America is making the same mistakes the Soviets made !

[CeeTee]

The Soviet union was done in by a government that was paranoid, militaristic and expansionist. This led to spending huge amounts of money on the military at the expense of peoples needs, political repression at home and an endless list of foreign military interventions. In the end the Soviet Union became a listing ship in a storm. Unable to right itself it sank beneath the waves.

The American political machine is making the same mistakes. Paranoia concerning terrorism has led an already fearful population to abandon all sense and reason in exchange for the illusion of security by way of the US invasion of the middle east. This is a war the US cannot win ! All it will serve to do is to perpetuate a false sense of security in the population and provide political support for right wing hawks in the US government.

Instead of spending money on social programs and infrastructure, the US feeds money borrowed from banks to military industrialists. This strategy is flawed from the start because it will provide the US with little to no return other than to provide large corps with huge amounts of money that will not be taxed on the level it should be or be used to provide better benefits for US workers.

The Patriot act is the first step in what will be a series of attempts at watering down the Bill of Rights. The police and prison systems in America are quite powerful as it is (2 million people in jail ) but now that Bush will be putting the Supreme Court in the hands of the right wing (4 possible appointments to the bench) this trend is sure to build in intensity. The only thing the US has going for itself is a better relationship with the international banking system, but how long can that last ? 30, 50 years at the most if Washington has its way and fights this new found Bug-a- boo (terrorism) for an entire generation.

The re-election of Bush may mark the begining of the end for US civilization ! All the signs of a dying civilization are in place. Over reliance on the military, social disorder, domestic repression, irresponsible government spending and a decadent, selfish, greedy corporate ruling class. As we have just seen in the election of November 04, the US electoral system is not capable of addressing these problems. All this having been said, how long can it be before this ship like the old Soviet Union sinks beneath the waves.

[Jerico]

Thanks for that post, Cee Tee!

ANATOMY OF A CRUSHING POLITICAL DEFEAT

By Arianna Huffington

This election was not stolen. It was lost by the Kerry campaign.

The reason it's so important to make this crystal clear — even as Kerry's concession speech is still ringing in our ears — is that to the victors go not only the spoils but the explanations. And the Republicans are framing their victory as the triumph of conservative moral values and the wedge cultural issues they exploited throughout the campaign.

But it wasn't gay marriage that did the Democrats in; it was the fatal decision to make the pursuit of undecided voters the overarching strategy of the Kerry campaign.

This meant that at every turn the campaign chose caution over boldness so as not to offend the undecideds who, as a group, long to be soothed and reassured rather than challenged and inspired.

The fixation on undecided voters turned a campaign that should have been about big ideas, big decisions, and the very, very big differences between the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush — both on national security and domestic priorities — into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous non-issues like whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart.

This timid, spineless, walking-on-eggshells strategy — with no central theme or moral vision — played right into the hands of the Bush-Cheney team's portrayal of Kerry as an unprincipled, equivocating flip-flopper who, in a time of war and national unease, stood for nothing other than his desire to become president.

The Republicans spent a hundred million dollars selling this image of Kerry to the public. But the public would not have bought it if the Kerry campaign had run a bold, visionary race that at every moment and every corner contradicted the caricature.

Kerry's advisors were so obsessed with not upsetting America's fence-sitting voters they ended up driving the Kerry bandwagon straight over the edge of the Grand Canyon, where the candidate proclaimed that even if he knew then what we all know now — that there were no WMD in Iraq — he still would have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

This equivocation was not an accidental slip. It was the result of a strategic decision — once again geared to undecided voters — not to take a decisive, contrary position on Iraq. In doing so, the Kerry camp failed to recognize that this election was a referendum on the president's leadership on the war on terror. (Jamie Rubin, who had been hired by the campaign as a foreign-policy advisor, went so far as to tell the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would likely have invaded Iraq.)

It was only after the polls started going south for Kerry, with the president opening a double-digit lead according to some surveys, that his campaign began to rethink this disastrous approach. The conventional wisdom had it that it was the Swift Boat attacks that were responsible for Kerry's late-summer drop in the polls but, in fact, it was the vacuum left by the lack of a powerful opposing narrative to the president's message on the war on terror — and whether Iraq was central to it — that allowed the attacks on Kerry's leadership and war record to take root.

We got a hint of what might have been when Kerry temporarily put aside the obsession with undecideds and gave a bold, unequivocal speech at New York University on Sept. 20 eviscerating the president's position on Iraq. This speech set the scene for Kerry's triumph in the first debate.

Once Kerry belatedly began taking on the president on the war on terror and the war on Iraq — "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" — he started to prevail on what the president considered his unassailable turf.

You would have thought that keeping up this line of attack day in and day out would have clearly emerged as the winning strategy — especially since the morning papers and the nightly news were filled with stories on the tragic events in Iraq, the CIA's no al-Qaida/Saddam link report, and the Duelfer no-WMD report.

Instead, those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them that domestic issues like jobs and health care were the way to win.

The Clintonistas who were having a greater and greater sway over the campaign — including Joe Lockhart, James Carville and the former president himself — were convinced it was "the economy, stupid" all over again, which dovetailed perfectly with the beliefs of chief strategist Bob Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

But what worked for Clinton in the '90s completely failed Kerry in 2004, at a time of war, fear and anxiety about more terrorist attacks. And even when it came to domestic issues, the message was tailored to the undecideds.

Bolder, more passionate language that Kerry had used during the primary — like calling companies hiding their profits in tax shelters "the Benedict Arnolds of corporate America" — was dropped for fear of scaring off undecideds and Wall Street. Or was it Wall Street undecideds? ("This was very unfortunate language," Roger Altman, Clinton's Deputy Treasury Secretary told me during the campaign. "We've buried it." And indeed, the phrase was quickly and quietly deleted from the Kerry Web site.)

Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq until the end (how could he not?), but the majority of the speeches, press releases and ads coming out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address to the nation 10 days before the election, were on domestic issues.

The fact that Kerry lost in Ohio, which had seen 232,000 jobs evaporate and 114,000 people lose their health insurance during the Bush years, shows how wrong was the polling data the campaign based its decisions on.

With Iraq burning, WMD missing, jobs at Herbert Hoover-levels, flu shots nowhere to be found, gas prices through the roof, and Osama bin Laden back on the scene looking tanned, rested, and ready to rumble, this should have been a can't-lose election for the Democrats. Especially since they were more unified than ever before, had raised as much money as the Republicans, and were appealing to a country where 55 percent of voters believed we were headed in the wrong direction.

But lose it they did.

So the question inevitably becomes: What now?

Already there are those in the party convinced that, in the interest of expediency, Democrats need to put forth more "centrist" candidates — i.e. Republican-lite candidates — who can make inroads in the all-red middle of the country.

I'm sorry to pour salt on raw wounds, but isn't that what Tom Daschle did? He even ran ads showing himself hugging the president! But South Dakotans refused to embrace this lily-livered tactic. Because, ultimately, copycat candidates fail in the way "me-too" brands do.

Unless the Democratic Party wants to become a permanent minority party, there is no alternative but to return to the idealism, boldness and generosity of spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.

Otherwise, the Republicans will continue their winning ways, convincing tens of millions of hard working Americans to vote for them even as they cut their services and send their children off to die in an unjust war.

Democrats have a winning message. They just have to trust it enough to deliver it. This time they clearly didn't.

[Mikey_C]

Re: America is making the same mistakes the Soviets made !

The Soviet union was done in by a government that was paranoid, militaristic and expansionist. This led to spending huge amounts of money on the military at the expense of peoples needs ... The American political machine is making the same mistakes.

There's a theory going around that one of the reasons the US won the Cold War was that, whereas "spending huge amounts of money on the military" acted as a stimulant to the capitalist economy (so-called "military Keynesianism"), it was an excessive drain on the Soviets' planned economy. It's something of a paradox that Bush is more "left" on the economy - willing to intervene and engage in protectionism to protect American jobs, for example - than Kerry's traditional conservative "balance the books" approach. (Where that observation leads us I'm not quite sure...)

Anyway - just 'cos you're paranoid - it doesn't mean they're not out to get you!

The tragic thing to my mind is that the US elections were all about being against things: against Bush; against terrorism; against war; against gays; against abortion....etc, etc. I guess Bush had more "againsts" on his side than Kerry. When I vote in the UK, it will be against the Tories. When are we ever going to get something to vote for?

[CeeTee]

I pray to Arioch for the day when people wake up and realize that democracy is simply another scam cooked up by state societies in order to rationalize the exploitation of the human population.

Democracy does not necessarily provide you with freedom, liberty or justice. Because democracy allows individuals to interact with government through the mechanism of voting, it becomes easy for governments to create the ILLUSION that you have been provided with these things.

[Mikey_C]

Well that's representative democracy. There's always direct democracy I suppose. But who could put up with all those meetings? :roll:

[silverhand]

To sound a note of cynicism, there's that old quote, I can't remember whose, "If voting changed anything they wouldn't let you do it."

[LoE]

Ah, thanks Silverhand!
A perfect segway for this:

[broken link]

Feel that there was corruption during the elections?

Take action!

[Alisa]

My only remark - USA didn't won the Cold War.

USSR was buried under its own problems without help of USA. I live here and I know why Soviet Union finished like it finished. There are a lot of economical and political issues and I don't feel it's the right place to discuss it.

But yes, seems like USA finally goes the same way as USSR, the only difference is that in USA even the poor people are rich comparing to people in former USSR and Russia.
So I don't think USA can end like USSR - people have too much money. They will never rebel!

[Kitsune]

I call that a win myself, Alisa.

[Jerico]

They will never rebel!

The reason I think this is true is because the neo-cons will not stay in power long enough to cause enough damage.