Thursday, September 18, 2008

misplaced aggression

Lately, I've been on a rampage about politics. I've realized in the past few days that perhaps my frustration is a little misplaced. Politicians are politicians. Some are better than others, some are just plain evil. I really can't expect things will change.

I'm really just frustrated with the American people. I hear the things that people say, "Obama's a muslim" "Obama will take our guns away" etc--and I just can't take it. I can't believe the lack of ability to think among our population. I really feel like we are speciating as humans.

I'm going to go ahead and post this now--but I will edit it later so stay tuned.

2 comments:

willthespill said...

The crazy thing to me, is that (at least around here) some of the people saying ridiculous things have at least a nominal (and sometimes significant) education. Just is enough to make you want to pull your hair out- or pull an "Into the Wild"

Dr. Jeff said...

Jeff Weintraub: The lost honor of John McCain: Well, now it's clear. McCain and his campaign decided that the only way they could win the general election was to run a dishonest, dirty, and cynically unscrupulous campaign. So that's what we're going to get.

On the one hand, shamelessly repeated lies by and about Sarah Palin. (It's bad enough that McCain was irresponsible enough to pick her as a running-mate in the first place.) On the other hand, pervasive lying about Barack Obama--not just systematic misrepresentations of Obama's position on important policy questions (ho-hum, right?), but sleazy character assassination and noisy fake outrage.

Right now, for example, much of the Republican world is in a paroxysm of artificial indignation about the transparently ludicrous charge that Obama called Sarah Palin a pig. And the McCain campaign just released a truly disgusting ad falsely claiming that Obama, as a State Senator in Illinois, sponsored a bill mandating "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners. This is not even a subtle or sophisticated smear. It's just straight gutter politics.... [W]hen John McCain unexpectedly won the Republican nomination, promising to run a substantive and "respectful" general election campaign, it looked possible that the Republicans might actually stay out of the gutter this time around. Apparently not. Well, it might work.

Some people I know will accuse me of being naive for saying this, but I feel genuinely disappointed with John McCain for taking this road...