Post: #101

Jim Webb (and a lot of other politicians) these days rehash the populism of John Edwards who was banging on about '2 Americas' 10 years ago.

Say what you want about Edwards, but history has proved him right in this crucial regard.

Post: #102

Quote:To put it bluntly, young guys aren't very wise because they haven't been fucked over enough yet. I expect that many of the shrill neo-cons here will be singing a different tune when they get fucked over a few times. Ah, how things change then!

If you are a decent human being with a conscience, you begin to believe that the best government is that which provides a square deal to its citizens. It should provide equality of opportunity. It should provide for education, health care, and a decent standard of living. That's about as good as can be asked for.

What's the solution, sit around and pout about how the system is unfair? Just resign ourselves to internet forums and opt out of civics because there's a feeling we're bought off by "elites"?

Meanwhile, a far less cynical group of feminists are getting our politicians to pass law, after law, after law...

We have a two party system that limits ideological alternatives, and we have corporate media entities cheerleading for either of the two. Money influencing politics and money controlling election results are two different things.

The game isn't fair but that's no excuse not to play.

Post: #103

(12-11-2014 02:02 AM)Tuthmosis Wrote:  

(12-10-2014 03:47 AM)It_is_my_time Wrote:  Obamacare will go down as one of the worst things to happen to the USA when history is written.

• The death of tens of millions of Indians, through a combination of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, enslavement, and displacement.
• The Middle Passage and African slavery.
• The disappearance of the Roanoke settlers.
• The pilgrims' first winter, which nearly killed them off.
• The Salem Witch Trials.
• The bloody Revolutionary War.
• The near-failure of the democratic experiment during the Articles of Confederation.
• The founders' institutionalization of slavery in the Constitution.
• Passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
• The burning of the nation's capital during the War of 1812.
• Indian removal and the Trail of Tears.
• Jackson's War on the Bank of the United States.
• Panic of 1837
• The untimely death of William Henry Harrison, setting off a series of deleterious events.
• The ignominious provocation of War with Mexico.
• The Dred Scott Decision.
• The election of James Buchanan, one of the most (actually) incompetent presidents in history, who could have arguably prevented disunion.
• The U.S. Civil War.
• The New York City Draft Riots.
• The assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
• The abrupt end to Reconstruction in the South and the rise of the KKK.
• Jim Crow legislation in the South
• Lynchings.
• The Tweed Ring and political corruption of the late 1800s.
• Corporate personhood.
• The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
• The Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
• The death of unprecedented numbers of Americans in WWI.
• The failure of the League of Nations.
• The Great Depression.
• The Dust Bowl.
• Attack on Pearl Harbor.
• Internment of the Japanese in California.
• The dropping of the atomic bomb(s).
• The Cold War.
• U.S. support of the Iranian Coup, toppling Mosaddeq and installing the Shah.
• The Bay of Pigs debacle.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Secret medical experimentation on Puerto Ricans during the 1960s
• The assassination of John F. Kennedy.
• The birth of Baby Boom Generation, bunch of fucking pussies who couldn't keep their bitches in check.
• The U.S. entry into the quagmire in Vietnam.
  
• The Birth of the Modern Feminist movement.
• The so-called "sexual revolution," which started us down the slippery slope of modern sluttiness.
• Assassination of Martin Luther King.
• Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
• The Watergate Scandal.
• U.S. support of coups and genocides in Latin America, leading to the very regional instability that's, in turn, led to the immigration that everyone's complaining about.
• The rushed pardoning of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford.
• Three-mile Island Accident.
• Stagflation and the Energy Crisis.
• "Red-lining," housing covenants, and other subtle forms of keeping black people from moving up.
• The Iranian Hostage Crisis, with complicity from the Reagan administration.
• The election of Ronald Reagan, a future war criminal, perjurer, and general snitch.
• Intensification of the "War on Drugs"
• John Lennon's murder (even though he was a massive pussy)
• Magic Johnson coming down with AIDS, leaving a giant vacuum in the NBA which would allow Michael Jordan to play in a diluted league with no real mega superstars, and eventually lead to (erroneous) claims of him being the GOAT.
• The sudden deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis; career-ending injuries to Larry Bird (see above)
• The election of Bill Clinton, giving his cunt wife a future in politics.
• It going public that Clinton banged a fatty, embarrassing the nation.
• NAFTA, CAFTA, and the exportation of U.S. industry.
• Passage of Telecommunications Act of 1996.
• Urban blight from de-industrialization, especially in the so-called "rust belt"
• The suspicious deaths of Biggie and 2Pac.
• Removal of blue-collar trade and technical training from the public schools.
• Irregularities in the Election of 2000, and it being decided by a split Supreme Court.
• The birth of millennials, arguably the shittiest, most useless generation in American history.
• The attacks on the World Trade Center.
• The PATRIOT Act, and the erosion of our civil liberties with the catch-all excuse of "terrorism" (e.g., taking off your shoes at airports)
• George W. Bush's massive failure at capitalizing on the international goodwill post-9/11.
• The War in Iraq.
• The foundation of Facebook.
• The secret and illegal monitoring of regular Americans by three-letter agencies.
• Hurricane Katrina.
• Boom in use of high-fructose corn syrup in the American diet (i.e., corn subsidies)
• Media consolidation.
• The over-medication of American children, especially boys.
• Making camera phones and cameras available to masses, especially attention-whoring bitches.
• The decline of broadcasting and journalism.
• The spread of Starbucks (and their fattening milkshakes).
• The slow decay of the English language.
• Dismantling of regulation, which allowed plastics and other toxic bullshit into our food supply that increases estrogen levels in men and has turned an entire generation of men into lispy-voiced, white-knighting pussies.
• The corporate war on the middle class and small business.
• Steve Jobs getting his job back at Apple, leading to the invention of the iPhone, leading to all this bullshit.
  

• Obamacare
  

Sometimes I wonder if some guys on the forum don't do exactly what we criticize women of doing: making statements based entirely on emotion instead of logic and reason.

Either that, or we need to stop encouraging guys to drop out of college. Maybe it's good for something after all.

I was able to place the era when most of the events in this list occurred, and I'm sure the majority of members could as well. Some of these events arguably were bad in a certain context, but were not among the worst things to happen to the USA in its entire history. However, each of them was probably pretty bad at the moment.

I'd say having the government try to take over 1/6 of the economy in a massive new regulatory system is pretty bad for this era, and ranks somewhere in the top third of the items you listed. Even if you think this attempt at increased socialism could have worked out great, if it was just implemented correctly, it has been a severe fuck up in practice, and it harms almost everybody who uses medical services in the US. This is all too common among attempts at increased socialism, and that's why attempting to take over 1/6th of the economy is a bad thing historically.

Where does it fit into your list?

• Quite a bit worse than the deaths of Biggie and 2PAC, or Lennon, or Three Mile Island, or the pardoning of Nixon
• Not as bad as the civil war
• Worse than the Iran hostage crisis or the Iran Coup engineered by Eisenhower, or maybe even the recent non-treaty over development of nuclear weapons
• About equivalent with Stagflation in the 70's (which was really only stopped by the beginning of massive government deficits, and therefore echoes to this day)
  

So, one of the worst things to happen to the USA?

Yes.

Post: #104

Back on topic.

This just published in The American Conservative magazine:

James Webb, War Novelist

Quote:The former senator's literary work displays his noninterventionist past and appealing populism.
By BILL KAUFFMAN • April 10, 2015

James Webb is the best politician-novelist since Brand Whitlock, the early 20th-century Ohio realist, mayor of Toledo, and protege of the sainted Tolstoyan Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones.

Whitlock was spoken of as a potential Democratic candidate for president; Webb, the much-decorated Vietnam vet, former secretary of the Navy, and ex-Virginia senator, is actively pursuing the nomination of a party whose brain trust consists largely of Ivy League contemners of the working-class whites whom author Webb has defended with eloquent ferocity.

His superb first novel, Fields of Fire (1978), follows into Vietnam a platoon of Marines led by Robert E. Lee Hodges, a young officer from hardscrabble Kentucky who hears ancestral voices as he fights not for the Domino Theory or Robert McNamara but “because we have always fought.” . . . .

In Something to Die For (1991), Webb’s bloodless villain is a defense secretary—a product of Harvard, naturally—who prissily disapproves of the photo of Nathan Bedford Forrest that decorates the office of the elderly Senate majority leader, a Mississippi populist who wants us to tend to our own affairs rather than go abroad to slay dragons.

The secretary, a cuckold who “didn’t have the guts to serve when there was a war on, and now every time there’s a crisis he wants to send them in,” engineers a U.S. intervention in Ethiopia to divert public attention from a scandal involving Japan. He is nicknamed Chicken Hawk by “the fighting troops of America,” among them Col. Bill Fogarty, who recalls of Vietnam: “I killed soldiers I did not hate, to fulfill the desires of politicians I did not love.” . . .

James Webb is hardly a pacifist, but next to Hillary Clinton he is a virtual Smedley Butler: the peace candidate, a sharp critic of our Middle Eastern entanglements and their architects.

The tired old categories need a reset. Webb, who praises the “Southern redneck” as “the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society,” will be the most powerful voice in his party for drug-law and prison reform, an end to promiscuous military interventions, and closing the chasm between the plutocracy and the rest of us.

Echoing the Populists of the 1890s, especially those who sought a biracial coalition against the exploiters and the imperialists, Webb denies that “America should be governed by a club of insiders who manipulate public opinion in order to serve the interests of hidden elites who hold the reins of power.”

Nothing he writes can be mistaken for a Martin O’Malley tweet or Heritage Foundation issue paper.

It is impossible to read Webb and conclude that he has anything but loathing for the Fortunate Sons—the Jeb Bushes and Mitt Romneys—and the epicene polemicists who do their masters’ bidding. If Webb gets anywhere near the White House, these un-American snipers will deploy, but Jim Webb has faced weaponry more potent than the chicken hawks’ pea-shooters—and he lived to tell the tale.

Post: #105

I'd like to see the election come down to Jim Webb vs. Rand Paul.

Post: #106

(04-13-2015 01:57 AM)poutsara Wrote:  

Very humorous when the interviewer tried to publically shame him by repeatedly bringing up "white working males" (THE HORROR!) and he basically smacked her away like a fly.

Post: #107

http://www.webb2016.com/

Quote:Jim Webb Announces Candidacy for President

After many months of thought, deliberation and discussion, I have decided to seek the office of the Presidency of the United States.

I understand the odds, particularly in today’s political climate where fair debate is so often drowned out by huge sums of money. I know that more than one candidate in this process intends to raise at least a billion dollars – some estimates run as high as two billion dollars – in direct and indirect financial support. Highly paid political consultants are working to shape the “messaging” of every major candidate.
But our country needs a fresh approach to solving the problems that confront us and too often unnecessarily divide us. We need to shake the hold of these shadow elites on our political process. Our elected officials need to get back to the basics of good governance and to remember that their principal obligations are to protect our national interests abroad and to ensure a level playing field here at home, especially for those who otherwise have no voice in the corridors of power. And at the same time our fellow Americans need proven, experienced leadership that can be trusted to move us forward from a new President’s first days in office.

I believe I can offer both.

Post: #108

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