No Speculation, Doing the Boston Jump Dept. 4
Reg Henry jumps himself to some conclusions. A snippet:
It is a tall jump to the next conclusion, but I’m up for it: Those who just hate and those others who act on their hate in murderous ways are swimming in the same swamp. And, yes, some of those who jumped immediately to prejudiced conclusions about the Boston Marathon bombing don’t realize that their selective disdain for humanity helps maintain, even if only a little, the habitat where killers flourish.
Jump to the link for the rest.
April 19, 2013 at 10:46 am
He nailed it. One could go a lot farther. We live in a bad time and the president, when you get right down to it, is not a very strong or good one. He’s much better than the last and a lot superior to what the result could have been but he’s not the guy who was actually up the job facing him when he entered office. And the other party won’t let him govern, anyway, which leaves him only rhetoric and calling it like it is, which he is often loathe to do. This country, like others, is split tribes that hate each other. I see it, I don’t want to be part of it, I want the other tribe to go away but it won’t, so we’re stuck with each other. And in this environment the weird, the unstable and the violently reactionary are inspired, motivated to action. In this country we built a large corporate industry of fear and we should not be surprised after well more than a decade that one of its products is profit off of making the division greater and bringing out the worst in the worst.
April 19, 2013 at 2:27 pm
Although I disagree with some of Obama’s policies, I can’t agree with your criticism of him. Who on the landscape would have been the “right man for the job”?
He’s a good and decent man trying to deal with an opposition party that has built itself and inhabits an insane world, along with 27% of the electorate (amazing how that figure is such a constant in the polls) and has gerrymandered the states so thoroughly as to entrench itself in the House of Representatives.
He can try either to function within the system or to abrogate it, and abrogating it would not be the doing of a good and decent man. Despite that the Republican Party has become a seditious, almost subversive organization, one that almost openly calls for the overthrow of the government, we have no place for a new Sedition Act. Enacting one would be to become as they are.
As I was looking in the book I mentioned in a later post today, I was struck by how much of the satire has come true. We live in Gahan Wilson’s world.
April 19, 2013 at 3:13 pm
That’s the question. I don’t know who would have been a better president and someone who could have been elected. Bernie Sanders would make a better president but could not be elected. There are probably a couple others, all ruled out because of the way the system has become constrained. Perhaps I’m too hard on Obama but … I thought better of him a few months ago and now we’re just in for static rule. Something very bad could happen in the 2014 elections, more remotely, something good.
April 19, 2013 at 10:00 pm
I think Obama places too much trust in finance men in three-piece suits and in gamers in Nevada raining robotic death from the sky in faraway places with strange-sounding name. Other than that, yes, you are too hard on him.
And 2014 is very important, far more important that 2016, which is getting all the press.
I have always had faith that the American people, with many fits and starts, usually manage to bumble on in the correct direction. That faith has been shaken, and racial bigotry, fed by the Republican Party’s loathsome Southern Strategy and again ripening to fruit, is in the hearts of those who are shaking it.
I dread it, but the debt run up by America’s original sin of slavery is coming due for another installment.
Until the bigotry is forsaken, we will be forsaken.