Obama's Top 50

[Albert Tatlock]

McCain or Obama - either way we're doomed to four more years of poo. Whether poo is white poo or brown poo - it's still poo.

[Jimcalagon]

It's most obvious on his Wikipedia picture:

 

Are you sure you aren't thinking of this bloke?

 

[VinnieK]

I liked Hilary. She seemed a little more openly condescending and smug than the others and it's refreshing to see a politician doing so little to appear even barely likeable during election time.

 

My ideal candidate: John Lithgow. Ted Danson would be good too.

[Jimcalagon]

I liked Hilary. She seemed a little more openly condescending and smug than the others and it's refreshing to see a politician doing so little to appear even barely likeable during election time.

 

My ideal candidate: John Lithgow. Ted Danson would be good too.

 

Nah, Clint Eastwood, especially in light of the way he dealt with Spike Lee a couple of weeks ago.

[Stu Peters]

Martin Sheen has more experience than any of them...

[jimbms]

Another 50 lies and he might make a decent politician

[VinnieK]

Martin Sheen has more experience than any of them...

 

He's past it though, there needs to be change, fresh ideas, and a new vision for the future. Vote Emilio Estevez, Sheen's son and star of such box office smashes as The Mighty Ducks and St Elmo's Fire.

[Miss Take]

Larry David ftw

 

Also, Charlie Sheen would be better than Emilio. He has Vietnam war experience after all, which made the man from the boy. Plus, he may have taken all that cocaine, but he didn't inhale it, er, as vigorously as others did...

[Chinahand]

Shame, I'd hoped this was Obama's top 50 power ballads or Byker Grove moments. Now I find it's just a tawdry smear of a politician from a country I'm not eligible to vote in.

 

Couldn't agree with you more.

 

But there is more than that - this isn't only a tawdry smear its an example of crooked thinking.

 

It doesn't care if the individual points contradict each other, whether they exaggerate or distort Obama's actual position, even whether they are accurate; it just wants to say Obama is wrong 50 times.

 

Looking at the snopes.com rebutal ans posted up its obvious most of the 50 are pure and simple political slander and mud slinging with only a tenuous grip on reality.

 

Its written for people seeking confirmation of their beliefs not to rationally examine an issue.

 

It's emotion and gut, not nuance and analysis.

 

I am sure Democrats are putting up identically motivated lists about McCain - please don't post them up, I genually hope this list isn't so full of politico Yanks evangelizing their particular party that we'll have to endure this sort of crap.

 

I find the whole thing an example of what is wrong with American politics - the idea is that free speach allows you to say any exaggerated crap as the other side can always put up their own bullshit in reply.

 

As a result you'll only find cherry picking that agrees with your position and disagrees with the other party's policies

 

The result isn't dialogue, but mutual deafness. It turns a spectrum of policy ideas into a false dichotomy portrayed as either perfection or the end of the world.

 

I suppose the fact is that as the democrat and republican positions do not, in the grand scheme of things, have any major policy differences all they can do is trade on hype and hot air.

 

Well whoopie for them - Sugarbee go way and enjoy your gerrymandered, lobbiest dominated, big money corrupted politics, but don't expect much support here for this sort of bull.

 

Sure give us some honest analyses of Obama's weaknesses, but lets not pretend this is what you've presented here, its rot and you should be honest enough to acknowledge it is. Its the sort of thing that turns over 50% of your population away from politics, and makes your democracy a laughing stock around the world.

 

And that is damaging for the whole concept of democracy.

 

What crap.

[VinnieK]

I suppose the fact is that as the democrat and republican positions do not, in the grand scheme of things, have any major policy differences all they can do is trade on hype and hot air.

 

Sure give us some honest analyses of Obama's weaknesses, but lets not pretend this is what you've presented here, its rot and you should be honest enough to acknowledge it is. Its the sort of thing that turns over 50% of your population away from politics, and makes your democracy a laughing stock around the world.

 

And that is damaging for the whole concept of democracy.

 

What crap.

 

That's a little unfair. Voter turnout in the UK has hardly been stellar, hovering around 60% since 2001, with it being under 40% in some constituencies. Nor is the UK any stranger to lobbying or smear campaigns. Also I'd say that the distinction in policy between Republican and Democrat is probably wider than that between the Conservatives and Labour here. The U.S. political parties tend to be loosely affiliated with traditional interest groups (with the Democrats particularly beholden and occassionally hindered by the big unions) that ensures a certain amount of divergence between the two, whereas in the UK both major parties tend to concentrate on courting exactly the same people.

 

I think it's also wrong to say that U.S. democracy is a laughing stock. Yes the conduct of candidates and parties can often be called into question, but let's not forget that the actual system has a lot to recommend it - not least in the idea of balancing vested interests through Congress, the Senate, the Executive, and the Supreme Court (even if the practice sometimes falls short of the ideal). What can the UK boast in comparison? A bloated parliament, ineffectual upper house, and an emasculated judiciary, all of which are more or less entirely at the mercy of the cabinet until public disaffection kicks in and backbench rebellions and the like reduce parliament to a scene of chaos and the passing of legislation turns into a process of deal making and distributing pork to various groups. Let's also not forget the role of the newspapers in British electioneering - it could be argued that parties don't often have to overtly smear their rivals' reputations, since the media is all too willing to do it for them. I know quite a few Americans are surprised to find out just how partisan, vicious, and obsessed with tattle the UK press can be compared to that back in the U.S.

 

Finally, it's also worth remembering that, for all the underhand tactics and unpleasantness it involves, in the U.S. the public has the opportunity to see how their political parties choose candidates for future elections. In the UK we're simply presented with candidates long after the jostling for votes and competition has ended and the party apparatus and local members have filtered through the options. Greater public exposure is usually accompanied by grandstanding and questionable tactics, but it nevertheless offers a window into a party's soul that would otherwise be closed off.

[Chinahand]

Hey I wasn't doing a comparision with the UK - obviously the UK system sucks big in all sorts of ways, but in the grand scheme of things that isn't relevent. Just because there are problems elsewhere doesn't mean I should ignore problems when I see them! Heck I'm a Manx voter not a UK one and if I was to compare the US system with ours I know which one I would prefer!!!

 

I am concerned that the US has lost a huge amount of political and moral authority due to failures of its political system.

 

I originally was going to end my first post with a series of quotes where various autocrats have used US political farces to justify their own corruption, but didn't have the energy to look them up.

 

I still don't but they are along the lines of:

 

Mugabe used the farce in Florida etc to justify the delay in releasing the first round elections

 

Russian politicians have pointed out that US Congressional gerrymandering means the risk a sitting candidate is removed from office in the US is about the same as it was in the Soviet Union. Russian politics has far more open contests than US congressional campaigns do.

 

Chinese commenators have used the example of the fact that the person who recieved fewer votes won the first Bush election to justify their anti-democratic position and have used examples of US political corruption to deflect legitimate criticism of their cronyism.

 

This sort of thing, and Guantanimo, Abu Grahb etc are part of the reason Zimbabwe can get elected to the UN Human Rights Comittee etc. Disillusionment with the US and its politics is a very serious issue, especially with China providing an alternative international voice uncritical of (and in many ways less hypocritical about) political and human rights failings in the countries they are seeking to support and gain support from.

 

I sort of agree with you about the use of primaries to choose leaders - its about the only time when you'll see a genuine spectrum of policy ideas. But due to the way its done it is also a time when you see the candidates courting the extremes. It creates a yoyo as candidates try to woo the particular wings of their party during the primaries and then rush back to the centre for the elections.

[VinnieK]

Hey I wasn't doing a comparision with the UK - obviously the UK system sucks big in all sorts of ways, but in the grand scheme of things that isn't relevent. Just because there are problems elsewhere doesn't mean I should ignore problems when I see them!

 

Of course not, but when you say that democracy in the U.S. is a laughing stock, you suggest a comparison be made. I'm simply suggesting that whilst it has serious flaws, so do most political systems, which I illustrated using the UK. Of course the U.S. has problems, but I fail to see them as that much more serious than that of quite a few other democracies.

 

I am concerned that the US has lost a huge amount of political and moral authority due to failures of its political system.

 

This sort of thing, and Guantanimo, Abu Grahb etc are part of the reason Zimbabwe can get elected to the UN Human Rights Comittee etc.

 

I think this is something of a simplification. Yes the conduct of Congress and during elections calls into question the moral authority of the U.S., but a far more important factor in the extraordinary leeway Zimbabwe's been afforded by the UN is to do with commercial and political interests - namely important regional allies of Mugabe, such as South Africa, exerting their influence. Southern Africa is an important region, and, to put it bluntly, few in the West or in Africa have wished to upset South Africa (whose forgiving disposition towards Mugabe is based on deeper ideological connections than a mutual disillusionment with the west) and so is willing to indulge it at the expense of ordinary Zimbabweans. In this context, the despot's bluster about the faliures of U.S. politics is just so much PR, and I doubt it actually fools anyone. The problem is that the U.S. is not as powerful as it once was, the West is no longer wedded to American policy by the threat of the U.S.S.R., and so naturally regional centres of power are becoming more powerful and can extract concessions from the U.N. on behalf of their allies.

 

You also raise the issue of China, but this kind of illustrates my point here. Corruption and unpleasant activities are certainly nothing new in U.S. politics, nor are scandals and questionable foreign policy, yet until relatively recently the West was only to happy to criticise, condemn, and attempt to thwart China's aspirations, regardless of any supposed hypocrisy in doing so or accusations thereof. What's changed is not so much the U.S. as China - governments are now more likely to pay attention to and indulge China and less inclined to criticise it because today China is an important player in world affairs.

 

 

 

I sort of agree with you about the use of primaries to choose leaders - its about the only time when you'll see a genuine spectrum of policy ideas. But due to the way its done it is also a time when you see the candidates courting the extremes.

 

An important factor that's being neglected here is the role of the public. The same happens in Britain, with both the Conservatives and Labour having been charged with courting the fringe element of the Daily Mail brigade, and accusations of scaremongering and capitalising on a climate of fear and resentment. This may be true in both nations, but ultimately things are this way because people allow it to be. Yes politicians smear one another, tell half truths, play fast and loose with fact, and generally act like bastards; but people lap it up. If this or that minister is having an affair or is gay, or some congressman smoked pot in college is irrelevant to the question of how suitable they are for office, yet it matters because people respond to it. Politicians, believing that they alone have what it takes to lead the nation, and that a lesser evil is justified by the greater good will always exploit the public's smug hypocrisy when it comes to election time. Little can be done to rectify this - forbid the party's themselves from attacking one another on a personal level and it simply moves to informally affiliated groups and the newspapers.

 

In the UK we see perhaps less of this kind of behaviour because the elections are essentially local in nature, voting for a party via local candidates rather than a particular individual, but even then there's usually a fair bit of mud slinging in the papers, and it's debatable whether it actually delivers a better result at the end of the day.

[tameelf]

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tzgV5QM5fi8&...feature=related

 

thats McCain's story. another story is that McCain wet started his plane allegedly common practice among-st pilots to scare the pilot behind . this time it did exactly that and the rear pilot launched a missile into McCain's aircraft.

[VinnieK]

You missed out the bit where, actually, secret agents planted bombs in all the other planes and the fact that it wasn't actually McCain in the jet, but a young George Bush senior in his CIA days who'd been planted by the Rand corporation, working in tandem with the Jews, Freemasons, and the mysterious and powerful Zeta project. Why? To provide an alibi for McCain who, at the urging of his father (an admiral and high ranking figure in the Knights Templar) was actually on a mission to the horsehead nebula to speak with Ho Chi Minh and Lord Zrknkry`baaa, ruler of the evil galactic empire of Snorks, to discuss how to prolong the Vietnam conflict and distract humanity for long enough to deploy the mind controlling orbs of Zanussi on Earth.

 

It's true. I read it on a website. One with flashing titles and frames and everything!

[Lonan3]

...the idea is that free speech allows you to say any exaggerated crap as the other side can always put up their own bullshit in reply.

 

To me, that sounds like a fairly succinct definition of politics.