I really, really hope they secede. I'd happily kick them the fuck out.
I have had enough of irrelevant, hatemongering bullshit topics becoming important political issues in America. We have actual issues, stuff having to do with human lives and the nation's prosperity, and you're worried about where people might be putting their dicks? Fuck you, get out of my country.
Yeah, tell you what. You can keep up the "let them secede" claptrap AFTER you've found me a job in blue America and helped me move.
We'll never have more than two viable parties on a national level. It's just the way our constitution works. You get one or two, never three or more.
Nonsense. We had a functional multi-party system well into the nineteenth century (and Lincoln was a third-party candidate). Yes, voting in congress is based on majority, but there's bound to be overlap in parties; using the Libertarian example, they'd side with the Democrats on social issues and the Republicans on economic ones.
The issues preventing third parties from becoming viable aren't about the Constitution so mach as an entrenched power structure. To achieve national attention, a third-party candidate has to have the resources of Ross Perot -- and after 1992, the Debate Commission changed its rules specifically to prevent him from being allowed back in.
Where the constitutional issue DOES arise is in the electoral college. Perot snagged millions of votes but not a single electoral vote.
Elections by simple plurality are a whole other argument, and have their pros and cons. (With instant runoff voting, people wouldn't face the "Do I vote Nader, or Gore?" dilemma, but on the other hand, Lincoln would never have been elected under such a system.)
The Republicans have an excuse lined up for an Obama victory. Defeat isn't going to break them. Now, depending what happens in the next four years, something might come up that will, but as long as they can tell themselves that the news media handed the White House to Obama on a silver platter then their motley alliance isn't going to dissolve. Should the unlikely happen and McCain carry the day, the Democrats have their own excuse, too, in the form of blaming voter racism.
Frankly I think that we'd be better off if half the country decided that power-mad newshounds were the ones who fucked everything up, rather than Klan hicks. But that's possibly because I know more rednecks than reporters.
Not going to work. It's a great excuse to give to the true believers, but the party leaders know that's not really what cost them the election -- and if they don't, then they're going to move forward with a failed strategy and continue to lose.
And the Republican intellectuals who've already turned against Palin aren't going to play ball with her in four years. Colbert made an excellent point the other night that they didn't seem to have any problem with the party's increasingly nasty politics until they started backfiring, but now the cat's out of the bag and you're not going to see Noonan, Will, or Frum slinking back to the very talking points that they believe are destroying their party.
The libertarians, too: how long has it been since either party pretended they were going to cut anything for any reason other than necessity?
Er, the Republicans have been pretty damn good about removing government regulation and oversight from private business. That's how we got into our current economic mess.
And while I'm at it, I also feel sorry for the greens, but it wouldn't be polite of me to explain why.
I'm going to go with "they nominated a candidate best known for hitting a Capitol security guard with her cell phone because he didn't recognize her."
Well, and I think I've just about used up my quota of posts in Real World for the year.
...Yeah, you know, I gotta tell you, the "I'm going to say some stuff and then run off rather than discuss any of it" bit's getting kind of old from where I'm standing.
I'd rather we just have viable parties that hateful, illogical crazed members of the fringe just aren't a part of so we can talk about things like health care in our elections, instead of who shook hands with an arab when they were growing up.
And I'd like to have a unicorn.
The evangelicals aren't going to go away -- at least, not for a very long time. They've got money, they've got access, and they vote in huge numbers.
Pat Buchanan hijacked the Reform Party and tried to make it the lunatic GOP fringe third-party but it turned out that even fundies hate Pat Buchanan. Also he dimwittedly took on a party identity shared most famously with Jesse Ventura.
The Reform Party has its own special set of problems. It never had an identity; it was a party specially created so Perot could run for President.
But yeah, it'd be nice to have a party specifically to separate out the lunatic conservative fringe the same way there's one for both ends of the socioeconomic scale and one for lunatic liberal fringe (sorry Thad).
Haven't been registered Green in over four years. They've made it abundantly clear they're not interested in forming a viable party or being the least bit relevant.
I still stand by my Nader vote in 2000, and think that his central message of corporate control of the government was utterly commonsense and not "lunatic fringe" in the least. But then the Green Party buckled, dumped him, and is now running Cynthia fucking McKinney.
Regardless of what happens to the GOP, we're never going to have real change while the Democrats are owned by special interests.
