I thought Dick Morris and Charles Hurt had interesting things to say on last night’s election results. Gay marriage lost in Maine, which suggests the momentum of this judge-and-elite-driven social change may be losing steam. Republicans won the governorship of Virginia, which is an Obama swing state and the home of a long stretch of DC suburbs, by a whopping 18%. The economy and a lack of confidence in Obama’s leadership I presume were important factors.
I think this just confirms what I already suspected. While Obama excited many people, much of his support was thin, driven more by personality, the projection of hopes of improved race relations, and concern for McCain’s erratic character and politics. Further, Obama has deviated from what he promised to be: a pragmatic and moderate “uniter.”
This series of interrelated outcomes should not be terribly surprising. The media did a lot to conceal Obama’s past, including playing along with his “et tu Brute” take on his long-time minister. The media basically suppressed the Bill Ayers’ controversy. And the media hardly noticed that Obama and his staff all cut their teeth in the nihilistic world of Chicago politics, where the name of the game was ethnic spoils and power more than idealism. To the extent there was idealism in this town, it was the socialist idealism so common in Hyde Park. People outside of the University of Chicago don’t realize that it’s as liberal and conventional a university town as any other and that the conservatives and Milton Friedman types all knew each other and could fit inside the Home Room of the International House, where we occasionally met. Everyone else was your basic extreme “progressive” and books about transgenderism and “Bombing the Suburbs” and support for gun control and other un-American ideas were common fare in the ‘hood.
Obama is an extreme liberal whose agenda is increasingly unpopular and who has implemented plans–such as the stimulus–that are not working. The recent elections and next years’ congressional elections are, in effect, referenda on Obamanism and its results. The best case scenario would be his and his liberalism’s thorough discreditment, though the incoherence and unwillingess to make tough choices by the American electorate will likely give it a new lease on life regardless of what happens in 2010 or 2012. Austerity doesn’t sell for very long. If Republicans are fighting for immigration amnesty, democratizing Iraq, overly generous Medicare, and other unsustainable subsidies, it hardly bodes well for the leave-me-alone coalition.
Democracies are inherently unstable and inimical to liberty in the long run, as William Lecky observed so well over 100 years ago.
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I think 2010 is really a question of how the economy performs between now and then. I think we can agree that Obama’s policies are wasteful, inflationary, threatening to the dollar, and very harmful to our economy in the long term, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that over the next 12 months things can’t get substantially better.
Well over half of our economy is still private, and that portion of our economy has just undergone a major improvement in efficiency, as it always does in a recession. While we won’t likely see major investments in new production like we used to see after downturns, we may likely see some limited rehiring and a better sense of security for those still employed that could be quite noticable before Nov 2010. Housing prices also seem to be rising.
I don’t know that all the structural problems our economy faces, as well as the debt-focused stimulas, won’t outweigh the benefits of improvements in the private sector, but in the short term, they may not. In that case, most of the negative feelings about Obama are going to disappear as the economy improves.
There is indeed a number of swing voters who are starting to realize that they are philosophically opposed to Obama, but a much greater number of swing voters are going to be more motivated by the economy. Essentially we are a “mandate of heaven” democracy. 80% of the electorate splits its votes between two candidates based on ideology, and 20% of the electorate decides the election based on how the economy and foreign policy is going.
As far as the gay marriage vote, this may slow the movement down, but the long term prognosis is still bleak for gay marriage opponents. I am sure a breakdown of demographics would show the measure winning handily among the under 40 bracket. Sometime in the next 20 years, we will see most of the blue states legalize gay marriage.
First the double-take, Roach. Intelligent and rational as you sound, why in the hell do you waste your moral energies on gay marriage issues? Seriously. I don’t mean I want your “reasons.” We all the know the stock anti-gay noise, as with the pro-gay marriage noise.
I’m talking about you; as in the everyday, wake up, have a coffee, read the blog jazz, check the bank account, look in on the kids, get your laundry done, go to bed-type you.
Are you really telling me-and yourself-that your world is at all impaired or challenged if some gay folks in bumbfck-wherever get married on any given Sunday? Really?
I shalln’t bother replying to your anticipated rationale. I’m sure some deep-rooted, tradition-speak, spiced with the providential law salad-dressings will weight your answers. Hey, be my guest. I just can’t believe that in the year 2009 that smart folks actually give a rats’ ass how other people conduct their personal affairs, anymore than were they to go fishing or not. It’s really quite stunning and strange and has all the odor of “Plessy v….”
On the plus side, Obama’s act is wearing thin. His economics and socio-nomics are proving allthemore to be fraudulent. He’s Bernie Madoff in DC printing bogus monopoly money. There’s no there, there, and the world is getting wise. He looks to his left and sees twiddledum, Pelosi; he looks to his right and sees twiddledee, Reid. What’s unfolding is cartoonish, comics as politics.
But it’s worse. If he looks to the centre, to the middle, he sees the glaring visage of angered independents. The smiles he once saw are now smirks. The savior in ‘08 has become the executioner in 09. We reap what we sow.
Politics aren’t really always local, to disturb Mr. Tip O’Neill’s little axiom. They’re only local when there’s food on the table and a job to be had.
Otherwise, politics become national and exceedingly personal. That time is now. And Obama better get used to the wrath of those who see no real changes to their desperation. The independents are the first to sound the alarm.
Why is it the people against gay marriage are the ones singled out as wasting time and energy on a meaningless issue while the real issues facing this nation go unaddressed?
Shouldn’t the same scorn be leveled against those who invented the concept of gay marriage and put it in the public sphere? I don’t recall gay marriage existing in any nation for the last 2000 years. Now suddenly in the last decade it’s an issue because of a handful of activists and judges. Who really deserves the blame for wasting America’s time while the nation withers?
With all the problems facing this country you would think these activists would come up with something more substantial to help our nation.
Just search my blog for my views on this. I can’t say it’s the most important thing, but it’s important enough, because it’s part of a broader war against tradition, traditional families, and decency.
First off, I have to agree with Rusty and disagree with resh. Gays are already free to have weddings, wear rings, and do whatever they want. In many states they already have civil unions or domestic partnertships that grant them the exact same set of privileges that married couples get. Their incessant demands for the same marriage licenses as straight couples reveals a desire to enact broader cultural changes. And, to add to Rusty’s point, it’s mostly the pro side that is expending time and energy on this. Look at Carrie Prejean for example. The judge uses his bully pulpit to promote the issue. Contestant calmly gives her honest, uncontroversial opinion. Judge blows his stack and turns the whole thing into an epic saga. The bottom line is that the pro-gay-marriage people are the ones making a big issue out of it. Just like the pro-abortion people are the ones being psychotically irrational to the point where even opposing partial-birth abortion, or supporting the rights of individual physicians to refuse to perform abortions, gets one labelled a reactionary misogynist. The only reason most people don’t realize this is because our media overlords always paint traditionalists as the hysterical, unreasonable ones.
As for the economy and 2010, I think you guys are underestimating the new regime. Remember back when the stimulus was new, and everyone on the Right was pointing out that it wouldn’t help the economy because the spending wasn’t going to hit until next year? Well, duh. Everyone knows that a stimulus, especially one that keeps so much of the money in the public sector, cannot actually create long-term prosperity. It can, however, provide a short-term economic booster shot. But politically, that booster shot would have been wasted in 2009. So they’re letting the economy suffer, letting all the pundits gloat and preach doom and gloom, so that next summer when the stimulus money starts flowing and the economy looks to be making a rebound they can say “Look! We were right all along!” An October surprise, if you will. And the electorate will totally fall for it.
1.”Sometime in the next 20 years, we will see most of the blue states legalize gay marriage.”
I think that much before that (within the decade, sooner perhaps) we’ll have a scientific answer to what causes homosexuality. Once the biological cause is determined, probably most people will say, “Oh, go ahead and let ‘em marry because there’ll not be too many more generations of ‘em.” That is, I do think once science figures out what the cause is, it’ll be something that can be prevented and that’s just the way things will go down.
2. “On the plus side, Obama’s act is wearing thin.”
Yeah, to me it has worn thin and to the majority of the country the dem’s health plans have “worn thin,” yet here I sit typing as Queen Nancy gets her way with the vote on the House floor. It’s not about their being tone-deaf. It’s worse than that: they are full of hubris.
If they figure out a genetic cause, homosexuals will disappear, because most people will abort them “so they don’t have a difficult life.” It’s already happening in various degrees with other genetic traits, retardation, and sex-selection particularly in Asia.
Except that homosexual couples who don’t like the idea of homosexuality disappearing would then create multiple embryos so that they could select for homosexual children. This is particularly likely since homosexuals are already much more likely to use artificial insemination than heterosexual couples.
A fair number of heterosexual couples would also refuse to abort homosexual embryos. This phenomenon would probably be split between couples who are morally opposed to abortion, and couples who support abortion rights but think that aborting a child on the grounds of a predisposition towards homosexuality would be an act of prejudice.
Overall, you might end up with a net gain in the homosexual population.
Think pathogen theory, guys, not genes.
If a common neonatal or childhood infection (probably from a virus) as Ewald and Cochran and others believe, is the cause of homosexuality, then the vaccine for said virus would be the preventative agent. No need for genetic engineering.
Plus, the said virus is likely to have other deleterious effects in infants/ kids. That is, in most it doesn’t cause homosexuality because it never makes it into the central nervous system, but it causes illness, nonetheless. How many parents would choose not to vaccinate for something like RSV (which causes thousands of hospitalizations each year and many deaths and which they believe to be the cause of asthma in many) and for which researchers are busy trying to come up with a safe vaccine? So, if you told parents that this bug also had a chance of causing homosexuality in a small % of kids, do you think an overwhelming % of people would choose NOT to vaccinate?
Further, as the number of gays plummeted, fewer and fewer parents would choose not to vaccinate.
Even the most affluent people who can afford test tube babies and surrogates only want a certain number of kids and they’d be increasingly looked at askance when people realized they had taken a chance with their kid’s health. Like I said, the bug is likely to cause other things in people.