I Would Gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger Today
It must be humbling for our globe galloping prez to have to run all the way to China in order to borrow a few more bucks to continue paying the high cost of war and empire. After all, it was once the United States that was an economic giant which has always been America’s true source of power and influence not the military. No doubt Obama wants to make sure the war coffers are full enough to pay for whatever number of troops that will be heading for Afghanistan.
How ironic it is that in their headlong rush for power our leaders have pissed away much of their true power by making the mistake of perceiving U.S. power as brute force. While much of the rest of the world moves towards peace and a more progressive existence the U.S. and its allies seem to be regressing toward a more barbaric state of being. I’m sure I needn’t refer to things like Guantanamo or the latest revelations of what the British troops have been up to. Why anyone should be surprised that this is what happens in wars is a mystery. Women are elevated and liberated by being raped. It’s for the women they cried. Yes one can certainly see how raping women is the right way to give them equal rights and bring Afghanistan into the fold of a more civilized West.
Our reliance on China to fund our wars is a reflection of things to come. China is indeed a rising economic power part of which is due to the fact that they spend only a fraction of what we do on their military. Other reasons are China’s industrialization and cheap labor pool which obviously means the wealth in China is not spread any more evenly than it is here in the States.
Who’s putting the fear of Sarah Palin into liberals? I dunno. Maybe it’s the fact that Obama could well be a one termer and apparently Sarah Palin has them worried. Hey, Obama could be a one termer, it’s happened before, we do have one term presidents from time to time. Would Palin be that awful? Obama is pretty awful. If McCain had been elected would he have been any worse? My point is not to promote one party over another because I don’t attach much importance to partisan politics. It’s a waste of time. I’m sure the middle class upper crust is repulsed by Palin’s demeanor as a backwoods hick more than anything else. A country twang has little appeal to much of the professional classes.
The person that repulses me is Hoh, a slime ball of humungous proportions. Hoh bragged about how much he and his pals in the marines enjoyed snuffing out Iraqi lives which makes him a psychotic murderer but liberals had no qualms about holding Hoh up as a beacon of light and reason. Fuck that asshole. I don’t want Hoh on my side ever, for any reason. In fact I regret that we inhabit the same planet and apparently belong to the same species. It’s enough to make you want to deny your own humanity.
posted by Unknown @ 1:13 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Hi Rob. I wonder how many people regard both Obama and Palin as phonies, and can see past their carefully manufactured appeal to what are essentially complementary demographics.
I don’t know Jonathan, but I suspect a fair number of people if they even care. The same was true of W. Bush. He came from Connecticut the scion of an oil rich family and all of a sudden he talks like a Texan. I have long suspected the reason Bush spoke short sentences was that if he spoke too many words his New England accent would reappear spoiling his carefully crafted image of a drunken moron that couldn’t find his butt with both hands and a mirror. You’ll of course notice Bush isn’t cutting brush or chopping down trees any longer.
My guess is the number is relatively small, although my reasoning is admittedly unscientific, involves a bit of broad generalizations and is perhaps a bit convoluted.
My sense is that very few people realize how precisely they are marketed to, and that marketing usually conveys a message of “you are normal.” The implicit message is therefore that others are not normal. When you accept that, it would be odd if political candidates did not come across the same. Or to put it another way, if you are a cool urban professional who works in a gay friendly environment where it seems like nobody goes to church or even ever did, someone like Bush is a shock to the system. He is the thing that is not like everything else in your life.
Perhaps I am not being clear here. What I am trying to say is that I believe people have been conditioned to think that candidates should be tailor made for them in terms of demeanor and style, and they only think something is odd when candidates do not appeal to them on that level.
For what it is worth, I am doubtful that either Obama or Palin are phonies in the sense that they are playing a character. Many appealing public personalities –celebrities and such- do not play characters, from what I gather- so much as they are highlighting a real aspect of their character. I know I have read interviews with Lewis Black and George Carlin where they said that they were not the agitated person that appears on stage in all aspects of their life all of the time, but that they were sometimes. I assume this is similar to how I clamp down on my sarcasm at work. My guess is that Obama and Palin work on a similar level.
Micah, it sounds like you are saying that modern marketing techniques are accelerating the drift of society into mutually exclusive, heterogeneous spheres, possibly because it will allow big business to offer a wider array of products.
And I thought that both Obama and Senora Palin were ordinary middle-class white folks.
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