If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress.
– me, September 7, 2008
There you have it. No less a paper than the Des Moines Register, which had endorsed Democrats every presidential election from 1976 on, has succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome and endorsed Mitt Romney because he’s more likely to be able to get a program through Congress. Because presumably Democrats won’t go the full Braveheart/300, and Republicans definitely will.
It’s fucking nuts. You have a candidate who has held every position imaginable – one whose manager, in fact, explicitly said that clinching the nomination was like an Etch-a-Sketch, shake it up and start over. You have a candidate who has made assertions about an “apology tour” and about car companies shipping jobs to China and about the President relaxing welfare rules – assertions that have been repeatedly proven false – and his response is to push those false assertions even harder. You have, in short, the first ever openly and unashamedly post-truth campaign for the White House. And at this point, there are people willing to throw their hands in the air and give in, just to make it stop.
This is what “no future” means. This is unsustainable. When people are endorsing a candidate on the basis that everything he’s said for the last year and a half is false, and what he said before that is true, and obviously he’ll go back to the way he was, and the people who pushed him to the right will go along with this – that is insane. If logic doesn’t matter, if reason doesn’t matter, if the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth don’t matter, then there’s no point in even attempting to have a democracy or anything like it. If truth means nothing, if reality means nothing…well, welcome to everything people bemoaned back when I was in college English. Welcome to the truly and completely postmodern world. If we as a nation actually decide that the truth is whatever you want it to be…well, maybe there’s enough medication and booze to help me see the world that way.
I guess we’ll find out.