Please check out my blog for NBCNews.com about something we’ve never seen before, how the presidential campaign is shaping up as a clash between two pessimists.
NBCNews.com Blog: Pessimist vs. Cynical Pessimist
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Please check out my blog for NBCNews.com about something we’ve never seen before, how the presidential campaign is shaping up as a clash between two pessimists.
Comments are closed.
2 Comments.
1) Actions speak louder than words. No matter what Obama says, we’ve seen what he does as President, so the best prediction is necessarily that he’ll continue to do the exact same thing. And the current best guess is that he’ll have a Republican House with lots of Tea Party types, and a very slightly Democratic Senate, meaning it won’t be able to pass anything. So Obama’s biggest projected accomplishment is that he won’t repeal Obamacare, and the Insurance CEOs will reap a windfall. And some people will have better health coverage.
2) Romney hasn’t been President, so we have to go on what he says, which is absolutely nothing. If Romney gets elected, that will mean a Republican sweep, so they’ll take the Senate against predictions, and will repeal Obamacare. Romney has promised to bomb Iran and make the US policies toward the Palestinians explicit rather than implicit (it will be official that Palestinians have a culture of doing nothing except suicide bombing, so the US will fully support Israel’s taking all of Palestine and either evicting the Palestinians or confining them to Bantustans; Obama will not do anything to help the Palestinians, but at least he’ll use rhetoric that sounds like the US supports Palestinian rights). On immigration, Romney’s actual policies will be similar to Obama’s (Obama deported more Hispanics than any other president while promising not to enforce immigration laws against those who had committed no criminal offenses other than being undocumented). Romney promises to force most Hispanics to ‘self-deport’, which means ????
3) Mr Rall criticizes Obama for saying, “I think there’s no bigger purpose right now than making sure that if people work hard in this country, they can get ahead,” Mr Rall says this used to be the right of Americans, so promising to restore it isn’t progress. That’s not the problem. The problem is that saying, ‘If I’m elected, there will be a chicken in every pot’ is NOT the same as delivering those chickens. And Obama gives absolutely no indication of how he might implement the opportunity for everyone to get ahead by hard work. And since he has done nothing about that for four years, and has promised without specifics, we can assume he’ll do no more about it in the next four years.
4) On the other hand, Romney probably will deliver those chickens, and those chickens will be the 99%. Bad as Obama has been and most assuredly will be, Romney has promised to be far worse for everyone who cannot, by hard work and diligent searching, find themselves on the Forbe’s 400 list.
5) So the answer is????
In terms of the US as a military power, I must suggest The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung. Not necessarily to read it, but to appreciate the Chinese view of the near future.
In the book, the US suffers complete economic collapse, but remains the strongest military power by far, stronger than the next two or three or ten nations combined (and they have other problems, so combining against the US is not an option). After the complete economic collapse of the US, it became far more dangerous as a military adversary looking for an excuse to engage in military action against anyone for any reason or for no reason, so China, though the richest, most advanced nation, had to tread very carefully to avoid giving the US the slightest excuse for a military intervention.
Mr Chan’s perception of the military might of the US is well worth noting, since it represents the view of much of the world.