given that politics in the states is a consumer choice affair, given that the "strategists" have decided that the american volk is fundamentally centrist and ideology-free, given that on the basis of this "assessment" both parties scramble to be fundamentally ideology-free while maintaining the option of shifting to the center or right as tactical needs require it, and given that one of the results of this process of draining content, draining positions and substituting tactics has been the development of the single party state with two right wings that we currently endure, it seems unlikely that the republicans are cooked--even as by ANY rational standard, given (say) the war in iraq if nothing else, they should be thoroughly, absolutely and irretrievably cooked. but you'll see the party whose politics is centered on the phrase "personal responsibility" making distinctions between the bush administration and itself and assuming that somehow, against all reason, folk will believe them. and the sick thing is that maybe they will believe them.
there is something deeply deeply wrong with this short-attention span theater that american politics has become--i think it makes it almost impossible for large-scale system adjustments to be raised coherently as problems much less carried out--think maybe adjusting the way the educational system operates so that the class structure it generates mirrors more closely the class structure that is profiled through the labor pool---not likely. take the dependence of the american economy on massive, obscene military expenditures as the keynesian underpinning of the hallucinated world of neoliberalism--not likely.
we'll see what happens.
but no, i don't think the republicans are really cooked.
but they should be.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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