>>>Frankly I'm having a hard time getting excited about it
>
>Are you ready to revolt? A cynic says that in 2012, politics is a game in which politicians must occupy as much of the playground as possible to assemble the largest house of cards, rewarding and punishing the other kids (muppets) with such cunning that they don't realize they are part of a game or what the rules are and definitely so they don't revolt and interfere with the even more important game of wealth concentration. The goal of that game is to re-establish an aristocracy while converting everybody else into peasants and chimneysweeps: the job for politicians is to temporarily occupy territory and create "tales of sound and fury signifying nothing" to distract the muppets from the permanent losses happening all around them. So, people who shrug and walk away in 2012 are safely ignored. The ones to worry about are those few who say "no, you can't take over the basketball court for your house of cards" especially if others are emboldened by this behavior. Those are the ones who need incentives to move along so that the game can proceed smoothly until the rest of the muppets wake up one day and realize that they are reduced to spectators who have to pay to watch in a playground that used to be theirs.
Waterboarding seems so unsophisticated compared to the torturing of a metaphor to include houses of cards, basketball courts, muppets, Shakespeare and aristocrats seizing the playground.
Yes, I am revolted <bg> Though it does sound like more fun that what I suspect is a rather more mundane interpretation of a celebrity driven culture which has no sense of individual privacy driving out the truly competent from the public arena until anyone who would go through this kind of crap to be President probably has character flaws that should disqualify him or her.
Controlling the levers of power does not depend on machinations to seize control of government. Those with power will continue to have it, and they don't really depend on one party or another holding majorities. Only the style of the demagoguery changes.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
