distro pruned to rcm

On Thu, 20 May 2010 21:27:09 -0700, Hawke
wrote:

snip
What's worse is the republicans have said they want to do more
of what they did when they ran things. This is like the captain of the
Titanic wanting to be a ship's captain again. And guys like him would
give him another shot at hitting another iceberg. A football comparison
is in order. The right wing guys need to understand that the two Bush
terms were like the last few years of the Detroit Lions, the worst team
in football and they set a record for the most losses in a season. No
one is going to hire the head coach again. We'd be just as stupid if we
hired the republicans to run the country again. Now, we are a dumb
country. But not that dumb.

Hawke
============
You're at least half-right.

The problem is that in the aggregate over the last 30 years,
both parties have become captives of special interest groups
and the economic elite. This is called "regulatory capture"
when it is "only" a department or agency rather than the
entire government. To be sure some of the specific special
interest groups may change with the parties in power, but
the economic elite remains supreme. The serious and
continual/accelerating socio-economic/cultural decline has
been a totally bipartisan effort.

It is tempting to attribute gross moral turpitude/failure to
the people accountable, which may be true in some cases, but
the evidence indicates that simply replacing the existing
politicians with other ones is not a partial solution or
even palliative/anodyne.

One of the more depressing possibilities is that the U.S.
specifically and the "west" in general have "shot their
bolt" and reached the end of their life cycle as major
powers, much as the occurred with the Chinese and Arab
cultures. This will only be proven "after the fact," but
prudence dictates considerable contingency planning should
be occurring.

Other factors include (1) grossly excessive legislative
tenure in a highly toxic environment [i.e. the Washington
D.C. "culture"] combined with disproportionate isolation
from the "real world;" and (2) governmental service well
past the onset of senility/dotage, where they are still
living in the "reality" of "Leave it to Beaver" and "Ozzie
and Harriet Nelson." [For our younger readers see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adv...ie_and_Harriet
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_It_to_Beaver ]


-- Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).