Liberalism has failed because liberals are dishonest shitheels and suck at communications, besides. Did you know, for example, that President Bush promised a trillion dollars more spending at his 2004 convention speech than John Kerry did at his? Of course you didn't, because Senator Kerry was too awesomely fucking dumb to point that out.
Make no mistake, Barack Obama didn't win the presidency because he was so Christ-like. At the beginning of September 2008, John McCain was ahead of him by three points. But Lehman Brothers collapsed six weeks before election, beginning what a number of serious people thought looked like the end of the world. And McCain was out there, without a solitary idea of what to do, and a half-wit of a running mate that thought that screaming shrilly about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers was a winning tactic.
After taking office, Obama's approval ratings were basically drowned in an orgy of misdirected spending. How did Republicans respond to this? By lying a lot, promising a shit-ton of immediate and expensive tax cuts, and proposing program reforms that don't take effect for at least fifteen years.
Think that through for a minute. On one hand, they argue that the deficits and debt - the overwhelming majority of which "conservatives" created because they're structural in nature - are a threat to the continuing existence of the nation itself. But on the other hand, they want to defer any serious program spending for nearly a generation, while front-loading tax cuts and defense spending that expand gigantic deficits into almost cosmic ones. Anyone who takes that kind of thinking seriously cannot themselves be taken seriously.
That kind of thinking is so easy to disassemble that I just did it in a paragraph. But you'll almost never see a fucking liberal do that because they're so wedded to their own shitheaded demagoguery. They want to say that this revolutionary (as opposed to conservative) Republican (again, as opposed to conservative) agenda hurts their constituents immediately, which it doesn't. Serious program cuts don't happen for at least a decade, if they happen at all. But that agenda does create a metric fuckload of immediate debt.
If liberals wanted to undermine these "conservatives", they'd point out that they don't take deficits and debt anywhere near as seriously as their rhetoric suggests. But to do that, liberals would have to themselves take deficits and debt seriously, which they don't. They intellectually know that reversing monstrously stupid tax cuts and defense spending increases is nothing more than a good way to start attacking the debt issue. The real work involves scaling back structural entitlements, and doing so in a way that affects current recipients. Progressives are at least smart enough to know that's a political loser, so they'd rather join modern conservatives in lying about everything.
I don't want to imly that this is exclusive to American Republicans, because it ain't. Not by a long shot.
I have a mayor here in Toronto that took Republican ignorance and dishonesty and threw it into hyper-drive. Rob Ford campaigned promising to cut taxes, build billions of dollars worth of subways that go everywhere, and pay for it by basically scaling back on the fucking gardening at City Hall. He swore up and down that social spending would stay where it is, if not actually increase.
In one of the only instances where I overestimated the intelligence of the electorate, I predicted that Ford would lose. But everything I predicted subsequent to that is happening as I write this. Ford's still married to tax cuts and subways, but he now understands that he can't actually pay for any of it without cutting city services. City Council is in pretty much open revolt, including his own allies, and his approval ratings are cratering.
Look, I don't give a shit about libraries, swimming pools or hockey rinks. I don't believe that entertaining the whelpish asshole kids of the upper and middle classes is a proper function of government. Fuck them and their overly-entitled parents. If it were up to me, all of it would be burned to the fucking ground and replaced with casinos, mega-whorehouses and opium dens. Do you have any idea how many whores and hookas you could stuff into the library at Fairview Mall? Neither do I, but I'd like to find out!
Having said that, Ford deserves every inch of the reprobation he's getting for cynically (or stupidly) promising things that he couldn't deliver on, more so because he made those fantastical promises in the name of fiscal responsibility. That asshole deserves every inch of it, and I hope that this city votes Rob Ford out and replaces him with the goddamned Khmer Rouge. They're about equally realistic.
Which brings me to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper surprises me because he's a personally cautious fellow, a conservative by disposition, if not politics.
When Harper was out whoring for his majority this past spring, he and his bankruptcy machine of a Finance Minister were promising to eliminate the deficit that they themselves created in four years. And they'd do it without anybody getting hurt.
I knew that they were lying, but I figured that they were lying on the side of ignoring the deficit.
Oops.
My previous point is key, here. Unlike Ford, who actually inherited a spending orgy and consciously chose to make a bad political situation even worse, Harper came into office with a great big surplus, which he promptly pissed away on a consumption tax cut that accomplished absolutely nothing and various social-engineering of the tax code to make those middle-class soccer moms and fucking hockey dads cream in their unmentionables. "Babysitters for everybody!" was the battle cry of the day.
And when the Lehan Brothers collapse came, the surplus was gone. So Harper spent hundreds of billions of dollars more in a stimulus that dwarfed Barack Obama's. The fact that Newt Gingrich repeatedly refers to Stephen Harper as a conservative tells me everything I need to know ... about Gingrich.
Well, it took about nine months, but "nobody gets hurt" has turned into "Pay up, grandpa!" Except not really.
While the Harper-Flaherty budget hasn't been released yet, I don't expect current retirees to take any kind of a hit whatsoever. It's going to be the current soccer moms and fucking hockey dads that it in the nuts. Y'know, exactly the same folks that Harper spent a fortune on in his first two governments.
The Greatest Generation, who voted themselves all manner of free shit are going to die comfortably. The Boomer cocksuckers, who voted for even more free shit, are pretty immune to the laws of economics and nature. But if you're in your thirties ot forties - the key "conservative" demographic - you, my friend, are well and truly going to take a pile-driver of an ass-reaming.
And it couldn't happen to a more deserving crowd. We knew that the day of reckoning was coming. But we still insisted on voting for more spending and less taxes. It's not like Harper puled a GST cut and federally subsidized goalie pads out of his ass. He focus-grouped the fuck out of those ideas. And my generation - the most awesomely fucking stupid grouping in human history - voted to pile on even more debt when there was no one left to pass it on to.
Up until the Bush-Harper era, I liked blaming the Boomers for everything. It was fun and factually correct. But then my contemporaries starting voting themselves more and progressively more expensive shit that made the system unsustainable. And the fact that we did it with nominally "conservative" politicians is an irony that should escape no one. Liberals wanted this nonsense, but it was conservatives that passed it. And we get to fucking pay for it in our golden years.
I'm nearly 42, but I almost certainly won't live to see 50, so I don't give a shit. Moreover, I don't have a pot to piss in. But my contemporaries, who are probably going to wind up worse off than their parents did, are going to live to see millionaire Boomer scumbags taking their kids to public hockey rinks while we scramble to figure out how to properly flavour cat food in our retirement.
And we can't blame it on the Boomers anymore. By voting for these assholes, from 1980 onward, we did it to ourselves.
The buck stops here, folks. Deal with it.
Link and inspiration lovingly stolen from The Tiger on Politics, who owes me a drink.
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