We have met the enemy and he is us! Poll

A while back the Politics forum was so filled with controversy and juvenile (but nasty) name calling that some folks wanted that forum to be removed from the Cellar. Many others simply stopped posting here.

I wonder if some of the enmity here is a reflection of the US political system as a whole - politicians call each other every name in the book, no real dialogue occurs between parties and factions. I am that close to "stopping posting" by refusing to vote in the national elections.

There seem to be a number of threads that pertain to this idea, but I was gone for a while with my computer to the Electronics Recovery Center - an excellent 12-step based outfit for recalcitrant machines.

I digress. My apology if this material has already been covered, but take the poll! I'm curious to see how you all would vote. :)

Oh yeah, you can make more than one choice if you want to confuse the issue even further!

Thanks - I took 2 choices. I probably shouldn't have taken the poll just now because I'm passed pissed off about it. They are all friggin liars, cheats and thieves.
Eff them all - D's R's I's T's WTFE.

SamIam;689248 wrote:

I am that close to "stopping posting" by refusing to vote in the national elections.

Not voting communicates no message, but voting ONLY THIRD PARTY does.

The best way to send the message is to write in your vote.

classicman;689261 wrote:

Thanks - I took 2 choices. I probably shouldn't have taken the poll just now because I'm passed pissed off about it. They are all friggin liars, cheats and thieves.
Eff them all - D's R's I's T's WTFE.

Yay, Classic! We actually voted for the same thing (OK, I didn't vote for the shiney thing).

Funny that we could come from such different viewpoints to finally find a common point of despair.

Wanna go get lots of guns and explosives and hide off the grid somewhere in the mountains while we plan our attack? :love:



[FONT="Comic Sans MS"][SIZE="1"]Pssst! Don't worry. I'm just pulling your tail![/SIZE][/FONT]

I voted for the shiny thing.

Sometimes gridlock is the best option.

I was skimming a short article the other day, and it said that this congress has been more productive than any congress in something like 40 years at passing new laws. They have done a tremendous amount.

So the question about "effectiveness" is really phrased wrong. Congress is extremely effective this year. I think the question is whether they can work together in a bipartisan way to pass laws that are good for the country as a whole and not just some special interest.

What he said.

I couldn't pick any of the options. I just think we are getting more and more negative, and more and more worried that someone else will pee in our spot. I hear bitching, but no ideas. I see discontent, but no action. As I said a couple years ago: we ain't gonna make it when it's more important to be right than to do what's good for the country. Too many would rather stand in breadlines saying "I told you so! HA!" than work together for the betterment of all of us. It's politics as usual, sure, but at some point we are supposed to grow out of the sandbox and get down to business. Meh.

Part of the problem is that we tend to vote for our representatives when they do things that are good for us, not best for the entire country. The candidates say "I brought home the bacon". How did they get the bacon? By voting for someone else to get their bacon, which escalates overall spending.

glatt;689371 wrote:

I was skimming a short article the other day, and it said that this congress has been more productive than any congress in something like 40 years at passing new laws. They have done a tremendous amount.

So the question about "effectiveness" is really phrased wrong. Congress is extremely effective this year. I think the question is whether they can work together in a bipartisan way to pass laws that are good for the country as a whole and not just some special interest.

Wasteful would be a better description. Big Government is not the answer. Sure they have been productive, productively destructive to our future. The latest scheme is to print more money and have the Federal Reserve feed it to the system to "stimulate" the economy, talk about weakening the dollar. Zimbabwe did the same thing.

I hate that term: Big Government. What does it really mean? Under one party we have less governing entities? HUH? We live in a BIG country, with BIG corporations and BIG amounts of peoples and BIG states and BIG monies...

More rhetoric. As MTP says: working for government small enough to fit inside your bedroom.

When you say BIG GOVERNMENT and TAXES it pisses people off, and they don't even know why. Ragers against the machine but they know nothing about the machine. Sheep.

Meh meh meh. Rinse and repeat.

Big Government means expanding and growing government and reaching past the edicts of their elected office beyond the powers given to them in our Constitution. More people understand it as they discuss it and read about it. I don't like it either, which is why I am against it.

I think most people have short memories when it comes to politics. Everything that is right/wrong TODAY gets blamed on/credited to those in office TODAY.

It's a pretty thankless job to make changes now whose effects will only be felt years down the road.

If only there wasn't so much greed in the world. :yelgreedy

glatt;689371 wrote:

I was skimming a short article the other day, and it said that this congress has been more productive than any congress in something like 40 years at passing new laws.
So the question about "effectiveness" is really phrased wrong.

They have passed a large amount of legislation. Agreed. Effective or productive or good? That won't be know for some time.

I think the question is whether they can work together in a bipartisan way to pass laws that are good for the country as a whole and not just some special interest.

Thats a whole different can of worms. If the R's gain as many seats as it appears they will, I think that will only embolden them even more.
I'm not seeing that future as bipartisan or productive.

Rather than refute or counterpoint someone's position, it's easier to discredit them by labeling them a ..........., be it liberal, progressive, racist, conservative, left wing, right wing, etc.

Stormieweather;689428 wrote:

I think most people have short memories when it comes to politics. Everything that is right/wrong TODAY gets blamed on/credited to those in office TODAY.

It's a pretty thankless job to make changes now whose effects will only be felt years down the road.

If only there wasn't so much greed in the world. :yelgreedy

The other problem is that many Americans are like children, demanding instant gratification. It is unrealistic to expect that government (or anyone else) can fix over night a problem that was 5 years or more in the making.

SamIam;689486 wrote:

The other problem is that many Americans are like children, demanding instant gratification. It is unrealistic to expect that government (or anyone else) can fix over night a problem that was 5 years or more in the making.

True: our entitlement mentality is certainly not limited just to those wanting handouts.

SamIam;689283 wrote:

Yay, Classic! We actually voted for the same thing (OK, I didn't vote for the shiney thing).
[snip]
Wanna go get lots of guns and explosives and hide off the grid somewhere in the mountains while we plan our attack? :love:

Disaster preparedness supplies in the main; guns, to taste, with reloading facilities and about a gazillion primers of every size you use, perhaps even down to the flintlock, flints/flint and a barrelful of old tire weights for melting down into bullets; explosives, in limited quantity and really more for blasting stumps.

And every Firefox book there is.

Darn, I only voted for one: I like the "Congress is corrupt but the Republic will survive them" option too.

When there is overmuch administration and too little of the productive, an organization is out of balance and it will fall. Government is not the productive wealth generator -- it is the administrative overhead. Too much overhead is bad for economic health of both corporations and nations.

Small government imposes but small burden upon wealth generation. This is to be desired, is it not?

[Too many statists have idiotically forgotten this. Do you wonder, now, why I speak as I do?]

xoxoxoBruce;689480 wrote:

Rather than refute or counterpoint someone's position, it's easier to discredit them by labeling them a ..........., be it liberal, progressive, racist, conservative, left wing, right wing, etc.

When their manifest ideology demonstrates their unwisdom, is it wrong to affix the correct label?

There are some few here who would insist I am not among the wise, but these are people to whom wisdom is a stranger anyway, if what they write is a window into their thought.

Congress!? I'll tell ya what's wrong with Cong---ooh, look, a butterfly!

Who cares what the party, or if it's bipartisan. If they bankrupt us, they're evil bastards.

Speaking of evil bastards...

SamIam;689248 wrote:

I wonder if some of the enmity here is a reflection of the US political system as a whole - politicians call each other every name in the book, no real dialogue occurs between parties and factions.

As this is an international forum I can't honestly see how it can be a reflection of the US political system.

xoxoxoBruce;691693 wrote:

Speaking of evil bastards...

I am going to be voting with my dollars. Or lack thereof in McDonald's case.

Rhetoric much?

It wasn't "McDonalds" telling workers what to do, it wasn't a "a multinational corporation like McDonalds threatening it's employees". Those are the grab lines that make for feel-good moral indignation.

It was one franchise owner doing something illegal, which the "evil multinational corporation" immediately disavowed.

Yebbut...
McDonalds is known worldwide for its heavy-handedness.
I agree with what you've said, but I'd have read the article with far more initial scepticism had it been Ben & Jerry's (for example).

Thanks for the reality-check, smooth.

Excellent blog read...

6 Political Talking Points that Need to Die