Saturday, February 6, 2010

THE POLITICS OF FEAR

Elections are rapidly approaching, and it is officially silly season, and that is being kind. In fact it is officially the season of gross distortions and full on lies. Lies to make you fear the future. You see the deficit, conservatively estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5% of GDP, is apparently going to rob generations of any hope of a future, and the Chinese are currently scouting out locations for a new Tienanmen square, complete with a huge mural of Chairman Mao.
The simple fact is, running deficits in this economic time is prudent. Used correctly, increasing expenditures, such as in the stimulus package, will create jobs. Funds used to prevent AIG, the financial cyclops of the east, with its massive tentacles into ever financial sector...was prudent. Propping up financial institutions, thus preventing a run on banks with an ever increasing number of bank closures, was prudent. Increasing unemployment benefits and Cobra rights for the newly unemployed, was prudent. Small business loans will help as well.
The current propaganda stemming from the opposition is that the deficit is entirely Obama's fault, and the sooner every liberal is unemployed, the least likely we will fold up the national tent. The fact is, a goodly portion of the national deficit is caused by a lack of national revenue due to the economic times. Add in Medicare and Social Security, not to mention the massive cost of fighting not one, but two wars, and you now have a clearer picture of where we stand today. A condition most economists label not as a crisis, but as problematic. Nothing to be scared or fearful of whatsoever.
But in a country whose collective I.Q. is just above illiterate...a country who will collectively spend millions on something so completely benign as filling out a 1040E tax form (which requires two salient pieces of information...how much you made, and how much you paid in taxes), this tactic works. These are the people Sarah Palin likes to call "real" Americans, who clamor to her like the sheep they truly are. And distorting the facts and making them afraid...very afraid, is good politics. Wave the flag, mention God, and make them afraid.....it works every time.
Considering the caliber of candidates America is willing to send to Congress (actors, comedians, nude centerfold models and athletes), this little sportscaster from Wasilla just might have a bright future, despite having a resume thinner than her depth of knowledge....on just about anything. So she has hit the road, at $100,000.00 per speech, and is the new darling of the Tea baggers, and the "real" people more than willing to pony up her speaking fees.
Come to think of it, I am more scared than you are....not of the deficit, but of whom you might elect next. And that is the world....the "World According to Kimba."

2 comments:

Papa Giorgio said...

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Obama's most recent bit of political chicanery is his proposed "spending freeze." He knows that this empty promise will have the net effect of increasing the government over time. Obama likes to claim he inherited record deficits from Bush. The only problem with this assertion; Obama's party controlled Congress the last two years of the Bush administration and then-Senator Obama supported the bank bailout which is the single largest aspect of the Bush deficit legacy. Obama fails to take credit for his massive economic stimulus, and other bailout programs that ran up the deficit in his first year in office. He proposes to "freeze" federal spending at 24 percent of GDP through fiscal year 2020. This is opposed to the historic average of government spending hovering around 20.5 percent of GDP. So while Obama claims that the deficit is temporary and he's "losing sleep over it": Americans beware. He wants to freeze spending all right, but freeze it at a higher level than ever before.

http://townhall.com/columnists/FloydandMaryBethBrown/2010/02/05/watch_obamas_actions,_not_his_words?page=full&comments=true

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Papa Giorgio said...

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Take note that Kimba here uses the ol' tactic of basically calling Republicans fear mongering (or easily swayed into fear positions) illiterates (or just above illiteracy) -- well, cultic lemmings. This same tactic was used on most Republican candidates or Republicans themselves since the dawn of the progressive movement in the 20;s (or round-a-bout). The "knowledgeable elite" are the ones we should be following. In fact, Obama was said to be stellar in his intelligence so why shouldn't both parties follow this intelligentsia? What hogwash.

You will note that there were some views at the Tea Party that didn't sit well with many, like Farah using his time at the podium to speak about birtherism. I even took WND (World Net Daily) off of my news sources (my "Daily Habit") because of this craziness, but this type of conspiratorial thinking infects the left much more than the right:



Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Overall, 22% of all voters believe the President knew about the attacks in advance. A slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.


In-other-words, you will find lefties over at Prison Planet much more than us righties. Which may be attributed to the fact that belief in God affords us something more to do than our secular counterparts with our free time rather than swindle an entire country into a belief that man can change the climate.