Palin vs. Pawlenty
May. 27th, 2011 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIt occurs to me that, in the question of which Republican candidate should we back, we should back Pawlenty, and not Palin. Here's the problem: right now, the Republican party is a drunk. It's close to bottoming out. After thirty years of drinking down the business community's money such that most Republicans have forgotten that one of their responisbilities is to promote the general welfare, a task that applies for every American and not just the predatory class.
Here's the thing: if Pawlenty wins, well, things won't be so bad. If Palin wins, life will become a hellish landscape of Christianist predators.
On the other hand, if Palin loses, the Republican party will not have finally bottomed out. They might learn the lesson that backing the batshit nutters does not endear you to the majority of Americans, most of whom are not batshit nutters.
But if Pawlenty loses, the Republican party activists will go all in for sheer madness. They picked a reasonable candidate, and they lost. Since most of the activists live in a black-and-white world, the only lesson they'll learn is this: Palin could have won.
Yes, we'll have to live with that 29% of America that does not actually belong to the Reality-Based Community screaming and yelling and giving their money to FOX, and they'll be on the Internet forever, but untill that madness burns itself out, if that's at all possible, they'll never have power again.
My only concern is that we'll have to live with madness for a long time to come.
Here's the thing: if Pawlenty wins, well, things won't be so bad. If Palin wins, life will become a hellish landscape of Christianist predators.
On the other hand, if Palin loses, the Republican party will not have finally bottomed out. They might learn the lesson that backing the batshit nutters does not endear you to the majority of Americans, most of whom are not batshit nutters.
But if Pawlenty loses, the Republican party activists will go all in for sheer madness. They picked a reasonable candidate, and they lost. Since most of the activists live in a black-and-white world, the only lesson they'll learn is this: Palin could have won.
Yes, we'll have to live with that 29% of America that does not actually belong to the Reality-Based Community screaming and yelling and giving their money to FOX, and they'll be on the Internet forever, but untill that madness burns itself out, if that's at all possible, they'll never have power again.
My only concern is that we'll have to live with madness for a long time to come.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-27 08:34 pm (UTC)==============
Just like Alaska while she was governor. Taxed the oil companies, sent the money to the citizens, got an 80+ approval rating. Really hellish.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-27 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 12:02 am (UTC)During those years of her governorship she:
1. signed into law a record $6.6 billion operating budget while at the same time making $237 million in cuts to the state's construction budget...the second largest in Alaska' history. So much for infrastructure, transportation, and workforce development (and where'd all that money go to??)
2. A year later she cut another $286 million of the capital budget from projects (either cutting them back or removing them entirely).
3. She first supported the "bridge to nowhere" as part of her transportation projects platform, then rejected it after becoming governor and had the money sent to the general transportation fund.
4. There's the pressure she put on the Public Safety Commissioner to fire her ex brother-in-law because of the bitter divorce that her sister was going through. The commissioner refused, and got fired.
5. Her environmental record shows no care for the environment, but great care for the companies who would put more money into the state's coffers (and her pocket), including drilling in the Alaska wildlife refuge.
6. Her approval rating went from 93% to 54% in only two years.
I'm not sure how making the second biggest cuts to the capital budget was "sending money to the citizens". But, yeah, trying to get her ex brother-in-law fired using her strings as governor was pretty hellish for everyone in Alaska.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 12:37 am (UTC)Alaska is a socialist state. Palin exploited her power as
head of the PolitburoGovernor by raising the fee imposed on oil companies and redistributing yet more wealth to the citizens through the Alaska Permanent Fund. When a politician puts a check directly into your hands, that makes her very popular. When the check is bigger than last years', all the more.To be fair to Palin, she succeeded in convincing the legislature to go along with her on this. The state had taken in an unexpected windfall in 2007 tax revenues, and Palin ran on a campaign of sending the windfall back to the voters rather than put it into a disaster relief fund. Each Alaskan received an extra $1200 in the mail. Palin also pushed the legislature to drop a state gas tax (Alaska has no refineries, so the oil it produces must be shipped elsewhere, then the gasoline must shipped back and distributed over over very rough and dangerous terrain; this makes it the second most expensive state in the nation for gas. The first is Hawaii.)
Palin is a cagey politician who, at the peak of her governing experience, ran a state with a population one-quarter the size of what Rahm Emmanuel now governs. (The population of Alaska is about 690,000. The population of Chicago is about 2,890,000). Alaska's enormous natural resources gave her an opening for sudden popularity.