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Hilary Clinton, former Secretary of State finally announces her candidacy, and indicates that she will make a formal announcement via a video around midday today, and already there are a half-dozen YouTube videos denigrating her character, and giving reasons why she should not be made President.
I was just complaining about this to my wife, when she coolly pointed out that we liberals do the same thing; as soon as someone throws their hat into the ring, there are ten liberal experts who point out why they would make a terrible president. To our minds, they’re all jokers who’ve thoroughly discredited themselves, and we cannot even conceive of one of them occupying the White House, and we start going into deep depression over it. Likewise, to us it seems that Hillary Clinton in the White House would be fabulous. In the first place, she would not dismantle the machinery of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, The National Science Foundation, the Nation Foundation for the Arts, the National Foundation for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and numerous other institutions that have come under fire from both extremely wealthy conservatives, and dirt poor conservatives.
A decade or two ago, we were not reduced to horror when contemplating the installation of a Republican administration, though they were indeed pretty bad. But now, with the strange denizens one finds among them, they cannot be trusted further than we can sling a piano.
Let’s be honest: as those on the far Left often observe, the political leadership of the USA has always rested in the hands of the educated elite, and to all intents and purposes, those who elected them were also members of the educated elite, albeit fringe members. But today, the elite has resolved into two groups: the wealthy elite, who are educated in name only; they may have credentials from various Ivy League institutions, but these credentials are due to family influence and affluence, and not to mental acuity or academic excellence. They have taken over the reins of enormously successful businesses, banks, investment companies and so on, and have put their friends and families and running dogs in Congress.
The other group is the truly educated elite, teachers, writers, members of academe, working mostly in second tier companies, occasionally in the government, and in social services. It is this group that continues to hold onto the attitudes of social responsibility. They believe that high taxes are the lesser of the two evils, the other of which is abandoning social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the remaining items on the blue list. In the old days, the elites on both sides of the aisle would not dream of abandoning social services. But now the uneducated elite has adopted the rhetoric that we’re forced to give up these services, because the pesky liberals, and Democrats, have spent more than they raised in tax revenues. Never mind that it was the Conservatives who constantly oppose taxes.
There is very little to be gained in running for President; I have no idea why Hillary Clinton wants to do it, except, perhaps, the compassion liberals have for the poor and the indigent, and even for the undeserving penniless members of the Tea Party. (I know a little of what drives them; we were just doing the taxes of our son, who has just entered the work force, and even his meager income is being whittled away by unforgiving local and state taxes.) Perhaps it is for the fame of being the first woman President of the USA, and who better than she, who tried her level best, when she was only the First Lady, to bring true Health Reform to legislation? Barack Obama succeeded to pass Health Reform legislation only by keeping it in the private sector. (The country as a whole has only hearty contempt for both the health care, and the health insurance industry, from the way they have responded to the legislation.)
Mark my words. If a conservative is elected, with this Republican Congress, they will raise taxes, and blame the Democrats. And none of it will be used for social services. It will all go to the military, for higher salaries for Congress, for huge tax incentives for the largest corporations, e.g. Exxon and BP, aid to Israel, and a tiny bit towards paying off the deficit.
[Added later: I have just seen Hilary Clinton’s video. It is at times like this that the teen texting abbreviation “OMG” is so useful. “When families are strong, America is strong,” she says, stealing the utterly empty rhetoric of the Tea Party and other people who natter inanities at times, including, I’m sorry to say, Elizabeth Warren. If she had said “When poor, hardworking families get the support they need,” that would make total sense. But let’s face it: there is nothing that the Federal Government can do to make families strong, dammit. Families are weakened by poverty, unemployment, drugs, lack of education, and general stupidity, encouraged by business and its marketing machine, in turn abetted by the Media, ever hungry for advertising revenue. The government can’t do anything about that; that ship, as the saying goes, has sailed. There are very few strings left that the government can pull, to make things better in a social sense. In contrast, the Supreme Court has decreed that the government cannot interfere with “string pulling” by the Private Sector.
Arch
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The great pizza conflict
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(Sherman’s Lagoon) It used to be the case that people had very strong
opinions for and against anchovies on pizza. But as the range of pizza
toppings has g...
20 hours ago