Rick Perry makes a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, that was "so obscurely digressive, so marked by airy hand gestures and slurry intonations" that the Governor found himself forced to answer questions the next day as to whether he had in fact been drunk. To say nothing of his subsequently forgetting the name of departments he'd like to eliminate if he were president. It's always bad to end an answer to a question posed in a debate with the word "oops." Cain's level of intellectual sophistication is revealed in his sage 9-9-9 tax plan. Meanwhile, Cain can't remember what Obama's Libyan policy is. And the candidates demonstrated that their fealty to orthodoxy triumphs over any sense of realism when a moderator asked the candidates to raise their hands if they would walk away from a deal that cut ten dollars from the deficit for every one dollar in tax increases and every last candidate said they'd reject that deal. Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum hardly deserve comment.
As David Remnick of the New Yorker says: “The lack of independent thinking on the notion that real economics matters anymore, as well as science, is just devastating. This party is in ideological crisis.”
In fact, this campaign has prompted Remnick to observe: "Sometime in the future, when a twenty-first-century Gibbon searches for a moment to use as a starting point for a chronicle of American decline, he or she might want to alight on the late-October and early-November days of 2011."
5 comments:
This has nothing to do with this post but i just though maybe some of you would like to try this.
http://thefailureclub.org/projects/
I might try to try something - essentially it is risking failure trying to do something you have never done before and totally out of your relm of expertise. Good luck.
Why would some one raise an alarm about the fall of the American empire? I can't think of a good reason to desire an American empire in the first place. During my life time I have fought against every effort by power hungry politicians and the xenophobic electorate to try to create one.
I read an article today in the Wall Street Journal called "The Brain-Dead Left" which said pretty much the same thing about the liberals. Why do both sides believe that the other "is in an ideological crisis"?
The right is teaching us some much needed lessons. There is too much government regulation in areas which should be handled by the general honesty and integrity of the general public. The left has some fine ideas also. If the left wants to codify decent behavior, there is no hope for this country let alone an empire. If the right wants to eliminate government, then, likewise, there is no hope for the country.
But that is not what each wants to do. There are honest, smart, well-meaning people on both sides, however, the current climate seems to be: the only way to sell papers/advertising is to yell louder or more outrageously than the next person.
It's the whole idea of an empire. It's big, forceful, loud, and full of itself.
Once we try to be common, normal, humble, neighbor loving citizens, we will find some answers, and some of them may be from the other side.
To Steve:
You've already done this. Write in and tell them that as someone familiar with every bakery on the east coast, I plan to run a marathon in Africa.
James R. takes my post more seriously and more literally than intended. First, this was not really a blog about the end of an empire. And, I didn't mean to suggest that the left is beyond criticism or that there are no responsible or thoughtful voices on the right. It's just that the current crop of Republican candidates are not among those responsible voices. The campaign more closely resembles some comic parody than actual political discourse.
I won't argue that, but I'm not sure it is the fault of the republican candidates. To read the papers or watch TV, however, it does seem the case. But when the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal promote articles ridiculing the "other side", I wonder if we are getting the proper picture.
I don't know why each side thinks the other are idiots. It's so easy to blame the press.
Perhaps it's human nature. We would rather talk about how a candidate waves his hands or forgets a line than what he says. We are more interested in the shenanigans of reality weddings than sorting out the federal budget. Who finds the budget interesting?—especially for 30 sec. of TV time?
I've said it before—sometimes I wonder if democracy is a sustainable form of government, despite the old canard. Has government, like medicine, science, accounting, etc. become too complicated to be understood by non-experts? Have we (and, consequently, the press) turned to less taxing, more understandable and entertaining news? Is it too much to ask that we should be interested in complexities of modern government and not just the trappings? Perhaps we have passed the point where we can remain focused on boring, technical, complex issues.
I don't know. I'm just trying to find a more reasonable explanation than all eight (or more) Republican candidates and the President of the U.S. are idiots.
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