The Most Important Election In A Generation...
...was the election of 2000.
Not this election.
This election is so important largely because the outcome in 2000 was so disastrous. This election is important because it's important to get the country out of the ditch. But if things had gone right in 2000, we wouldn't have ended up in the ditch in the first place.
Anybody who thinks that "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans" simply is not paying attention.
...was the election of 2000.
Not this election.
This election is so important largely because the outcome in 2000 was so disastrous. This election is important because it's important to get the country out of the ditch. But if things had gone right in 2000, we wouldn't have ended up in the ditch in the first place.
Anybody who thinks that "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans" simply is not paying attention.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:20 PM
3 Comments:
I'd say that the lesson to take from this is that any election could be the most important of our lifetime, and since it's unlikely that we'll know which one actually will be ahead of time, it's incumbent upon us to ... y'know ... not fuck around.
I know right?
The most important lesson of the last eight years:
It matters who you elect President.
I mean, was the idea something like "Aw, everything'll probably be alright. Let's elect this asshole. It'll be fine."?
"Anybody who thinks that 'there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans' simply is not paying attention."
Preach it, Brother Smith. The most frustrating part of this election, for me, has been the sheer number of otherwise intelligent people who perform some kind of weird mental math that equates "Obama is not perfect" to "the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans". Every time one of them cites an example where Obama is "just as bad" as McCain, it's something that's on a completely different scale. Like there's some threshold where once you commit even the tiniest infraction, there's no distinction between any other crimes. It's as if jaywalking and assault are equal crimes equally deserving of scorn.
As I keep telling people, what we're talking about is the difference between flawed but competent on the one hand and completely batshit insane on the other. You can't reasonably say that the two sides are the same, unless you're being willfully ignorant.
Which is, sadly, what I think it comes down to. Some people are just very, very strongly identified with this kind of attitude that intelligence and cynicism are the same thing, so if they actually -- God forbid -- took a side, that makes them some kind of mouth-breathing imbecile. I don't think it's intelligent at all to avoid taking sides in this election, I just think it's cowardly. And this is coming from someone who's a pretty goddamned big cynic most of the time.
Oh, yeah, and also I agree with what both of you already said. The big take home message from the Bush administration has to be that every election matters. Because even if it looks like things are going so well that no fool could fuck them up, somebody invents a better fool.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home