Seeing What is Left After All This Right

Hopefully, the country has gotten smarter after seeing their intentions.

You think so, Mark? I am asking sincerely. 20 years ago Romney, or at least the positions he claims to have would have been considered conservative. Today's conservative wants to dismantle the EPA, outlaw abortion, and cut taxes for the rich in ways that even Reagan would not have tried. They want an electrified fence and belittle each other for any policy of another candidate that espoused an ounce of human decency. Poor old Herman Cain comes out and says that a woman that is raped should have the choice to get an abortion though he would be personally opposed, and he is hounded by his opponents into an extreme position. Americans complain that they don't like the candidates, but in 1968, we had Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, and McGovern competing for the dem nomination.

On the Republican side the conservative Nixon beat the East Coast Rockefeller. In Vietnam & Chile Nixon was pure evil, and domestically he was a creep, but he also created the EPA, signed the first Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and signed off on OSHA, not to mention opening relations with China, and initiating détente with the Russians and signing the Ballistic Missile treaty. While running racially divisive campaigns in the south, Nixon also signed off on affirmative action programs at the federal level and supported the ERA. His record is to the left of Obama’s in most areas except foreign policy. Of course, he was a kook and a crook, but in exactly what ways has Obama led us into a more just progressive agenda. He has been stymied no question, but he has brought some of that on himself, by being astoundingly timid.

The whole country knows that Bush ran us into a ditch. If do-overs were allowed most Americans would judge Bush incapable of handling the office. But a scant three years later there is an enormous appetite to support far right candidates that would only provide more of the same, albeit with perhaps greater brain power.  Bush set that bar very, very low.

Polls, smolls, by the time we get to Election Day it will be a 51-49 vote, or maybe 52-48, and a very tight electoral college vote. I don't think we have learned s***, and that makes Americans the problem at least as much as our politicians.