Is it just me, or is this country going to hell in a handbasket?

[Squatch]

And, I'm not just talking about the peripheral "oh noes" that we normally see. I'm talking about the things that are happening right now, directly eroding the absolute core of our country's security. Major banks going tits up, inflation at record levels, an insane chief executive, a hobbled legislature, a fascist high court...jebus, I'm not much on Chicken Little prophesies, but I'm not liking what I'm seeing for this country over the next 5 to 15 years.

[LeftyFingerPop]

1. I have the same feeling....

and I also feel that it is going to be very difficult to turn things around.

[bdamomma]

2. going to hell in a handbasket

if these thugs are not kicked to the curb.

[mucifer]

3. yes

[raccoon]

4. I feel the same way. Looks like a perfect storm to me. nt

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. I wanted to post a sarcastic "Going?" but

I have to agree that the last seven years have been far worse than anything in my memory. I dare say things now are worse than they were during the McCarthy years, when Congress and the Court at least made an effort to give the illusion of constitutionality.

What we have now and where we very likely will stay.... :scared:

[LynnTheDem]

6. Nope, not just you.

We have far too high a percentage of MFing stupid people in this country.

One little example; name the ONLY NATION in the entire world that ever thought Iraq did 911.


Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm

[Wiley50]

11. And the media disinformation that caused that is our #1 greatest problem

it's going to be pretty much impossible to turn it around
as long as the corporate media have our reps intimidated
and are spinning the "low info" citizens into confusion

My greatest dream is that some terrorists will firebomb Faux or something.
(I said "dream" Agent Mike)

[NMDemDist2]

7. Going?? the basket is scorched and smoking already

it's already in hell

[Beausoleil]

13. I was going to say

it ain't even looking good for the handbasket.

[marmar]

8. I saw a great bumper sticker the other day:

"What's wrong with this country? ..... And why am I in this handbasket?"

[zanne]

9. I blame everybody who voted for George W. Bush.

Especially those who voted for him twice. If this was just another failed presidency, I wouldn't blame the voters, but this administration has acted with malice and so have most of the people who voted for him.

[scheming daemons]

16. ...and Ralph Nader

[The Stranger]

18. Right, because Nader told us the Pelosis of the world would coddle and protect the GOP criminals.

Sure, keep 'em coming.

[readmoreoften]

21. Please don't kill the 3rd party scapegoat.

Nader is the root of all evil to many Democrats the way Clinton is the root of all evil to Republicans.

[scheming daemons]

22. Nader's campaign put Bush in the whitehouse in 2000... indisputable fact

90,000+ votes for Nader in Florida.


Bush won Florida by less than 600 votes.



'nuff said.

[The Stranger]

24. Bullshit. Nader kept LEIBERMAN from playing the role of DICK CHENEY.

And Nader told us that the Democrats -- once elected -- suddenly metamorph into Republicans -- case in point, Nancy Pelosi's inexplicable and unforgivable holding down the American people so they could be raped repeatedly by the Neocon Junta.

[scheming daemons]

28. You seriously think that Gore would've been as bad as Chimpy?

Even if Gore "moved to the right", he would've been light years better than President Dumbfuck.


And Lieberman is a snake.... but he's got a long way to go to be as bad as Vice President Evil-Incarnate

[The Stranger]

37. Lieberman is working on it, if he isn't there yet.

But the point is that Nader is not the enemy of all that is good in the world, and many of us are getting sick and tired of the cute little knee jerk little reactions attacking him.

[scheming daemons]

40. No... Nader was the ENABLER of the guy that is the "enemy of all that is good in the world"

That's the point.

He's supposed to be on the good side. And he enabled the "evil-doers".

[warren pease]

30. Bush did not win Florida...

I'm getting a little goddamn sick of this so-called conventional wisdom that Nader cost Gore Florida and therefore is to blame for inflicting the Bushies on us for this awful period in history. That argument also assumes that voting ones conscience is inherent bad because only candidates who represent the duopoly are legitimate, no matter how tightly you have to pinch your nose shut when voting for one of them.

This wasn't an election; this was a right wing coup d'état, planned for years, funded by the usual wingnut billionaires, Jebbie and Cruella in place, mass media working continuing the fine work they did as the RNC's PR agency throughout the campaign. This opportunity doesn't come along every day and they weren't about to waste it.

Nader's just a convenient distraction and scapegoat, but the fix was in both times -- first in Florida, then in Ohio -- and the Supremes would have figured out a way to screw Kerry out of a win in 2004 if the Ohio voter caging strategy hadn't worked so well.

Bush was going to "win" the 2000 election no matter what. Same with 2004. There's so much proof out there, complete with insider whistle-blowers who wrote vote-flipping code and other such relatively invisible ways to steal elections. Palast, MC Miller, Bobby Kennedy Jr. and a bunch more have physical evidence, statements from people who worked the elections in Florida and then Ohio. Not a single one of them buys the "Nader the demonspawn cost Gore and Kerry the presidency."

Witnesses have testified to finding tens of thousands of ballots from strong democratic precincts in waterlogged crates in tidal pools and marshes. Then there's the uncounted expat ballots, overseas military votes (which likely would have favored Bush anyway), missing absentee ballots and so on.

While these real crimes were taking place, the PR battle raged on in mass media. Fux Nudes had already set up the Bush = winner/Gore = whiner meme. The rest of corporate mass media took their orders from their conglomerate holding company bosses and their cues from Fux and reinforced the whole phony illogical construct. The RNC released the hounds to harass election workers during various recounts, the most notorious incident being the hilarious staged preppie riots. Intimidation was all over the place as khaki-clad mobs stormed state government building, chanting perfectly punctuated and correctly phrased slogans demanding an end to the recount.

The quickly Bushies brought in caporegime and chief fixer Jim Baker, looking sleek, invulnerable, healthy, sartorially resplendent, mobbed up. He joked and charmed and back-slapped his way into the hearts of the "on-air talent" who play reporters on TV and his PR work helped embed the "Bush won" theme into the American collective consciousness.

The DNC, showing off their usual ignorance about the pivotal role image and superficiality play in pop culture America, brought in Warren Christopher. He looked like he had just crawled out of his crypt, dusted himself off, pulled off a few strips of rotting flesh, found an old suit that didn't reek of muck and mold, filed down his canines a bit, put on his magic cape and flew all the way from Washington to Tallahassee without a plane.

So on the one hand, there's Baker -- tall, robust, supremely confident, joking, master of the 8-second sound bite and obviously in command. On the other, there's Christopher the reanimated corpse, those weird eyebrows bouncing all over the place, looking devious and uncertain, voice shaky, short and bony, a little on the wimpy side and absolutely NOT CREDIBLE.

The November 11, 2001 NORC report on Florida election anomalies -- commissioned by a consortium of U.S. news organizations including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Tribune Publishing which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and several newspapers in Florida -- determined that Gore would have won had he pursued his own preferred course of action re ballot counting, and not that of his legal advisers.

Of course, all major papers ran a front-page over the fold story on how the report proves that Bush won. Then way down in paragraph 17, we read NORC's conclusion that if Gore had insisted on recounting all of of Florida's ballots, now just those from selected counties, he would have won. The "strategy" employed by the DNC's "finest minds" was a loser. Christopher was a major contributor to that strategy.

Fortunately for BushCo, post-9/11 fervor had turned him from an idiot to a statesman and, just for good measure, another passenger plane went down that day, killing all aboard and quite a few people on the ground. Predictably, the NORC report was buried or ignored in nightly TV newscasts.

Gawwam... sounds like one a them thar conspiritazations. Good thing the US is the only country in the history of the world that's never experienced a single political conspiracy. Must be that American exceptionalism.


wp

[scheming daemons]

41. That is all true.... . but Gore would've won by 50,000+ votes with no Nader in Florida....

...and there would have been no path for the Coup d'etat to occur.

They can win in the courts a recount battle.


But a 50,000+ vote win means there wouldn't have been a recount battle.

[warren pease]

42. No... That means he would have won the Florida popular vote...

Gore was not going to be allowed to win that election. You really think the Bushies had only one contingency plan, and that single plan depended entirely on the unlikely event that only a few hundred votes would separate the two?

This was a carefully planned out right wing coup enabled by putting all the right people in all the right spots. Jebbie and Cruella being the most obvious, but have you ever seen that fat buzz cut asshole who tries to justify the great voter roll purge? Or the precinct workers whose only job was to delay the recount so that it couldn't meet the Florida Supreme Court-imposed deadline?

Key people also included the Boy King's cousin John Ellis, who was in charge of certain aspects of Fux's election coverage. Ellis gave the order to call it for Bush with no basis for doing so but his loyalty to his cousins Georgie and Jebbie -- and probably a little something extra in his christmas stocking.

Between 2000 and 2004, there are nearly as many happy "coincidences" as there are in the official fairy tale about "the events of 9/11(tm)."

Nader's supposedly overwhelming influence has been a convenient fiction the Bushies have used time and again to divert attention from the little man behind the curtain as he purges the voter rolls of black people, historic democratic voters, known "libruls," and then resets a couple of software switches and maybe a DIP switch or two. Presto, instant coup -- and Fat Tony and the Supremes take care of the legal issues.

Consider everything that's happened since the coup. Do you think these are random acts enabled only because Ralph Nader was on the Florida ballot? Even though the entire Bush regime is the living embodiment of the script written by PNAC?

The Bushies have this rep for abysmal incompetence. But if you look at who's getting richer and who's getting screwed, I don't see a single member of the administration, its corporate cronies, the good people at Carlyle and everybody else in the top 2 percent that owns this country and its political institutions. Privatization has accelerated the shift of wealth from the bottom to the top. War profiteering has never been more lucrative. And they're all making a killing, as it were.

Not to exclude the faux opposition party. According to financial disclosure statements required of all members of Congress, in calendar year 2006 -- the latest year for which complete and audited reports exist -- 151 members of congress, both representatives and senators, had a financial stake in one or more of the numerous DoD contractors. Those investments were worth a combined $78.7 million to $195.5 million at the time. These weren't small deals either; the list only includes DoD contractors with signed deals worth at least $5 million apiece.

So every time Patreus comes to town for a congressional briefing, at least 151 of the peoples' representatives are getting a private investment counseling session for free. And they seem to have worked. Those investments earned those 151 members a total of between $15.8 million and $62 million in stock profits from 2004 and 2006. This marvelous bit of news courtesy of a study released in early April 2008 by Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan research group.

Iraq's only a quagmire if you're over there fighting and dying. It's a once-in-a-lifetime profit opportunity if you're holding the right stocks.

From right wing coup to dem venality to stock tips from the horses mouth, or possibly the other end. My how the boy do ramble...


wp

[SammyWinstonJack]

20. I blame everyone who voted for the little pissant for Gov too. That just encouraged the little

freak.

[MadrasT]

39. Ding ding ding!!!

"Especially those who voted for him twice."

It makes me NUTS when I encounter anyone who voted for the shrub in '04 who says, "But, we were in the middle of a war! That's no time to bring in a new president."

:nuke:

[NC_Nurse]

10. I've been thinking we were circling the drain for quite some time now.

What's hard to predict is whether we are going to plunge the rest of the way down all at once or maintain a slow progression toward the bottom.
Hard to tell at this point.

I'd have to say I agree with Lynn upthread about the complete ignorance of most of the electorate as well. I think that's been the key to sending
us to our demise as much as anything. A real democracy demands an informed, involved public. We don't have one. C'est la vie.

[ChazII]

12. Going

I thought it has already gone to hell.

[lazyriver]

14. I had to sell my handbasket to buy gas, so yeah.

[scheming daemons]

15. As an atheist that doesn't believe in the concept of "hell", I'll just say it's going to "Cleveland"

[shadowknows69]

26. Hey! Cleveland Rocks!!!

[gratuitous]

17. What are ya, some kind of a whiner?

Looks like you need a Happy-Gramm to tell you that it's just a mental recession. So turn that frown upside down Buster Brown! Didja hear Rush Limbaugh just signed a fat new contract? Now, how could someone offer a big contract like that if we were in hard economic times? How about another round of tax cuts for the overrich? That should perk you up!

[DailyGrind51]

19. People I know who had been trying to stop smoking and cut back

on booze, are now smoking and drinking more, and not because they can afford it either.
I have doubled up on my Zantac and migraine meds.

[shadowknows69]

27. I was finally able to whine a scrip for Xanax from my Doctor

King Kong could come sit on my house and I could give a shit. Great stuff.

[Subdivisions]

23. This has all long been predicted as the consequence of

surpassing the point of maximum world oil production. Once the supply of crude oil has decoupled from the demand for it and there is no longer enough oil to fuel the world's economy, you get what you see happening now.

[shadowknows69]

25. Yes, this would be the "interesting times" in that old Chinese curse

And we get to be front row center, whoopee!

[sammythecat]

31. Yeah... great, ain't it?

I like movies and stories about interesting times. It's not so cool living the part of one of the minor characters.

[exothermic]

29. Even the handbasket is mortgaged, and

Indymac is the lienholder. :scared:

[DangerDave921]

32. Cluck Cluck Cluck

Not Chicken Little? LOL, could have fooled me.

Every generation believes the country is going down the toilet. It gets old hearing it. It's human nature to believe things were better back in the old days.

I've seen quotes from retired baseball players in the early 1900's bemoaning the game being played by these "modern" players. And this was in 1916!!

[librechik]

33. the handbasket is pretty tattered too!

It's a landslide...

[slackmaster]

34. Honestly Squatch, a lot of it is probably your perception changing as you get older

I find myself less and less tolerant of stupidity with each passing year.

[defendandprotect]

35. It's the GOP's "third world America" arriving . . . !!!

[HughBeaumont]

36. That's called Reagone + Bewsh The First + Bewsh The Worst.

Those three dickheads and their Big (insert industry here)/extremely wealthy gladhanding, abetting and handouts while everything and anyone else went straight in the shitter is the reason why we're in the nearly unrepairable state we're in.

Low taxation for decades with no bill-a-coming due? Peace through Strength? 9-11 Changed Everything? Job Offshoring is good for the economy? Supply Side? Free Markets? Trickle Down? Deficits don't Matter? Yeah, HOW'S that working OUT for you, CONSERVATURDS???? HOW'S THAT WORKING OUT FOR ALL OF US, ASSHOLES???

I could say "Hope you're proud of yourselves" but chances are they would just sit there drooling with their bucket of Flaturin and continue to watch "Ow My Balls!".

[mmonk]

38. Either that or a lead balloon. No, it's not just you.

[Ewellian]

43. Impossible.

The handbasket factory closed years ago.