Hard to see how Romney-Ryan can win from here. Ryan proposed, this year, the end of all moneys to FEMA, the agency currently swabbing out and rebuilding Eastern America. Romney proposed, last year, its privatisation.
Romney thinks Big Government should be wound up and the taxes that fund storm repairs given back to the entrepreneurs. He thinks those who make bad choices, like buying a beachside house in the East or catching leukemia, should pay for it; bankrupt their families to pay for it, in millions if need be. Obama looks more merciful than this, and more in control of the winds and waves when crying ‘Peace, be still.’
And of history’s priorities too. On Sunday night the Geronimo film, about the SEALs that shot Bin Laden once in the face and five times in the chest, will be seen by fifty million people keen to vote on Tuesday, and on Monday downloaded by twenty million more; voters who may then judge Obama a man of iron will, and Romney a vacillating pussy. By then Romney-Ryan will no doubt have been asked by stormwashed Ohioans why, if elected, they will cut off the money for the clean-up, or reduce it.
And they may have nothing convincing to say, in this, the state they need to win. And so it will go.
As I always tend to say in weeks like this, ‘Bad policies lose votes.’ And though the Murdochists try each day to remove all hint of policy from political discussion — Craig Thomson’s imaginary strumpet is back again this morning — it all comes back to policy eventually. Had Gore got 285 more votes in Florida in 2000 there would have been no Hurricane Sandy. Had Beazley got 1000 more votes in 1998 there would have been no Iraq War.
Policy is important; and the more we avert our eyes from it the more we suffer down the track.
And this the Eastern Seaboard is discovering as we speak, and watch television, and shake our heads.
Discuss.
Name:
When Romney challenged The Big “O” on economic grounds, why didn’t he respond with the $12trillion debt Bush version 2 left him? (This is what the Libz do in Oz and make HEAPS of political ground with it even when it is a blatant LIE)
Is there some sort of calamity that could have been averted if Al Gore was elected president?
I’m dumbfounded.
Pray, do tell Bob what exactly he could have done? Could he have stilled the waters the same way Obama did when he preached to the masses and said, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.”
Yep, that’s our hero Obama talking.
Many will believe him though.
Does Al Gore posses some supernatural ability like Moses to subdue natural forces that we may not be aware of?
(He’s pretty good at making a fast buck on the lecture circuit preaching global warming nonsense.) Al Gore may have other skills we are unaware of – just like our great peacemaker, Kim Beazley.
He would have slowed global warming. Global warming was the cause of Sandy, the superstorm.
All clear now?
Yes.
A major disaster would have been averted if the relative moderate Al Gore had been up held in his candidacy by the despicable US Supreme court.
I can believe that any rational person would say other, in this suffering post Cheney/Bush world.
Typo, can’t for can in second para.
This is shaping as a “hanging chad” election also, given numerous reports of voter deregistration of poorer Democrat voters in areas controlled by Republican state governments.
To explain further would require a comprehension of the arcane esoterica and inanities of the primitive US voting system that is possibly lacking in some here.
Yes – Al Gore would never have invaded Iraq.
That was and is a calamity, not just for Iraq but for the US national interest. It destroyed the goodwill engendered by the reaction to 9/11 and took the world’s eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
Calamity.
Bob, before you call me a moron or ban me for eternity or tell me to fuck off, let me put this to you and your readers.
Today you wrote this praising Obama:
“On Sunday night the Geronimo film, about shooting Bin Laden once in the head and five times in the chest, will be seen by fifty million people keen to vote on Tuesday, and on Monday downloaded by twenty million more; voters who may then judge Obama a man of iron will, and Romney a vacillating pussy.’
Yet in May 2011, this is what you said of the “man of iron will”:
“It would have established whether or not the President was guilty of treason, and should be executed for it.”
“I also think he was killed against Barack Obama’s wishes”
“It seems what they did was take him alive and then, against Obama’s wishes, shoot him in the brain and then the stomach, panic, and bury the evidence at sea.”
“Obama was a long time coming to make his speech, and he looked pissed off when he made it, and it wasn’t very good. He’d been angry for quite a while backstage, I’d reckon, roaring up some hot-headed, mutinous, treasonous Navy Seals who had turned a triumph — that of a captured, articulate Osama — into a debacle.”
“Assassinating Bin Laden in front of his nine children and three wives, no.”
“What a silly idea that was. No, no, every killed man brings grief to his wife, his mother, his friends, his fellow churchgoers, and laughter and champagne is wrong when death happens, anywhere, to anyone.”
So you claim the President didn’t order the shotting of bin Laden.
You claim Obama was pissed off at the mutinous soldiers who assassinated him in front of his family.
Now you say the killing was an act of iron will!
It’s just my opinion, but I think you will write anything just to stir and then write the exact opposite when you sniff the tide of public opinion.
I’ll post your earlier Lines for Obama to the President!
Umm … yes, that’s what I said on the morning after. This proved to be wrong, to judge by Vanity Fair and Mark Owen’s book. And it proved to be electorally significant this morning when Obama looked again like a strong leader.
Your point being?
No rudeness intended Bob, but to me you were unfair about the justified killing of bin Laden and that’s something you should say if you now think he showed iron will in getting rid of this murderer.
I didn’t say I approved of the killing. I merely noted its electoral effect. Hitler showed iron will when invading France against the advice of his generals. But to say he showed iron will is not to approve of him invading France, or of Obama killing Osama when he could have been captured and tried. Which of course I do not. And I am not alone in this.
You approved of OBL’s extralegal killing, did you?
Why?
“You approved of OBL’s extralegal killing, did you?”
I certainly did. And Obama does also. Whenever he presides over the drone kill list (and the targets on which he personally approves). I am ambivalent about this as it smacks of the previous years when regular cruise missile and other arms-length attacks (Kosovo?) diverted from accurate, targeted operations on the ground, probably caused deaths of innocents, did not prevent the USS Cole or 911 and so on.
However, it is a hard world this real one we live in. As I saw written on more than one occasion,
‘The Romans did not build a great empire by holding meetings.They built a great empire by killing everyone who opposed them’.
Don’t forget, Bin Laden didn’t worry about ‘collateral damage’ either.
And, as the saying goes: “Rome wasn’t burned in a day”.
But it burned.
To M Ryutin,
I am puzzled by your use of this word ‘innocents’. What do you mean? That some people are so guilty they should be killed by a rocket bomb, without a call to their lawyer, without a day in court? That they should be killed in their own homes, as they sleep beside their children?
How do you argue this?
Using ‘innocents’ was to avoid having to do what I am now doing: describe how that whilst I deplore deaths of uninvolved persons, I don’t care in the slightest about how terrorists are killed. Or their enablers who are actively supporting them to commit their acts of terror. I regret and deplore it when a drone intended for a terrorist or an organiser of terrorist acts kills someone who has done none of those things merely because they were there. I am ambivalent about it for that reason, but even in my preferred option, the on-the-ground operation/targeted assassination (as with the superb post-Munich actions of the Israelis) etc, mistakes can be made and, as in the Israeli Lillehammer case, a total innocent can be killed.
But when teenagers are killed by bombs in a pizza parlour in Israel or Australians at Bali, every method available which protects innocents from death can be used to get those terrorists. Unlike in Indonesia, many Islamic states cannot (or will not – Palestine comes to mind) do anything to get them by alternate means.
“as they sleep beside their children” wouldn’t be a factor in such cases.
It is in Gaza, frequently.
And Pakistan.
An interesting post, Mr Ellis. Commendable for going hard ever yet.
“It all comes back to policy eventually.”
Worth thinking on. Perhaps it all does. However, personality, or the personage housing values and so forth, plays an equal role, would you say, along the way? Only when the bastards have left the scene can it all come back to policy – or do bastard values live on, as well?
And if you have mind, have you seen the interview of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, and care to remark upon it publicly?
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/?WT.srch=1&WT.svl=TV_iview_au#/view/27858
Haven’t seen it, Robert Ellis, or wanted to, or have, and not moved somehow? Don’t want to see the interview? Saving it, perhaps, for timing’s sake, upon release of your professional work regarding Rupert? Will you refer to it then? You don’t regard this interview as part of your professional work?
Do you mind if I remind you of it, this interview, in times ahead? Deal with it now? Others will remind you.
It’s interesting, and these are good questions of you, Robert Ellis. And not just of you.
Call me a sycophant (although I do prefer groupie, its more rock’n'roll) but this is why I love Bob Ellis. He takes you on the ride with him. The incisive wit, the acerbic tongue, the intrigue and then, just when you think all might be lost, the hope, the inspiration. A believer’s true believer. Swoon.
It wasn’t going to be close at any stage. I said three months ago that Romney would do a Barry Goldwater and nothing I’ve seen since has changed my view.
Obama by a country mile.
Hopefully the storm will be a reminder to Americans of how badly the last Republican administration did, as to the requisite response to a natural disaster.
Obama could be a doing an Anna Bligh,if he handles himself right during the event.
But that ended in tears, for poor Anna.
What is fairly plain is that Romney has no idea what he should be doing, and it shows.
He gives a relief rally in a swing state far from any hurricane. He’s onto it.
Doug Quixote.
Obama may be re-elected, but if he behaves as stupidly as Bligh did after engineering the chance (twice, also the broken promise election win), he will find a place in history as despised as Anna Bligh’s.
Some lies are forgiveable, but some things are sacred.
Yes, it appears almost any lie made by a conservative politician is forgiveable, whereas any slight displacement of the truth by a progressive politician is unforgiveable.
Non-core promises, anyone? Or no GST ever? Or how about dead buried and cremated?
Perhaps it is that we expect to be lied to by the conservatives, it is what they do; whilst the progressives are supposed to be paragons of virtue.
Out of the mouths of babes…
For the blinkered/stirrers predicting Goldwater landslides or Romney blowouts, a reality check from Chris Stirewalt :-
“Like any good scary story, the tale of the churning electorate now has a strong element of suspense. Hurricane Sandy has made it harder to poll, and given the existing challenges nationally and in survey-saturated Ohio – cell phones, caller ID, voter fatigue, dishonest answers – we can only guess at what changes are currently taking place in the electorate”.
Read the whole thing to get the complicated context of this particular election.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/31/frightful-final-week-for-campaigns/#ixzz2Av03a8WU
So many imponderables. The Obama show of leadership on for all to see (naturally) at Sandy, is it juxtaposed with the Benghazi failure in the eyes of the electorate? Is the late rush to get Clinton and Biden to states like Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (and big new ad buys) late panic or just a case of ‘we have the money to spare, better to close off that chance’?. While we cannot believe the parties at all, the Stirewalt article is one of many available analysing polling and their validity.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/10/26/benghazi-massacre-foxhuffington-cia-tale-nonsense/
Should say thanks to you, Reader1, for these VT links.
The article on Romney’s relationship with the ponerological Shrubs was an eye-opener of sorts. Not necessarily a ‘gasp, shock’ type thing, more in the line of ‘yet another example of what’s going on’, but still…
American politics and power plays are almost as corrupt and illegal as those in China. Pot, kettle, black.
A bit of a late addition. Obama himself is to go to Wisconsin on Thursday and Saturday.
That’s confidence for you.
It is a very “Mark Twain” thing with Americans and whimsical story-telling.
For Reader1 and Canguro I think you misplacxed this…..
http://zapatopi.net/afdb/
You’re right. Next time you’re having a garage sale, please give us more notice. There’s a place for these curios, and knowing your interest in such adds a quaint touch to the oddity.