Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead...
Two bright spots coming out of the pathetic results of Presidential Election '04...
First off... John Ashcroft has resigned as attorney general and, about that, I couldn't be happier. He's a religious lunatic, a man who claims we're completely, totally safe from crime and terrorism now (hence the reason for his resignation); a moron who found it better to go after Tommy Chong for selling glass pipes than to go after real terrorists. He was more concerned with covering up the cold metal boobies of statues in the DOJ offices than with... going after real terrorists. He was deathly afraid of cats and used to self-annoint with Crisco. Lunatic, madman, fool, fucktard.
The man is an insane asshat, and good riddance. I only hope that he doesn't manage to turn his post-AG life into a lucrative speaking circuit gig. And... has anyone ever noticed that he's almost a dead-ringer for The Simpson's Principal Skinner?
The other silver lining is this: since Bush won the election (and with hardly a mandate, by the way, but a bare majority), he's now stuck with cleaning up his own mess, and that may be a good thing in the long run, because no one in the blue states has any hope that he's even capable of the deed. Perhaps 2005 was too early for a Democrat to take office. Perhaps we need four more years of his incompetent, capricious, downright Caligulan rule in order for him to screw this country so far into the ground that people will finally wake up and reject his party and their politics for generations to come. With any luck, we'll have Hilary Clinton and/or Barack Obama on hand to fix it in 2008 and 2012.
Looking back seventy-one years, to FDR's innauguration in March 1933, here's the breakdown. Democrats in office: 39 years, 10 months. Republicans in office, 36 years. So, about equal time. But plot the social, intellectual and artistic history of the US against those same administrations, and you'll find that the boom times tended to come under Democratic administrations. The sole exception is the explosion of the middle class, which happened under Eisenhower -- but he was pretty much a Republican of the John McCain mold, with little in common with the current robber barons in power.
But -- space race? Democrats, JFK & LBJ, with Nixon lucky enough to be president as their programs paid off with a moon walk. Conversely, the space shuttle blew up on Reagan's watch, then not again until Bush Jr. Dotcom boom? Clinton. The success of the youth movement, begun under LBJ, paid off with Nixon's resugnation.
The WPA, TVA, Social Security, Medicare, commercial television, school vaccinations, the GI Bill, etc., etc., etc.: FDR and Truman (although you have to knock points off Truman's score for being the first and only president to engage in nuclear war, allowing McCarthy to get away with it and beginning the Cold War.) AIDS crisis, Reagan. Bad economies: Nixon, Ford, Bush I and Bush II. (And Herbert Hoover, but I didn't include him in the math above.)
Cinema seems immune to this formula. The "good" periods (mid 90s through now, sort of; the 70s; the mid-30s to late 40s) don't match up at all with who was in office.
Music sucks less under Democrats: Clinton, LBJ, FDR and Truman. You can't really blame Carter for Disco, but you sure can blame Ike for the 50s. And you can really blame Reagan for New Wave.
But anyway -- I'd like to hope that this last election was not a revelation of the total stupidity of the typical red state voter. Rather, I'd like to think it was the electorate handing the maniacs in power just enough rope to finally hang themselves.
W, may the shame with which you leave this office make Richard Nixon look like a saint.
First off... John Ashcroft has resigned as attorney general and, about that, I couldn't be happier. He's a religious lunatic, a man who claims we're completely, totally safe from crime and terrorism now (hence the reason for his resignation); a moron who found it better to go after Tommy Chong for selling glass pipes than to go after real terrorists. He was more concerned with covering up the cold metal boobies of statues in the DOJ offices than with... going after real terrorists. He was deathly afraid of cats and used to self-annoint with Crisco. Lunatic, madman, fool, fucktard.
The man is an insane asshat, and good riddance. I only hope that he doesn't manage to turn his post-AG life into a lucrative speaking circuit gig. And... has anyone ever noticed that he's almost a dead-ringer for The Simpson's Principal Skinner?
The other silver lining is this: since Bush won the election (and with hardly a mandate, by the way, but a bare majority), he's now stuck with cleaning up his own mess, and that may be a good thing in the long run, because no one in the blue states has any hope that he's even capable of the deed. Perhaps 2005 was too early for a Democrat to take office. Perhaps we need four more years of his incompetent, capricious, downright Caligulan rule in order for him to screw this country so far into the ground that people will finally wake up and reject his party and their politics for generations to come. With any luck, we'll have Hilary Clinton and/or Barack Obama on hand to fix it in 2008 and 2012.
Looking back seventy-one years, to FDR's innauguration in March 1933, here's the breakdown. Democrats in office: 39 years, 10 months. Republicans in office, 36 years. So, about equal time. But plot the social, intellectual and artistic history of the US against those same administrations, and you'll find that the boom times tended to come under Democratic administrations. The sole exception is the explosion of the middle class, which happened under Eisenhower -- but he was pretty much a Republican of the John McCain mold, with little in common with the current robber barons in power.
But -- space race? Democrats, JFK & LBJ, with Nixon lucky enough to be president as their programs paid off with a moon walk. Conversely, the space shuttle blew up on Reagan's watch, then not again until Bush Jr. Dotcom boom? Clinton. The success of the youth movement, begun under LBJ, paid off with Nixon's resugnation.
The WPA, TVA, Social Security, Medicare, commercial television, school vaccinations, the GI Bill, etc., etc., etc.: FDR and Truman (although you have to knock points off Truman's score for being the first and only president to engage in nuclear war, allowing McCarthy to get away with it and beginning the Cold War.) AIDS crisis, Reagan. Bad economies: Nixon, Ford, Bush I and Bush II. (And Herbert Hoover, but I didn't include him in the math above.)
Cinema seems immune to this formula. The "good" periods (mid 90s through now, sort of; the 70s; the mid-30s to late 40s) don't match up at all with who was in office.
Music sucks less under Democrats: Clinton, LBJ, FDR and Truman. You can't really blame Carter for Disco, but you sure can blame Ike for the 50s. And you can really blame Reagan for New Wave.
But anyway -- I'd like to hope that this last election was not a revelation of the total stupidity of the typical red state voter. Rather, I'd like to think it was the electorate handing the maniacs in power just enough rope to finally hang themselves.
W, may the shame with which you leave this office make Richard Nixon look like a saint.
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