Figuring the Odds on “the American People”

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/58342/figuring-the-odds-on-the-american-people

Figuring the Odds on “the American People”
Government
by Jaime O'Neill | September 16, 2014 - 8:23am

In a recent speech, Vice President Joe Biden said: “Folks, it’s never a good bet to bet against the American people.” Now it just so happens that I like Joe Biden, and agree with him about lots of stuff, but it can’t be denied that political pandering doesn’t get any more generic than that. It’s the kind of fearless assertion that will never be challenged or questioned or even thought about by anyone, the kind of sentiment likely to be spouted from a wide spectrum of scoundrels eager to blow smoke up our collective ass. And though I’m reluctant to lend weight to that Chomskified legion of Americans who love to put the knock on the nation every chance they get, I must say that any gambler worth his salt is going to come to the conclusion that betting against the American people currently seems like a pretty smart wager.

A savvy gambler would have been wise to take the odds and bet against the American people when they were making the 2000 presidential campaign so close that a Supreme Court stacked by the daddy of one of the two contenders would give the country’s top job to perhaps the dumbest son of a bitch to ever hold high office, anywhere. Then, when that same candidate came up for re-election not long after invading a nation that posed no threat and had done us no harm, the American people elected that guy again, in spite of the fact that his tax cuts for the wealthy and his very stupid war were running up a huge deficit and doing lots of other harm.

You could bet against the American people on that score, especially when that dimwitted leader was propped up by a Vice President who told us then that “deficits don’t matter,” but who tells us now, as do all members of his political party, that they do.

Betting against the American people can be a pretty good bet, if you can get a bookie to give you true odds. For instance, right about now the American people aren’t too keen on their current leader. Right, left, and center, they just aren’t happy with him. Lots of people on the left have concluded, somewhat haughtily, that there’s just no difference between the two parties, and that’s mostly what they have to say about the situation. If there’s trouble in the world, it’s our fault, and American exceptionalism is the root of all evil, and if there’s any other evil to be found, it can be traced to our door. On the right wing of the political spectrum, of course, the current president was always illegitimate. He wasn’t born here, wasn’t one of us, was a secret Muslim who hates this country. Then, of course, there are those Americans referred to as Independents, as though they stand apart from what’s being done by the two parties that exercise actual power. These people are, for all intents and purposes, Republicans who can’t bear the shame of the name. The carping and morally elevated “progressives” who often find some Third Party elitist upon whom they can squander their votes, and the numbnut right- wingers who see people like Representative Louie Gohmert as their intellectual avatars, and the dipshits who love to spout that they “vote for the man, not the party” all coalesce into a big chunk of the American people well worth betting against.