Two Stagnant Years
The next two years will see the Federal government locked in a logjam of procedure and ideology as significant initiatives get hung up on the ego of President Bush. For all his politically expedient talk of brotherly love and non-partisan progress subsequent to the recent congressional Democratic switch, the man in the Oval Office remains a calamitous ego-maniac with a voluminous track-record of stubborn, ill-informed, ill-conceived and ill-executed policies – regardless of any political platitudes he might occasionally mumble to try and placate (or anesthetize) those with a more rational or practical world-view.
It is encouraging to see the slight groundswell of popular sentiment which condemns the incompetence, double-talk, double standards and malice of the Republican party and which has led to Democratic congressional majorities. It was discouraging to see the vast numbers of Americans that still endorsed the Republican agenda with the power of their vote. I join with the chorus of pundits who view these 2006 midterm elections not as a vote “for the Democrats”, but as a vote “against the Republicans.” It saddens and discourages me though to see such vast numbers of voters still electing to give away their liberties, their financial security and the sustainability of our culture and industries by supporting the disgusting Republican platform.
Perhaps this election is sufficient to change the course of federal policies over the next two years, perhaps everybody in Washington will join hands and sing Kum By Ya – and perhaps you could ignore a 1200 pound angry elephant sitting in your family room.
I predict: The Democrats will not be concillatory or graceful in victory. The Republicans will fight for every inch of power and clout they can possibly maintain, slinging mud harder than ever to try and come back in 2008. On top of this, the President will be true to form and continue to behave like an ego-maniacle dullard (or mallard).
If history is any judge, the chances of President Bush exhibiting any tendency toward deliberative, well-reasoned, fact-based, compassionate or conscientious decision-making are close to zero. Bush never, ever changes his mind – once it is made up, he sticks to his malformed picture of reality regardless of such niceties as reality or constitutional mandates. If he were a smarter man, possessed of insightful acumen and a subtle grasp of obsurely interacting systems (economics, psychology, anthropology, biology, climatology, etc.) then his “sticking to his guns” might be a laudable attribute. More capable and learned presidents such as John Adams and Abraham Lincoln were able to make headway in a storm of opposition primarily because their policies were based on insights which time and thought proved right, (the Alien and Sedition Acts excepted). But in the case of George W. Bush, his principled stubbornness comes off only as ego-centric and nearly adolescent hubris devoid of any deep knowledge or subtle understandings. He has acted with amateurish ham-handedness at best and destructive stupidity at worst. His supposed “mandate”, whether from the voters, heaven or his own inner demons has created only a recipe for destruction. There is only one aspect of his person which keeps him from being totally revolting: He is indeed a patriot. There is no doubt that he passionately loves his country. But acting on emotion divorced from reason leads to all kinds of destructive and stupid behaviors – such actions by a President of the United States should make us all sick.
Anybody who thinks President Bush instigated or even gracefully accepted the resignation of Donald Rumsfield is disregarding Bush’s past behavior. Bush NEVER admits he’s wrong and never changes his convictions. The probability that Bush suddenly decided Rumsfield was incompetent is zero. It is far more likely that Rumsfield came to understand the impossibility of executing his job effectively, and upon tendering his resignation for this second time, refused to let the President gainsay him. Cheney and others may also have needed to be heavy-handed with the Petulant in Chief, but rest assured Mr. Mandate did not meekly accept this decision.
Since it takes two thirds of congress to override a presidential veto, the probability of any substantive progress on legislative issues is also low. The only possible ways for progress to be made in the next two years are:
- Republican congressmen pull their heads out of their… um… sands, and stop cow-towing to the Imbecile at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (pretty unlikely)
- President Bush resigns (not bloody likely)
- President Bush is successfully impeached (even less bloody likely)
- President Bush listens to the majority instead of to his own malformed adolescent inner voice. (not a chance in Hell).
So that’s my prediction. Contrary to the make-nice talk in the past few days, the President will continue to push his authoritarian and moneyed-oligarchy state philosophies for the next two years down the craw of a recalcitrant but mostly paralyzed congress which will lack the will to override him. Just look at the issues of John Bolton and the domestic Surveillance Act – Bush is playing politics one last time to try and force through his personal disastrous agenda.
One final thought about the Lame Duck in Chief, then I’ll go back to being a more dispassionate sophist: Americans elected this idiot, so I guess we desereve him. Maybe we’ll collectively raise our standards for entry into the office of the most powerful person in the world by the time John McCain and Barak Obama run for office…
Friday, November 10th, 2006 @ 1:56 pm 
Elections, Races, Candidates & Outcomes, Political Science
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November 10th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Such negativity after what has been seen by most considered to be a landslide. The very thing that you despair of will likely turn out to be a good thing in the long run. Regardless of true fault, Bush will bear the brunt of every action or inaction for the next two years. If the debt continues to skyrocket, if troops end up not being brought back from Iraq, if our liberties are not returned…all of these things will fall squarely on his head. The reason that so many red states made such a path towards the middle, if not switching to blue entirely is the utter disgust that the American people have with this government. Any Republicans end up dirty by association just by virtue of being in the same party. The best way that the Republican party can have a chance in two years is if Bush decides to change, which, we agree, is pretty much no chance at all. I predict that you are correct in two years of near stagnation, which is still better than two years continuing to make strides towards the ultra conservative right. However, I also predict that we will still have such an incredibly disaffected public that people will turn out in droves to drive out “the president and his ilk”, which will bleed over onto the majority of the republican party.
As for voter turnout, while the numbers may have been indicative of slightly higher turnout over previous years…the young voter turnout was higher this year than it has been in the last 20 years…and it was only for a mid term election. Combine the fact that young people turned out in droves, with the overall turnout being only slightly higher and you have a nearly built in voting shift to more liberal agendas. It is sad that it took a president of such gross incompetence to mobilize the youth of America, but this can only be a good thing if they can be kept mobilized.
We control the house, we control the senate. In two years I have little doubt that we will control the presidency, especially if the buffoon remains true to form. After this happens, we might finally begin repairing some of the damages done by “Jr”
November 11th, 2006 at 1:56 am
Karl Rove was quoted by Time as saying:
The Republican National Committee has been pointing out that a small shift in votes would have made a big difference. A shift of 77,611 votes would have given Republicans control of the House, according to Bush’s political team. And a shift of 2,847 votes in Montana, or 7,217 votes in Virginia, or 41,537 votes in Missouri would have given a Republicans control of the Senate. In addition, the party has calculated that the winner received 51 percent or less in 35 contests, and that 23 races were decided by two percentage points or fewer, 18 races were decided by fewer than 5,000 votes, 15 races were decided by fewer than 4,000 votes, 10 races were decided by fewer than 3,000 votes, eight were decided by fewer than 2,000 votes and five races were decided by fewer than 1,000 votes.
I agree that stagnation and stalemate is better than a continuing slide into the disastrous vision of the current Republican platform, and is indeed cause for celebration. But I am very much disheartened that the margin of victory was so very slim; what the heck do 49% of Americans *like* about these incompetent twits? I’m sure these 49% include in their number the 50+% of Americans who believe the Earth to be 6000 years old and the 44% who think the world will end through Divine intervention within 50 years (see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15566391/site/newsweek/ ). The cultural slide into ignorance and mysticism is underpinning the Republican platform and it’s a war we are currently loosing. Harkening back to the idea that the Deomcrats didn’t *win* so much as the Republicans *lost* – and that mostly due to obvious corruption and Iraq; the core dogmatic close-minded issues are still way too prevelent in our culture, and will likely be resurgent (as Karl predicts).
The other discouraging fact is that there’s really no chance of bi-partisan cooperation on some of the most important issues, because the side of mysticism and the side of science are so far apart. That, along with the resentment and immaturity of the parties involved will assure nothing but acrimonious and spiteful jabs for the next two years – which will further poison citizen’s view of the potential merits of our political process.
My mood now is akin to a mountain climber who has fallen off a mountain and landed on a narrow ledge – the abyss looms large and the ledge is a respite, not a salvation.
November 11th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
My first worry is the source of your quoted information. Karl Rove…the evil mastermind behind Bush? I would strongly question where he is getting his data. Did the Time article give any indication of this?
As for disillusionment of Americans, I think that Diebold has done more to make people feel that their vote won’t be counted than many things that the parties have done so far. I am also heartened by the statistics of the drastically higher number of American youth that turned out this year as opposed to previous years. If there is anywhere I would expect to look for forward thinking and drive to embrace new ideas, it would be the younger set I would look to. There were certainly a lot of close races, but I would be interested in seeing what these 1, 3 and 3,000 count districts did historically on voting. Are these counties that were normally strongly Democrat, strongly Republican, or usually pretty centrist. The quoted numbers mean next to nothing if their voting record is historically split…however if they were strongly Republican before, then it DOES say something for a change in feeling.
The Republicans will still manage to hold on to that vast swath of America that insists upon “non-thinking” and faith over a rational consideration of the evidence at hand. The Democrats just will have nothing to do with those crackjobs most of the time. As long as people think that Armageddon is upon us they will find a place with the Republicans…unless the party casts them out as whack jobs as well…unlikely given that they need every bit of support they can get, regardless of it being distasteful or not. What I find hard to fathom is how “virtuous upstanding Christians” can wrap their minds around continuing to back a party that has shown such immoral behavior on such a grand scale of late. I almost have to wonder if both sides of this arrangement hates their bedmate *Grin*.
I agree, this is certainly not a crashing victory overall, however there were a number of pretty telling things here. From what I can tell, in every Senate race that happened, the results for the Republicans were that they held a seat they already had or they lost one. There were no races where the Republicans picked up a seat…thats pretty telling. If this was as close a race overall as Karl Rove says, one would have expected at least ONE seat picked up. Equally telling is the same picture on the house side of things. The only way that things changed was that republicans held or lost a seat…they didn’t pick up a single seat. The democrats did not lose any seats at all. I haven’t followed politics much until lately, but I am willing to hazard a guess that unilateral movement like that is not seen very commonly.