The morning after: Iowa regrets its Obama decision
Too little, too late, many Independent and Republican voters who voted for Obama have woken up with a splitting headache:
Pauline McAreavy voted for President Obama. From the moment she first saw him two years ago, she was smitten by his speeches and sold on his promise of change. She switched parties to support him in the Iowa caucuses, donated money and opened her home to a pair of young campaign workers…
“I’m afraid I wasn’t realistic,” Ms. McAreavy, 76, a retired school nurse, said on a recent morning on the deck of her home here in east-central Iowa.
“I really thought there would be immediate change,” she said. “Sometimes the Republicans are just as bad as Democrats. But it’s politics as usual, and that’s what I voted against.”
I hate to insult a senior citizen, but how did Ms. McAreavy ever manage to reach the ripe old age of seventy-six while remaining naive enough to believe that Obama could have actually overhauled “politics as usual,” even if he’d wanted to?
Not too realistic—she’s got that right. But here’s the money quote:
“All my Republican friends ”” and independents ”” are sitting back saying, ”˜Oh, what did we do?” Ms. McAreavy said.
I can answer that question: you fell in love with a con artist. What’s more, you and other Americans were so angry at the Republicans in Congress that you threw them out and elected the only thing that’s worse: an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress with a virtually filibuster-proof majority and a couple of leaders who are from the Left wing of the party.
Good going, folks. But:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
how did Ms. McAreavy ever manage to reach the ripe old age of seventy-six while remaining naive enough to believe that Obama could have actually overhauled “politics as usual,” even if he’d wanted to?
at that age, she had already experienced churchill, hitler, eisenhower, FDR, mao, stalin, lenin, and others who didnt let their system get in the way of their ideas.
depending on her life experience and where she was, she coudl have found examples in history she experinced from the better side…(meaning that she or who she knew and such were never victims).
now since blaming bush wont work, they are blaming the constitution… (which is a way to tell fellow traveler, true believer, termites to go at that point).
A year ago a jubilant Barack Obama stood in Grant Park, Chicago to claim victory before his exuberant fans. … The first year of the Obama Administration has tested the strength of the true believers who gathered in Grant Park on that November night last year. During the campaign they had suspended their beliefs in how the American system works and embraced Obama’s heady promises of a changed America…
Yet a year after the November 4 election, the checks and balances the founding fathers built into the US political system to moderate the revolutionary zeal of its early settlers have worked, all too well, to blunt Obama’s agenda.
Obama commenting on the flawed constition..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11OhmY1obS4&feature=player_embedded
I can answer that question: you fell in love with a con artist.
Nation McKinley:
if you open your heart to a smooth operator
He’ll take you for all that you’ve got
He’ll hand you a curse that’ll be with you later
It’ll shake you the way he takes off like a shot
You’re blinded by romance, you’re blinded by science
You’re condition is critically grave
But don’t expect mercy from such an alliance
Suspicion of traditions so new wave
its all there…
your blinded by romance (rousseau and the others)
your blinded by science (scientific socialism/communism)
and no culture or tradition to follow back, like cortez the culture was our ship and they have burned them on the beaches to remove our choice.
Sooner or later we all end up dining at a table laden with the consequences of our actions
Geebus. I knew that Obama would be Jimmy Carter Redux from the first time I saw him. Why Ms. McAreavy didn’t see that, I’ll never know.
Possibly it was a quiver in the Zeitgeist which said all the morally and intellectually superior people will vote for zero.
Only rednecks would vote against him, and, Iowa not being on the coast, they had to go the extra mile to prove they weren’t rubes.
Ah, but the noble Iowans are still wondering what arugala is!
How could anyone of normal intelligence possibly think this?
We need some subtle mechanism to electorally disenfranchise the cognitively disenfranchised. Something like the butterfly ballot, where those too stupid to figure it out end up voting the opposite of the way they intended, and thereby inadvertently make a sound decision. In 2008 everyone who thought he was voting for the candidate who would pay his mortgage would actually have voted for McCain. Problem solved.
That way everyone would be happy; the nitwits could still vote, but the right half of the bell curve wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of the left half’s stupidity.
Butterfly Ballot = Darwinian Democracy. Love it.
The big problem, in reality, was that the Iowa caucus came BEFORE the Reverend Wright revelation (which has re-emerged into the headlines just these last few days as he was back at it, dropping his venomous, stomach-roiling “pearls of wisdom.” (I thought he was bad before, but when I saw clips of his performance this last week, I literally had to run to the bathroom. The man is sick, sick, sick, and so blinded by his own poison (or perhaps his own narcissism é la Obama) that perhaps he has lost any touchstone to reality. The question begs, how has he grown such a huge following, let alone those who believe he is a scholar of the greatest magnitude. Black Liberation Theory is nothing but a blindfold masking a radical political school of thought whose proponents define Whites, by definition, to be Oppressors; theorizes because slavery existed for a period of time in this country, all persons of color (Latins and Asians have been included at this point to gins up strength in more nos.) are due reparations despite the fact that most people living today in this country, did not even have ancestors who were in America during the years of slavery! (Many blacks…pardon me: African-Americans….here today may well not have had ancestors who were enslaved here!) It bothers me most, because I know that many of the hard-working church-going members of Trinity Church cannot all believe this nonsense. There are many reasons to belong to a place of worship which include joining a greater community, giving back to those less fortunate, finding kindred souls in a mutual belief of a power greater than ourselves — and by that I do not mean Reverend Wright! Nor do I mean his self-serving claptrap! The absurdity of this man, who drives in only the most expensive Mercedes, lives in one of the most exclusive enclaves in Chicago in a multi-million dollar house, and living off a $10 million credit line to the church’s funds, flies in the face of all he preaches. His congregation is oppressed — but not by Whites. They are oppressed by his manipulative hogwash, and the rational part of my brain just cannot come to terms with why so many honest hard-working people with families would not eventually see this charlatan for what he is, for the hatred, the race-baiting, the bigotry the man espouses, and turn away. (And yes, I get that his manipulations are designed to convince them they are unjust victims and are owed by the US Govt. lifetimes of unfair treatment that is the reason they have not achieved success…. But do they ALL swallow this? It’d be interesting to know how many actually do turn away from Wright’s fictions ultimately….)
Then again, there are an awful lot of people who voted for Obama because they believed he was going to give them new homes, pay their mortgages, give them free money, free everything, folks who didn’t care where it came from and were interested only insofar as they’d be able to redeem all the campaign promises for cold hard cash. And Obama HAS been trying — and continues to — try to deliver. And even tho many have been bounced back to reality by his duplicitous rhetoric, the man still has poll nos. hovering around 50%. When I was in school taking statistics (yuck) we learned all about the science of careful polling across a spectrum to obtain relevant results. Who the heck gets polled by the endless no. of polls that are taken day in and day out. Have you ever been polled?
“Smitten” I’m thinking that was the emotional state of many. Well, most of these adolescent crushes don’t end well. Even if the adolescent is an old lady.
csimon,
the big problem is that for years before that if someone knew something too far off radar, it was automatically tin hat (a term that russia uses a lot).
it was like trying to do an average, and everytime you ran across a number that was too far out of the norm, or would point to some off point that was not approved by the party lines, it was to be ignored as if it didnt exist. that is, pc tells you whats real or whats not real in a reality you have lost touch with.
it has taken people a year to start to get around to accepting a few of the factual points that were relegated to this area of verbotten information.
we had cleansed ourselves of the caution we had by labeling it paranoia. we had cleansed ourselves of the next generation to carry on, and replaced them with immigrants by labelling eugenics as abortion, and labeling illegal immigration as something else.
we discuss the labeling game, but yet, refuse to accept how far it has gone, and how far it controls us.
this concept is so complete and so skinerian that the left is amazed when it doesnt work! ergo pelosi.
oh…
and by the way
the more we are reasonable, the farther and more unreasonable the actions will have to be to get back.
that is, if the reasonables didnt do their bs, and the across the aisles people wanting collusion as the norm rather than merit based argument, we would have nipped ALL these things way way way before they were even imagined to be a problem.
want to teach fisting to kindergartners?
the only way that works is if someone like *** comes along and says be reasonable, lets get this passed with it, and remove this later.
only reasonable idiots would think bipartisan collusion agaisnt the people would be a preferred choice between two sides arguing in favor of doing the right thing and not batching sh*t with food in the bills.
reasonable people never fight for principals!!!
doing so is not reasonable!!!
they instead figfht for holding still and seeign what happens.. and when its good they pretend to be wise, and when its bad they pretend that they couldnt have known.
but deep down…
they are the ones that created hitler, created stalin, created mao, and all the others.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
and how do good men do nothing?
be reasonable!
one only has to read the definition to see the word game they play.
reasonable:
agreeable to reason or sound judgment; logical:
ah, by being reasonable we assume they are of sound judgment… that is the opposite of the meaning!!! as they equate not acting as the only reasonable logical action until everything is known, but, by then, its too late and so they are on to the next thing they will be reasonable on.
one cant be reasonable unless one accepts logical facts as facts and not use reasonableness and behavior to determine what is logical.
which means they pose to the first, and they are really this meaning.
not exceeding the limit prescribed by reason; not excessive:
this means that they again define it backwards. they look at the execciveness and then say whats excessive is not reasoonable.
but they ignore reasonable men who have said that when men do unreasonable things, excessive acts become reasonable.
and their goal in all of it, is the third meaning.
endowed with reason.
that is, they believe that actions and thoughts never taken to excess makes then reasonable, which then means they are endowed with reason, and can feel superior.
no such thing…
OB, as wonderful as the idea of a covert test for sensibleness sounds (I have always liked the idea of moving the polls every year), it would quickly be manipulated so that people who had the trappings of intelligence would get to vote, and keep many worthies out. Sort of like journalism, and we see how well that worked.
It’s not really an intelligence, in the sense of candlepower, question. It is closer to a personality type that is willing to suspend sensibleness on the basis of hope. These folks, such as a school nurse, could have known the answer if they’d wanted to.
We are all willing to believe some impossible things, and only change when the number grows too great and some other explanation (plate tectonics, genetic predisposition to schizophrenia) requires fewer impossible things. For example, believing that Republicans are going to reduce government has also proved illusory – just not so batshit crazy as believing that Democrats will save us money on health care.
csimon: I like your style!
That was a little Orphic, I realize. What I meant was I like your writing style, and your style of thinking. Impassioned, but lucid.
It is closer to a personality type that is willing to suspend sensibleness on the basis of hope.
AVI, I agree. It was a modest proposal. And in the same spirit, I offer this one:
We put a rattlesnake in a terrarium at each polling place, and invite prospective voters to pet him, because he’s a “good rattlesnake” and responds well to “good people.” Kind of a crotalic version of the pons asinorum.
Those who voted for change will soon get more change than they ever dreamed possible.
And Mr. Darwin will then help purge the polls of those who are too weak; too ill-informed; or too illogical.
Ok, as the foreigner – the friendly foreigner – I nevertheless have to shake my head.
The fact is, Obama IS bringing `Change’ – he’s changing the American republic into, essentially, a European social-democratic state; or rather, a very large-size Canada.
This is the Change he promised; this is the Change he’s hell-bent on bringing about.
Why anyone is surprised about this, is quite beyond me.
OB – I knew you’d essentially agree as you have said similar things yourself in the past. And that snake thing has possibilities.
OB – Re: snakes. We’ll tell them they’re special Islamist snakes that will be nice to you if you’re nice to them. We win either way – either they pet the snakes, or they have a moment of insight.