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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Sarge, Anthony, it's a beautiful idea, but what I've seen happen in the past is that, if such a movement starts to gain traction and momentum, it gets co-opted by whichever major party is nearest its ideology.

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..I'd actually predicted in the aftermath of the election that it would be the other way 'round, that the GOP was ripe for a takeover by the libertarians in its center, but that reasonable expectation wasn't to occur, to my chagrin and disappointment.

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Similarly, but at the same time differently, in 2000, Al Gore's campaign lost a significant portion of support to third-party candidate Ralph Nader. There were a large enough number of people who just couldn't hold their nose and pull the lever for the lesser of two evils that it had a profound effect on the election. As a result, the lesser of the two evils lost, and the greatest evil of our time was "selected" President.

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So that's how third-party support usually goes: it either splits a race and throws it to the candidate with the support of less than half of the voters, or it simply gets taken over by the large party in closest proximity.

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There's exactly one way to change it, and it's going to take a long, long time: START LOCAL! Start small, vote third-party candidates into office, get them noticed, get them elected, get them listened to, and they'll act as a springboard to launch higher-profile third-party candidates to ever more prestigious statewide and national offices.

It has to be bottom-up, not top-down, I'm certain.

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
I would so love to be able to run some kind of simulation (or as long as we're fantasizing, do a bit of travel) and run the last ten years of history as though Gore had won. Because I suspect the overall vector of history would have changed very little. I'm reasonably confident Gore would have fucked things up just as badly as Bush - perhaps in different ways, but I don't see the overall direction or country changing that much.

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Really? I mean...REALLY? Hard to imagine the not-going-to-war-with-Iraq that would have been as bad or nearly so as going-to-war-with-Iraq. If Gore simply avoided that nightmare, the entire world would be better off today.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
I'm glad you're pleased with the choice you made, HK, and feel that the president has earned the faith you put into him. I made the same choice, but I am not pleased. I can envision this president asking me to choose him again soon, under the promise that THIS time, he'll do what I hoped. THIS time, it'll be really different.

Meanwhile I can imagine the alternative candidates (whoever they will be) promising a swivel back to a time of good judgment that never existed.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
Would've happened anyway. Bush and Cheney may have had their own special motivations and grudges, but a number of Clinton administrator advisors went over to the Bush administration, and would've gone over to a Gore administration.

Frem and DT know who I'm talking about, I think Wolfowitz is one of them.

And the CIA had it's own agenda over there too, having to do with some black market weapon smuggling.

The leadership of our country is always firmly in the hands of the Industrial Military Complex.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Really? I mean...REALLY? Hard to imagine the not-going-to-war-with-Iraq that would have been as bad or nearly so as going-to-war-with-Iraq. If Gore simply avoided that nightmare, the entire world would be better off today.

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I don't think there ever had to be a "post 9/11 world." For fuck's sake, the rest of the world has been dealing with terrorists for generations. 9/11 could have just been the day we grew up and joined the world community.

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Byte, your misanthropy is really getting out of hand. I just got finished reading your comments in the Carlin thread that you could never get behind his brand of comedy because he makes everything sound so hopeless and here you go saying the war in Iraq was inevitable. When does a person who thinks as you do get interested in hope?

And I don't buy it for a second. Yes, I too know about the boys who keep hopping from admin to admin, they've been at it at least since Nixon, but they're parasites, and influence peddlers. Bush II was simply a far better host than Gore would ever have been.

Sure, we'd have continued to meddle--and meddle mightily and destructively--in the Middle East (whataya think Saddam was for, in the first place?), but a full-on preemptive war on a country that posed zero threat to this nation? You really think that kind of about face on 65 years of political morality was inevitable???

The world community was united against the war in Iraq, and it was only Bush's willingness to "go rogue" that got it done. A Democratic President would not have gone against the will of the entire world community like that, military-industrial complex or no.

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
But I think that ugliness like the Bush administration happens because that ugliness exists in the society.

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But I don't know if he would have steered the insecurity and anger provoked by the 9/11 attacks in a particularly productive direction.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,

We can't know what would have been chosen or why under a different candidate, so simulations are impossible. Such thinking is only fun for 'alternate history' works of fiction.

I'm glad you're pleased with the choice you made, HK, and feel that the president has earned the faith you put into him. I made the same choice, but I am not pleased. I can envision this president asking me to choose him again soon, under the promise that THIS time, he'll do what I hoped. THIS time, it'll be really different.

Meanwhile I can imagine the alternative candidates (whoever they will be) promising a swivel back to a time of good judgment that never existed.

Some engineers have posited that the Titanic might have been saved if it had impacted the iceberg head-on. I wonder sometimes if we've only prolonged and exacerbated our problem.

I do not feel the Country is in better shape than it was before. I do not feel safer than before. I do not feel a brighter future than before. The only thing I feel is what you said: The rest of the world seems to like us better.

But we don't seem to like ourselves, each other, or anyone else much better.

--Anthony

Due to the use of Naomi 3.3.2 Beta web filtering, the following people may need to private-message me if they wish to contact me: Auraptor, Kaneman, Piratenews. I apologize for the inconvenience.

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There are those who say that even such as I must retire, as a blade is retired when grinding use wears it to a sliver—be that sliver ever so sharp.
They say, they say . . .
And they are all of them correct.

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