Politics of the Mid-Term Elections

Frankly, I think Democrats are playing a long term game. I think they want Republicans to be in power for next term and let a republican bear the disgrace of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Good and timely topic Gill sahib... though you seem to have hurriedly slapped it together without too much ardour. This is not your standard style when you are more thoughtful and take some pains to edit your copy before submission.

On January 20, 2009, George W Bush will be succeeded by the 44th US president. But the political trauma will take place in just over two years between now and then. If President Bush loses one of the Houses of Congress, the House of Representatives being the most likely, the means will be at hand for the lower House to cut off the funds for both the occupation of Iraq and the US Afghanistan war. If that was to be done, the Democrats in the House would set themselves up politically as being co-responsible for the strategic and political debacles that will follow. That being the case, this is unlikely to happen. The Democrats want a clear run towards the presidential contest of 2008 and for the Congressional elections. Here, President Bush has no option at all. He has to stay in Iraq with whatever means a split Congress will offer him. For President Bush himself to withdraw from Iraq would mean that he himself has signed on the dotted line for a complete failure.

If President Bush loses the House of Representatives, the most likely outcome will be an endless investigative stream directed at him and the entire US Executive Branch uncovering an endless stream of official misconduct. This would also serve the political purpose of hanging President Bush on the horns of a dilemma. He could make the decision to withdraw from Iraq and then wear the entire political responsibility for the failed enterprise. Or he could decide to stay in Iraq and suffer the fallout from the ongoing US casualties there while being slowly roasted before all the Congressional investigations.

Should the Democrats, by a near fluke, also take the Senate on November 7, they would have no excuses. They would have to place their own policies vis a vis Iraq and the worldwide ``war on terror`` right out in the open for all to see. It would then become a political contest between the White House and a new Democrat Congress as to who can persuade the American public that they defend them best.

Should the November 7 elections end up with the Republicans still holding both Houses, most of the American public would not believe it was a ``legitimate`` result. The legitimacy of the entire US political system would therefore be brought into the most severe doubt. Such a crisis of legitimacy always ends up in the disappearance from history of one of the main political parties - never to return.

What will it be? All eyes will be glued to the news media that night.

...SR

As the Gill laments, we bring to close yet another year of even numbers, of yet another election, yet another spate of negativism, of half-truths, of complete outright lies, of denials and of counter-attacks and of absolute couter-denials.

All of this stuff!

All to be forgotten come the morning of November 8, 2006.

(PS: I think many chowkies – especially Manto, may have a promising future ahead as a scurrilous campaign ad-designer – truth be darned!)

Gill Sahib, the White House is only against the Embryonic stem cell research, and not all stem cell research. Your statement is misleading. Even if the Dems control the House (Senate is a long shot), it is still a do-nothing house that has only passed laws such as tightening internet gambling and gay marriages. People have a habit of counting chickens before they are hatched, Pelosi is not going to change a damn thing. A single terrorist event (either internal or external) will bring the politics and governance back to October 2001. It’s only a matter of time.

``Gill Sahib, the White House is only against the Embryonic stem cell research, and not all stem cell research. Your statement is misleading.``(Kulharee)

Gill sahib is right -- he is not misleading -- in fact he is a little too balanced regarding Fox`s Parkinson shaking.

....yes the demented dubya is against the stem cell research -- and yes the illiterate dimwit is absolutely against the Embryonic ones -- because he wants those Embryos to grow up as Teens to die for his born-again Christian Crusade in I-rock, I-ran, and in Surya -- not before.

Interactors:

Thanks for your comments.

SR elaborated the consequences if the Republicans lost their majority control in senate and the house. I had only hinted at them presuming that the consequences would be pretty obvious.. Nonetheless, I thank SR for his comprehensive post.

Kulharee nitpicked on the stem cell research. My point was not so much on the stem cell research per se but on the Michael J. Fox`s tv ad. nasah thankfully clarified the stem cell research issue in his post.

The central theme of the essay was the triviality of the exploitative strategies used by both parties to score points and try to win the votes. Now John Kerry has entered the fray with his ambiguous comments regarding the war on Iraq. Every day there is a new approach for exploitation and winning the votes. John Kerry, a decorated veteran of Vietnam war, would not slur the army. It is just unfortunate that in stead of naming the president directly, his comments became confusing and gave the opening to Republicans, particularly the president and Senator McCain, to accuse him of slurring the army.

The elections circus will continue till November 7 and may become more intense by the day.

Mohammad Gill

Gill sahib,

You did not make too many predictions regarding the political outcomes?!!

Doodh ka jalaa....?

{``...The central theme of the essay was the triviality of the exploitative strategies used by both parties to score points and try to win the votes. Now John Kerry has entered the fray with his ambiguous comments regarding the war on Iraq. Every day there is a new approach for exploitation and winning the votes...``}

That isn`t all. It is far worse if you dig deeper.

As Americans face approaching the voting booths on November, they face a dismal prospect. Their own approval of Congress has now fallen to 16 percent from 20 percent in early September. The Republicans have been in control of the House of Representatives since 1994 and the Senate since 2002. But the spineless Democraps also voted en masse for the authorisation which launched the US military attack on Iraq. At that point, there was no - ``no war party`` - in the USA.

Throughout the haze of political spin and other planned distractions, one plain fact stands out, namely: The incumbents are the ones who voted for all this - from both parties. These people made the decisions which have placed the US where it is today. They are the ones in the Administration AND in Congress.

Regardless of the outcome on November 7, Bush turns into a lame duck as everybody in politics starts looking to the next election and NONE of the future candidates wants to be faced with Iraq.

The voices to get out of Iraq will get louder and drown out Mr Bush`s. Neither political party wants to end up ``owning`` Iraq. Iraq will hang like a dead bird around his neck alone.

Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union Address:
Iraq is in possession of 26,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin nerve gas, mustard gas and VX nerve agent, with 30,000 munitions to deliver same, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger, a very large nuclear weapons programs, and solid connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.

The hard facts are these: Iraq, was invaded on the pretext of having a serious program to produce nuclear weapons which are now known not to have existed since soon after UN inspections began there in 1991 (repeat - 1991).

Nearly three thousand American military personal have now been killed. More than forty thousand are known to have been wounded or injured. The Iraqi dead go beyond counting, varying from the renowned Lancet study of 655,000 to Bush`s estimate of about 30,000. The UN estimates that one out of four Iraqi children suffers from acute malnourishment.

Bush has no means to extricate himself from the position in which he has placed himself and the US. Democraps will try to shovel the responsibility for all that has gone wrong on the GOP. The Republicans will begin to desert Bush, so that he alone ends up taking the blame for the debacle in the Middle East. That would give the GOP a chance of not being torn to pieces in the 2008.

Today, the US has its armed forces inside 170 other nations, so says the Pentagon itself. Is it any wonder why the US faces so much opposition, in so many places around the world than any other nation?

In the History of the United States, one can find truly wondrous things. American real wages tripled in the years between 1850-1913, and US GDP increased over 500 percent, having an average 4.3 percent annual growth rate from 1870 to 1913. That was achieved even with the enormous real damage caused by the Civil War. Even more wondrous is the fact that it was done without any inflation of fiat paper ``money``. There was no Federal Reserve. This highly productive era was accompanied by an actual deflation of prices. From 1800 to 1913, there was a 30 percent reduction in the US Consumer Price Index from 43 to 30.6. American living standards were going up and Up and UP. In 1915, the total output of the United States exceeded that of ALL of Europe. That whole vast economic event had only taken about 45 years.

It was also the greatest feat of industrialisation ever seen. Between 1865 and 1915, more new wealth was produced by the United States than had ever existed in all of human history.

The old world of Europe reeled. Here was a near mortal challenge, not because of the new wealth that was being created inside the United States but because of the IDEAS and PRINCIPLES which made all the new wealth possible. It was these American ideas which were a mortal challenge to the old regimes all over the world. By putting these ideas into ACTION, America showed that human progress was possible and that all such achievement and happiness depended upon individual freedom and liberty. Millions of people flowed from Europe, Japan and even China and Russia to the United States simply to live free.

As Europe was back in 1870, the United States is today. And it is all alone. Back in 1870, just about every European nation called itself an Empire. Great Britain had a big one, of course, with colonies all over the world, the jewel in the crown being India. But France also had colonies and was an Empire, as was Germany. Portugal and Spain had colonies and even newly formed Italy was trying to get colonies.

These Empires are all gone. Today it is the United States which has its armed forces on the soil of Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain as well as Japan and also today inside occupied Iraq.

To Americans themselves, the costs of Empire are enormous. US real wages have not climbed since 1973, so says the US Labour Department. And with external Empire has gone internal repression - the one necessitates the other. The choice before the American people is simple: Liberty or Empire.

If the men who signed the US Constitution were wake up from their graves and look at the United States today, they would not recognise it. They would see an Empire, stronger in military terms than the British Empire they fought against, with a global reach vastly exceeding anything Great Britain ever had. They would see a Congress where laws are for sale to those who are prepared to fund the election campaigns of its members. They would see this Congress lying flat on its belly in abject submission to the powers held by the man in the White House.

Voter participation in the elections since about 1945 has been in constant decline. Many perceptive Americans have observed that it didn`t seem to matter which candidate or what party they voted for, nothing really changed. Today, that is clearly a truism. Each political party, when in power, has been ferocious in expanding the political powers it wanted. When the other party gained office, it used its period in office to expand the political powers that it wanted. The sum is that power - as such - has expanded by exponential rates over the past couple of decades. And what, at the root, is this power? It is POLITICAL power over the lives of each and every individual man, woman or child in the USA.

Inside the United States today, there is no political party standing firmly for the Constitution. There is no party standing for Individual Freedom and Liberty. There is not even a political party standing firmly for the Bill of Rights. The Republic lays dying.

Sorry for the long rant... but I feel strongly about these matters.

...SR