Winterizing

They Got What They Wanted

The big car companies paid big to get George Bush 'elected' and kept paying to get more of what they wanted- big tax breaks for people who bought the kind of trucks and cars that the companies made the most money selling. And the car companies kept paying, through their grants to rightwing thinktanks, to bullshit the rest of us into believing that competition had virtues and that survival of the fittest was chief among them.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. The general public thinks the car companies are out-of-touch dinosaurs that deserve to be swallowed by the tar pits they built.

This disaster isn't something that just 'kinda happened' because American car buyers wanted big cars. It took a full-court press by the Big Three, with tax cuts, no-interest loans, and 24-7 advertising, to persuade Americans to buy as many large cars as they did. If the people have changed their minds now, that's their privilege.

Cats A' Plenty

The Golden Age That Wasn't

Soft headed Democrats are already hoping that 'real conservatives' will again emerge to offer 'valuable insights and arguments' about public policy.

They never existed. Buckley's 'conservatives' were states-rights apologists for segregation. Go back and read their own words.

Bush was a fraud. His dad was a CIA agent. Reagan was a spokesman for GE. Nixon was a crook. Goldwater was a cracker-barrel philosopher hijacked by the Buckley crowd. As far back as you go, there is no conservatism, just a bunch of corporate lawyers intent on keeping power in the hands of the few. Get back to the 19th century and you have a Republican party spending money as fast as possible to force the federal government to maintain high tariffs for revenue collection purposes.

Nobody even knows what a real conservative might look like. Thomas Mann probably came closest to nailing it with his slippery character Naphta, in The Magic Mountain, who eventually commits suicide. Conservatism always gestures vaguely to a past which, on inspection, turns out not to have existed.

Yearning for 'real conservatives' displays an abysmal ignorance, of history in general and American history in particular. Just shut the fuck up already.

Spare Me

Ok, we have now paid our dues and voted Democratic and now Obama can save a nation that arguably shouldn't be saved. But this ain't the second coming, and I don't need to keep cheering.

For example, over a half million Americans are arrested each year for simple possession of marijuana- a prohibition based on lies that most Americans would like to see ended.

And the Democrats can't do a thing about it. They can't even stop telling the lies, let alone take control of the agencies and make them stop lying. As for putting a bill in the hopper to end the insanity- that'll be the day!

And so it will go over the next four years, as Senator Dodd speaks up to defend Joe Lieberman, and Obama castigates Chavez of Venezuela, and 'clean coal' and 'ethanol' line up at the federal trough.

The Democrats didn't save us, we saved the Democrats, and nothing is surer than the fact that they will eventually forget this and swap a few chairs of power with the Republicans. Because when that happens they don't feel the pain- we do.

No Apologies Needed

For George Bush to become president, the press needed to overlook- or hide- a lot. That he came from a notorious family of thugs, scam artists and swindlers, that he'd been a failure in college and a falling down drunk and went AWOL from his cushy alternate service gig. And pretty much the same was true for John McCain, a personally despicable example of the incompetent military "aristocracy" who get promoted because of their accident of birth.

So when it comes to these Republican scumbags, the much-vaunted scrutiny of the press consists mainly of a Nelsonian holding of the telescope to the blind eye and finding nothing to worry about.

With Obama, though, it's different- 'fine tooth comb' doesn't even begin to describe the scrutiny, and what do you think they found?

That's right, a man who is personally brilliant, with morals well above the average, with a record illustrating his personal habits of hard work and deep reflection. I don't need to agree with him about anything to support him. If the Republicans could have run an Obama, and the Democrats had chosen a McCain, I would have voted Republican.

But that ain't gonna happen, because over the years the Republicans have narrowed their pool to the shallow end. The Democrats, meanwhile, have few skeletons left in their closets. And Obama supporters, in particular, have nothing to worry about.

Dynamic Duo