I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for the compendium of 2013 posts, Lucky '13, to hit the Kindle Book store, and it will, definitely within the next week. Only so many hours in the day, and for some reason I continue to show up at my day job, even though I'm now getting cornholed on the health insurance I don't even use. Another $200/month I don't have, for something I don't use. Yes, this is certainly "reform" that will make my future life on a fucking sidewalk so much better. Awesome. Remind me again why I voted for this fucking guy, and how much worse the other guy would have been.
Anyhoo, until that magickal day when you can pick up Lucky '13 (which will kick off with a free download weekend), you can always grab the 2013 list of assholes, Baker's Dozen, for just 99 cents. If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for free (and I still get paid).
Thanks for your support. Party on.
Anyhoo, until that magickal day when you can pick up Lucky '13 (which will kick off with a free download weekend), you can always grab the 2013 list of assholes, Baker's Dozen, for just 99 cents. If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for free (and I still get paid).
Thanks for your support. Party on.
2 comments:
Thing is, no one can say how much worse the other guy would have been. Looking back, would you rather have had Gore or Bush? (Leave Kerry out, cuz Gore would have had a second term). Carter or Reagan?
There's not much difference anymore, but if the Dems had prevailed maybe there would be.
File it under "we get what we deserve", I suppose, if you think that our elections are clean.
It's a fair question, but it may not be the most useful one to ask about those instances, especially if the point is to discern between the parties, point out salient differences in policy and approach.
Carter has turned out to be a far better and more effective ex-president than as president. Between the economy and the hostage crisis, he didn't stand a chance.
Gore is a trickier one, ultimately I think he serves as a banner example of the intangibility of political decisions -- that is, how people frequently vote with their gut, with whether they like someone as a person.
We can poke fun at the "who would you rather have a beer with" syndrome that infests politics and electoral bodies, but it's a fact all the same -- there is a level of comfort and trust that people need to feel about someone before handing over the keys to the country to them, and Gore, unfortunately, transmitted discomfort and insincerity. He cared too much what people thought of him, while Bush couldn't have cared less.
I can't recall exactly when offhand, but I did write a "if Gore had won" speculative a few years back. Glass-Steagall had been repealed already, so the stage was set economically; desecuritization and rampant derivative trading was happening regardless. The Bush tax cuts wouldn't have happened, but some sort of compromise would likely have taken place.
Obviously the big questions of a Gore administration would have been 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 9/11 most likely would not have occurred, but the Taliban had been destabilizing and worsening Afghanistan for several years by then, and would have done something somewhere, as they did in Spain, Britain, Bali. Some military commitment would likely have taken place, on a smaller scale, but then we have always been at war, here, there, everywhere. We don't have 700 military bases around the world for nothing.
So Iraq, and recall that the no-fly zones had been in effect, that we had been doing bombing and strafing runs in the final years of Clinton's presidency, that sanctions had killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, especially children.
The popularThanksralph! notion that none of the Cheney administration's shenanigans would have happened in a Gore administration, in any way, shape, or for, is I believe optimistic, even unrealistic. I suggest that a look at Gore's rather moderate to conservative record as Senator and VP provides a greater clue to what sort of president he would have been than his post-loss enviro-hero guise, when he no longer had anything to lose.
Regardless, at this point it is all about the money, and the chasing thereof, and that will be ultimate arbiter now of exactly where any remaining party differences will lie.
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