Category: Uncategorized (Page 34 of 53)

The Washington Post, often a spreader of right wing talking points in the spirit of “balance,” had an op-ed piece anti-endorsing Romney:

Every politician changes his mind sometimes; you’d worry if not. But rarely has a politician gotten so far with only one evident immutable belief: his conviction in his own fitness for higher office.

I would disagree that he has a conviction that he is fit for higher office. Rather, I have come to the conclusion that he, like Bush, Jr., feels that he deserves it. Despite Mr. Romney’s “contempt for 47 percent of the population,” he displays a characteristic he ascribes to them: a feeling of entitlement.

He is a pampered, privileged prima donna with a preternatural predilection to prevarication.

Also, he is a prick.

I am occasionally reminded of a truism by which I hope I live my life:

Never forget that the asshole who is causing all the problems may be you.

I think I have about had it with politics. Most of the people with whom I occasionally discuss politics seem to have less thought into choosing a political side than they had on choosing a football team to cheer. The Republican platform would accelerate the transfer of the nations wealth to the wealthiest and away from everyone else. What the rubes (meaning anyone earning less than about $1,000,000 per year) don’t realize is that this transfer is not to the 1% as the dirty hippies claim. Rather, it is to the top 0.1%. At least I think they don’t understand. It’s possible that denizens of the low-to-mid tiers of the upper-class are simply willing to allow their own piece of the pie to shrink so long as that of the filthy peasants shrinks at a much faster rate. Cast thus, the merely rich are gaining relative to the filthy peasants. And for some people, that is all that matters.

I think I should end my political voice with a definition:

Politics – the collected methods used by the powerful to dupe citizens into voting against self-interest.

I only wish I had the lack of ethics required to personally profit in the willful ignorance of others, or the lack of dignity required to be a token minority scientist bootlick for the anti-science party.

This is a theory that I’ve heard variously phrased over the past few years. It is not any truer now than it was when the people failed to revolt over Hitler’s death camps, or the late night disappearance of Stalin’s enemies, or the tragic absurdity of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” When a voice is given to those people at the periphery of sanity, people who would otherwise keep their craziness to themselves feel that they can now unleash the crazy. Free of the fetters of the expectations of polite society, the followers of Limbaugh or Hannity can break out the racist language and use it to incite maximum response from the brainwashed audience.

I have heard people express a hope that if, after the election, women who lose the fundamental right to do what they want to do with their reproductive parts will be so outraged, they will swing the next election.

This a sad and unsupportable hypothesis.

I really wish I had watched the first debate. I only saw snippets, with Obama looking distracted and Romney sounding like a competent politician. I just can’t get up the motivation to see it. It’s like watching a game from earlier in the season. I would be interested. From what I saw of it, Romney did seem presidential. The second one, he looked clearly overmatched. This final debate, however, he simply looked like an oily salesman (literally, too. Why was he so sweaty?) who knows his pitch is falling flat. I would compare him to a desperate salesman trying to make a pitch to the board of directors while a hostile board member shreds his spiel. It was weird.