Got No Game
When making a business decision,
the only color that matters is green
--He Got Game (1998)
The awful thing about life is this:
Everybody has their reasons.
--The Rules of the Game (1939)
I've got a brand new pair of roller skates
You've got a brand new key
--Brand New Key, Melanie Safka
_________________
Another general subjective reaction to the new millennia of U.S. government and its leadership, that is, the "We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For" ®. the only color that matters is green
--He Got Game (1998)
The awful thing about life is this:
Everybody has their reasons.
--The Rules of the Game (1939)
I've got a brand new pair of roller skates
You've got a brand new key
--Brand New Key, Melanie Safka
_________________
In 2000, and again in 2008, we The People elected presidents that were required to have training wheels. Both Cheney and Biden were sold as the solid base of experience and knowledge that would keep the younger, inexperienced presidents on the Right Track.
Yup, they were the training wheels alright, but the bike of state still looks wobbly. It is common to hear that Obama is young and inexperienced, but that he will mature and grow while in office. Ditto George Bush, and he never did achieve statesman stature.
Why do we elect presidents expecting them to grow into the job? This is not an on-the-job type of position. This is a job with nuclear capability.
It escapes our reason as to why the American people would elect Bush over Al Gore, who was light years ahead of Bush in experience, brains and rationality. It seems the media, which delivers the viewer 5-second cutaways, has made the public happy with the quickest snippet. Who looked best in the 5 second shot: exerciser Bush in his cowboy boots, or rigid, tubby Gore. No battle there, sadly.
Americans must begin electing mature (not necessarily aged) intelligent and government-savvy leaders. A president must be on top of his game first day out.
Since '00 the score hasn't moved.
posted by rangeragainstwar at 8:00 AM
10 Comments:
Well, Ranger,
Substance will always be the smart homely, unpretentious, mousey haired girl at home on a Friday night, while Image will always be the hot platinum blonde, with the dancers body, going commando in a skimpy dress up on the raised dance dais at the club.
That Ranger, is American politics, and our fellow countrymen, and sometimes ourselves, will be distracted by the blonde.
The object I suppose is to notice, admire, and then get our minds back up into the head on our shoulders before we decide on whom we want to be married too.
I will give this guy more time (more slack) for a variety of reasons:
He paid dues as community organizer, and state level legislator, without sleaze attachment
His alternatives in o8:
Richardson, under investigation
Dodd, in the shithouse for taking favorable Countrywise mortgage/favor.
Biden, same motormouth, with head and ass unwired, Plus, as Col Lang testifies, Totally in the Bag for the Israelis,
Hillary: similar hack personnel as Bill, (Ross, Holbrooke, Rahmie, and of course Summers/Rubin for the recapitalization of Goldmann-Sachs.
maybe the future will bring us better tidings. seize the banks and separate the good institutions from the bad. and switch some of the holdings.
Time will tell.
"without sleaze attachment":
Tony Rezko, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright...
Just sayin'...
I'd say that when the choice is between a bunch of proven losers and an untested hopeful..?
What was it that Lincoln said about Grant? Sure, he had a rep as a drunk but given that the upright and sober MacClellans and Burnsides had done such a fuckin' great job...
I'm inclined to wait and see, too, if for no other reason than the memory that the system barfed up two less than ideal choices in 2008 but the OTHER choice was "bomb bomb bomb Iran" Crash McCain and Turkey Killer Palin, and I'd be willing to take Gary Hart before those idiots...
just as it is impossible to rise beyond looey without learning which asses to kiss, which asses to kick, and which asses to give a big wide bearth to, it's impossible to get where obama got without having to play some drives in the mud.
we'll see is all i gots to say. it might be that the flocks of black swans lurking just over the horizon will clog our engines and we'll call it a miracle to simply make the hudson after takeoff.
there really isn't any prep available for the job of president. eisenhower knew the political end of the military as well as any commander of the last two centuries. he didn't love that part of the gig like he loved strategic and tactical planning, but he knew he had to do it.
he said several times that dealing with the likes of bradley, clarke, patton, montgomery and degaulle could not prepare him for the byzantine plottings and back stabbing of washington.
there's no prospect league in the world that will prepare you for the job of president. anymore than three seasons of triple aaa will prepare you to face sabathia.
Lisa:
Farrakhan? he's nuts, not taken seriously, is not in the cabinet, and Obama is not a Muslim
Ayers??third rate would be Weatherman (the kind that usually IED'ed themselves in brownstones}? went to Jail to serve his time.
Rezko, yes, but a local sleazebag, ergo not as filthy rich and free with his money as are the national level folks.
Pastor Wright: par for the course. Michelle Norris from NPR said that half of the black churches, she ever attended had pastors as fiery as that. Starting with Watts, Newark, Detroit, DC, etc. You could find millions of blacks who thought exactly that. The ones in the military were not just runnin' at the mouth: Murders, drugs, fraggings, MP's using dogs and shotguns to close enlisted clubs (on a regular basis). When I say using dogs and shotguns I mean in the most activist methods (Think Edwin Pettus Bridge).
During the MLK riots in DC, you had 50 cal positions set up adjacent to Congressional buildings.
When I heard the speeches on you tube, it was nothing I had not already heard in the barracks nor seen in poster form. Hell, today, I agree with most of it. The Empire that steps on all the furin' little peoples, plus the local ones as well.
I come from a different Church though. more like HIS
Fasteddiez,
Surely Ayers is an ineffective fool, but he is an unrepentant one and yet accepted by the system.
Farrakhan is as wicked and nuts as they come, but for many (Obama?), he is not marginalized. Of Rezko nothing more needs be said.
Wright preaches to the masses, sure. Lots of marginalized groups have reason to hate, but hatred doesn't uplift you or those around you.
But we were told there would be a "New Day". Hope. In order to have that paradigm shift, one needs to ditch all this bloody profiteering, hate-spewing, internecine trench warfare.
To all: No doubt, we must observe and see. I wish neither my president nor my country ill.
(I haven't checked out the link you sent, yet.)
Lisa:
Who is the system? Upper west side manhattanites and their big city equivalents. Ayers is and was an insect. That he did good works for Obama in Chicago, Hurray.
Look at Milhous' skeletons Liddy, the burglars, insects, all. They all did their time. They are all way more harmless than Phill Gramm, friend of McCain, friend of Rubin, Bill Clinton.....friends in the scence that they deregulated things, and paved the way for the biggest highway robbery of all.
We may all be paupers before long because of it.
Just saying...they're minor leaguers, and Wright scares the whiteys who have never heard this uppity talk. Wright (who was a Navy Corpsman) was in the OR during one of LBJ's surgeries....I suppose he could have done him in...snatch the scalpel and all.
The link is from one of my favorite celluloid messengers. He speaks to a larger audience through his medium. I used to belong to the Church of Life is too short. I now belong to the church of his punch line. and Yea, though I may walk throughout the valleys of bad MoFos', in the future, I will never steer away from this new faith.
"there's no prospect league in the world that will prepare you for the job of president. anymore than three seasons of triple aaa will prepare you to face sabathia."
Right on, MB. Baseball history is littered with the corpses of guys who tore up the minors, but never made it in the show. Then you have Feller and Koufax. Never spent a day in the minors, but both are in the Hall of Fame.
The presidency is always OJT. Presidents are always learning and they grow into the job. The great ones grow more and learn more. I voted for Obama because I viewed him as the lesser of two evils, but also because he had room to grow and would admit that. McCain, OTOH, had been there, done that, and knew everything. If you didn't believe it, he'd yell at you long enough to convince you. McCain is proof positive that living longer doesn't necessarily give you anything more than liver spots, thinning hair and dyspepsia. McCain is an asshole who's never learned a thing in his life.
I don't regret my vote for Obama. Maybe someday. But not now. When I think of how things would be right now had McCain been elected, I shudder. Yeah, it's bad now, and I have some problems with how Obama is going about things, but it actually could be a lot worse.
The POTUS is not the source of power but merely its conduit, and that's how its been for quite some time now. The people making the important and long term decisions are faceless to us, operating in circles we don't even know exist. Obama or McCain, same dog, different head.
Elections are a spectacle put on every few years to maintain the illusion that the country's people are in control, ultimately deciding on which way the cookie crumbles. Reality however is that the old theme of divide and conquer is used to perfection, no matter which candidate wins on the day, the powers to be will be enthralled to see their asset voted in.
[...] People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. [...]
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