A SImple Little "Regime CHange"

Yep, anything to distract the American people from Dubya's involvement in Harken. Or the trainwork-in-progress that his entire regime has become, not to mention the entire nation.

At least Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Trainwreck in progress, I meant.

Not to twist the knife, but still think there's "no difference" between Bush and Gore, Mr. Nader?

candidates from parties other than the Republicans or Democrats should not be allowed contest elections.

Well at the moment I can't leave my house without being carpet bombed by Evil Saddam. So I say get him out, get someone responsible in such as Winnie Mandela or Johnathan Aitken.

Do you blame anyone for this? Bush? American People who support Bush? The people behind Bush? 12 foot Lizards? Who? It's all so frustratingly inevitable to the point where I can't even bring myself to get really annoyed.

Do you blame anyone for this? Bush? American People who support Bush? The people behind Bush? 12 foot Lizards? Who? It's all so frustratingly inevitable to the point where I can't even bring myself to get really annoyed.

My opinion -- (1) Dubya's monomania about Iraq and a (non- existent) "Axis of Evil." Same with his tax-cuts-ueber-alles monomania for economic matters. It's as if the Idiot-in-Chief is only capable of one idea. (2) Dubya's involvement in possible securities fraud while with Harken (late eighties/early nineties), and the entire Worldcom/Adelphia/Enron mess. And the need to get that sort of thing off the front pages, with dumb shit like the Idiot going on and on about Saddam Hussein.

We'll tell how deeply the Dubya rot has sunk in this November, with the Congressional elections.

And while not to turn this into an Election 2000 thread, but of course Nader had the right to run for President. What he did not have the right to, though, was to lie and to have his lies go uncommented upon. Nader's campaign was built on a Big Lie -- to wit, that "Gore=Bush" -- that was demonstrably false in the Fall of 2000, and whose demonstrable falsity has become undeniable in the past year-and-a-half that Dubya's been squatting in the White House.

Lest anyone think I'm exaggerating, I ask anyone to imagine if Gore would be ranting and raving about "Axes of Evil" and the need to "take out" Saddam Hussein at every opportunity.

It's insulting to say that Nader's campaign was built on a big lie. Without Nader's help, I already had the feeling that Gore and Bush were much too similar. I was definitely not going to vote for Bush, but I truly did not want to vote for Gore. Gore's record is extremely pro-interventionist, and his ties to big corporations, including the oil business, are about as close as Bush's; and don't forget who his vice president running mate was. I'm not convinced that what Gore would have done would have been so much different from what Bush is doing. He just would not have been as complete an embarrassment as Bush.

surely the person whose job it was effectively to challenge that lie = gore

the fact that he didn't = taken as evidence by many voters that he was not up to being president

blimey tad, an election is a FITE!! and partly it's a fite abt what the rules of the fite shd be => the reason his supporters are all STILL crying "foul" and the reason he lost an election he shd have won really really overlap, which is that he was FRIGHTENED of taking the fight to his opponents

as a non-american w.extremely perverse politics i think bush winning was ("in the final analysis"©Cynical Radical PostureSpeak Inc.) a GOOD thing, becuz the deliquescence of the ruling political order of the last 30-odd yrs has as a result occurred that much faster => pragmatists wd have propped up enron and worldcom more effectively, possibly

I largely agree with everything you wrote, Mark. It was extremely frustating to watch the entire election unfold, particularly the Florida mess and then Bush v. Gore. I don't have a direct pipeline to Gore's mind, so I'm guessing that if Gore didn't effectively counter Nader and his claims, it was because he didn't take Nader's candidacy seriously until it was too late. Again, this is conjecture, but since Gore had to spend a significant portion of his time running around in states he should have sewn up but for Nader during the last few weeks of the campaign, I think that this conjecture is close to the mark.

Sorry for the abbreviated answers, because I'm out the door to work now. Will post more later, as needed.

Its funny to imagine Gore's mind now. He's like "What the fuck...I WON didn't I? I got more votes than him. What the FUCK! SHould I run again? Will I beat him again and he's still president? SHould I grow a beard agian?"

Any man who thinks a beard will help his popularity doesn't deserve to be president.

Mr. Lincoln included.

Ah, he grew the darn thing in office, didn't he? He was so worried about the war he forgot to shave.

Didn't they teach you in elementary school, Ned? A wee little girly sprog from New England wrote him a letter that said "I think you'd look nice with whiskers," thus proving that even the tiniest of us can influence great men etc. etc.

dude, gore didn't even win his home state, and even nader, eddie veder and patti smith couldn't have saved his ass if they'd supported him.

George is being told what to do by his daddy and mates, just like he's always done. It hurts his head less that way.

(Actually G the whole rub is that the election wound up hinging on Florida, where Gore "lost" by a margin of like .006% of the state's Nader vote: I mean, if you assume that even just some of those people voted, and you assume that they were even vaguely more likely to vote for Gore, Gore would have taken it. Nader was indeed a spoiler; the question is whether that's entirely blameworthy or not.)

(I understand Mark's contention here and largely agree with it but Tad is right as well: it was opportunistic and disingenous of Nader to hammer the Bush=Gore assertion, especially for a candidate who'd like to present himself as an "apolitical" truth-teller. And it required, oddly enough, marginalizing himself: adopting a Bush=Gore stance means shifting the political scale, casting Nader as so far out there that Bush and Gore become relatively undifferentiated points. What's uncomfortable is the use of a presidential campaign as a party-building tool: during the process of electing a president, someone's campaign to establish something else entirely winds up skewing what was meant to be the main purpose of the thing.)

(That should say something like "If you assume that even some of those people would have voted," i.e. gone out and voted even in the absence of Nader, etc.) (Basically this whole election was an great big lesson in how our small-R republical electoral system can put a person in the white house even though the electoral results clearly indicate the nation as a whole would have preferred someone else.)

but they, the .006 percent whatever, were all voting for buchanan anyway.

buchanan had the corner on the jewish holocaust survivors living in miami market

Yeah, like how I'm simulataneously really angry and yet somehow glad that Bud Selig called off the All-Star Game in an 11th-inning tie because I hope it will the final act of corruption and disappointment that causes him to be fired as commissioner of baseball.©Cynical Radical PostureSpeak Inc.

!! How freaking bizarre.

Are we safer and more peaceful yet?

these old political threads are amazing. so much better than talk of kitty cats etc

It's a pity Felicity's prediction didn't come true.