This will be my first election since coming of voting age, so I might as well get some bitching and moaning out of the way about why the political system in the US blows chunks and how to fix it. This is, of course, the deepest depths of failure I can take my little blog project, so I dive head first into the depths of this colossal failure with earnest. As usual, I am wrong about most of the stuff I will say, and most of what I say is stupid. Get used to that.
So election 2012. Two parties that fail to properly represent any significant fraction of the American public going back and forth about how the other guy is doing everything wrong, just to dodge the real issues going on in the world and why everything is going to shit. Being an idiot, I am speaking out of my bum here (as per usual) but it drives me insane how almost every single person I know, most of whom should prove themselves to be my betters, constantly fall into this monkey poo slinging trap of the modern us vs them of politics that is ruining the entirety of human civilization in short order.
So whats wrong with everything? As with most problems, the biggest issue is ignorance. Almost no one understands the influence of the president or how the federal government of the USA is set up, and I'll skip that since I wrote it before. If for some bizarre reason you give a crap, you can read up on what I wrote up on what is wrong with presidential elections here. The cliff notes is that nobody really understands what presidents can do, which really is not much, outside of vetoing legislation, controlling the departments of the fed (which includes the military) and the political influence that comes with *owning* one of the three branches in DC, plus electing supreme court reps. They don't write laws, they don't vote or debate on them, and they don't argue the validity or legality of law, that is what the other branches do. Almost everything people blame on presidents is not their faults, and everything that they blame elsewhere is a presidents fault.
Obama is a great case study for this. It is his fault we have an overbearing borderline police state military presence around the world. You can blame him for how we are still a global empire trying to impart the political classes will upon every other country in the world. Because he is commander in chief. He can, at whim, by executive order, close almost any military base or diffuse almost any military operation. In the midst of the grotesque military industrial complex that is bankrupting the country worse than the entitlement bloat is that it is a money black hole. You get no tangible benefits out of taking millions of America's youth, feeding and clothing them to, for the most part (relative to the size of the military, the fraction that are actively engaged in Afghanistan atm, being the only legitimate war the USA is currently engaged in, is minuscule) are sitting around military bases acting as agents of fear over those places they occupy. When the 800 billion a year defense budget comes up, blame the president the whole way through for maintaining the insane thousand plus military bases in almost every country in the world, in an age when the only real threats are the deranged and the desperate who we bring to bear against us because we fuck with so many other countries it is insane more people don't actively try to kill Americans.
You can also blame Obama for the size of the fed. It is within his authority to close the IRS, the dept. of homeland security, he could close down any cabinet branch by executive order on a whim (whereas they need to be created by acts of congressional law) and the fact he doesn't trim the oversided fed is his fault.
You can blame him for all the awful laws that are being passed and renewed under his presidency that he didn't veto. NDAA, the renewed bush tax cuts, patriot act, and NCLB, are all his fault. If he had vetoed any of those, they would never get the 2/3 support in congress to overturn the veto, and we could be all the less a nanny police state than we were a decade ago if he had done so, but he didn't, so that is his fuck up.
The state of the economy is not his responsibility. The fed influences economics in a very long term game, he is the arbiter of law, not the creator, and the bailouts and "obamacare" are products of congress that he signed, and the fact that a president and his party can jointly write legislation that gets passed through in weeks to vote on the floor of congress is a failure of the system, not of the individuals.
Which brings up another critical flaw, which is that the reason people seem to think presidents matter so much is because their parties are jointly drafting and passing laws and they are collaborating outside of the floor of congress all the way through. The two parties are unified monoliths of policy where the individual members might slip in special considerations for their constituency but the overall policy is drafted not by any one politicians design, but by the collaborations of the entire organization into whatever represents what the party, not the individual politician, wants.
NCLB was a republican ideal, not a Bush one. The attribution of a law that the president can not legally propose in congress to the sitting president is asinine. The process of lawmaking in America is never about individuals, it is about a compilation of desires of disparate groups coming together to represent the groups desire in the political game, and what comes forth is not any one persons responsibility. The archaic proposal system in place today is a farce in the face of two parties that already know very well in advance every policy they want passed and only try to play hardball to get through whatever they think is most important. The only reason we have two parties in the first place is the fact that the system is so fundamentally corrupt that whenever one group takes control of the reigns and gets through a significant chunk of their desires, the recoil and resulting damage to the country shakes everyone in their boots and makes them jump sides. But they jump between two fallacious extremes because neither of them represents their interests.
The problems are numerous and deeply ingrained in the American psyche. A dozen fronts assault the good and well being of the political system in this country and they all contribute to the continue class war going on that is going to destroy the western world this century. And nothing can ever be done about it, because the people who have the power and influence to turn course are reaping the short term benefits of selfish and arrogant power plays that harm us all but the disconnection from the world lets these people play puppeteers with all of us with disregard for the future or the consequences of their actions.
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