I haven’t really posted much about politics lately. I can say that it has been because I’ve been so busy, exciting new job, had to buy a new car, submitting a rough draft and a new book pitch to my editor within a week, stuff like that, but it would be a lie. The truth is that the American political scene has just been too obnoxious and frustrating to think about lately.
If a year ago I had posted an April Fool’s joke about how the government was buying banks, bailing out the auto industry, buying insurance companies, multiplying the national debt over and over again in a period of a couple of months, passed a stimulus bill that didn’t stimulate anything but cost more than the 2nd World War, that all of the new government appointees were either socialists, tax-evaders, trans-nationalists, or lunatics, that we were cutting all of our military programs in a time when other nations were growing theirs, and that our president would take a tour of Europe where we apologized to other countries for being America and the only thing the media could report on is that his wife has buffed arms, you would have said that I had gone way too far coming up with something too far-fetched to be a good prank.
I find it ironic that our government is printing money and passing it out to anybody and everybody, but meanwhile we’re cutting back on military spending. I suppose that creating jobs building useless crap is more stimulating than jobs building fighter planes. Apparently ACORN employees need jobs a whole lot more than Lockheed’s. Personally I would rather have more F-22s than Harry Reid’s magnetic levitation train to Disneyland.
The president of the US went to Europe, apologized to everybody for everything, kissed butt, stood in lots of photos, gave out I-Pods, bowed to the Saudis (literally), and now the media is tripping over themselves in the rush to pat him on the back because the rest of the world (like Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, etc.) loves us again. Personally I don’t really care if a bunch of despots don’t like us, but that is priority number one of the new administration.
And here is something scary. I find myself actually agreeing with France and Germany about how useless the American president’s plans are… That is downright disturbing. It is like I’ve entered Topsy-Turvey Land. I’m waiting for Bizzaro Superman to fly past my window or for it to start raining doughnuts. I may have to start carrying an HK.
Obama gave a speech where he talked about all of the wonderful things the Islamic world has brought to us to make the US a better place. I’m kind of drawing a blank from the 1400s on, but I’m sure there is something just awesome in there that I’m overlooking. I’m kind of a Rachid Taha fan,(especially Barra Barra from the Blackhawk Down soundtrack) but I don’t know if that’s quite what Obama meant.
Every time I turn on the news, I’m deluged with something else idiotic. My country is trying its best to abandon capitalism, because that has only worked better than everything else for all of recorded human history, in order to switch to some bastardized socialism than even FDR would have laughed at.
On FDR, my latest fiction project is set in 1932. I’ve been doing a lot of research into this time period lately. The media keeps comparing Obama to FDR for a reason, and I’ve seen a definite trend in the way Obama keeps trying to define himself in the same terms. Obama wants to be FDR, and he’ll probably succeed. As in, we’ll cause the economic downturn to get even worse and last longer by government meddling, and through typical democrat weakness on the international stage, we’ll end up in a great big war with somebody, and then we’ll spend the next few decades recovering from our flirtation with letting the government run everything.
And on that note, anybody who thinks that this is the same as the Great Depression is an imbecile and needs to crack open a history book. We averaged as high as 25% unemployment, and that was closer to 1/3 in some states. Though once we manage to utterly destroy the dollar by spending 8 times what we make, and you have to have a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread, Weimar style, then we’ll probably be close.
Meanwhile, the opposition party is still sucking merrily along. While America is being revamped into Big-Dumb-Canada, John McCain is fixated on getting boxing champion Jack Johnson pardoned for violating the Mann Act back in like 1910-something. Was Jack Johnson wronged? Yes. But since he’s been dead for like 60 years, maybe, John, you should concentrate on something more friggin’ important right now…
I hate you, John McCain… so very, very much, for so many reasons…
But I digress. I’m still waiting for the Republicans to float a leader who can actually gain some traction off of this mess. Most Americans don’t want to be Big-Dumb-Canada. They will gladly support somebody who stands up to this madness. In the meantime, we’ll keep sliding along this path toward who knows what.
April fools? Man, I wish…