously, Nixon WON that war. The stalinists in congress LOST that war by deliberate and meaningful design. They set out to do it. They meant to do it.
The ones in Kingston were less than impressive even at the Palace of Fine Arts.
What’s your problem with Bahrain ‘buying’ influence? The Emir/King play host to the largest and most successful of our current overseas bases which serve OUR interests. Fuck Japan and Okinawa and Korea, Bahrain is host to OUR interests. I wouldn’t piss on Japanese, Koreans or Okinawans if they were found burning in the street. They never did anything for the US.
Just argruing to oter stuff now.
I find myself debating with illiterate grunts who don’t know how to spell.
We outsource jobs to Bahrain?
Curtis,
No, what Nixon got – and it was about the best that he could – in the Paris Peace Accords was an “in place” ceasefire, which sounds great until you realize that there were no ARVN in the North, but thousands of North Vietnamese in the South. The only troops that had committed to leave South Vietnam were American ones.
More importantly, Paris was almost exactly the same deal that Ho was offering LBJ in the fall of ’68. What Vietnamization, with it’s drawdown of ground troops, did was to eventually make it impossible to refuse that deal, given the failure of bombing to break Hanoi and the catastrophic domestic political consequences of Cambodia. Nor did the China opening pay the expected dividends in the Paris negotiations, mostly because the Chinese and Vietnamese never trusted each other to begin with.
Keeping the “secret protocols” ( increased material support for Saigon, coupled with renewed bombing, in the event of a renewed northern offensive) secret from Congress was also a pretty stupid idea, particularly given the political realities of Watergate. As Congress asserted itself more and more through 1973 with the things like the War Powers Act, it should have been clear that Nixon’s penchant for secrecy would be fatal to any continued Vietnamese policy. Besides, you can’t have secret protocols and expect Congress to pay for it, as I’m sure that you’d point out if Obama did something similiar.
The Watergate hearings generally, and Dean’s testimony in particular, crippled Nixon to the point where he could no longer successfully pull off surprise announcements of policy like the China opening. Worse, the hangover of the war, Watergate and the Nixon pardon precluded Ford from moving Congress his way after Nixon resigned.
So how does that constitute winning a war?
The Chinese attacked Vietnam in February of 1979. After more than a month of battles, China agreed to withdraw.
About 25,000 dead on both sides.
Curtis,
You need to go over to Bahrain more. Most successful? Hardly. The damn place is a fortress – isolated from the rest of the city. There are too many people there – and when the dependents were gone they made you work obscene hours. I know I was one of those who got screwed at the drive through.
And if the Bahrainis are so supportive- why do they jerk us around so much? We can’t load live ordnance there and when ships need a missile in load it is a pain in the ass.
Bahrain is hardly a success.
Richard,
China invaded Vietnam in response to Hanoi’s invasion of Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rogue. Yes, Pol Pot was bad, but China’s stated interest was avoiding hegemony of any kind in their backyard. Keep in mind also that the unified Vietnam still had a fairly impressive military and were closely allied with Beijing’s rivals in Moscow.
More importantly, it worked. Vietnam has been on a rather short leash ever since.
ss,
full of shit as usual. when did america withdraw? What fucking YEAR was that? When did North Vietnam roll over South Vietnam? Dumbass.
How many years later did Saigon fall?
That war didn’t end because we left thousands of enemies behind in south vietnam. Our guys pretty much exterminated them in the Tet offensive.
ss,
remember the domino scam? I used to feel bad for svietnam, laos, cambodia but clearly they suffered nothing at all whatsoever.
skippy,
compare and contrast viz Bahrain. Know of a more robustly helpful ally?
Been there an awful lot. You’re free to offer any other country that is more or has been more helpful.
You can start with naming the Middle Eastern country that helps more follow by the European country and then with the Asian country. Been there, done that got the t shirt.
Jesus, Curtis, your ignorance is so powerful that it should be used to power cars. You could wind up being the fucking epicenter of the Green Economy.
Let’s see: Nixon signed the same deal that Johnson was offered five years earlier, and that somehow constitutes a victory. What do you suppose the phrase “decent interval” that appears throughout the Nixon administration’s debates on Vietnam means, other than the time between withdrawing and the ultimate fall of Saigon.
You’re also confusing your enemies and your timeline, chuckles, and that fucks with your original argument that Nixon “won” the war.
The Tet Offensive was in January and February of 1968, 11 months before Nixon took office. The enemy in that case was the Vietcong, who were indeed largely wiped out as an insurgent force. The only problem was that allowed the North Vietnamese army to take over. If, as you assert, “the enemy” was exterminated by your guys, there wouldn’t have been a war for Nixon to win at all, now would there? In fact, why would Nixon go into Cambodia if the enemy had been exterminated two years earlier?
Even your “extermination” argument falls apart under closer scrutiny. Thieu was adamant that the NLF not be seated at the Paris negotiations, which wouldn’t have been an issue if they had been “exterminated.” They were still very much a political force, which goes a long way in explaining why they wound up in reeducation camps in 1975.
Moreover, if America was blameless in the fall of Saigon, and actually won the war five years prior, how do you reconcle those “facts” with your earlier assertion that “The stalinists in congress LOST that war by deliberate and meaningful design. They set out to do it. They meant to do it?” If the United States won in ’68 and withdrew in March of ’73, why would it matter what congerssional stalinists (and I think that they were more trotskyites, personally) did in 1974 and ’75?
Curtis, you’re not arguing with me half as much as you are with yourself. But don’t get me wrong, it’s really fun to watch.
funny is it not that both skippy’s initally poo pood the post 1960 presidents and then both came around to admitting to some admiration for some of them and both of them liked Nixon. both utterly predictable.
the stalinist is asking me to debate what to term communists as if there is any difference.
Looked at Mexico lately ole stalin? reaping all the fruits isn’t it?
skippy,
3 guesses how we load ammo in CA onboard our warships. Do we drive it down from the magazines to San Diego in trucks or fly it off the beach at Pendleton? Or maybe we send the ship up to the magazine for loadout without ever putting the ammo on the road or sending it to 32nd Street? Is it different there? Yorktown? ammo pier?
At Sheik Isa there are some factors beyond my ken but loading at Mina Sulman? never. translate
Aegis BMD ships had to load at Mina. The Bahrainis made the evolution a royal pain in the ass.
Plus I was involved in supporting aircraft up at BAH. The Bahrainis made everything difficult- and P-3’s in Bahrain were not allowed to load buoys much less SLAM.
We tried to negotiate access to a building for our Sailors. The terms the Bahrainis wanted were nothing short of extortion.
How hard is it to imagine that it is their fucking sovereign country? One we did not defeat in a crushing military victory against socialism using atomic weapons after hammering flat and burning to the ground most of their cities?
Your namepart loses focus awfully fast. 2 years after the Peace Accords were signed was the final invasion by NVietnam of SVietnam. Fuck yeah, it was clearly Bush’s fault. And that interlude, what was that called again?
I know, a wine tasting in Sonoma.
Curtis, you ignorant slut,
Before we go any further, I’d ask you how a ceasefire hat leaves the enemy exactly where they were in your territory, which the Paris Peace Accords explicitly did, constitutes a victory. That’s usually called a surrender.
Also, why did the presidents Reagan and Bush 41 constantly refer to the “Vietnam syndrome in reference to a “victory?”
No skippy you ignorant slut. What part of 2 years don’t you get? Does that mean you think that Vichy France never fell to the Nazis?
Put any Jews on trains?
Tell us they pulled a nooner and just failed to wake up and conquer the place for 2 years while they waited for jerks like you to run Congress.
You don’t get that dumb. You get taught to be as stupid as you are.
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