I usually try to avoid outright partisan battles here on Windypundit, but with all the complaining people are doing about the state of the country today, I was struck by a recent tweet by Roger Ebert:
Say, how d’ya think we’d be doing about now with McCain and Palin?
Yes, let’s try to imagine what life in this country would be like if the country had been run by these right-wing zealots for the last year and a half instead of the Obama administration. If McCain and Palin had been in charge…
- …healthcare reform would still be a distant dream.
[Update: A number of commenters were confused by this first item, but I’m actually serious. I felt it only fair to list Obama’s one major accomplishment before I began snarking at everything else. Unfortunately, as the comments reveal, the change in irony level confused some of my readers. My mistake.]
- …the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) would still be holding prisoners without trial or any real proof they had done something wrong.
- …the unemployment rate would be not have returned to the lows of the Clinton-Bush era.
- …federal law enforcement agents would still be raiding medical marijuana operations that are legal under state law.
- …no one would be looking into the reasons why police agencies keep killing innocent Americans and their dogs.
- …the government would be seeking outrageous new ways to spy on American citizens.
- …Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell would not have been repealed.
- …moral busybodies would be emboldened to try to force their values on America.
- …we would be getting hit by wave after wave of bank failures.
- …no one from the Bush administration would have been prosecuted for torture.
- …the government would be using claims of national security to protect private people and corporations involved in torture during the past decade.
- …the government would still be trying to drum up fear and paranoia among the citizens.
- …government agents would continue to abuse the anti-terrorism excuse to pry into our lives.
Any other suggestions?
Update: How could I forget? If the McCain/Palin warmonger party had won…
- …we’d still have troops fighting in Iraq.
- …there’d probably be death squads killing American citizens accused of disloyalty.
* …healthcare reform would still be a distant dream.
Real healthcare reform is still a dream, given that ObamaCare requires everyone to buy health insurance and at the same time doing absolutely nothing to control the cost or the quality of that insurance. McCain wouldn’t have done any worse or any better. There are a few industries in the United States that are impossible to over-regulate. Insurance is one such industry.
* …the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) would still be holding prisoners without trial or any real proof they had done something wrong.
Instead of Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) the prisoners are being held elsewhere. At least the general population knows where Gitmo is.
* …the unemployment rate would be not have returned to the lows of the Clinton-Bush era.
First of all, the method used to rate unemployment is flawed, and you know this. Begin by telling the whole story about unemployment.
* …federal law enforcement agents would still be raiding medical marijuana operations that are legal under state law.
When did they stop? The feds are still raiding State legal medical marijuana operations.
* …no one would be looking into the reasons why police agencies keep killing innocent Americans and their dogs.
This situation is going to get worse until the citizens begin fighting back against the police. Obama isn’t doing anything to correct this abuse of power; McCain wouldn’t do anything either.
Face it. There is no meaningful difference between Obama and McCain.
Healthcare reform would have been a non-existent dream, not just a distant one. As it is I’ll see benefits from the reform in 2014 and others will get them sooner. McCain and Palin would also have setup guarantees for insurance company profits in the name of health reform.
NASA would have no hope for returning to a center for research and exploration and would be solidified in its role as a mechanism for channeling money to existing contracts without ever accomplishing anything new. (We’ll see how this one plays out in the coming months…)
We would have a theologian as a Secretary of Energy instead of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. We probably would now have a national program to pray for more oil reserves instead of investing in alternative energies as the rest of the industrialized world is now doing.
Fermilab and Argonne would be closed by now, or have been purchased by Chinese interests. Most science not supported by the Creation Institute or Jenny McCarthy would be struggling for funding, but at least there would be new industries to support laser acupuncture and chiropractic technologies.
With Bush out of office, the government could start really cracking down on this whole American Muslim problem. Bush kept the anti-Muslim crowd at bay. McCain-Palin would be able to get those war-time detention camps up and running. (OK, this one, I HOPE is out there in fantasy-land, but I bet there would have been a law created to stop the “WTC Mosque”.)
Our ability to influence international politics (short of actually invading someone) would have reached zero by now. China probably would have stopped shipments of rare earth minerals to us as they have done to Japan.
Russia would have completed its sale of new anti-aircraft missile technology to Iran and Israel would have bombed Iran before installation was complete. The US would have probably provided some sort of batched aid to Israel instead of acting ourselves since Palin would be hoarding troops for her North Korea invasion plans which she will personally lead.
We would have probably pulled out of Afghanistan by now, but that would be to provide troops for the attack on North Korea, not to send them home.
The good news is that, as it turns out, Palin won’t be leading the attack since she has just quit the job of VP! Yay! The bad news is that she will insist that whatever general is put in charge follow her plan religiously. (And the attack plan will involve, of course, rely upon God parting the Yalu River.)
Obama is FAR from what I had hoped for, but I still believe that McCain-Palin would have been worse.
My dad always told me that, at the presidential level, one candidate or another would only be able to make small changes from the previous administration. After 60 years of repeating that theory, he stopped saying it a few years into the Bush administration and I haven’t heard it since.
Maybe we are back to the days when the president can only make small pushes, guiding policies rather than being able to reverse them. I wonder what power McCain would actually have been able to wield.
Mad Jack, judging by your comments, I think you may have misunderstood the spirit of this list.
Ken, yeah, I keep telling myself that about Obama, but it keeps getting harder to believe.
Obama is better than McCain would’ve been, same way being gang-raped by five biker scumbags is better than being gang-raped by ten. You’re still badly screwed, though.
Honestly, Jennifer, I do think McCain would have been worse. (Although I suppose that depends on which version of McCain showed up.) But Obama has been such a crushing disappointment. I knew I wouldn’t be happy about his economic policies, but he talked such a good game about reining in the abuses of the Bush administration that I figured it was a trade-off I could live with.
Some of that stuff I listed, like shitcanning Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, isn’t entirely up to Obama because it requires legislation. So it’s a matter of priorities and conserving political capital. (Besides, I can’t really remember if Obama was against Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell.) A lot of those changes, however, require only executive power. Obama could stop the medical marijuana raids with an executive order. He could close Gitmo with a phone call.