x3n wrote:Jumping late on this one as well. Shit.
late, but welcome!
What is it that the average North American wants, finally?
That is the gazillion dollar question... Who's average anymore?
I know what I want: To engage my life, my family, my community, my country, my search for knowledge and meaning, my citizenry on this planet, and my assets to fulfill my forefathers's dream of being free to enjoy Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; which are rights I hold to be truthful and self-evident for any that would engage the struggle to achieve them, and defend them against all peril and tyranny.
(but I am a pretty old guard Conservative.)
Do you want to be a completely independent nation? separate and with no obligations to other countries? Keep in mind this negates the "empire" title. There are no expansion (except in war) and no interventionism.
Or, do you think the US can and should regain its rightful place as empire, with all the obligations this entails?
It doesn't negate the notions of expansion and intervention - it puts them in the proper context.
Always keep in mind these options affect everything internally. Your budget right now can't support much more stretching. China is already buying off debt and thus creating a situation you might not like. That is what happens when war doesn't go quite as planned and nothing has for a few years now.
We haven't faced war for some time now. War is real - this is bullshit. Selling debt to support people domestic and abroad had to stop. War is something the US citizen has no heart for anymore. If a journalist feels safe enough to go there with a microphone but not a weapon... If there are survivors who can stand and talk into a camera,.. it's not war. The UN has made armed global conflict socially acceptable, it happens everyday, and is just the way it is. They allow this because it prevents war. I don't like war, and really regret it when it occurs, but it is part of man's legacy. We must change or die.
Democrats seem to be arguing for "making everything better" through "change" while these new Republicans think the answer is looking back to "small town values" as if that Norman Rockwell past held the answer to all present woes. Oil, foreign intervention and war...shit even I feel more Republican than these kats.
The average Democrat is a liberal, if not a socialist. They seek a superintendent position over the citizenry and seek to . We have laws that protect people from THOUGHTS of others, for Chrissakes.
The average Republican is a liberal, who doesn't realize "NeoConservative" was a derogatory term adopted for Liberals abandoning their own party's tendency to overstate their assets to leverage control over the "welfare of the people."
Neither of these are particularly attractive to me... If I were to join a party, I'd probably join the Libertarian party.
The Democrats want a badly needed change, but at what cost? is Bill Clinton's "America"® complete with extra saving, what the public really wants? Again, it will be lots of work and the results will probably be ones you've already seen.
People still think Clinton somehow changed things in a way he didn't. He simply re-balanced the budget to a projected, but unrealized, surplus. It never came to be, and it really laid up some bad bad ground for some of the things that happened. In order to REALLY see the effect of a president, you have to look to the next terms, because alot of what they did in office hits the books in the next 10 years after their first term.