Steve Benen has a good item about how the new conservative/principled centrist line about the deficit is that it doesn’t matter who caused it, let’s not play the blame game etc…except that from now on we should blame Obama.
One of the big things I’ve never gotten about politics is why it matters who you’d like to have a beer with. No one chooses their surgeon on the basis of whether or not they’d like to have a beer with him, why would they do it with prospective leaders of the free world?
The other thing I don’t get is why people are so weird about assigning blame in politics. It seems to me that in most successful enterprises, some effort is made to keep track of who has screwed things up and who has generally succeeded. Not to get too Bayesian about this, but it’s not unreasonable to think that the best way to predict people’s future job performance is to analyze their past job performance.
Why doesn’t politics work that way? Why would anyone want to put Republicans in charge of the federal budget again after the Bush (and Reagan, to be honest) budget fiascos?
MikeJ
The standard republican line on the Reagan budget debacle is that it was the fault of the Democratically controlled congress. When you point out that Clinton didn’t pass budgets he didn’t approve of, going so far as to allow a shutdown of the federal government, and therefore Clinton was a stronger, more honest leader, they don;t like that.
b-psycho
I drink particularly strong stuff. So getting an expert that drinks like me is probably not a good idea anyway…
Joe Max
As sci-fi author Larry Niven once wrote:
“Never confuse the assignment of blame with the solution to the problem. It is far more vital to patch the leak in your airhose than to find the guy with the pin.”
CalD
I’ve also always wondered why politics is the only job where not having experience is often considered a virtue.
Beeb
I always thought that “I voted for him because I’d like to have a beer with him” stuff was a myth. Then I saw an interview with a Scott Brown voter who had previously voted for Obama. He explained that he voted for Brown because he seemed like a regular guy. I guess the truck worked, and I guess it’s not a myth after all. But don’t ask me why it works, please, because I don’t get it.
Linkmeister
The Republican party is highly inconsistent, too. (D’oh!) For years they used to attempt to smear people with the “Who lost China?” canard. Sounds like blame to me.
bcinaz
If Rs can succeed in pinning the blame on President Obama then it would be reasonable to turn control of the country back over the them.
Blame is another way of reminding everybody who really did get us into this mess.
Like when Mary Matlin is on my TEEVEE telling me Bush Inherited the 911 attacks – Rs are also very busy with the Bush WLP (Whitewash Legacy Project). In another decade the 90s won’t even have happened and there never was President Dubya.
Linkmeister
@Beeb: You know, most of the people I drank beer with, back when I still drank, were nice enough folks, but I couldn’t imagine them as President of the United States. Still can’t.
DougJ
You know, most of the people I drank beer with, back when I still drank, were nice enough folks, but I couldn’t imagine them as President of the United States. Still can’t.
Elitist.
Yutsano
@Beeb: So apparently that voter’s definition of regular guys is eaters of arugula and Cosmo pin-ups with trucks. Lovely. I’m gonna blame the education system for that. Oh wait…
b-psycho
One of these days I want someone to ask people which candidate in an election they’d like to smoke a joint with.
williamc
DougJ,
I don’t think its that people don’t like to assign blame in politics, its that Conservatives don’t like to blame their politicians because it means that liberals were RIGHT about something. It seems hard to believe that this could be true, that its all just spite, until you talk to a Con Politician and they tell you that they hate Bill Clinton because of his “lack of morals” and then they pivot to the need to kill Muslims because they are all terrorists or that poor people are analogous to stray animals. Or when they attempt to argue the opposite of the fact that in the last 30 years every Republican President has racked up more debt than the Democratic Presidents and then go on to argue that liberal Presidents are always just going on “tax and spend” sprees.
I’ve encountered tons of center-left voters over the years who can tell you that while on the one hand they loved the Clinton years, there are things that happened during that administration that they can critique, and outside of the George HW Bush term, Republicans don’t usually speak ill of their Presidents.
…oh, and I think any politician that drinks beer after having to wade around in the sewer of politics and isn’t doing shots of the hard stuff at the bar is a pussy that I wouldn’t want to associate with.
Farmer_Jones
The Republicans controlled the Senate until 1986. So they had the WH and the Senate for most of Reagan’s tenure.
More relevant, even though some Democrats might have been on board, the economic policies that sent us spiraling into debt (from being the world’s largest creditor in 1979 to the largest debtor by 1989), were championed by Republicans. Specifically, massive tax cuts, a massive military buildup, and massive borrowing to finance these things. These were called Reaganomics, not Tiponeillonomics.
This is overlooking the larger point: connecting policy with results is not something we do anymore. The “beer test” reigns — pointing to cause and effect in a logical way is for haters and the “far left.”
General Winfield Stuck
I have a crackpot theory of this, but it seems to me that a lot of people on the new media of the internet, are involved as much for personal emotional reasons as anything else. What better way to join a tribe and vent existing personal angst into the ethers and channeling it through the raucus world of politics. Blogging without need for facts and editing is impersonal and can be cathartic. It was for me with the Bush administration and their crime syndicate of constitution shredding.
But when dems got power, most of that rage went away for me, and it has been surprising that with too many others on the left it hasn’t. Not everything Obama has done I agree with, and some things like the Drone attacks, and using mercs like Blackwater has pissed me off. Though the doddling in congress, especially by the senate was expected. And Obama has groped along for periods before finding his footing. Though breaks for being new on the job are part of the American culture, always has been.
But the white knuckle angst and outrage hanging on every tidbit of info that crosses the wire, is something else altogether than just about politics, I think. The wingnuts are just crazy, but they are loyal, often to a fault like with Bush/Cheney, and naturally hateful.
But with large blocks of internet liberals, the level of emotional whip sawing to any first reports, and rumor, seems stuck somewhere between doom and gloom unless wishes come true in their entirety, which never happens in a functioning democracy. This non stop disappointment , just has to be a lot more about personal Psychology than following and being active in politics. It is the only thing that makes sense to me. But my being an Obot, who knows?
Svensker
@Joe Max:
Yeah, but once you fix the leak, it’s a good idea not to give the pin-wielder access to the airhose again. Nowadimeen?
freelancer
“Because undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet.”
Heh, they even got the ‘have a beer with him’ joke in there.
El Cid
If leading elected Republicans not on the campaign trail repeatedly blame Democrats and liberal policies for the problems of the nation, no matter how fictional the argument may be, they’re considered by the political consultancy class and the punditariat to be strongly defending their party’s interest and standing up for good old fashioned American values.
If leading elected Democrats not on the campaign trail repeatedly blame Republicans and conservative policies for the problems of the nation, no matter how accurate the argument may be, they’re derided as ideologically raving ultra-liberal fringe nation-dividing extremists who may doom the nation’s agenda not just by the punditariat and consultancy class but also by the leadership of their own party.
akaoni
I think it boils down to the fact that we are still basically tribal creatures in a very “hard-wired” kind of way. We instinctively think positively about individuals who display characteristics of our tribe. I think that’s one of the reasons Obama gets so much trouble from both the right and the left.
From the right, we’ve seen the obvious tribal thinking from the start with the nonsensical obsession with birth certificates, the Pledge of Allegiance and over the top rhetoric about just about anything that the faithful lap up.
From the left it’s a bit less subtle but Obama it’s still pretty obvious. Whether it’s the PUMAs or others on the left who have quickly abandoned Obama, we see him given much less leeway than they would have with Clinton.
Although race is certainly a factor in this, I don’t think it is race alone that is responsible for the hostility we see for Obama, it’s much more about the in-group/out-group way in which humans instinctively view people.
I think this also explains blame and job performance question to some extent. Once again, it’s easier to blame and scapegoat those outside one’s group.
The Republic of Stupidity
I know this is O/T, but how about a thread about THIS little bit of nastiness?
BTW… Out of the Past is a fantastic film… one of the best film noirs…
Virginia Huston: She can’t be all bad. No one is.
Mitchum: Well, she comes the closest.
Linkmeister
@DougJ: Hey! It was Budweiser!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Joe Max:
“
A nice thought, except the guys with the pin are still running around trying to poke a hole in the hose, and The Guardians of Teh Hose keep telling us their poking is a valid method of hose maintenance.
NR
It’s hard for me to work up too much sympathy for Obama on this score considering that he and his surrogates have been saying “We need to look forward and not backward” pretty much nonstop for the past year when it comes to stuff like torture, etc.
Beeb
@b-psycho: If that were the test, Kucinich would have won. :>)
mcd410x
Why do we ask people who could never figure the cube root of 8 if the stimulus worked?
The world is upside-down.
wiley
I think it’s the tribalism of the simple-minded who are ignorant about how the government actually works. They want someone to represent them like a mini-me, and are fixated on attitudes, emotional platitudes, and props.
John S.
Did you see the Q and A with Obama yesterday?
Even after explaining to them that it is impossible to provide every American with health insurance and not raise taxes or government spending, they still didn’t get it. Because somehow, they actually believe the nonsensical bullshit they spout to their base and run in their ads, even though they should know better. Most of their other ideas fail miserably when put into practice, not that you could tell from how they still wax poetic about them. Tax cuts fix everything, even though this has proven to be false over and over again.
Republican politics are firmly rooted in unreality, and despite all the lip service they pay to personal responsibility, they absolutely despise it.
Violet
Failing upwards.
There are a lot of CEOs out there who did a terrible job running their companies. They left with big payouts, then a little while later surfaced to head another company, often in a different industry.
Letting idiots who have failed run things is not isolated to politics.
gypsy howell
Becuase people are under the (mistaken) impression that we elect these people to represent us, ergo should be just like us, and ergo, we should like.
Dumb, but true I think.
Mike E
@MikeJ:
As the fat Michael Moore likes to say, Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had. Plus, his coopting the conservative agenda made their heads ‘splode, a crime punishable by impeachment. Love the Big Dog’s mad skillz, but hate the DINO movement he spawned.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Violet:
Then they run for Senate, and get a surprisingly favorable reception by the electorate, based on the notion that they “know how to meet a payroll”, whatever the hell that means.
John S.
I voted for him.
I still think that Obama would be the coolest head to smoke with. Me and the rest of the young kids really enjoy the way he gets down verbally.
Yutsano
@Violet: Two names: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Lord help California.
El Cid
In the 1970s, conservative ideologues began organizing with the super-rich, including a number of billionaires, in order to launch a new wave of right wing ideological themes and media, because they aimed to systematically discredit the thinking of their opponents. And they fully intended this ideological war to last for decades, and generations.
And on the liberal side, we often wonder why people spending so much time arguing instead of coming together to ‘get stuff done’ with people whose very raison d’etre is to defeat you, your policies, and every last shred of your ideas.
ajr22
At this point I have given up trying to understand why the republicans do anything. They are off in another world. While we consider it a fact Bush built up massive debt, in their minds it is really all Obama’s fault. It’s hard to understand how this is possible, I have come to just blame Fox and the rest of the conservative media. Their media is always lying to them and they must be to dumb or brainwashed to understand what a fact is. Unless it’s pro conservative it’s not fact.
ps. I would love to have a beer with obama, and get some good chi town sports talk in.
El Cid
Well…
Those that do know don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. They just need to get in office and do the things they want. They can lie and pretend shit can work that can’t and get their way for a few years in some additional degree of pillaging and deregulating and tearing down any shred of liberal governance, and they don’t care if this causes massive problems down the road or if every now and then liberals are hired to clean up their messes.
rootless_e
@NR: Simple realism. The federal courts are far more infested with federalists than they were 20 years ago when judges sabotaged the iran-contra investigation. Wasting time pleading with Judge Sentelle or worse would be a fools errand. “Progressives” really have a naive idea of how well the system works.
b-psycho
On a serious note: the beer test is just an unsophisticated way of saying “I want someone like ME in charge”. This is because people (reasonably) figure that the further removed someone is from their experiences the more likely they are to react to their needs with “…fuck should I care for?”
It’s Othercism, as I’ve referred to it. The light form is the rejection of candidates on Beer Test grounds; the heavy form is, well, just look at most of the tea party types.
Mike E
@El Cid:
This. Is. Why. I’m. Not. Registered. ‘D’. Anymore. Also.
gex
And why is Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter” quote not being blasted loudly everywhere as the Republicans claim the mantle of fiscal discipline now?
NR
@rootless_e: We can’t succeed, so let’s not even try. Brilliant. With that attitude, we can get nothing done faster than ever before!
Violet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yep. Nevermind that they met the payroll in a fancy hotel during their multi-year affair.
@Yutsano:
Absolutely. But they don’t all go into politics. The failed CEOs show up to run other companies. Maybe there’s some unofficial rule where you have to ruin more than one company before being allowed to run for Senate.
El Cid
@gex: Because the only people in the position to do it thinks it’s rude and not bipartisan to emphasize this when you don’t absolutely have to.
rootless_e
@NR: There are a lot of fronts in the war – I’ve never understood the appeal of charging towards defeat when there are better targets.
MikeJ
@Mike E:
I never said he was perfect, just a damned sight better than Reagan. And I love using Clinton’s fiscal restraint to torture wingnuts.
Silver
The whole beer thing cracks me up too.
Keep in mind, conventional wisdom says that one of the reasons George W. Bush beat John Kerry is a lot of voters thought they’d rather have a beer with Bush.
Think about that for a second: Americans are so retarded that they’d rather be drinking with a ignoramus alcoholic.
J. Michael Neal
I suspect that a lot of people do choose the people they do business with based upon whether they’d like to have a beer with. It’s less true with surgeons specifically, since we rarely sort through them when we are looking at going under the knife, but it’s definitely true of GPs. It’s true of lawyers, where people talk about choosing one because they “connect” with him. And so on.
The problem is that it’s impossible for us to really evaluate people in most professions outside our own. Those of us who follow politics intently can make an informed judgment. For the majority of people, who don’t follow politics much at all, there isn’t any way to sort through the competing claims about competence. The *only* things they have to go on are broad ideological agreements and perceived personality. That’s it. They choose based upon who they want to have a beer with because it’s the only criterion on which they can competently make a distinction.
Before you laugh, I’m sure you do the same thing on a regular basis. For pretty much everyone here, politics is probably not a field where this is a big issue, but I’ll bet that almost all of you have others where it’s the way you operate.
TR
True. What’s also important to remember is that Reagan never once submitted a balanced budget to Congress. Never.
Mike E
@MikeJ:
Me too, I love telling the crunchies how superior to Reagan he is. Again, love to see heads ‘splode but I’d much rather bludgeon them with a sock full o’ manure, and I’m dying here waiting for Dems to fight these sick bastards.
El Cid
@MikeJ: Yeah, it’s weird, it’s two completely different discussions. Overall I didn’t like Clinton’s leadership.
But when you compare him to the Republican opposition, it’s like discussing whether you’d prefer your company run by a competent boss who would enact some policies you know would be harmful but otherwise was quite competent, or if it should be run by an angry drunken caveman with a stone axe who is hallucinating that your fellow employees are wasps trying to sting him.
General Winfield Stuck
@rootless_e: Never hear of the prog saying of The Thrill of defeat and the Agony of Victory. It’s right there in activist manual Mr. Obot.
DougJ
They choose based upon who they want to have a beer with because it’s the only criterion on which they can competently make a distinction.
I see your point, but I’m not sure I buy it. In the debates, for example, you had one guy speaking fluently (if vaguely) about actual issues while another screamed “bear DNA” and addressed his answers to a pretend plumber he met earlier in the day.
Bender
Obama is grateful that you think only Republicans should be elected based on your assessment of their past job performance. COUGHaltgeldgardensCOUGH!
El Cid
@DougJ: YOU TELL TONY BLAIR! YOU TELL TONY BLAIR! AND YOU FORGOT POLAND!
Comrade Dread
Most people don’t follow politics. They don’t have the time or make the time between family, work, and trying to stay afloat. What politics they do hear about, they get in 15-30 minutes snips of news at night, or the 1-2 hours of talk radio they listen to in the car.
Hence, the discussion of the issues is very slim, and it boils down to ‘who do I relate to better?’ or ‘Who seems more authentic (i.e. honest) to me?’ which gets further watered down into ‘Who would I rather have a beer with?’ cause real authentic Americans drink beer, not this highbrow liberal wine s***.
rootless_e
@General Winfield Stuck: They do love losing – it smells authentic to them.
DougJ
altgeldgardens
What is that?
Ailuridae
@El Cid:
I don’t think the right-wing think tanks were intended to discredit the opposition as much as they were to muddy the waters and diminish the power of expertise. This was really telling during the stimulus debate where on the side arguing in favor of the stimulus you every economist of any worth in the world. Arguing against them you had
1) wingnut welfare types at the Heritage foundation and the ilk
2) George Mason university economists. George Mason is basically a wingnut welfare University
3) Chicago School guys
The facts were overwhelmingly in the pro-stimulus camp. But having this echo chamber allowed the debate to move from “Are the president’s proposals too modest to address this issue?” between 10 or 15 reputable economistswhere it should have been to “Should we call this bill porkulus?” in a matter of weeks with the clowns in the second camp provided intellectual heft to the argument of Michelle malkin and Jonah Goldberg and McMegan.
To Doug’s original point:
One of the big things I’ve never gotten about politics is why it matters who you’d like to have a beer with. No one chooses their surgeon on the basis of whether or not they’d like to have a beer with him, why would they do it with prospective leaders of the free world?
Honestly its because journalists, especially political journalists are social outcasts who want to be seen as the cool kids. Mike Allen for instance, drips of this. I knew Ana Marie Cox at U of C and while most of us in our overlapping social circles were primarily concerned with academics she was hyper concerned with social dynamics and people’s perception of whether she was hip enough or cool enough. So when they find someone who validates that like Bush or McCain they give him a really long leash.
DougJ
I knew Ana Marie Cox at U of C and while most of us in our overlapping social circles were primarily concerned with academics she was hyper concerned with social dynamics and people’s perception of whether she was hip enough or cool enough.
No!
I refuse to believe this.
gnomedad
Voters vote for people whom they imagine to be just like them, only with fame and power. Thus they vote for someone “they’d like to have a beer with”. You don’t use these criteria for a surgeon, because the most important thing a surgeon needs is skill; you’d die if your surgeon weren’t skillful. Politicians are not imagined to need skill, we only want to feel they they will use their power in our interest. I also want to feel that that could easily be me up there. If a pol is too smart or too different, that fantasy is spoiled. Being rich is cool, though, because we’d all like to be rich.
Regarding blame, assigning blame is only a bad idea when Republicans are to blame. SATSQ.
Chad N Freude
The have-beer-with criterion has been ingrained in the American character from the beginning. Mrs. Frances Trollope (the mother of Anthony Trollope) wrote about this in her priceless “Domestic Manners of the Americans”
The book really is priceless; it’s available from Project Gutenberg. The book was written in 1832. I think it should be taught in every US History class.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DougJ:
Can I make that LOL laffy face here? :lol: NPR had AMC and Sam Seder on to discuss the demise of Air American (IIRC they don’t much care for one another). AMC kept saying “Liberals have MSNBC and the Daily Show! They don’t need AAR!” She worked there for an hour and a half after everyone good had left.
John S.
True.
But that’s why there are so many stoners that do, and are here on Balloon Juice. Generally speaking, if you have time for a spliff, you have time to think about exactly what the fuck is going on with America. And also to wonder about the awesome coincidence of what dog spells backwards.
Chad N Freude
An afterthought: Have a beer with someone who you want to make hard decisions that can’t be made by the people you have a beer with. We are a nation of cognitive dissonance.
Chad N Freude
@John S.:
I’ve never seen a dog that could spell forward or backwards.
Cat Lady
Interesting it was the audience that thought Obama won the debates and the media pundits who thought the bear DNA guy did. The media never wants to play the “blame game” either. Let’s not forget Obama did get elected in a landslide.
Chad N Freude
@Cat Lady: Media Rule: Grimacing on camera wins more points than speaking cogently.
Cat Lady
@Chad N Freude:
Looking for Mr. Puddles while your opponent is speaking scores well too. (Did all that really happen?)
Roseanne Rosanna-danna
DougJ:
You sure ask a lot of questions, Mr. Feder.
Tax Analyst
b-psycho:
demo woman
@Cat Lady: Let’s not forget McCain wandering around the stage looking for Mr. Puddles..
Balconesfault
Different issue, same issue.
Just saw CBS interviewing Peter King about the new Obama waffling over whether or not to hold the trial in New York.
And the interviewer asked King, seemingly with a straight face “how do you think this issue has been handled from the start”?
Implicit in that question, it seems to me, is the presumption that there is anything Obama could do with respect to national security besides resign that would make Peter King happy.
And of course that presumption is as insane as King.
gnomedad
@Tax Analyst:
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit voting.
J. Michael Neal
@Cat Lady: Note also that Obama beat DNA Guy pretty handily. I think that most people came to the conclusion that they’d rather have a beer with the black law professor then the angry old white guy.
More puzzling to Democrats and lefty types was the success Bush II had in this regard. Frankly, I don’t have trouble seeing it. Those of us who already know policy wanted to sit down with Gore, but his whole attitude toward Bush dripped with (deserved) contempt, and that didn’t play well. While the message Gore was trying to send was that Bush was a lying moron, what got received was that anyone who didn’t understand policy was an idiot, rather than just someone who wasn’t paying attention. I think that it’s a lesson that Gore learned, but it was pretty obvious to me why his campaign didn’t play well.
Kerry came across as a spineless, boring, elitist. I voted for the guy, but I really am not that interested in having a beer with him. I can also see why someone that only tuned in once the campaign was underway didn’t like him.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Bender:
Nice straw man there…
It would appear from your last comment that you have something stuck in your throat… one is reluctant to wonder what it could be…
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
It matters to the journos who are covering them because they will in fact be having beers with them from time to time. It doesn’t matter to the rest of us.
Chat Noir
@DougJ: Obama did community organizing there. I believe it was one of the housing projects in Chicago. He talked about it in “Dreams From My Father.”
Tax Analyst
gnomedad:
@Tax Analyst:
One of these days I want someone to ask people which candidate in an election they’d like to
smoke a jointsniff glue with.Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit voting.
Tax Analyst
fixt.
Chad N Freude
@Cat Lady:
In Jon Stewart’s alternate reality. Daily Show video, relevant bit at about 7:30 into the clip.
demo woman
@Chad N Freude: I just found that clip and watched it again. That was one of my all time Daily Show favorites.
Chad N Freude
Somewhat OT, but relevant:
Republican Leaders Forming New Political Group.
Good news for John McCain.
Phoebe
@Joe Max: Did he say that while holding a pin?
The two are not mutually exclusive. And figuring out what caused something is essential to preventing it happening again. In this case all the “what” is going to have names attached to it. Lots of names of people who are or were in office, and it seems like they care exclusively about keeping their names hidden than they do about preventing future problems. Surprise surprise.
Linkmeister
@Chad N Freude: Dollars to donuts there will be some affiliation with that fundamentalist outfit Jeff Sharlet writes about in his book The Family.
I’m just finishing it, and it’s quite a story. All the interviews he’s done with Terry Gross and Rachel Maddow have focused on current connections between Congressfolk and the group, but Sharlet traces the roots of its history back to a preacher in Northhampton, Mass in the late 1700s. It’s slow to start, but then it grabs your attention.
Bobby Thomson
Another popular strategy during Democratic administrations is to make the most hypocritical arguments imaginable, then (correctly) state that pointing out the hypocrisy is an example of a “tu coque” fallacy. Which it is. “You did it first” doesn’t mean that “it” is a good thing. However, political argument is not just about the truth or accuracy of the content of statements, but the credibility of the person making them. So, to the extent that someone did “it” even worse, or takes the position that “it” is bad only on a selective basis, that is highly relevant. In the end, representative democracy is a series of choices between people, some of whom are hypocritical, lying sacks, and not a choice between platonic ideals.
Nellcote
@Chad N Freude:
So that Cantor ‘n Jeb pizza parlor tour didn’t work out?
JackieBinAZ
Al Franken!
Rob
Amen!
I could not agree more. There should be standard sets of metrics we measure each politician with on an ongoing basis and they should be posted on the web using the same criteria over time for easy public consumption.
And I wish when politicians spoke, they would use graphs and charts more often so we could see the statistics they are quoting….Ross Perot style. Any decent executive does that so why don’t the people demand this from politicians.
Rob
Newmericans.com
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ:
Here, let me explain it to you in wingnut
Does it make sense now?
DougJ
Does it make sense now?
Yes, thanks.
Panurge
@ajr22:
The reason Republicans do anything is to keep the hippies from taking over. Maybe the country is in the toilet, but if that means the hippies won’t take over now (partly due to other liberals’ willingness to punch them as well), well, it was all worth it, because NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE.
The counterculture thought it “lost” because they didn’t get their pony IMMEDIATELY and because there was a backlash, but what they don’t understand is that (1) they got a bit of it, which is how it works, and (2) they did succeed in killing the other side’s pony. They’ve been trying to resurrect their pony for the last thirty years, with what looks like a lot of success (and again, lots of help from liberals), but it can never really be the same. (Though raising a new generation that doesn’t know the difference sure helps.)
Ian
@Bobby Thomson:
The correct way of phrasing that is choosing between a douche and a turd sandwich
sparky
@Chad N Freude: exactly.
and here, of course, the fan blather for Obama is the D inverse of Rs liking Bush. go team?
in any case, i think the premise is incorrect. politics is not rational. in a sense you could argue that it is irrational to think it would be rational.
Hob
@John S.:
I would avoid doing that, just because it’s hard for me to not embarrass myself around gorgeous-looking people when I’m high. If I tried to kiss him, I’m sure he’d just politely sidestep it and be cool about it. But then I’d try to kiss his wife and that might not go so well.