The Smiley Smile Message Board

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Yeah....Dubya kept us safe all right. Except for that one day. Can't quite remember which.  ???

Bush 2.0 deserves his fair share of the blame, as do Reagan, Bush 1.0, and Clinton. Lie down with the dogs in the Middle East who are claiming to be freedom fighters and you wake up with fleas in the form of terrorists.

And Rambo.  Don't forget about Rambo.

Kept us safe, Jeb (with an exclamation point!)? 
George and Dick came in swinging their wrecking ball, but "safe" is not the word for how they either kept, or left us.
Ol' Jeb hasn't a chance, not even the most wooden brained voter wants another Bush. 
So, which dogs in the race are folks out here rootin' on and supporting?

No one in either major party seems remotely capable of inspiring any real support from me. In fact, without some serious changes to the political climate in this country, I struggle to imagine any party putting forward a candidate in the future who could get my real support, either. Unfortunately, the so-called "tell it like it is" candidates are even worse jokes than the candidates. Populism seems to attract the lowest common denominators, and this time around that includes a lot of xenophobia. That's no way to "make America great again..."

I guess I'll be investigating the third party candidates. Maybe I'll end up voting for the lesser of the two major evils, maybe I'll "waste my vote" on someone else. Whatever I do, I won't be thrilled, that's for sure.

I'm with the Captain on this one.

There hasn't been a single candidate since i began voting at age 18 who I really liked - other than third party/outsider candidates.   I like Bernie Sanders, however.  Though I wish he had remained Independent and not joined the Dems.  I suppose he thought he had to do that to even have a shot - seeing as third party candidates are pretty much excluded from participating in debates.   Ultimately though, it isn't really about the one candidate - it's the whole system.   Mr. Smith may go to Washington, but he will be swallowed by the corruption in short order.

AB-SO-LUTLEY!

By the end of Bushie's term, the USA economy was in a CRATER, and goldurned effing CRATER.  Essentially a second Depression.  So, no, Chimpie McBushie did NOT keep us safe.

GEEZ

9/11 is the result of failed foreign policy pursued by the U.S. from 1953 onward.

I have to agree with this, though I'd take it at least as far back as the Monroe Doctrine.

Intervening in the Middle East has led to moderate governments (like it or not, Mossadegh, Gaddafi, and Hussein were SECULAR leaders who kept extremists in check) being overthrown by U.S.-backed coups designed to put radicals in power. Failed foreign policy all around. I don't know how much the Monroe Doctrine really had to do with Islamist blowback in the U.S.; I'd argue next to none. The Monroe Doctrine was certainly used in recent history to justify overthrowing leftist governments in South America, but how much blowback has really been seen from that? It worked wonders in Chile.

I think the Monroe Doctrine basically established the approach of US foreign policy still followed to this day by both major parties: when dealing with economically weaker nations, we prefer to ally with dictatorships and extremists who will allow us cheap access to resources, allowing the dictators and oligarchs to gain tremendous personal wealth at the expense of their general population, than with democracies and moderates who will demand a fair price for their resources.

The Middle East has been a quagmire since the Sunni/Shiite schism in the 8th Century. No amount of  foreign engagement will ever change the enmity between those sects. Our addiction to oil has led to our getting involved with regimes that are an anathema to our Constitution and form of government. Nearly every problem we have faced in that region has been relayed to the schism and these two sects of Islam. We need to disengage with this part of the world and mind our own business. We are feeling in the problems our own nation faces. We need to focus on those and let the Islamic world resolve their centuries long dispute.

Our addiction to tropical fruit, coffee, tropical hardwoods, and precious metals led to the same in Latin America. It is not particular to the Middle East.
Europe has had as much intramural warring in the last millennium as the Middle East. That schism between Protestants and Catholics, you know.

Such is the problem with economic protectionism - it inevitably leads to conflict.

Your vote for a third party candidate, you might as well vote Republican. They already control the House and Senate via Citizen's United and gerrymandering.
Because if they get control of the White House,  we will see destruction of the EPA, the start of Social Security being dismantled, huge tax breaks for Corporations and the rich, the death of the middle classs, the end of a woman's right to choose, a right wing corporate slanted Suptreme Court for the next 30 years, unchecked CO2 emissions and unchecked global warming, the death of renewable energy, the end of affordable health care, another Middle East war, the rapid increase of poverty as programs are slashed as the military budget balloons,  more mass shootings,  and our infrastructure conntinuing to crumble.

Apathy is not the answer. If you are not voting "for" someone, atleast vote "against" the dooming of our Nation from the Corporate controlled Republican party!

I completely disagree with that idea, not because it mightn't end up accurate from a practical perspective, but because it perpetuates a corrupt two-party system. If sufficient people acted based on their real beliefs and opinions, they get something closer to what they want (for good or bad). When people hold their noses to vote for the second-stinkiest trash, they get stinky trash.

Gore lost Florida, and the election, because of third party candidate Ralph Nader. So we ended up with a severely slanted right wing Supreme Court and Citizens United. Thus now massive money in politics.  We got the Irag War, a huge swing back into coal and oil, a concerted effort away from renewable energy, corruption of the clean water act, and a collapsed economy, just for starters.  So those that voted for Nader screwed us all!

I do wish we had a real 3rd party system but right now a vote for Bernie as an independent, for example, gives us Jeb or Rubio, and then we are truly and completely f***ed!

Actually, in 1992 the third-party vote gave the election to Clinton. Ross Perot was the ultimate troll.

ORR, while Nader's campaign is popularly blamed for Gore's loss, there's quite a bit of credible information that says it didn't: enough Nader voters probably would have voted Bush in the key states that it wouldn't have changed the outcome.

You also are weighing the flaws of an actual administration against the presumed strengths of optimistically seen would-have-been administration.

And as TRBB said, 3rd party spoilers can spoil either way. I don't think I said my 3rd party vote (if I eventually chose to go that route) would be for Sanders. It could pull from either side, hypothetically.

My stance is unchanged: people need to vote with their brains in sufficient numbers to topple the 2-party grip on our nation. There won't ever be a time (barring massive event) when the population can reasonably expect a third party to be a viable challenger without starting the process.

Actually that's a popular misconception. If you look at the polls after Perot weirdly dropped out for that small period of time, Clinton was doing even better.

But the Republicans like to use the Perot thing to make the Clinton presidency seem less "valid."

It's interesting; that's an ongoing and peculiarly Republican theme I think, trying to delegitimize the opposition through innuendo.

I totally agree thst we need a viable 3 or 4 party system. But that isn't happening in 2016! Nader got 97,421 votes in Florida, mostly Democrats. You can't deny the realities of the W Presidency. It was a disaster in every respect and in 100 yearss he will be regarded  as one of our worst Presidents.

There is nothing presumed about the Republican agenda.  Yeah, I guess I presumed from your writings that you were liberal.

If you want an uncorrupted candidate, you have one, the Donald. Though it seems he  is running mainly to give himself a big tax break, and in doing so, tripling the national debt.

I'm probably not being as clear as id like to. I'm at work for a couple more hours but will try to respond properly after.

OK, here is another attempt at clarifying my points.

First, the slightly tangential but interesting and important issue about Nader costing Gore 2000. Here is an interesting Salon article that claims that for however many liberals voted Nader (and yes, it was more than enough votes to change the election), far, far more self-described liberals voted for Bush. http://www.salon.com/2000/11/28/hightower/   There are also studies of exit polls--hardly foolproof, but certainly interesting points to consider--showing that had Nader not run, Bush would have won because it wouldn't have been a simple matter of splitting those votes Democrat versus Republican: one has to consider the segment who would have stayed home. And those studies show exactly that: a sufficient percentage only came out to vote because of Nader, and wouldn't have voted otherwise. Other studies of actual ballots show that enough Nader voters voted Republican elsewhere on that same ballot to suggest they could well have voted Bush. Make sense? Not really. But does that make it impossible? Nope. So on the Nader issue, I think it's important to consider it holistically. There are a lot of inputs to the situation. Just because one superficially seems to be "the decider," so, too, could any number of others. And there are always those other possible outcomes we don't see because, well, they didn't happen.

Second, my own political affiliation. Certainly nonpartisan, though I do vote Democratic most of the time for lack of options and a certain nagging feeling toward the exact phenomenon we're discussing right now. But I voted Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Obama in the presidential elections for which I've been eligible to vote. I've voted Franken and Klobuchar and Mondale (!) for senate. (That's all I recall, there may have been others.) I vote Ellison regularly in the House. So you're correct that, in oversimplified terms (e.g., Republican v Democrat, or the moronic two-sided narrative we're force-fed), I'm a liberal. However... [Stay tuned for my "Origins" thread entry, which I've embarrassingly note written yet despite having started the f-cking thread! I'll get to it this evening. It's going to be sufficiently nuanced to piss off those not into those sorts of things.]

Third, the Bush administration. I wasn't saying you'd presumed anything about that train wreck. I'm not convinced he was a terrible person by any means, but I do think he was a pretty damn bad president with some awful, awful senior advisors. My point there was that you're measuring an actual terrible administration against a hypothetical great one. In some ways, you can go back to my answer about the Nader campaign to get my point. We can't know how a Gore administration would have played out, especially considering the admittedly unique circumstances of that decade. We can look at his history, at his record, and guess. But we'd be guessing. And from my perspective, for example, this is the guy whose wife led the shockingly absurd and heavy handed movement 30 years ago for what I consider to be censorship in the arts. Worse, it was idiotically pointed at hard rock and rap, as opposed to similarly "dangerous" content in, say, country, presumably because it offended her cultural and artistic sensibilities, not because of any difference. (I hated Tipper Gore in 1985 and sincerely thank Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider for their great work.) No, a man is not his wife or vice versa, but I don't recall Sen. Gore publicly disowning her positions...

Fourth, an uncorrupted candidate. Trump is a fucking joke. His popularity is a damning condemnation of our idiotic nation's populace. Being loud, stupid, rude, and arrogant--while consistently failing to say anything remotely substantive or credible, instead riling up the dolts--is not "telling it like it is," much less "making America great again, as if there were some golden age we could revisit. (What is his golden age, anyway? We're never quite clear based on his ... is policy positions the right term, coming from someone who hasn't said anything remotely coherent yet? When exactly did America have a big wall keeping out them damn Mexicans, a strong leader who could get things done by "making deals" with foreign leaders, and whatever other fucktarded nonsense that reality tv star has vomited?) So please don't think I have anything good to say about that. (And there is nothing uncorrupted about him. He has made that much clear in his boasts about his up-to-now participation in politics.)

What I'm talking about is adding some actual competition to the political system, and breaking the two-party stranglehold. I wholly understand, sympathize with, and have sometimes caved to what you're talking about: voting for someone who probably won't win (or at least compete) is wasting a vote. But I firmly believe that if as many Americans despise our choices as say they do, if as many Americans hate our elected leaders as say they do, if as many Americans have priorities being ignored by elected officials as say they do, then the answer isn't for such a group to (as I keep saying) hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil (whichever side they think is that lesser evil). Rather, they should speak up and vote for the candidates they think are better options, be those options radical on this side, that, or the other. If we're a democratic republic, then we need to try harder to elect people who carry out our wishes, or at least vaguely represent our priorities.

The short-term likely result is failure. But with sufficient buy-in to what is painfully obvious logic, it doesn't take long for people to understand the actual reality: one person, one vote. The dollars can corrupt when you let them. The media can corrupt when you let it. The fear can paralyze when you let it. If people don't begin supporting third- (and fourth, and fifth, and sixth) party candidates, there will never be a time when we who proclaim a desire to see such candidates can begin voting for them. They won't rise from nowhere to be legitimate options. They will slowly grow.

That, or one can dream of changing the parties from within. Look at the Republican party the past five or six years to consider how that goes. Personally, I think the parties are too established, too self-serving, too institutionalized to allow the obvious improvement of more voices into the process. Whatever their rhetoric, they have no interest whatsoever in being challenged by anyone but one another. For fundamental change, there must be, well, fundamental change. Painful, full of shortfalls, but necessary.

(I'm no optimist, by the way. I'm more apt to drop out than go activist.)

Hope that all helped clarify what I'm talking about. Probably not. I babbled. Anyway, I'll also work on my personal political journey / profile and post that in the appropriate thread shortly. I actually wrote a lot of that here and cut and pasted it for purposes of coherence and relevance. Heh. Because this was so coherent and relevant.

In closing, it's opening night in the NBA. That's something I care about. Go Wolves!

It was valid, for sure...one in a long line of failures since LBJ. :)

I think what ended up hurting Bush the most in 1992 was him reneging on his tax pledge.

A recession, jobless recovery and high unemployment didn't help, either.

There's also just the reality that the public gets tired of one party and thinks the other will come in and make everything all better. "Change" and "outsiders" and "something new in Washington" and all that BS. It had been 12 years of Republicans in the presidency. Pretty tough to get 16, especially when the candidate is the ultimate establishment figure and not particularly charismatic.

Trump is not giving specifics.   :lol  Really!?  That's like complaining that Tom Brady hasn't also caught any touchdowns.  He's only been throwing them... what a loser Tom Brady is.

As if any candidate has been "specific" -- or needs to be.  That's such an establishment talking point... makes me chuckle.



The two-party system blows -- I'll give you that.  But I'm not sure what you're complaining about.  The Left has been getting what it wants, regardless of who wins these fcking elections.  More government, less freedom.  More, more, more.  I don't know why you don't like it.  This is the creep of Socialism.  Both Party's are doing it.

Perhaps, if I may, what you don't like are the results.  But this is Socialism.  I'm always amazed to see people complaining about something -- then getting it and being angry.  Maybe you should stop wanting it.  But that never occurs to them.

...more like how the Lefties use the "Hanging Chad" to make W's Presidency less valid.   ;)  That still frosts their berries!

Clinton probably had it regardless.  But who knows how much Perot deflated Bush's #s.  He certainly didn't help Bush.  But of course, there wouldn't have been a Ross Perot if HW Bush didn't suck.

What would be far more hypothetically interesting... is if Clinton didn't have the Media.  Now we're talking.  It's still up to each candidate to win their election -- but the media's love of Democrats is the most deciding external factor.  We live in TV HappyLand now.

You either don't read what I write or don't understand it. I suspect it's the pair of funhouse lenses you insist on wearing, distorting everything. You're not quite incoherent, just sadly (laughably?) insistent on your one note, however irrelevant, tangential, or inaccurate. I'll try yet again to ignore you, though it's tough with your technicolor vomits on otherwise not unpleasant or uninteresting threads.

"Riling up the dolts" -- nice.   :lol  I read what you wrote.