More fun than watching Kim Kardashian put on her makeup

Politics is a fun game to watch, or I should say watching politicians shoot themselves in the foot is fun to watch, and Rick Santorum is the funnest of the bunch.  An ultra-conservative Republican candidate has no more chance of winning the White House today than an ultra-liberal Democrat had of winning 30 years ago.  Rick might win the hearts of the Tea Partyers, but probably not many others.


We're not a country of "ultra" anythings.  The ultra's make a lot of noise and get a lot of publicity, but they alienate so many others along the way they can never win the Big One.   We're a nation of reasonable, responsible, compassionate people who work hard and by-and-large keep under the radar.  Wasn't it Nixon who referred to them (us) as "The Silent Majority"?  We're the ones who will decide elections.  


It took the Democrats years to dig themselves out from under the Mondale / Dukakis pile and get back to respectability, and I predict it will take years for the Republicans to prove to the voters they're not still a bunch of cold-blooded Tea Party knuckle-draggers. 


'Course I think they're ALL a bunch of crooks.  I still love the bumper sticker that says, "Don't vote.  It'll just encourage the bastards."  (I'm still holding out for a new Third Party that advocates shooting all the politicians and bankers and lawyers and mandates year-round football. ;)


S

The Silent Majority has found it's voice

I know how little you care about the ongoing street protests across the country as evidenced by your lack of comments on the subject.  That's OK, move on to something else now if you wish, but I'm still going to blog about it because this movement, growing in respectability, is saying what I've been saying for several years now.  This issue really has my attention.  

From one of the online newspaper's editorial pages I read daily:

[The protesters]...."are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery."

"The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer."

"It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge."

The "silent majority" isn't so silent any more, is it?  The next 12 months (leading up to the 2012 election) are going to be interesting, to say the least.  

S