Virginia Breeze

I don’t really get too involved in politics.  And I enjoy life a great deal more as a result.  My feeling is that there have always been economic cycles and nobody is going to be elected who can repeal them.   Prosperity comes and goes.  We make far too many foolish decisions to allow it to stay forever. And we have lessons to learn.  Nobody is going to stop that from happening.

A lot of people want to blame Bush for the economic problems that face us now.  But I don’t blame anyone in particular.  I don’t think they really control the tides of our economic fortunes.  They can influence them however.  They can make things somewhat better or somewhat worse.

Reagan made things somewhat better in the eighties.  Before him Nixon and his evil twin Jimmy C. made things much worse than they had to be.  And we haven’t gone into a recession since George W. Bush took office.  It has been a time of relative prosperity.  We often forget that Bush prays a great deal and that can be very helpful.   But it’s all over now baby.

I find the notion of Democrats trying to load these recent events on a truck and dump them on W’s doorstep to be pure politics and just a little bit over the top.   Democrats have not been stellar performers where the economy is concerned either.   Nobody has done a great job.   And a lot of mischief makers on Wall Street have taken advantage of the tides and reaped their rewards.

The finger pointing is just unbelievable.  Why didn’t they work together to find a solution to some of these economic problems?   Because they have and will always be too busy fighting.  They don’t want solutions.  They want power.

Eventually we do find solutions however.  Things blow up or fall apart or freeze and it’s over.  Whatever has happened is finished.  The economy commits suicide or keels over and dies.  Players retire or go to jail.  It’s done.  RIP.

And at this point something HAS to be done.   New ideas are tried.  Everyone (or most sane people) recognize the mistakes of the past and away we go again. At first with great sincerity and later with more games and abuse of the system.

But one political party will be blamed for the crash.  And the other one will claim the mantle of savior.  We know how this worked out in the 1920’s and 1930’s.   Democrats won the contest and enjoyed fifty years of supremacy as their prize.

Who is going to win this time?  Because it’s not about the winner of this election.  It’s about identifying the next Herbert Hoover and the next FDR.

Sometimes you have to lose in order to win.  In which case you run the oldest candidate who has ever run this race.  You find someone who has already been diagnosed with the worst kind of cancer there is and who is rumored to be kind of crazy when he gets agitated.  He does things like calling off his campaign just as things are heating up.

You find someone who makes Bob Dole look like JFK.   And you run the guy because you don’t want to do Herbert Hoover anymore.

No party can win all the presidential races.  The trick is to win the ones that will help your cause and to lose the ones that will hurt your cause. Old men make decisions like this.

And that’s why I’m busy listening to Craig Ferguson, taking photos, blogging and enjoying the autumn leaves instead of watching the debates.   I’m still going to vote on election day.  But I doubt it will mean much unless a lot of folks have the same idea.   People sometimes don’t vote because they feel the results are predetermined “rigged” in some way.  Dead people vote and so forth. They are right but they don’t always think about someone actually wanting to LOSE an election.  They don’t equate politics with boxing for example.  And they should because it’s no better a sport.

I’m going to vote because it’s my duty.  But don’t expect me to watch all the theater that is going on now.  It’s not that compelling.  Craig Ferguson does a much better job. And I have seen it before.  Besides, I need to store and share some of the good times and feelings with my several readers.  Ghosts and evil illusions will  try to block our paths. They always do.  But we may elude them if we recognize their ways and look beyond their speeches.

*