Reading around the various nitwittery about OMG OBAMA and OMG HILLARY and OMG HUNTER this morning, I happened to look up at my Bush Countdown Calendar and realize we’re a year away from the official end of our long national nightmare. I don’t know about you guys, but I plan to be so blind drunk 366 days from now that when I wake up (naked, in a tree, with a string of pearls around my waist and only a fur pelt for cover) not only will I not remember Bush’s helicopter boarding moment, I won’t remember BUSH.
Seriously, though. We’ve got to start thinking about what kind of world we want built after this, and thinking not just wishfully but practically, too: What will we need to do to recover from this, to repair what’s been broken, to account for what’s been lost?
I was joking to somebody in the Crack Van last night that the Freepi might be in a froth right now, hating on Mitt and McCain and Giuliani with equal fervor, but once the primaries were over their candidate would magically assemble with Jesus and Reagan’s corpse into a giant battle robot to take on the horrible DemonRats and be transformed from whatever worthless sack of shit they thought he was into the Next Great American Action Hero, because the enemy of my enemy is my masturbation fantasy, or something like that anyway.
And I’m only partly joking, because it’s not like we won’t have to do that, too. I’m glad that for the most party we’re not actively freaking out about it, except in thepatently wanktastic and narcissistic corners of the Internet. We’re going to have to find some way to figure out how to mobilize behind who we’ve got, regardless of who we wanted, because President Romney? Oh Cylon God, no. President McCain … Not with your vote would I cast one for that guy, not after he humped Bush’s leg like an overwound spaniel in 2004, not after that, no.
We’ve got to start thinking not just about winning the presidency but winning the country back, too, and doing things to ensure what has happened to us in the past eight years will never happen again. How do we do that? How do we undo all the damage? Where do we even begin? As much fun as it may be to autowitter on about UR CANDIDATE SUXXORZ and OMG UR MEEN!!11! and whatnot, we’re doing this for something, right? What for? What do we do, when we have to turn our attention from building up a candidate to rebuilding a country? Where do we even start?
A.
qWayle will b the preznit that keeps coming back to haunt us.
We will have to clean up the mess like you clean any other mess. Pick a corner and go from there and don’t stop until the room (country) is “clean” again. Should take about 10 or 15 years if we are lucky.
mook
Athenae
“The pearls”, “naked in the tree”, and “the pelt” combines for a good visual.
😉
mook
I keep thinking that the Democratic candidates, and even the Republican ones, all have to be masochists at heart. The job of president following the disaster of the past 8 years will be one of the most difficult, most frustrating, and nearly impossible jobs in the world.
Frankly, the first thing I would want done is for Congress to pass a bill increasing the US Supreme Court to an 11 member court, then appointing two liberals to that court to finally stop the bleeding there. Perhaps next I would totally revamp our foreign policy to a no-preemptive war policy, a no attack except in response to an attack policy, a no more embargoing of nations we don’t like, and a policy of support for the UN.
Then I would greatly reduce the budget for the military, and withdraw US forces from Korea, Germany, Japan, etc., plus dropping the Star Wars program entirely.
With the money that would free up I would push all out for a single payer health care system, probably contracting out management of the details to insurance companies who would bid for the contracts.
Then, the next day…
Careful what you wish for. A Huckabee win may actually make us think of Bush in nostalgic terms.
This is probably going to turn into a novel, so bear with me. I’d personally say that one of the big places to start is by attacking those pieces of “conventional wisdom,” the things that “everybody knows”…
…but are patently, demonstrably, and unequivocally false.
For example, the right wing has been phenomenally successful in wiping out many people’s perception of privilege by harping over and over again on twisted versions of individualism. You know: Collective action is always bad. Everyone should always be completely responsible for themselves, and, with very few exceptions (mostly for women, who are supposed to be responsible for everyone else first, then themselves), only themselves. If youhonestly believe that who your parents were, where you lived when you were growing up, what kind of school you went to as a kid, how you were taught to dress and act and all that makeno difference to your success in life, and that everything that happens to you is a result of your actions and choices, you’re succeptible to this meme.
Go after the other ways the right obscures agency, like how in their world, market forces are implacable, unstoppable, and autochthonous; they don’t come from anywhere and they can’t be controlled. Go after the meme that things “just happen,” and don’t have causes. I heard this one a lot recently talking about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan didn’t “just happen” because of some mysterious etheric shift in the public consciousness, he was the product of a dedicated campaign that spanned over a decade, perpetrated by people like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Viguerie, and Jerry Falwell. There are countless examples of things that people in general believe “just happened,” but didn’t.
You know a bunch of ways their dishonest framings have manifested themselves in the real world:
— government doesn’t work
— public transit doesn’t work
— poor people are lazy
et cetera. Looking back at, say, the actual mechanics of the New Deal probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. If right-wingers hated it so much, and it was overall successful, there has got to be some good stuff in there that’s since passed out of the contemporary public consciousness. Hammerthose things, too.
Just my CDN$0.02, FWIW.