I think the Democrats thought they could "raise" a president in their little victory garden of narratives.

Jul 14, 2012 -- 8:36AM, catboxer wrote:

I've come to think of him as "Mr. Drone Warfare,"

That is the worst of it, for sure.  Close to 2,000 in Pakistan killed by drone bombings, in less than the past 2 years, although who knows the truth?  It's not like such "preemptive killings" are reported by the press.  You're generally lucky to find such statistics.

If somebody would have told me 30 years ago that it would be a Democrat and some whol was alive during the Viet Nam Tragedy who would be the one to usher in the age of "star wars" I wouldn't have believed it.

What a fantasy to have hoped for a president who would decry the militaristic and corporate misuse of technology instead of secretly use it for his own.

Jul 14, 2012 -- 8:36AM, catboxer wrote:

...and another brazen sell-out to the bankers, like Clinton.

He could have taken a lesson from FDR when it comes to the Banksters and the tycoons of the modern guilded age.   Or Krugman.  Instead of Timmy and Larry

Jul 14, 2012 -- 4:40PM, rabello wrote:

The Electoral College renders it a moot point for most of us.  It doesn't matter who I vote for; it doesn't matter if I vote, at all.  For Pres anyway.  All of my state's EC votes will go to Obama.  I am free to vote my conscience and not worry about who is the lesser of two evils.  The person or persons who would represent people like me and who share my values has already been knocked out of the running by the Big Money that buys people like Obama or Romney.  

If the red states are dumb enough to get Romeny elected so soon after the 8 years of ruin by the Republicans' Fortunate Son and his puppet masters, then I guess the red states deserve what they get, altho it's always unfair to the ordinary people who don't have a chance to begin with to get such a shaft.

It'll be interesting to see how those who blame Obama for continuing Bush's foreign policies (ie, pro-war Republicans) will react to a Romney foreign policy should that come to pass.  Am I to believe Romney would "end" the "wars" that Bush started and Obama is trying to trump?

Or they were knocked out because almost all of America doesn't share your values, regardless of money. But, I know, it makes you feel better about yourself by telling lies that anywhere more than a handful of people really do believe as you do.

Jul 14, 2012 -- 9:32PM, rabello wrote:

Jul 14, 2012 -- 6:23PM, aarroottoonn wrote:

 
Or they were knocked out because almost all of America doesn't share your values, regardless of money. But, I know, it makes you feel better about yourself by telling lies that anywhere more than a handful of people really do believe as you do.

"Lies"?   As if I am something different from a majority of Americans who believe in equality, equal rights, a clean & safe environment, safe working conditions and a fair wage, to not be robbed by the money barrons, to be able to see a doctor when sick, safe schools, etc. etc. etc.

But red staters who won't follow the money are welcome to stay in their little blood-red cocoons if they like....that being the case, perhaps you can tell us why candidates from all 3rd parties -- both right and left -- are "shut out" of the presidential debates, and guaranteed to lose because of the winner-take-all set-up of the electoral college?  Maybe you'll divert the question and tell me that most Americans "believe" in social darwinism and survivial of only the Ayn Rand-inspired "fit"?

Yes .. rab ... lies!  Only a handful of people define equal rights and all that as the extreme left does.  I'm sorry if this disappoints you, but the revisionism of the left on the constitution is what it is. ... and very few people are actually leftist.

As for you big question ... yes, third party candidates get knocked out because of fear that the lesser candidate of the Democrat and Republican party will win.  Just look at GHWB and Clinton.  Perot threw the election for Clinton.  Yes .. that is correct, without Perot, Clinton would not have won the election .. he won on only 43% of the vote, and almost all of Perot's votes were Conservative votes.  Since that time ... nobody is willing to throw an election by voting for a third party candidate, with the exception of voters who are in decided states .. like Washington.

Looking at the candidates of the two major parties is depressing. Can't we do any better than to run a mindless horse race pitting the cynical, calculating Obama and his  stupid and repulsive opponent, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?

I find myself recalling Doris Haddock, or Granny D as she became known toward the end of her life, who in her 90th year walked from Santa Monica to Washington DC to call attention to the need for campaign finance reform. That was in 1999 and 2000, and since she passed on the political deformity she protested has grown much worse.
 
She stopped in Madison, Wisconsin at the Reform Party convention the year of her long walk, and spoke to the delegates of the overwhelming evil that had crept into the American political system and had become its dominant characteristic, "Due" she said "to the twin judicial fictions that money is speech, and that a corporation is a person."

She was a simple person, a wife and mother who worked 20 years as an executive secretary for a shoe manufacturing company in her home state of New Hampshire. At the time she took her personal campaign for reform from coast to coast she suffered from an arthritic foot and emphysema, but still undertook what would have been difficult for someone half her age in good physical condition. She was determined.

In 2008 she ran for the US Senate as New Hampshire's Democratic nominee, losing to the Republican incumbent Greg Judd, and died in 2010 at age 100.

Doris Haddock took any political conversation in which she engaged to a level much higher than we're used to. Why do we tolerate the disgusting crudities of sound-byte-campaigning, the raw corruption of the artillery duels with giant checks as ammunition, or the bully-boy intimidation of the mobilization of mass-media propaganda? Are we stupid, or simply too immoral to care?

Maybe we shouldn't answer those questions. We might find out more about ourselves than we want to know, but Granny would never have tolerated that kind of willful ignorance. She died too young, because we need her today more than ever.