House of Eratosthenes

That’s the question all reality-attached Americans are asking themselves as of last night, sometime around nine Pacific as the election was called for President Obama’s re-election. It’s a big question in that context, but I mean it in another. I mean it as a pointed inquiry, to be directed toward Obama’s slobbering toadies. Quoting myself, in some personal correspondence:

Okay, we’ve kept the eeeeevil Mormon out of the White House; the Bush tax cuts are going away and employers have to worry about ObamaCare before they hire anybody, which means they won’t be hiring anybody until they’re absolutely backed into a corner. But the top-dog is a likable guy, or is rumored to be, although He’s a snob, this much seems provable, has never held a real job, seems to only be going through the motions of building anything useful while He’s destroying entire industries everywhere you look…He can’t be told a damn thing, and apparently is rather proud of this. Now what?

It’s an important question, America needs and deserves an answer to it every place it applies, and it hasn’t been getting asked enough. The platform of Obama, and the democrats, has been replete with the phrase “and that should work out just great,” in some annotation placed immediately behind the huge bubble taking up most of the chalkboard, marked “some miracle occurs here.”

Make sure Warren Buffett pays as high a tax rate as his secretary — meaning that the capital gains tax bite is always equal to or higher than federal withholding, on a per-dollar basis — and that should somehow work well. In other words, level the playing field, even though the federal budget isn’t balanced, not even close to being balanced, doesn’t even exist and that should work well.

Tax the millionaires and billionaires so they “pay their fair share.” We’re a bit starved for details as to what exactly that means, over the longer term, other than “more.” And that should somehow work well.

A Little More Detail Spend a trillion dollars more out of the treasury than it can take in, just don’t worry about the budget deficit for that year or any other, and that should work well.

Pay out hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus funds to provide maintenance jobs, jobs which are upkeep and are not supposed to actually create new assets, primarily (temporary) road construction work & teaching. Ignore the plain and simple fact that there must be a resulting and counterbalancing lack of jobs existing wherever this money was siphoned away, we’ll never find out about what those jobs would’ve been…but the road construction guy gets to work. Temporarily. And that should work well.

Tear up the roads all over the country in this misguided massive road construction frenzy. All at the same time, so it takes half again as long to transport anything anywhere. And that should work well.

Keep that guy who said that idiotic thing, out of the Senate…so that the Senate is made up entirely of people who say soothing, sensible, wise things (gigglesnort). And that should work well.

Keep the oil in the ground. Sink taxpayer money into “green” energy which, even if it works perfectly, costs several times more than petroleum on a per-joule basis and will for the next century or so, perhaps forever. If everything works perfectly. And that should work well.

When the green energy companies soak up the taxpayer money and then go bankrupt, ignore it. That should work well.

Why, you even see it in their debating strategies. Vice President Biden showed how it’s done: Just cackle and sneer at everything like a petulant child, and that should work well.

Obama’s supporters, faced with anything that is glaringly wrong with their strategies and can be expressed in simple and obvious terms: For example, “Businesses are not likely to hire more people if it is more expensive to hire them,” or “If the economy is to improve, some people are going to have to get rich, and Obama seems to have a problem with that” — reply with the pablum that this is complicated stuff, and we need to come together to make it work. If those things are really true, then as we come together to make it work for the sake of the country, we owe it to the country to go back to that huge blank bubble marked only with “a miracle occurs here” and clarify things a bit in that bubble. We owe it to the country to stop relying on “and that should work well” and start filling in an answer to the question that cries out to us, “How, exactly?”

And the people like me who saw the President for what He really is, back to the first day, don’t need to worry about answering it. Speaking just for myself, I think I know the answer and it sickens me. This is, as I noted, a question for the President’s supporters. They need to provide some working, credible details.

In the case of many of them, probably for the very first time in their lives.

Update: And this is not doing much to answer my question…

And there you have it.

At bottom, America is an isolationist (some would say self-absorbed*) country. We don’t wear the burdens of empire well. Lots of us, in fact, spend a great deal of time and energy denying that we are an empire, or that something like empires (region hegemons, what have you) are baked into the firmware of human society. We’ve been forced to confront the outside world three times in the long 20th century, and every time we try as hard as we can to retreat back inside the whale as soon as possible— the roaring twenties, the preening narcissism of the seventies, and now this. As a nation, we’ve decided that the best response to Islamic radicalism and fiscal fuckuppery is to stick our heads in the sand and focus on the truly important stuff, like gay marriage and taxpayer-funded contraception for middle-aged coeds. I predict this will work about as well as ignoring fascism and Wilhelmine militarism did. I don’t even want to contemplate the global event that will shake us out of this bubble; the most likely options — Middle East-wide war, Chinese annexation of Taiwan, Chinese civil war — are too horrific (and nukey) to think about.
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*the people who say this are of course leftists, doing their usual projection thing — nobody is more narrowly parochial than a love-the-world, save-the-earth, Prius-driving, “Coexist” sticker-sporting, multi-culti liberal.
- Severian | 11/07/2012 @ 07:30
“Now what?”

Just this: hold on, Maynard…and stand by for heavy rolls.
- bpenni | 11/07/2012 @ 10:53
“America needs and deserves an answer to it every place it applies…”

If by America you refer to the saps who reelected him, I couldn’t disagree more.

But beyond that, great feeking post.

(Oh, and are you going to put this up at Rick’s place or do I have to do it?)
- tim | 11/07/2012 @ 11:11
[…] [expletive] White People Mistake Now What? Two Cats Tied Up in a Bag “Ask Joe Biden and Harry Reid” Why Do democrats Say Such […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/08/2012 @ 06:36
[…] Let’s Come Up With Some Names For Things “[expletive] White People” Mistake Now What? Two Cats Tied Up in a Bag “Ask Joe Biden and Harry Reid” Why Do democrats Say Such […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/08/2012 @ 10:35

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Now What?Wednesday, November 7th, 2012

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Wednesday, November 7th, 2012