Look Back In Nostalgia
Question: When do the ruins of the Korean war start to look like the Good Old Days? Answer: when you are a mourner at Kim Jong-Il’s funeral.
Public Radio International thinks propaganda efforts to link the Great Successor — Kim Jong-Un to his grandfather Kim Il-sung rather than Papa Kim Jong-il are an attempt to ground him in the nostalgia for the past rather than the grim reality of the present. Escaped North Koreans living in the South believe “many North Koreans still have great respect for Kim Il-sung. Kim Jong-il is a different story.”
“People blame Kim Jong-il for why North Korea is in such bad shape, and the government knows it,.” Hyun said. “That’s why during this mourning period they’ve given out more food and staples, and kept markets open. They’re treating the people a lot better than normal.” …
Hyun and other refugees say the trick now is for Pyongyang to make new leader Kim Jong-un seem less like his father and more like his grandfather.
Lee said based on the images she’s seen from the funeral, that’s exactly what the North is trying to do.
“I’ve seen pictures of Kim Jong-un from a few years ago. He was slim then. I think he put on a lot of weight to look more like his grandfather. He even wears the same type of suit and has the same haircut,” Lee said.
For some years after the Korean War, North Korea’s standard of living remained fairly close to that of the South. Only in the 1970s did they begin to diverge drastically. By the 1990s, Southern incomes were four times that of the North. Then Kim Il-sung died and things really went downhill. As the Washington Post put it:
in 1994, after Kim Jong Il took over, the economy started shrinking noticeably, per capita incomes fell, and the country became dependent on emergency U.N. food aid to stave off famines that had already killed as many as 3 million people. North Korea became, as Eberstadt puts it, “the world’s first and only industrialized economy to lose the capacity to feed itself.”
From Bad to Worse
The problem, as the Strategy Page puts it, was that everything that the Dear Leader touched turned to dross. Recently, the 100,000 housing units he built for the Party faithful to placate key constituencies were so badly built that people feared being given a new unit. “Hundreds of students drafted to help in the construction were killed or mutilated by work accidents.”
Pyongyang proved unable to even accept spoon-feeding by the Chinese, who offered to let its huge construction industry show Pyongyang how to do it for nothing. But letting the Chinese demonstrate competence would embarrass incompetent North Korean bureaucrats and reduce their power. The result was that they refused the offer and kept on building their houses of cards.
Things have gotten so bad in North Korea that many people look back on the days after the Korean War — the heyday of Kim Il-sung — as the “good old days”. For all of his faults the old dictator probably held enough power to keep the rapacious elements of the Party at bay, or at least, limit the rackets to himself. When he died the apparatchiks moved in on the Korean carcass like hungry wolves and have been at it ever since.
The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun describes the housing catastrophe. The housing target was reduced from 100,000 to 20,000 and finally to 2,800 units along Mansudae Street. A new power plant was also planned, but its completion is in doubt due to safety concerns. The Asahi Shimbun said that the North’s compulsion to compete in the propaganda war with the South often diverted men and material to Potemkin projects. When South Korea effortlessly spent billions to host the Olympics, the North used up what resources it had to sponsor a pathetic rival event, the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students.
Ominously, DVDs have leaked in over the Chinese border showing life in China and South Korea, causing the Northerners to boggle at the prosperity. Another danger signal was that North Koreans began to imitate the dress habits of South Korean, a sign that they were viewing bootleg programs. The combination of rising expectations and falling incomes was an explosive combination. The Strategy Page says the secret police are cracking down on rumor mills which say that Kim Jong-il was poisoned in order to keep the lid on the catastrophic results of the housing and power debacles, suggesting the men behind the throne decided to act before the storm burst.
The hope among some members of the public is that Kim Jong-Un can successfully take on the clique his father built and tear it down. The Strategy Page writes, “there is some scant hope that Kim Jong Un and his handlers will push for a Chinese solution and get away with it.”
A lot of North Koreans are just going through the motions when it comes to public mourning. Privately, there is great fear and uncertainty about the new government. The heir, Kim Jong Un, is in his 20s and it’s unclear if he has the ability to hold things together. Apparently he is controlled by his aunt (the younger sister of Kim Jong Il) and uncle (Jang Song Taek, a powerful official, who has long been advising Kim Jong Un and his father). It’s still unclear what the new leadership will do to solve the many crises facing North Korea. Famine and lack of fuel and jobs are just the most pressing matters, there are many more problems. Kim Jong Un’s uncle has been in trouble in the past for his pro-reform attitudes. He has also gotten into trouble for openly saying that the economic situation in North Korea was very difficult to deal with. But now Jang is at the very top. If ever there was a chance to enact some real economic reform next year would be the time to do it. But with that reform will come cultural change, and North Koreans will eventually demand less dictatorship and more democracy. That unrest may take years to develop, while famine and massive unemployment are here now.
But the men who are the proximate causes of the North Korean disaster literally surround the new princeling. The Chosun Ilbo newspaper shows the members of the inner circle walking beside the Dear Leader’s hearse. They are Jang Song-taek, Kim Ki-nam, Choe Tae-bok, Ri Yong-ho, Kim Yong-chun, Kim Jong-gak, and U Dong-chuk. Hailing from either the senior ranks of the Party or the Military, these men have grown up in the system and have profited handsomely from it. They are the men whose rackets and mismanagement have created the shoddy housing, famine and economic failure that weigh down the North.
It is unlikely they will let go. But as ever, hope springs eternal and the desperate North Koreans Hope that Change will come to the Korean peninsula. But can Kim Jong-un be at once the creature of the regime and the hoped-for beginning to its end? One can’t blame the famine-stricken North Koreans from clinging to the possibility.
Yet fanciful as it sounds, international diplomats are in the same case: they are in a mode of wait-and-see. “Neighboring countries including South Korea will inevitably have to revise their strategies toward North Korea depending on whether the new leadership in Pyongyang will hold on to power and how the impoverished state will respond to challenges at home and abroad.”
The first litmus test of whether the new North Korean leadership will take power will likely be the third round of talks between North Korea and the U.S. that was originally scheduled for Dec. 22 but postponed due to Kim Jong Il`s death. Considering that Pyongyang-Washington nuclear negotiations resumed a month after Kim Il Sung`s demise in 1994, experts say the postponed talks will likely be held in January. It cannot be ruled out, however, that Pyongyang makes a sudden about-face on the nuclear issue if hard-liners have a stronger voice.
Due to the unpredictability, hectic diplomatic efforts surrounding the situation on the Korean Peninsula are being made behind closed doors. Lim Sung-nam, Seoul`s chief nuclear negotiator, departed for Washington Wednesday for a meeting with U.S. special envoy to North Korea Glyn Davies.
In their own way the “international community” is acting as passively as the crowds which were bused in to line the funeral route.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interréd with their bones;
So let it be with Kim.
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Old Ronery,
And I must pause till it collapse on me.
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
UNITED NATIONS: The flag of the United Nations flew at half-mast at the world’s body headquarters in New York and its Geneva offices to mark the funeral for late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
So somebody misses him.
the real question is will U Dong-Chuk chuck some dung at Kim the Youngun’? It could get ugly fast if cooler heads don’t prevail.
Watching all this recent footage of even Nork army officers bawling over Kim Jong Il has gotten me thinking about propaganda and myths that people are willing to accept even when these lies have been bitch slapping them for years.
Ron Paul has been exposing the Fed for decades and finally the internet alternate media have brought these ideas to the main stream. Even Rick Perry is jumping on the bandwagon as he parrots Paul on ending the Fed and shutting down entire departments.
Well it turns out that what Ron Paul has been saying about US imperialism and incessant foreign wars (@bogie wheel: is that more appropriate than “endless war”) is correct too. The internet is bringing all these things to our attention that otherwise would have been kept below our radar by the MSM. Pat Buchanon has written loads about the true origins of WWII.
I found this interview highly enlightening:
John Denson, editor of The Costs of War, talks to Lew Rockwell about Nothing Less Than War and Freedom Betrayed.
“Freedom Betrayed” is Herbert Hoovers book that just came out after 50 years!!! Roosevelt and Truman sure did a hatchet job on him. Guess what, WWII was part of the New Deal, just like WWII was really a continuation of WWI and WWI was pushed by the same banks that wrested control of the money supply in 1913.
Here are some tidbits:
- The Germans announced they were going to sink the Lusitania and advertised in the papers to keep US passengers off of it. Wilson refused to take any actions despite German channels telling him what would happen.
- Churchill replaced the captain and ordered Lusitania’s escorts away and had her stop making evasive manoeuvres.
- Roosevelt and Joe Kennedy intervened and told England that Roosevelt would only back England if war broke out if England had guaranteed Polish sovereignty.
- Hoover says that when Roosevelt couldn’t get Hitler to fire the first shot that then he turned to Japan. Roosevelt then followed McCollums 8 steps to provoke the war.
So if we want to talk about nostalgia, if we want to talk about the good old days, then perhaps BC should put a little effort into looking our hard truths in the eyes.
It seems entirely plausible that the progressives and the big banks helped provoke US involvement in both world wars and even the cold war. And this is why we have outrageous income taxes, collapsing fiat currency, run amok central government and all the social decay. If we are willing to accept this, is it too hard to accept that perhaps these same banks/elite were involved in provoking 9/11 in entirely the same fashion? After all there is the history of Ft. Sumpter, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin and now so many lies about 9/11.
Here it is 70 years after Pearl Harbor, and still so many people ignore any evidence of Roosevelts rape of the US through WWII. Or the rape of the US by Wilson in WWI. Or the rape of the US in the civil war by Lincoln.
This also reveals is the gigantic rift that Ron Paul is opening up in the Republican party. Those remaining of the greatest generation and many boomers will never accept that they were duped, that they sacrificed so much in order to help to have our freedom stolen and the banks and the elite empowered and enriched. The shattering of these myths that is so critical to their generation is the real reason why they despise Ron Paul so. It is also very reminiscent of North Korean military clinging to the myths and nostalgia about Kim Il.
3. ConfederateH: Even if everything you say is gospel, in fact because of it, the Republican machine will not vote for Ron Paul, neither Paul nor any other GOP candidate will be elected which leaves us with Obama. Better or worse?
There are many things to like about Paul’s positions (and many to be wary of as well) but he will always be a fringe candidate like Perot or Nader. Feel free to rearrange the deck chairs if you wish but be sure, when cursing the people that re-elected Obama, to throw a few into the mirror.
Richard:
I am surprised that you have fallen into the traditional thinking when a Communist dictator goes off to the eternal hall of shame. “Yes, the next dictator is really a closet reformer” the world says only to be disappointed yet again. The system has rendered KJU incapable of even thinking of reform. He has been “Winston Smithed” from his first memories. Long Live Big Brother!….wait a minute, I am now Big Brother!
The claim is that the North Koreans hope he is a closet reformer, an optimism born out of desperation and so do the diplomats. I don’t know what he is going to be.
ConfederateH: Pat Buchanan wrote about the true origins of WW2 so it must be true? Lew Rockwell is a reliable source? Get real. Do you agree with Paul that 9-11 was blowback for US intervention in the Mideast- that we deserved it?
Congressman Paul is a fruitcake. He’s been one for thirty years. That misguided people vote for him, or for Barack Obama, does not change that.
More proof that Ron Paul is right! My newspaper boy has taken to throwing the paper to the gate, rather than under the car. If only I had known……
I was watching a newly released news documentary about N.Korea and it had some people practicing for a music recital.
I don’t remember the exact words to the song they showed but it was like this:
“Food is very plentiful
It’s abundant and very good.”
In poker terms that would be called a “dead giveaway.”
Ron Paul praises Occupy Wall Street;
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/ron-paul-praises-occupy-wall-street_614967.html
Paul compared OWS to the Tea Party movement. (Sounds like what Obama said a few weeks ago.) “In many ways, I identify with both groups,” Paul said.
Sorry, Dr Paul, but I think Gingrich is closer to the truth on OWS (take a bath, get a job) than you are.
So it appears that NKor is really an oligarchy, not a dictatorship. If it was the latter, the leader would have eliminated all rivals. But instead various members of his family are ‘defacto leaders’.
When we talk about the possibility of reform in North Korea, what is it we’re really referring to? What could be done that might actually make a difference? Does anybody have a plan? How do we get from A to B? And furthermore, what exactly is ‘B’?
Before answering, remember that counterfactuals and subjunctives are philosophically tricky things.
For my part, I don’t think there is much reform there to be had. The relative prosperity of South Korea and China is an artifact of certain global conditions that will not obtain for very much longer. Europe is slowly disintegrating before our eyes; the U.S. has done just about all the deficit spending it will ever be able to do; and the developed nations in Asia are all demographic basket-cases who are topping the crest of the hill right now and will shortly careen down the path of no return.
How is tiny, backward North Korea supposed to get richer and freer when the rest of the global “playaz” are all about to get poorer and more belligerent? What is North Korea’s best chance of survival in such a world? However odd it may sound to say it, perhaps the policy they’ve been pursuing all these years really is the one most rationally calculated to preserve their independence. As long as they cling to their scanty nukes and continue to feed their army, the world powers will decide that they have better things to do than to bother imperializing North Korea. It’s worked so far.
Eventually those trend lines representing per capita GDP will draw closer together, but it will be because South Korea is getting poorer and more isolated, like the North. There is no way that countries like South Korea and Japan can maintain their prosperity over the next few decades, especially if energy prices spike up (which is a virtual certainty). The best chance for reunification will come when the people realize that they will be about equally miserable living on either side of the DMZ, but by that time the whole political calculus of world affairs will have changed so drastically that reunification may not be of much interest to anyone outside the peninsula.
The second half of the 20th century saw a brief burst of technological wonderment flare up in the maritime lands of East Asia, but this will prove to be a minor episode in the long and complex history of those peoples—one which they may well suppress and forget about as they retreat from building supertankers and return to fishing in the bay. North Korea, rather than being twitted upon for having missed the party, may end up none the worse for having skipped it altogether.
Those cheerleaders in the video need acting lessons. I couldn’t tell if they were acting happy or acting sad. At least for effort they deserved whatever extra rations they may have received. That weeping OWS rich kid with his “help us” pleas should have put on a crocodile-tear school for the N. Korean ladies.
I notice they used all the black cars in N. Korea for the front part of the cavalcade. Unfortunately there weren’t enough and they had to commandeer all the white cars in N. Korea to fill in the back part.
Wretchard: good post about Ron Pau . . . oh. Wait. It’s about N. Korea. I’m confused by the thread, sorry
The Un will stay in power for so long as he proves capable of delivering the goodies to which they become accustomed to the guys in the gray suits. They have a formula that works for them and nothing will change except that which is necessary to keep the goodies coming.
We can only hope that that the Western diplomats really don’t believe what they say about “reform” but that is perhaps too much to ask. Heaven forbid that they would actually name the whole sordid regime as the criminal enterprise that it is.
If you want a fine example of Paul Derangement Syndrome, Annoy Mouse doesn’t even come close. Look no further:
http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5898
University of Houston professor compares Paul supporters to Khmer Rouge:
http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5901#comment-86006
And gets called out for it, here.
Some people deserve to get named and shamed.
Oligarchies breed both rivalries and alliances. The relative “outs” in the inner circle, or those who feel cut out of the goodies by the dominating inner clique will reach out either to China, South Korea or the United States for alliances.
There is also the possibility that the entire ruling clique has decided the status quo is doomed; that information is leaking into North Korea and are searching out survival strategies.
To those looking for external patrons, China and South Korea will probably be the preferred. The US has proved too inconstant and shifty to trust. The problem with Nokor inner cliques drifting to China will be the knowledge it is an absorbing state; the end of the dream of national reunification. For China, unlike America, plays for keeps.
But to trust South Korea and thereby keep alive the dream of reunification would be to implicitly trust America, for only America must back Seoul to balance off China.
Ultimately, if you want to “break” North Korea in the direction of Seoul, the US has to man up. “I’ll catch you if you fall”. Otherwise Pyongyang will never step in that direction. And it probably won’t under the Obama administration.
Torn between the prospect of a safe but final rush to China’s embrace and a more desirable but risky approach to the South the Northern elites are likely to simply stay in a holding pattern. Make no waves. This means the economy will continue to collapse as none of the looters can be dislodged from their positions of power.
My own guess is that the fulsome praise for Kim Yong-un and his “elevation” to the titles of the state are a signal that the leadership wants to keep things as they are, the better to prevent what is really on their minds, an all out struggle for power. Kim Jong-un is really the flag of truce or titular monarch which papers over a cracking system.
Over the next 12 months North Korea could break up without its leadership having decided whether to lean on China or approach the South. Overtaken by events, as it were. Or Pyongyang could hold together long enough to await a change in Washington and consciously risk an approach then, especially if China is distracted by a collapsing bubble.
Sorry, here’s the link:
http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5901#comment-86006
End of thread for me.
In an interview, a highly placed Japanese political analyst revealed that the new administration of Kim Jong-un will pattern itself on the current American administration.
Hope and change, he gravely said
To banish their dejection
Just rike for you in year oh eight
Had grorious erection
Awready signs in Pyongyang Square
Have picture of Obama
In frashing rights to right the sky
And made in Yokohama
A stimurus and Chinese debt
And soon the prace be humming
For Kim Jong-un in history be
Obama second coming
We Japanese are happy to
See North Korea prosperous
Though we prefer them far away
Antarctic or the Bosporus
@4. SpeakEasy: The way I see it, it is Ron Paul or bust. More of the same leads to martial law and the loss of most of the remaining constitutional rights.
@7. Jim in Virginia: When you can’t attack facts the attack the source. That and ad hominem attacks against Paul. I am as sick of “he’s unelectable” as I am of “he’s a racist”.
@8. 49erDweet: Don’t be so cheap, buy the iphone app.
@10. Jim in Virginia: There is a great quote from Hayek about how the Germans slid into Nazi control but I can’t find it now. It describes how one right after another was peeled away by the Nazi’s and no one did a thing. Well OWS get my respect because they are at least doing something. What have you done lately? Or do you think everything is just hunky-dory?
@16. Mr. X: Sorry to see you check out of this thread so early.
It is not only in cloesed societies that the “dissidents” feel isolated and afraid to express themselves. Prior to the internet the zanies and crazies in free societies stayed in their closets out of fear of ostracism by the more rational elements of society. With the coming of the internet these nutcases found out that they have their own constituency after all and now brazenly parade their conspiracy theories and other fantasies in the larger world. Some of them even run for President. I have observed this phenomonon all across the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Belmont Club or a cooking blog eventually the F*****g Nuts end up dominating forum after forum.
The subject of Ron Paul is related to that of Kim Jong-un, but not in the obvious way. Like the North Koreans, many voters in the Western world know they are at the end of an era. They feel it in their bones.
Thus, what disqualifies Romney, Gingrich or even Perry is that they are competent enough to keep the dying old system going for just a bit longer. People are looking for a discontinuity, not a continuity.
Paradoxically, both Paul and Obama offer that exact chance: an end to the old. A smash at all events. It is not that what either has on offer is particularly appealing (though some may find it so). It is what they don’t offer, which is more of the same. Keats caught this spirit of recklessness in his Ode to the Nightingale. Give me the smash! I have done with all this old s**t.
Although I think most people are going to see the election in conventional terms, there are already quite a few who see it as a choice between either one more spin of the wheel or upsetting the table altogether. “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
Well how do we know there will be no pain? Tipping the table over in the Obama direction means going down the road of socialism. He has made that clear. Going the other way is less clear. And yet people are so sick of things they may chance it. What the Republican Party has failed to do is articulate a radical alternative in the mold of Leo Linbeck. All that is, except Ron Paul. And his alternative is mostly what he’s not going to do, not in what he’s going to do. His chief credential is his promise to upset the apple-cart. His unarticulated watchword is: “what have you got to lose?” Or as Keats put it, “Tender is the Night.”
Paul’s going to burn stuff and some people are just about angry enough to take their chance. What is uncertain, and which people are debating on this thread is what exactly he’s going to burn.
But as in most things, I believe timing matters. People can either choose to upset the casino table now or plan to do in the somewhat more orderly Leo way; build the infrastructure, take over the primaries, etc. So that when the table goes over, it doesn’t crush everyone in the process. Whether an orderly revolution will happen or whether part of the country goes the OWS path and the other goes directly the other way, whatever way that is, is what the next months will show.
Personally I think we are in a race to control runaway history. It’s like one of those old cowboy movies where a stuntman has to duck down between the horses hooves to retrieve the reins which have fallen between the hooves. In the meantime the pretty girls are shrieking in the stagecoach. The Tea Party and initiatives like Leo’s are precisely aimed at grasping the reins and bringing stuff to safe harbor according to the principles of the Founders. But maybe things won’t work out that way and there’s every chance that we’ll all keep yelling from the stagecoach until the whole thing finishes up on some building-sized boulder.
“Hailing from either the senior ranks of the Party or the Military, these men have grown up in the system and have profited handsomely from it. They are the men whose rackets and mismanagement have created the shoddy housing, famine and economic failure that weigh down the North.”
Even North Korea has crony capitalists.
…The American system doesn’t allow the option of a new election anytime the Legislature can muster a vote of no confidence, but a Presidents power is directly related to how strong is his party and message control. If Ron Paul were elected, he would soon be isolated from almost all Presidential control because he would lose funding and his opposition, I’d guess it to be north of 90%, would refuse to cooperate. Executive appointments would go unfilled. Monies unappropriated.
..Impeachment is what the House says it is. Paul would be toast. Burned toast.
..Libertarians think they can game their way in. It can’t be done.
tdi@ 21: +1
I’ve seen so many open forums on usenet and web eventually fall to nutjobs or spam floods, very few survive unmoderated.
(insert here your choice of disparaging remarks about LuapNor and Paulbots)
As to nostalgia, haven’t we in the US already a tradition of nostalgia for virtually the same period of time, the late 1950s, as our Happy Days? OTOH I guess we’d won, not lost, a couple of wars by that time, and each of those an ocean away.
And what ended those happy times? Communist revolution in Cuba. Thermonuclear standoff with the Soviets. Assassination of a US president. Involvement with another ground war in Asia, that we did not seem able to end, especially in our favor. The political repercussions thereof in the US. Social costs of the civil rights act, affirmative action, wymn’s lib. Heck, I dunno, Japanese car imports, or conversely the crap being put out by Detroit under planned obsolescence. By the time we got to 1970, happy was somewhere in the rear-view mirror, HST said as much in F&LILV though that wasn’t exactly what he was talking about.
Wrechard:
I would think that everybody would have figured out by now that upsetting the table as you put it is more likely to make things worse instead of better. Whether it’s Egypt, Russia or the United States those who want to dump the dinner on the floor are the ones who are guarennteed to cause a catastrophe. I saw a post on another blog extolling the anti-Putin demostraters who happenned to be marching behind the Red Star and Hammer and Sickle. Did he really think it would be better for the Russian people to be once again ruled by the Communist Party?
Of course, nostalgia is not what it used to be.
” When South Korea effortlessly spent billions to host the Olympics, the North used up what resources it had to sponsor a pathetic rival event….”
And the North also sent 2 agents who planted a bomb on a South Korean 747 and blew it out of the air in an attempt to disrupt the Olympics. Then held “negotations” with the South over the unfairness of the North not having an Olympics.
Ironically, the leaders of an intrinsically unstable country such as North Korea, knowing that they are constantly teetering on the brink of disaster, seek to knock over other people’s well tended and full apple carts. Whether this is simply pure human evil, a desire to bring everyone down to their level, or part of some kind of whacked out master plan, very probably not even they know.
It seems that lots of people want to upset the apple cart. Some of them actually think that will make the cart better, some think that it is unfair that the guy with the cart has so many apples, and some probably want it upset for the same reason that that the NORKS blew up that 747, whatever that was.
Simply upsetting the table is an evil choice–the kind that produced the French and Bolshevik Revolutions and all the horrors and miseries attendant thereto. Young people often want to take this sort of radical path because they haven’t lived long enough to really know what they are advocating or what will ensue. But I am not young and I know that radical change is usually accompanied by great sorrow and pain to no good purpose or accomplishment unless vengeance and bloodshed and the thrill of violence and action are the goals.
I don’t want discontinuity, but rather continuity with the best traditions of the past.
W: “Paul’s going to burn stuff and some people are just about angry enough to take their chance. What is uncertain, and which people are debating on this thread is what exactly he’s going to burn.”
In 2008 when tarp was moving through congress with much fearmongering in the press a local radio personality said on air “the only thing worse than bailing these bums out is NOT bailing these bums out.”
I thought he had it exactly backwards. We have bankruptcy laws for a reason. I dont want to hear about TBTF… I dont want to hear “well if we didnt do some thing then … blah blah blah” … I dont want to hear it! if you are big enough boys to take control of the global economy and wreck it then you are big enough boys to spend the rest of your lives in prison (and/or be guest’s of honor at a global neck tie party).
anyway while the radio host was lamenting that he saw no good options I got out my best Mel Gibson/William Wallace impersonation and said out loud in the car ” … burn it” (with all the disgust I could muster).
Of course we all know how that worked out for Wallace in the movie, but at least he could live with himself afterwards (or die with himself as the case may be).
If we could have headed this non sense off back in ’08 by stopping TARP et al then the pain ahead would be alot less. but thats not what happened. and at this point the sooner we stop the maddness the better. we have already got a good bit of pain headed our way … best face it and get it over with before the tab gets any higher.
while im on a rant let me get a few other things off my chest. capitalism is NOT the system that makes/made america into the global economic power house that it has become (we have ~20% of global GDP with <5% of global population). it is "Free Enterprise" that did this, they are not the same thing (and I suppose the world wars didnt hurt).
I have no room in my heart for OWS, but i have no room in my heart for those they would rob either. Its like that deal in libya… there are no good guys in that story either.
now back to W's point… Ron Paul is not exactly a man on a white horse to my eyes, but one thing is for sure… he is definately NOT establishment. and for me that is a MAJOR feature, not a bug.
Before christmas folks on talk radio were going on about how conservatives have to vote for who ever the republican candidate is just so we dont get obama again. many of them then bashed ron paul in the next breath. well after 2008 I figure strategic voting doesnt work… I held my nose and voted for mccain and look what we got.
People gripe that ron paul's support isnt from "real" republicans. news flash republicans are an integral part of the problems that have been accumulating these last decades. Early on in the tea party movement people wondered if they would take over the republicans or merge into them … well I dont know but I say put ron paul on the ticket … and let the establishment republicans hold *their* noses and pull the lever this time. im sick of their establishment republican stink.
/rant
“Of course, nostalgia is not what it used to be.” – Charles
That, Sir, is extremely humorous.
A few years ago, there was the phenomenon of LePen in France. I discussed this with a few French friends, and they assured me that there was no way LePen could be elected, and all he really wanted to do was cause mischief in the electoral system. France does not have a “winner take all” election for President, and the Prime Minister is, of course, chosen by the House of Deputies. There are literally six or seven fractional parties (most of them left and further left) the split the vote and cause a run-off election to follow.
The US is, of course, not much like France at all. Except for the periodic appearance of 3rd party candidates that want to gum up the works, who are, of course, campaigning on “principles”. George Wallace in ’68. John Anderson in 1980. And Ross Perot in 1992 (and again in ’96, just much less interested). Third party candidates always appear in times of apparent turmoil. (like 1860, for instance).
My pedestrian uneducated guess is that like Le Pen, Ron Paul and Kim Jung-Un do not want to govern, are incapable of governing if given the chance, and enjoy making noise more than anything else.
Comparing Ron Paul followers to the Khmer Rouge is truly idiotic. The Ronulans themselves think they have found gold, when they hold a handful of iron pyrite. Not even a roll of silver dimes.
El Hefe you miss the point. It was an opportunity too good to miss. They got 2X the govt and all them good Federal middle classmen. TBTF was just a branding exercise.
As I have said before, the current slate has not the cojones to do what needs doing.
God help us.
David @31
Try Fourth Party candidates — in 1860…
Until Lincoln it was VERY common to have THREE parties in the hunt for the presidency.
Reconstruction changed America into a two party state.
wretchard @ 22 said:
“… many voters in the Western world know they are at the end of an era. They feel it in their bones. Thus, what disqualifies Romney, Gingrich or even Perry is that they are competent enough to keep the dying old system going for just a bit longer. People are looking for a discontinuity, not a continuity. Paradoxically, both Paul and Obama offer that exact chance: an end to the old. … Tipping the table over in the Obama direction means going down the road of socialism. He has made that clear. Going the other way is less clear. … except Ron Paul. And his alternative is mostly what he’s not going to do, not in what he’s going to do. His chief credential is his promise to upset the apple-cart.”
As usual, Wretchard understands things better than anyone else and expresses it best.
In 2008, people were deceived by Obama’s empty rhetoric about “hope and change”. Seduced by the MSM, voters did not recognize that Obama as a Cold War leftist straight out of the 1970s (there’s nothing new about Obama). I guess there is a certain logic behind Obama’s support, i.e. everything is going to hell but we Americans never really tried full blown socialism before so let’s vote for Obama and give it a try. It seems many people failed to notice that the main lesson of the 20th century was that given time, socialism always fails.
Ron Paul is the opposite extreme from Obama, i.e. Libertarianism which is really just watered-down anarchism. Lots of people died in the late 19th century due to anarchist terrorists (President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist). Anarchism still has a strong stink attached to it due to that learning process.
It can be argued that anarchists and communists are opposite sides of the same coin, i.e. people who believe in those ideologies process information in the same way even though the information is diametrically opposed.
To some extent, the question about Ron Paul is moot. Ron Paul can not possibly win the nomination. However through some miracle should Ron Paul be nominated, the MSM would cut him to pieces as soon as they saw him as a viable threat to Obama. Recent opinion polls indicated that Romney is about to clinch the Republican nomination and has a good shot at winning the general election. As Wretchard indicated above, Romney’s success would be a disaster for the nation (he’ll simply prop up a dying system). Admittedly, it would not be as bad a disaster as Obama’s reelection. This brings out the slippery argument that maybe reelecting Obama would be a “good thing” because through incompetence Obama would cause a rapid collapse of the old order.
I don’t accept this for a moment.
There’s a world a difference between a gentle landing versus hammering into the ground at Mach 2.
If Romney is nominated, I’ll vote for him in the general election. If Ron Paul is nominated, I certainly won’t vote for Obama. The question will be whether or not to abstain.
The ruling oligarchy in North Korea, and most of the North’s neighbors, want the same thing: the status quo. For the North, it means they hold onto power, sell their weapons technology to anyone who will buy, and threaten the neighbors when they think they can shake them down for money or food. (In one way, the Norks are like late night TV junk vendors- it doesn’t matter whether the vegematic really works; it only matters that the buyer think it works. If it fails, it’s user error.)
For the South Koreans and the Japanese, the status quo beats the alternative. The Norks threaten occasionally, but they aren’t shelling Seoul with artillery, nor are there a couple million starving refugees streaming across the border. The status quo isn’t perfect but it’s known and it’s usually safe. Why can’t we keep doing what we’ve always done?
It’s difficult for anyone to believe that things will not always go on just as they have for all of our adult lives. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC assures me that social security is not going bankrupt. Barack Obama is sure that another stimulus program would reduce unemployment, just as he knows that Obamacare has helped stimulate the economy. Everyone Obama listens to agrees with him. And everyone who speaks to Kim jong-un agrees with him.
This is one of those interesting times when the way it’s always worked, for the last sixty years, won’t work anymore. None of our leaders are prepared for that. Heck, I doubt anyone is ready for it.
Sorry for the earlier digression. Ron Paul turns me into Pavlov’s rabid dog.
re: #3. ConfederateH
I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I take it that you are the official PaulBot assigned to spam Wretchard’s blog. Every day another PaulBot spamvertisement from you.
Do you realize how creepy that is? Or, how irrelevant your comments appear because of your PaulBot-ism? You’re not going to change Paul’s historical record or dangerous policy statements. The lefty’s went all in on the cult of Obama, as you are for your god, Ron Paul.
The last damn breath I’ll take will happen before I vote for Ron Paul – or Romney either, for that matter.
O.S.
Paul’s going to burn stuff and some people are just about angry enough to take their chance. What is uncertain, and which people are debating on this thread is what exactly he’s going to burn.
The irony here is rich. The GOP “Establishment”, which I define as the same GOP RINO Senators who cooperate with the Democrat lefties, have done all they can to make Romney the ONLY qualified GOP candidate who has “a chance to beat Obama”. That is in spite of the fact that only about 25% of the party’s base supports the RINO’s. They’ve been screwing the GOP rank and file ever since Reagan, and probably before that.
So, they will have their chosen candidate, it will likely be Romney, and the GOP 75% conservatives will NOT support Romney as they did with McCain, Bush II, Dole, and Bush I. The alternative will arrive, and it may be Paul, or Trump, or Palin in a last minute outside run, or in a brokered convention, who knows. But if the GOP candidate ends up to be Romney, he will lose.
You can pump that Kool-aid into the bowl, sprinkle the arsenic liberally, and call it “all good”. However, the Republic is borrowing $0.44 of every dollar it spends, ALL of the SOB politicians are reaching for the accelerator to spend the USA into oblivion, and we REALLY, really, ain’t gonna take this shit again.
I’d rather lose to Obama than have a Northeast liberal version of Arnie Schwarzenegger in the White House to destroy the country in my own name. I’d rather lose to Obama than have a anarchist nut like Ron Paul running the country either.
Romney wins the primary, runs against Obama, then Romney will find a way to lose it. And then the GOP will go *pop* and will be no more. Then the country rebuilds from the rubble the Democrats leave behind, for in “winning” for Socialism they will also be *pop* no more. Words like “liberal” or “progressive” or “community activist” or “Democrat” or “Marxist”, AND RINO GOP will forever be remaindered into infamy.
O.S.
El_Heffe (#30) I couldn’t swallow McCain so I vote for Palin!
Just as the Brainless Democrat co-worker said she and her Brainless Union democrat husband voted for the “White Half” of Obama. I then proceed to vote for the libertarian running for my states Governor knowing full well he didn’t have a chance of winning I couldn’t vote for the same “Good ole Boy” politicians that was running both in the Rub side and Demo side. L3 has it right let’s start throwing the bums out at the grass level first and work our way up! I can’t vote 4 Ron P. his “Make all drugs legal, allow little girls too practice the oldest profession” and his Anti-Ally policy scares me more then Obama.
For such is the course of events in the world that, wherever a kingdom or principality rises to a position of might, envy will not rest until it is destroyed. All of history illustrates this with numerous examples. — Martin Luther, over 400 years ago.
Plus ca change. . . .
In re: Luap Nor, I think Vodkapundit puts it well: for the first half of Luap’s remarks, he’s brilliant; the rest is all just dogs barking.
God help us if that crackpot gets a third party effort mounted. What we really need is Barry Goldwater, circa 1960s, to ride in on a white horse. Someone who has balls to the floor. Someone who has integrity, patriotism, love of this country as she was meant to be, and who will by God FIGHT.
OTOH, I’m not quite so pessimistic as our host. Humans are like rubber balls: we get squeezed, we bounce back. We went through two titanic World Wars in just the last century, and recovered from both of them, in most ways, almost indecently quickly. The mighty and dreadful Soviet Union collapsed into a rubbish heap after just seven decades. We, as a race, have survived the Mongol hordes, Islamic wars of conquest, centuries of warfare on every continent; we’ve endured every system of government that human ingenuity or mischief can come up with, all of which passed eventually into history. We got through the Dark Ages with most of our knowledge intact, thanks to the islands of learning known as monasteries.
Et Cetera.
In other words, my generation, the spoilt Boomers, are about to be reintroduced to History in all her dread and awe. Gird your loins, folks. Remember our not-so-distant ancestors carved this entire nation out of a vast wilderness, and buck up.
30. El_Heffe
well I dont know but I say put ron paul on the ticket … and let the establishment republicans hold *their* noses and pull the lever this time.
Well said!!!
I am bloody sick and tired of being told that I have to vote for whoever the Republicans nominate, no matter how objectionable I find him, and that voting for a third-party candidate is exactly the same as voting for Obama.
And some of those very same people then turn around and say, “I’ll vote for whoever the Republicans nominate…except Ron Paul.”
You can’t have it both ways.
A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for Obama. Full Stop. Anyone who argues for Ron Paul is arguing for throwing over the table. That is they are arguing for the Gramscian Socialist revolution. They are voting against Western Civilization, human dignity and liberty and individual freedom and respect and the Rule of Law and creativity and property and security and wealth and everything that it has built over the last three centuries.
Regarding North Korea, the thread topic our host offered before it was hijacked, a Marine platoon armed with buckets of chicken and beer would make short work of those poor desperate distraught but attractive women. The men may be another problem. Perhaps we could unleash surplus Ukrainian nurses and underemployed Gender Studies majors on them.
Korea was one of the most homogenous societies on earth, far more than Germany was. The results of the division between Communist and Capitalist zones in Korea is the rarest of things, an almost perfect natural experiment. It has been said that the Soviets triumphed brilliantly in Germany. They made Germans harmless. What has happened to the people of North Korea?
3. ConfederateH – “Freedom Betrayed” is Herbert Hoovers book that just came out after 50 years!!!
Yes, it’s high on my wish list. The book and online excerpts are available at the Hoover Institution Press.
This also reveals is the gigantic rift that Ron Paul is opening up in the Republican party.
There are already serious rifts in the party. Please take stock of the objections people have towards Paul, because one way to magically heal a lot of those rifts and turn them against you is to corporealize every conspiracy theory held by Paul fans into a campaign platform, especially if they involve 9/11. I hesitate to say anything nice about him for that reason, as I’m not sure of all that I’d be validating.
But in reading his plans and reasoning for immigration reform, I didn’t see the crazy. I looked into his points of health care reform vs. those of other leading Republicans, and they with their block grants to “save Medicare” look completely batshit in comparison. I don’t have any fondness for foreign U.S. military bases and I was born on one (now closed), and I can visualize life without FEMA & EPA & NCLB & DOE, etc. His commitment to upholding the Constitution seems to drive it all, and I can understand why he’s gaining support.
Recently our little community had an election for council and mayor. Our incumbents had guided us through the turmoil of holding the Winter Olympics relatively unscathed and their spending on infrastructure over the last six or nine years, although profligate, had not actually ruined us. However a couple of otherwise minor problems reared ugly heads, day parking would be charged for instead of free (Mostly visitors) and they had got themselves (and us) into a jamb by not removing an asphalt plant before building the Olympic Village and were now stuck with it 150 metres from housing.
In the six months before the election these two issues blew up into a real firestorm and while, for the rest of the province, the incumbents were mostly re-elected, here they were thrown out wholesale, clean sweep and by a serious landslide.
I don’t see anyone of the GOP candidates having anything close to the charisma to unseat Obama, but, as Harold Wilson said “A week is a long time in politics.” Should a decent issue arise in the last nine months leading up to the election it will not matter who wins the primaries, momentum would make Obama toast.
@22. wretchard: “Paradoxically, both Paul and Obama offer that exact chance: an end to the old. A smash at all events.”
I disagree. What Paul offers first and foremost is a return to the constitution and this doesn’t represent a “smash event” unless you are sucking at the government tit like Teresita. A return to states rights and small constitutionally constrained federal government means that some states can legalize marijuana while others ban abortion. This is exactly how it should be.
One really important question I never hear asked of Ron Paul is this: “What would you do if one or more states decided to secede?”. I think I would like the answer while most contributors here would not.
@36. Old Salt: I am not a PaulBot or a Rondulan. I have been posting on and off here at BC since I believe 2002. Long ago I used to post under KennyB, and I gave Wretchard hell for chasing Whiskey off. At the time of the elections in 2008 I had never heard of Austrian economics and was a Fred Thompson fan, completely ignoring Ron Paul for his “weakness” on foreign policy. During the last 3 years I have learned a lot, call it a catharsis. Losing my son and renouncing my citizenship forced me to do a lot of thinking.
@41. Blast From the Past: First of all, I didn’t “hijack” the thread. Like 25. Josh said, there are similarities between the nostalgia of this thread’s military buffs and that of all those bawling Nork officers. But I have to say your rant about Paul has has about as much sound logic as I would expect from a hormone laden pregnant women:
“They are voting against Western Civilization, human dignity and liberty and individual freedom and respect and the Rule of Law and creativity and property and security and wealth and everything that it has built over the last three centuries.”
@21. tdiinva , @25 Josh: Here are a few of the names you two called me:
zanies and crazies, in their closets, fear, ostracism, nutcases, brazen parader of conspiracy theories and other fantasies, F*****g Nuts, nutjobs and yet you blame others for problems on so many forums. Bravo!
31. David
That line isn’t new or original. I recall hearing it for the first time back in the late 1980′s in NYC during my New York days. Maybe a line from New Yorker, a magazine I couldn’t stomach even in my liberal days — except for the funnies–which very occasionally (and only very occasionally) careened to the screaming humor of the Far Side when the Far Side was at its best. Hmm New Yorker jokes were never as good as the Far Side at its best.
Hmm, on second thought, that joke probably didn’t come from New Yorker. So I don’t know where it came from originally beyond that I first heard it 25 years ago in Manhattan.
@44. ConfederateH
“Losing my son and renouncing my citizenship forced me to do a lot of thinking.”
Sorry about your son, I’m sure. Perhaps you should have done the thinking before renouncing your citizenship? Do I understand you correctly there?
I would pretty much say, without intending to wound or insult, that if renouncing your citizenship does not actually mark you as insane and/or treasonous, it marks you as someone who does not have America’s interests at heart or a stake in our fate, and your opinion on Paul or anyone else as pretty much null. I would assume that your preferences are now for what benefits your new nation. Or are you stateless?
Ron Paul will not be nominated. Fiat nomination, Obama’s people would chew him up and spit him out. Fiat election, his policies would swiftly lead to worldwide holocaust and the end of American world power. Whether he knows it or not, power abhors a vacuum, and America would not be left alone. He would be a deer in the headlights.
He is really wasting the time, money and attention of his fans and of the American people. I hope he is satisfied with whatever is his real agenda because he will never be elected and he knows it. He is best seasoning the Republican stew, but you can’t eat a whole block of salt and call it dinner.
This is coming from someone who bitterly regrets that Sarah Palin stayed out, btw. I am not happy with the current slate. I suppose Perry is least bad…
(BTW if you want to learn a small secret, the Left would like Romney because they feel they can live with him and they expect Obama to lose. When a rabid left ex-congresswoman – one who wants Bush and Cheney hanged for war crimes – says over the dinner table, respectfully, that “the president doesn’t understand the economy,” you can see that they are grasping for a controlled crash; and Romney represents the least repulsive delta from their preferred glide path.)
Also – what is the point of this jape about Teresita and the gov’t teat? I find little to like about her ideas or persona but why abuse her needlessly?
Well, the hijackers were successful again.
And speaking of hijackers, we haven’t seen much of Victor in the last few days. I’m guessing it’s because he got what he was propagandizing for. In Vic’s defense, at least he usually tried to don the fig leaf of relevance by attempting clumsy segues into his pre-programmed talking points. Hell, sometimes he actually talks about the topic on-hand, unlike some of the other one-note Johnnies around here.
I guess I shouldn’t complain. I know that Wretchard is very tolerant of the commenters, and it’s his house to use as he sees fit. It just bothers me to see such crude tactics in a place filled with a lot of sharp minds.
Wretchard@22 – excellent post. it is those kinds of insights that make you the finest commentator on or off the WEB
I do not know whether it wil be better, assuming Romney gets the nod to kick the can down the road a while longer or to vote for Barry and a socialism that cannot last for long without imploding economically. will the slow drift to socialism be so morally debilitating that there wil be nobody left to resist or even rembember I.e. what we will get under the squishy Republicans like Romney or is it better to let Obama hasten the crisis? My sense is we are a society in profound disequilibrium but that an actual crisis may not be inevitable. A slow decay and dissipation is as likely as a sudden upheaval. Byzantium collapsed long before the walls were breeched. Obama promises us socialism today and Romney promises to negotiate it a step at a time. the destination is the same either way but with the establishment Republicans we will like the Byzantines be left with no one to man the walls.
#34 Eggplant
Recent opinion polls indicated that Romney is about to clinch the Republican nomination and has a good shot at winning the general election.
I am not sure that Romney is going to clinch the nomination; but if he fails it will not be through lack of effort on the part of the Institutional Republicans who are intent on forcing him down our throats. If he does get the nomination handed to him however, he will never win the general election. And that lost election will not be displeasing to the Institutionals, because they would prefer an Obama victory to losing power within the Party to the Patriot movement.
But getting back to the election, Romney will run a campaign that will make Bob Dole’s fiasco look like my namesake romping and stomping through Kievan Rus in comparison. He will not fight Democrats. Throughout the current regime, he has reserved his fire for his fellow Republicans and expressed contempt for the Patriot movement.
Over at PJ Tatler, I have been asking a series of questions of Myra Adams; who is the columnist who is the resident Romney groupie. She will not answer. I asked them, again, in response to her recent column where she averred that Mitt Romney was the new Ronald Reagan.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/12/29/could-romney-be-the-next-reagan/#comments
Mitt Romney has NEVER stood up and fought against the Democrats. He won his stint as Governor of Massachusetts by specifically and publicly renouncing every statement of conservative principle and by adopting and promising to protect the Leftist canon. Between now and the Republican Convention, we are to believe that he has recanted what he said them. After the Convention, we can expect him to return to the only thing that has worked for him in the past.
I admit that I am a fairly conservative sort; with more than a passing fondness for the Gadsden and First Navy Jack banners. I supported and hoped for Sarah Palin to run, then before he imploded, for Herman Cain. I am at the point where my irreducible minimum to make a candidate from the remaining field includes a willingness to actually fight back against the Leftist Enemy.
Romney does not have that willingness. Never has, and past performance is the best predictor of future behavior.
Subotai Bahadur
the people of north korea are doomed. they have no useful skills and a pathological passivity. orc food at best.
who exactly is going to turn things around here? the people that forfeitted the public schoool system? the people who forfeitted the public service jobs? the people that allow 30m abortions a year? you would sooner see a squirrel fight off a mountain lion, than you will see “good” Americans turn things around, wresting control back from leftists.
no, the future belongs to those willing to fight, and only the left is willing to fight.
SB @ 49
Hear, hear.
Romney is ALREADY on the record WRT finessing Obama/Romneycare.
Yiikes!
1/7th of the national economy beholden to Obqmq czars…
It’s a political super-volcano.
49. Subotai Bahadur
I am not sure that Romney is going to clinch the nomination; but if he fails it will not be through lack of effort on the part of the Institutional Republicans who are intent on forcing him down our throats.
Check this out: Some amateur analysis on why the fix is in for Romney
Note the front-loading of open primary states. This problem was obvious in 2008, and the Institutionals have made no attempt to fix it despite having four years to do so. This time around, we have also been treated to an interminable series of debates, the main purpose of which seems to have been to allow the media and pollsters to pick front-runners before any voters got to have their say.
@46. Nichevo
“renouncing your citizenship… marks you as someone who does not have America’s interests at heart or a stake in our fate”
Question: Is “America’s interests” one and the same as “the US federal government’s interests”? I certainly don’t think so. I think “America’s interests” is restoring the constitution. Period. I think the federal government has broken free from the chains of the constitution and is trampling on human rights all over the world, but mostly in the United States. I think federal bureaucracies have become entirely unaccountable to anyone, like DOJ, EPA, DHS and especially DOD. I think America’s biggest enemy is it’s own federal government, far more so than Iran.
Have you ever had to file taxes on your income in 2 countries with contradictory tax codes? It is almost as difficult to get a straight answer from a lawyer as a full prognosis from a doctor. Imagine trying to get a straight answer from one of the few tax lawyers that understands Swiss and US tax code. Do you know how much they cost? Have you ever heard of FACTA? Do you realize that Americans can no longer open an account in any of the normal Swiss banks? Could you live in America if you weren’t allowed to have a bank account at an American bank? Do you even have a clue about what the US has been doing to it’s expats?
@49. Subotai Bahadur
“And that lost election will not be displeasing to the Institutionals, because they would prefer an Obama victory to losing power within the Party to the Patriot movement. “
My point exactly and you refer only to the Tea Party when Ron Paul is a far bigger threat. He has the constitution as his legal litmus test, has had it for decades, and has the record to prove it. Romney is owned by the “Institutionals” (I would call them the elite) as are all the other front runners. Romney would be McCain 2008 all over again.
So ConfederateH, which of Ron Paul’s previous positions is your favorite?
Running as a libertarian Paul said, “As in our country’s first 150 years, there shouldn’t be any immigration policy at all. We should welcome everyone who wants to come here and work.”. I know that he has since changed his tune, but still opposes Arizona’s right to enforce immigration law.
Or was it when Paul went on the Alex Jones show and warned about the coming North American Union and the coming Amero currency, and wanted to impeach Bush because of it?
Maybe it was when he wrote that the redesigned US currency was a plot to track Americans?
Or when he went before Congress and warned that Bush was going to cook up a phoney attack on the US as a pretext to bomb Iran.
Or when Paul claimed that Iran had no army or navy, when actually they have over 800,000 active and reserves and have threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz.
Or my personal favorite, “We need to take out the CIA!”
A vote for Romney is a vote for Progressivism. Romney admitted he was a Progressive several years ago.
He now has backed it up.
He has come out for a VAT, last week in an interview with the WSJ.
With a VAT the unholy rent seeking Progressive/Corporatist Allliance of the TBTF, Unions, Bureaucrats, Academia and Welfare cheats, will be able to greatly expand their payoffs and tilt the playing field decidedly in their favor. Government spending will grow even further and the private sector will waste away.
Romney could lead a Rino/Demcrat coalition to take Progressivism to places the Dems could only dream of now.
Obama is a spent force. He no longer inspires awe; he inspires ridicule. He can still undermine the US of A, but he could never in a million years get a VAT passed. Romney could. He would have the votes.
Obama is no longer the one to be feared. The one to fear now is Romney.
I can’t find any fault with your analysis, Unsk. Unfortunately.
53. ConfederateH
I don’t know about the issues you raise (while noting you only address this and nothing else I said), I don’t see the point, and I don’t care. It all looks like squid ink to me.
Are you telling me you are an expat who moved to Switzerland and can’t manage to move between the systems so you defected to Switz? Well then good for you, you did what you felt you must for the sake of your money. Whaddya want, a medal?
An Irishman or a Switz who comes here and naturalizes is supposed to cast off those old allegiances. I presume the same applies to you as a new proud Swiss or whatever you are. So go make chocolate or cheese or whatever you went there to do. What’s that to me?
So go kibitz elections in Switzerland, not here. As an ex-citizen I don’t really expect you to care about either America or the American federal system, don’t hide behind an irrelevant distinction. You may be an American well-wisher like Irish-Americans are Irish well-wishers but really, you have surrendered your dog in the fight. As for turning our wonderful Constitution into a totem, well, fine, to whom do we return the illegally funded Louisiana Purchase?