Are Americans so angry about politics because the U.S. is declining as a world power?

[KingOrfeo]

We all look alike, huh?

Not at all! Look at the guy in the back! Bow tie! Radical, dude!

 

[KingOrfeo]

If U.S. goes down, the whole world goes down.

That is the stupidest statement posted so far in this thread, and perhaps the stupidest on the board this week.

 

[bronzeage]

Mmm.

I want that suit on the guy second from the right. Looks like Yves St Laurent, charcoal gray pin stripes.

Too bad, I just don't have the shoulders for it.

 

[tactful]

Because in Politics everyone is Just Talking about the Economy, rathing then doing something about it. I think they're playing Switch, with their thumbs.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frizzle_Fry]

Probably votes Democrat as well.

No way dude, thats 100% green party...lol the other other democrat.

 

[Frizzle_Fry]

That is the stupidest statement posted so far in this thread, and perhaps the stupidest on the board this week.

LMFAO......

 

[Spider Rand]

The nice thing about non-conforming individuals is they are all so similar.

Dustin Diamond aka Samuel "Screech" Powers. Erie, isn't it?

 

[MeeMie]

Are Americans so angry about politics because the U.S. is declining as a world power?

No.

We're angry that the Obama-Loonie Majority Congress is turning our great nation into a banana republic, suffocating taxpayers with debt, depriving the next generation of opportunities to succeed, regulating personal choices and freedoms, taking over private business, biased racial inequities in place of law, killing jobs, wasting taxpayer money by padding every bill with unrelated perks & bribes, hiding bills that cannot be passed on their own merits within monster bills too large for comprehension, passing bills in the midnight hours/weekends, refusing to participate with the minority party (except for false show), totally disregarding the millions of voices objecting to the bills they are shoving down our throats ...

Yes, Americans are very angry.

You will begin to understand about what after the November election.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Can you name anything you've ever posted with substantially correct analysis?

KingOrfeo is the most intelligent poster here. His posts are always worth reading.

 

[The_Trouvere]

The Tea Party is nothing more than the Republican Party without intellectual pretensions. When the Republicans dominate the rich get much richer. Up to now, however, most Americans advanced somewhat.

There never has been a long period of time when the rich got richer as the median income adjusted for inflation declined. We may be entering such an era. The eventual outcome is unpredictable.

In the short run the Republicans will benefit. Later on, there may be an interest in economic redistribution. This will benefit the Democrats.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Not quite as stupid as your initial question however.

Oh, come now, vetteman, however you may feel about that, even you must admit that "If U.S. goes down, the whole world goes down" is way dumber. That is, if you have even as much geopolitical knowledge as a below-average recruit would bring with him to his first day of boot camp. Which may be too much to expect, in your case.

 

[KingOrfeo]

The Tea Party is nothing more than the Republican Party without intellectual pretensions. When the Republicans dominate the rich get much richer. Up to now, however, most Americans advanced somewhat.

There never has been a long period of time when the rich got richer as the median income adjusted for inflation declined. We may be entering such an era. The eventual outcome is unpredictable.

In the short run the Republicans will benefit. Later on, there may be an interest in economic redistribution. This will benefit the Democrats.

To be fair, the Tea Party is a populist movement -- which means its resentments go up and down the socioeconomic ladder.

Relevant article: "Can Populism Be Liberal?"

In itself, American populism is neither left nor right. Translated into economics, Jacksonian populism spells producerism. For generations, Jacksonian populists have believed that the hardworking majority of small producers is threatened from above and below by two classes of drones: unproductive capitalists and unproductive paupers. While government promotion of public goods like defense, infrastructure and utilities that benefit all citizens is acceptable, Jacksonomics is suspicious of crony capitalists who owe their fortunes to political connections (can you spell B-A-I-L-O-U-T?). And Jacksonian producerism naturally is haunted by the nightmare of a class of the idle poor, who are capable of working but instead live off the labors of others and lack an ownership stake in the community.

 

[KingOrfeo]

No.

We're angry that the Obama-Loonie Majority Congress is turning our great nation into a banana republic, suffocating taxpayers with debt, depriving the next generation of opportunities to succeed, regulating personal choices and freedoms, taking over private business, biased racial inequities in place of law, killing jobs, wasting taxpayer money by padding every bill with unrelated perks & bribes, hiding bills that cannot be passed on their own merits within monster bills too large for comprehension, passing bills in the midnight hours/weekends, refusing to participate with the minority party (except for false show), totally disregarding the millions of voices objecting to the bills they are shoving down our throats ...

Yes, Americans are very angry.

You will begin to understand about what after the November election.

*sigh* Yes, yes, of course, my dear. See post #20. So far, Abramsky seems to have everything sussed.

 

[unregistered]

 

[hobbit.]

No.

its because they are a bunch of cunts.

 

[off2bed]

What the egg heads don't get or won't admit is, America has declined because of leftist politicians. Our decline wasn't some naturally cyclical thing that couldn't be helped. It was desired and engineered on purpose.

That's why Americans are so angry.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Having lived on military bases all over the world, I've probably forgotten more about the subject than you will ever know.

And quite thoroughly, too.

 

[KingOrfeo]

What the egg heads don't get or won't admit is, America has declined because of leftist politicians. Our decline wasn't some naturally cyclical thing that couldn't be helped. It was desired and engineered on purpose.

That's why Americans are so angry.

Wrong on two counts:

1) There are practically no leftist politicians of any importance in America. Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, that's about it. Obama, like Clinton before him, mostly represents the right wing of the Democratic Party -- the left wing of which is quite conservative by many democracies' standards.

2) It was not leftist politicians -- for the most part, it was not even mainstream Democrats -- who recklessly squandered America's wealth, power, prestige and moral authority in the Middle East, allowed America's industrial and financial sectors to ruin themselves, or facilitated the decline of the middle class. All that happened during the Republican hegemony of 1980 through 2008.

 

[miles]

Oh, come now, vetteman, however you may feel about that, even you must admit that "If U.S. goes down, the whole world goes down" is way dumber. That is, if you have even as much geopolitical knowledge as a below-average recruit would bring with him to his first day of boot camp. Which may be too much to expect, in your case.

What a putz.

 

[unregistered]

 

[miles]

What can you expect from a Mensa wannabe?

Can you see him in boot camp?

"Wipe that fucking smile off your face, boy!"

"Sir, yes sir!!"

"Less dramatically, as Britain's position as a pre-eminent power collapsed post-World War II, the country responded with a strange mixture of fury and resignation. "I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American age, apart from if you're an American, of course," opined the drunken, nihilistic, spiteful, and utterly depressive Jimmy Porter, bitterly, in Look Back in Anger, the famous postwar play and later film about British angst and the loss of illusion. John Osborne's creation was the quintessential rage drama in a Britain when young people could still recall a childhood living in a land of undisputed supremacy, and could look forward to a middle age of mediocrity in a victorious but bankrupt kingdom and to an old age of national insignificance. And when they were angry enough about it to be shouting bloody murder and casting around for people to blame.

Half a generation later, as the British public grew more accustomed to the country's diminished role in world affairs, at least some of the anger had changed to sarcasm, humor, and self-denigration. The era of Monty Python had commenced. National quirks that previously signified greatness were now derided. Stiff upper lips, the queen, Winston Churchill, those were now the stuff of jokes rather than the majesty of empire.

That said, the anger never entirely dissipated: The 1970s, the era of London punk rock, saw a surge in fascist street politics in many poor communities. The 1980s were pockmarked by skinhead violence and football hooliganism. And today anti-immigrant parties like the British National Party are sometimes making electoral inroads, at the local if not the national level. Britain is a land that knows how to laugh at itself, but it is also a place still riven with a subterranean fury at the hand dealt it by recent history. "Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma?" Sloterdijk asks in his recent book.

America in 2010 hasn't reached the self-deprecating Monty Python stage yet, but it's not much of a stretch to see in Glenn Beck's tirades, Lou Dobbs's anti-immigrant screeds, and Sarah Palin's faux nostalgia for the sunshine days, the nastiness and anger, if not the poetry, of Jimmy Porter; the fury, if not the haircuts, of skinhead hooligans (although a fair number of white-supremacist and militia groups in America these days do seem to have numbers of skinheads in their midst). The hollow sounds of a skinhead rendition of "Rule Britannia" are echoed, in some ways, in the raucous chants of "USA, USA!" at Tea Party gatherings today."

 

[miles]

What can you expect from a Mensa wannabe?

Can you see him in boot camp?

DI: "Wipe that fucking smile off your face, boy!"

Mensa Boy: "Sir, yes sir!!"

"Less dramatically, as Britain's position as a pre-eminent power collapsed post-World War II, the country responded with a strange mixture of fury and resignation. "I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American age, apart from if you're an American, of course," opined the drunken, nihilistic, spiteful, and utterly depressive Jimmy Porter, bitterly, in Look Back in Anger, the famous postwar play and later film about British angst and the loss of illusion. John Osborne's creation was the quintessential rage drama in a Britain when young people could still recall a childhood living in a land of undisputed supremacy, and could look forward to a middle age of mediocrity in a victorious but bankrupt kingdom and to an old age of national insignificance. And when they were angry enough about it to be shouting bloody murder and casting around for people to blame.

Half a generation later, as the British public grew more accustomed to the country's diminished role in world affairs, at least some of the anger had changed to sarcasm, humor, and self-denigration. The era of Monty Python had commenced. National quirks that previously signified greatness were now derided. Stiff upper lips, the queen, Winston Churchill, those were now the stuff of jokes rather than the majesty of empire.

That said, the anger never entirely dissipated: The 1970s, the era of London punk rock, saw a surge in fascist street politics in many poor communities. The 1980s were pockmarked by skinhead violence and football hooliganism. And today anti-immigrant parties like the British National Party are sometimes making electoral inroads, at the local if not the national level. Britain is a land that knows how to laugh at itself, but it is also a place still riven with a subterranean fury at the hand dealt it by recent history. "Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma?" Sloterdijk asks in his recent book.

America in 2010 hasn't reached the self-deprecating Monty Python stage yet, but it's not much of a stretch to see in Glenn Beck's tirades, Lou Dobbs's anti-immigrant screeds, and Sarah Palin's faux nostalgia for the sunshine days, the nastiness and anger, if not the poetry, of Jimmy Porter; the fury, if not the haircuts, of skinhead hooligans (although a fair number of white-supremacist and militia groups in America these days do seem to have numbers of skinheads in their midst). The hollow sounds of a skinhead rendition of "Rule Britannia" are echoed, in some ways, in the raucous chants of "USA, USA!" at Tea Party gatherings today."

"Sir!"

 

[RightField]

Wrong on two counts:

It was not leftist politicians -- for the most part, it was not even mainstream Democrats -- who recklessly squandered America's wealth, power, prestige and moral authority in the Middle East, allowed America's industrial and financial sectors to ruin themselves, or facilitated the decline of the middle class. All that happened during the Republican hegemony of 1980 through 2008.

Stability in the middle east is a key part of a stable world environment. Obama's spending programs far exceed the amount spent on the war and are for what...payoffs to his loyal constituants and provide virtually no benefit to the nation or the world. His stimulus program alone costs about as much as the entire Iraqi war and was done with a simple stroke of the pen over a weekend with support from his all-democrat congress and no practical debate. What's more, Obama elected to continue the war effort so he seems to have thought it was important.

Obama is going to tax us into oblivion. It's not a natural progression that we're losing our leadership position, rather, it's a direct result of his policies. One of the most important contributors to this problem is the excessive taxes on our businesses (the ones he regularly derides) that make them less competitive around the world and which practically force them to establish operations overseas in order to remain viable organizations (accelerating the flight of jobs offshore). Instead of reducing the taxes on our businesses, rather he adds more, adds healthcare costs, proposes adding capntrade which will be another massive tax (even as he tries to say the increased costs won't really be a tax).

No, its the democrat policies which are causing this pain and "malaise" and the sooner we vote them out the sooner we can get ourselves back on a growth trajectory again.