TallMike said:
In my book, the measure of a politician is the extent of the changes he affects during his tenure, not the minutiae of every bow and handshake.
I have to strongly disagree with you on that one, but then the thinking on that very statement is often the difference between a liberal and a conservative. I don't know if you have decided which side of the aisle you fall on, so I'm not commenting on your beliefs directly, just using your statement as a starting point.
The fact is, many conservatives now actually feel that Clinton was one of our best recent presidents (aside from Reagan, of course). Why is that? Because specifically he didn't really do very much. He didn't gum up the works.
A lot of us feel that the government (and by extension, as leader of the government, the president) should be a steward for the people, not an activist to give the people things - whether one group or the other thinks those things are good or not. Republicans are as bad at getting "things" as the Democrats, they just get different stuff, but both sides are almost always wasteful.
In fact, Clinton started off almost as far left as Obama, but when he realized that the people in general didn't want changes that big, he came back toward center and aside from blowjobs, he had a very successful presidency because he was a steward and not an activist.
On the other hand, we now have a president and leaders of congress who are in power specifically to be activists, to make sweeping changes that a majority of the people don't want, at least not how it was presented to the people. They have explicitly stated that they will do whatever it takes, no matter the opposition, to pass the things that THEY think are good for the country.
I'll take a steward over an activist every damned time.
TallMike said:
Discussing past events will do nothing to change them, so instead of engaging in more of this coffee shop revolutionary drivel, why not check out the
docket and give influencing the future a shot. Take your comments and put them in a letter to your congressman. After all, they're called
representatives for a reason.
Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it.
I think it makes a lot of good sense to discuss things like this, but without calling either side names. The idiotic bickering, started in part because Obama made a lot of backroom deals to get something passed that has the most wide-reaching changes to the country since Social Security, has got to stop. Of course, he made those backroom deals EXACTLY OPPOSITE to some of most important (to many of us) campaign promises, such as open-ness of what the government is doing, which after George Bush we really wanted and needed but Obama let us down big time on that. In this regard Obama is just as bad as Bush and it should be talked about - a lot.
And when something like the Tea Party movement starts up, the "side" that is currently in power is doing everything they can to discredit it. It is a movement that is really not related to the Republican party, although it is mostly made up of conservatives (and more fiscal conservatives than social conservatives). It is a movement that is trying honestly to change things by getting enough people with the same sort of ideals to try to change the way Washington works by putting people in office who will listent o the people and not the PACs.
It amazes me some of the distortions and lies that have been told in an attempt to make a legitimate movement look like a bunch of whack jobs. It also cracks me up how a bunch of Republicans have started making noises like real conservatives now that the Tea Party movement has grown - but they are in as much trouble as the Democrats!
Tea Partiers, for the most part, really don't give a rat's ass if the person they are supporting is Democrat or Republican, as long as they show themselves to be fiscally responsible and willing to listen to their consituents. The crap that Obama and the Democrats have pushed down the throats of Americans through backroom dealing is far from fiscally responible or representative.
Our representatives don't "represent" us. It takes large groups of people to put fear into our representatives. It's a shame that we have to threaten them like that (not physically! not with violence!), but really, very few representatives "represent" the desires of their consituency. Had this been the case, the bill that Obama signed into law a couple of weeks ago would never have passed in its current form.
That's all very much worth talking about.
---