Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
This bothers me on a fairly deep level, and I'm not quite sure I can define it well. I had the same sort of feeling watching NOW defend - hell, lionize - Clinton as the rape and harassment allegations were all coming out.
It bothers me because, on the one hand, I can understand it. NOW knew that, in Clinton, its aims and goals could be more profitably sought - it knew that the major societal changes it wanted had a higher chance of realization with Clinton as Prez than with the other choices. Because of that cost/benefit analysis, NOW had to, most likely, stifle an urge to condemn the guy doing exactly those things that it professes to hate.
But what do we, as a society, give up when we make such a choice? I understand that there's no perfect leader - but how far down are we willing to draw the line of acceptability in order to fight for our positions?
This isn't just a Clinton/Dems issue - I'm not just addressing his past crimes - but do we accept a Hitler who can deliver cheap, universal medical care? A Saddam who can stop crime? Exaggerated examples, both - but illustrations of the scary idea that we make a moral choice to allow unacceptable conduct if it profits us.
It doesn't lead to admiration of what we've become.
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Its our own fault. We're so fucking childish that we can't even discuss sex. A decent candidate with a divorce or an affair is dead in the water because thousands of hyprocrites will call him immoral and band together against him.
In that vacuum of talent, we see things like W, Clinton and Bush I elected. None of them are worthy of the title they held. And what did they run against? John Fucking Kerry? Al Gore?
DAN QUAYLE???
Until we grow the fuck up in this counttry and act like adults about sex and personal mores, we're going to get more and more shit in the Oval Office. Decent, intelligent people tend to experiment a bit in life, and they make mistakes, and they have moral shortcomings. Until we address those shortcoming as a normal, excusable human foibles, we'll only get the idiots the religious right will tolerate.
I don't want to sound like some Berkeley douchebag, but WTF is wrong with this nation? We just excused gunmakers from lawsuits. We tolerate insane violence in our media. We have scumbags stealing our tax money for polictical gain (I hope Ted Stevens loses his sight for that goddamned bridge to nowhere). Yet we're debating whether abortion should be legal, and whther there's moral deficit on the Left?
There's a huge deficit in this country we ought to deal with before our economic or moral deficits, and thats the deficit of fucking brains in the political arena. Until we have some honest discourse, instead of sumbags who play to their idiot constituents, we'll never get anywhere. I hate to say it, but a temporary monarchy run by practical, sensible thinkers would be a very nice thing right now.
Off with the heads of all the idiots (about half the country).
