I listened to the latest debate and came away with two observations:
- Each of the candidates–if elected President–will add $2 Trillion plus to the National debt as their ante for the first year in office. Each will make George W. Bush look like a <s>spendthrift</s> a careful steward of the budget. (fixed for clarity)
- Each of the candidates (with the possible exception of Ron Paul)–if elected President–will have us in at least two more Wars before 2014.
What did you notice?
Cheers
opie jeanne
(spendthrift is one word. you might want to change it)
jl
Definition of SPENDTHRIFT
: a person who spends improvidently or wastefully
From Merriam Webster online. Is that what you meant?
gnomedad
Well, a strong America prevents war, and you have to fight wars to prevent wars. Or something.
Violet
Rick Santorum’s nose doesn’t line up with his mouth. It’s weird looking.
John Hutsman looks and sounds like a Dad who has been infinitely patient, but is now tired and somewhat exasperated with the kids’ nonsense. He looks like he doesn’t want to be there but has to because, well, it’s his responsibility.
Megyn Kelly has bad skin.
Angela
@Violet: Pretty much what Violet said. Oh and they are all scary.
namekarB
I came away thinking if Huntsman were President we might be okay. I’d still vote for Obama but I wouldn’t be in sheer panic if Huntsman won the election. Loved his jabs at Wall Street.
Linda Featheringill
It sounds to me like they all think that Obama would be easy to beat. Hmmmmm.
burnspbesq
@namekarB:
You just succinctly explained why Huntsman has no shot.
Sanity doesn’t play well with the Republican base.
Hunter Gathers
@namekarB:
If you think a guy who will eliminate all taxes on investment will actually do a fucking thing to reign in Wall Street, I have a very large bag of magic beans and a bridge I’d like to sell you.
opie jeanne
I didn’t watch the debate. I have been lucky to miss every single one of them for some reason or other, but I’m very glad to read the essays and comments that you all post here.
Jim C.
I noticed that, looking at things from Republican eyes, Newt came away looking pretty damn acceptable as a “Not Romney” alternative.
With the exception of Bachmann, who even Republicans, god bless them, know is completely crazy despite how much they love her, nobody else really managed to lay a glove on him.
Mittster pivoted too quickly into general election mode assuming that the establishment had, FINALLY, backed his candidacy and didn’t really go after Newt.
For the Republican establishment, as the last debate before the Iowa caucuses, this was incredibly dangerous. I think the really clear winner tonight was Barack Obama given that Newt was able to portray himself as reasonable, not “zany” and, even if a little liberal with the truth, avoid serious damage.
Romney misplayed this badly IMO.
R Johnston
We’ll only have one more war under a President Paul, but that’s largely because civil wars can crowd out other war opportunities. The rest of the Republicans would be horrible, but Paul would assure rapid and total economic collapse.
Three months into a Paul Presidency and we’re all Detroit.
Veritas
HALPERIN:
Romney: A-
BACHMANN: B
SANTORUM: B
Gingrich: B-
Paul: B-
HUNTSMAN: C-
PERRY: C-
Mike in NC
In late 2008, The Atlantic had a cover story on John Fucking McCain called “Why War Is His Answer”, which is pretty much the GOP/neo-con blueprint for American dominance anywhere in the world, costs be damned.
These mendacious people create their own “reality”, but manage to avoid the actual outcome since it doesn’t affect them personally.
Chris T.
@namekarB: Huntsman is an old-school Republican: he only wants to make things a tiny bit worse, instead of a whole lot worse.
FlipYrWhig
@namekarB: The Huntsman family has a billion-dollar fortune and a lavish ziggurat at The Wharton School known not affectionately as “the Death Star.” A less believable crusader against Wall Street I can scarcely imagine.
John Weiss
I watched the first debate. I decided to skip the rest of them. Life’s too short.
Ruckus
@namekarB:
Huntsman only looks semi-sane by comparison. And he may be. Semi-sane. I want my president to have to be able to walk over a slightly higher bar, while barely picking up his feet. If any of these clowns(and that is highly disrespectful of actual clowns) becomes president, the last 64 years of republican bullshit will culminate in the end of the republic. It’s not that any one of them would be a bad president, they are all such horrible people that they will decimate this country. Any one of them.
burnspbesq
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s worth remembering that in 1933, the conventional wisdom about Joe Kennedy was approximately equal to what you are saying about Huntsman.
People are full of surprises.
Triassic Sands
The same thing I always notice when I see these clowns:
Romney is a phony.
Perry is dumb as a rock.
Bachmann is crazy.
Santorum is sickening.
Paul is a kook.
Gingrich is an egotistical ass.
And Huntsman, because he willingly identifies as a Republican, must also be classified a lunatic and has to be considered just as dangerous as the rest of these clowns. Would he really veto any legislation sent to him by a Republican House and a Republican Senate? I doubt it. The question isn’t “Would he sign a pledge never to raise taxes?,” but would he veto any bill sent to his desk that made the Bush tax cuts permanent? And would he ever propose legislation to raise taxes on only the wealthiest Americans? Huntsman’s rhetoric often sounds better than that of the other candidate-bozos. But would a Huntsman presidency save our safety net? I don’t think so.
What else did I notice?
None of these freaks should be allowed anywhere near the White House. Ever.
Steamboater
Yes, these GOP’ers are slugs but so are the democrats who voted for a bill that allows for the detention of even Americans based on suspicions alone and for as long as they like, a terrorist attack on our constitution. Our great constitutional scholar of a president just flipped-flopped and announced he will sign the bill too. Not one of them is worth voting for. How anyone can defend this and still be an apologist for Obama and this administration and those democrats who allowed this happen requires a spin not even they can come up with.
So many Americans died in WWII to preserve and protect our constitution and the freedoms guaranteed by it. This one act of signing this disgrace into law spits on their graves. The height of hypocrisy is for democrats and Obama to denounce laws about illegals and detaining them based on suspicions alone and then to support this bill. The enemy is among us folks but not the foreigner or American who faces Mecca when they pray, but in the white house and among our red, white and blue representatives.
chopper
@Hunter Gathers:
that’s the brilliant thing about this race. people actually think huntsman is a normal, middle-of-the-road candidate. do you have any idea how crazy-ape bonkers the rest of the field has to be to have that effect?
Boots Day
My favorite part was when Santorum talked of the need to go to war with Iran, which segued directly into Romney warning us that Obama was risking a war with Iran. I wonder how many viewers noticed that these two positions are incompatible.
sherparick
I thought about suggesting we call this whole “Independence” thing off since it is obvoiusly not working out and George III was right, we can’t govern ourselves. But then when I look at the Cameron Government in the U.K. and the Hayes Government in Canada, I realize basically the whole governing classes have gone loco and think nothing is wrong with putting tens of millions of people out of work for a decade as long as we can keep inflation at 2% and give tax cuts to rich people. The Rentiers rule.
mclaren
@Ruckus:
Too late, buckaroo. Now that Barack Obama has ordered the assassination of American citizens without even charging them with a crime and has signed off on the kidnapping and torture of U.S. citizens in secret prisons with no hope of release or even seeing a lawyer, the republic, she done ended a while ago.
These are not the kinds of things that go on in a republic operating under the rule of law. These are the kinds of things that go on in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the Burmese dictatorship, or North Korea.
Barack Obama hasn’t yet ordered the extrajudicial murder of more than one U.S. citizen. So we’re not yet at the point of the killing fields with millions of people getting marched into the wilderness and shot in the head.
Obama seems like a nice guy. He’s eloquent. He gives great speeches extolling the values of liberty and democracy and an open society.
Yet the things Barack Obama is now doing are no different, on a much smaller scale, than the extrajudicial murders ordered by Stalin to liquidate his own citizens without a trial or even charges, or the Great Leap Forward ordered by Mao when Chinese citizens were murdered by their own country simply for saying and thinking the wrong things.
Is Obama another Stalin or Mao? No, of course not. Obama hasn’t ordered the mass murder of U.S. citizens. He has merely ordered the assassination of one U.S. citizen.
That ends the rule of law in America and wipes out democracy. When the president can order American citizens murdered without a trial and without charges, what can’t he do?
We no longer have a republic, we’ve got a lawless police state run by secret star chamber courts and enforced by muggers with badges and masked killers who murder U.S. citizens on mere suspicion, without accountability.
You can call such a state a lotta things, but it ain’t a republic, buckaroos.
As for the killing fields and the mass murders…wait a while. The killing starts small. A few citizens murdered here, a few of your own neighbors assassinated on suspicion there…then a few more. And a few more. And after a few years roll by, the extrajudicial murders and “targeted killings” of your own countrymen stop being exceptional and start to become routine. Pretty soon guys with official badges and impressive uniforms start shooting people in the head on the streets for speaking out against the regime or posting the wrong comments on political blogs, and that’s really unusual and people get upset about it, just the way it was once really unusual for American citizens to get kidnapped and tortured and then assassinated without even being accused of committing a crime.
But after a while, people get used to Internal Security agents walking up to ordinary citizens on the street and shooting ’em in the head for “suspected subversion.” People just look away. And it becomes routine.
And at that point, the battalions of internal security police start rounding up U.S. citizens en masse and herding ’em into interment centers from which no one returns alive. And at first that’s shocking, and people are upset about it. But eventually that, too, becomes routine.
This is the way history shows the process happening. It always starts small. A few targeted killing here. A kidnapping of one of your own citizens by your own government there. Extraordinary rendition to secret torture chambers, cells without numbers and prisoners without names. Only a few…at first.
Then more and more. What was unusual at first soon becomes routine. And the cancer grows.
Eventually, you’ve got millions of Disappeared Ones. People walking by the roadside find mutilated bodies half-buried in ditches. The government says nothing, but rumors begin to spread about the killing fields…
Of course, that can’t happen here. It could never happen here. America is special. We’re immune to that kind of thing. America would never torture its own citizens. America would never preside over the kidnapping of its own citizens and hold them in secret prisons. The American government would never order the murder of one of its own citizens (Anwar AL-Awlaki) without even accusing him of having committed a crime.
The American republic is dead. The constitution is gone. The rule of law has ended. Get ready for Lord Humongous, the ruler of the wasteland, buckaroos. That’s your new president circa 2024.
And two thirds of the commenters here will be yelping “Why are you criticizing Lord Humongous? After all, he never ran as a liberal!“
g
Newt was able to portray himself as reasonable, not “zany”
As long as you think threatening to disband courts because he doesn’t like their decisions is “not zany.”
My jaw dropped to read that Newt actually criticized the courts for “misreading the American people.” It’s not their job to read public opinion, fuckwit. Their job is to read the law!
humbert dinglepencker
What was left of the republic was done away with in 1968.