Post Election Thoughts

[teddynospaces]

Okay, I'm not really a big Southpark fan.  It's generally speaking a show for people with a different sense of humor than me.  But this weeks episode was really really funny.  Or at least, I thought so.  two plots at work.  One an Oceans 11 spoof, that was generally sort of lame, but it worked well to break up the social commentary aspect of the

Comments

[djfavorite]

Some very good thoughts.

I admit I'm not a history buff, so there are things that like what you mentioned I have either forgotten, or was never taught. I imagine the latter is because, HS history doesn't typically go into that level of history.

[teddynospaces]

Just some things we all need to keep in mind. While Bush is among the top 10 in terms of least popular, Half the country hated Lincoln enough that there was a war. And while in the wake of 9/11 there were constitutional rights denied to American Citizens, which is deplorable. Bush in no way flexed or ignored the constitution to the extent that Jackson did. Christ Jackson outright ousted a tribe of Native Americans with military after the Supreme Court ruled that they had a right to be there. And he said at the time regarding the decision (slight paraphrase) "Well, they made their decision, now watch them uphold it." And we survived. The ability of a society to absorb all manner of things is amazing. I mean every time anyone ever "concurred" Rome, nothing in the empire changed, everything just kept happening the way it always had, only a different guy was sitting in the expensive chair.

[scruffy_21]

the nothing changing in Rome thing is in large part due to the machine like efficiency they had developed in society. They knew how to do their jobs, and they did them. Also, assimilation to roman lifestyle was easier than melting ice cream. all you had to do was not give a crap about things and let the other people live as romans. (it was non-romans that had the issues man).

[teddynospaces]

And that's sort of what I mean. Like when the president changes in this country, how much does our job change? How much does your daily routine change? For some people, especially in DC the answer is probably, "a lot" but for a vast majority of Americans, the answer is "not at all"

[scruffy_21]

Alright Teddy. Thank you for point these things out. I have said over and over that people give the president too much credit and too little credit at the same time.

As for President Lincoln being the least approved of president in history. I would have to add that there was a civil war at the time, and someone killed him. Bush just choked on a pretzel.

[teddynospaces]

the civil war is essentially why Lincoln was the most hated president, sort of a corrolation there.

[designgeek]

I read an article on cnn.com the other day (which I can't find now and so can't quote perfectly), that generally stated that although the economy sucks right now, it doesn't suck as much as we think it does, or anywhere near as much as it did by comparison during the Great Depression or even the recession of the early 1980s.

I do think that the general public's memory of history is quite short and sometimes short-sighted. I was very happy that my candidate won, but I also accept that he is just a man doing a job and that we have yet to see what kind of job he will do. I don't believe in miracles.

[teddynospaces]

I must correct myself, unemployment right now is in the vicinity of 6.5% percent. Which is still pretty damn good seeing as how we view 6% as acceptable full employment, what with us being in a recession and all. but under Clinton we were looking at like 3% for an extended period of time, which was ridiculous.

[jillybiehn]

I thought South Park was funny, too, but the thing that got me was a few people I know actually reacted like that to McCain losing. Real doomsaying, it's-the-end-of-the-world kinda stuff.

Nobody ended up with an Obama sign in their ass, though.

[teddynospaces]

People are funny. People are really funny. We're amazing too. But you have to take the bad with the good.

Crazy gaijin