You may not have noticed, but America is in trouble. Our credit is overextended. Our military is overextended. Our welcome in the rest of the world is overextended. Civil liberties are disappearing and it’s only a matter of time before people start vanishing too. As a group, we’re getting fatter and lazier. Our political system is broken to the point that many people don’t think it can be repaired. There are not enough significant differences between the two parties in charge to matter in the long run. Both of them are driving us inexorably towards a point where we’ll either be a giant modern day version of a plantation or, depending where the technology goes, the majority of us will be converted into Solyent Green to feed the elite class. Anyone outside the two-party umbrella is marginalized or criminalized or simply ignored, depending what’s most expedient.
Jack Cafferty gets at least half of the picture.
It’s more than symbolic that when a million Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, the Republican candidate for president has lost track of his holdings.
McCain surrounds himself with people like former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners” and said we are only suffering a “mental recession.”
That’s the same problem the Republican Party has. It has lost track of what it used to stand for: small government, a disciplined fiscal policy, integrity.
In a way, the perfect storm of a rapidly changing population — old white people aren’t going to be in the majority very much longer (and isn’t that who most of the Republicans are?) — has combined with the total abdication of principles, Republican or otherwise, of arguably the worst president in the nation’s history to mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as we know it.
The Democrats will be in charge of both the legislative and executive branches soon. This means they’ll have some opportunities to take over the judicial again. Things will change, as they always do, but not for the better. Government doesn’t offer inspiration. Government isn’t good at hope. Government has no idea what creative vision is and it doesn’t do invention well. When all you offer as a solution to every problem is more government, then the overriding problem becomes how much government you have. We’ve reached that point.
Instead we can expect the police state to continue to grow. Concepts like zero tolerance, a “war on terror,” the continual decline of individual choices, more monitoring technologies and the ongoing dumbing down of citizens as the rise of the nanny state continues. That’s what I predict when the ball passes from the Republicans to the Democrats.