Neanderpundit

Most young men at some time or another run across a guy playing three card monte. Ten minutes later, broke, and a little wiser, they move on.

I grew up on the other side of that classic short con, watching people I was related to hustle marks at lightning speed, separate the fresh scrubbed rube from his cash. Most of the people I knew were straight short con men, and I despised them, despise them still.

Most people, on having fallen victim to a short con, will gather that little bit of hard earned wisdom and carry it with them, a shield against falling prey to broke folks who loiter at truck stops in need of “Just enough cash to buy gas to get me home” or whatever. Sadly, the most cynical mark will fall easy prey to a long con.

To anyone who doesn’t know, a long con is a complex and carefully orchestrated piece of theater involving sometimes several operatives, whose actions and attitude draw the mark in, make him believe their game is the real thing, and lower the boom so fully and completely the mark may find himself not even in posession of the clothes on his back. “The Sting” was an example of the Long Con. For others, see “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, or “The Grifters”. The long con is a time honored tradition of the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth.

And that is the face of our elected leadership today, my friends. Pascal reminds me of the Freon debacle. Car companies were informed that they had to eliminate production of R12 refrigerant years ago, and did, at great cost and annoyance to their customers. And it turned out not to be the disaster it was supposed to be (remember the hole in the ozone layer, and how we were all gonna die? Seems just a bad memory now, right? But we have a whole passel of new regulations because of it)

That, my friends, was a long con.
Pro Choice? Long con.
Global warming? Long con.
Financial crisis? Long con.

I see this shit. I can spot a game of three card monte a hundred miles away, and I can see a long con when I’m looking at one, and I’m looking at a lot. And it’s not just my pocket that’s being picked, it’s yours too.

Let’s look at this from a common sense standpoint, shall we?

Banks lent money on homes.

Those homes were worth money.

The bank still holds the paper on those homes.

The homes, even devalued, will still return (as mortgage payments) far more than the value of the loan, even in a bad market
The gummint will make that money now.
Braak Osama will not spend that money paying bills. He will use it to create more entitlement programs for people who don’t deserve them, and the people who created the “financial crisis” we see now will once again collect fat paychecks for administering those programs.

Follow the queen. See the queen?

The only way to win is not to play.

I’ve had conversations several times over the last weeks about single issue voting. A bunch of people I know are single issue voters, and frankly, it happens on both sides of the aisle. A LOT.

I understand most people who vote libertarian. If I was as committed to smoking dope as a lot of people are, I’d want a libertarian president as well. And the other, non dope smoking libertarian issues? Well, most of them make sense too.

But we willl never have a libertarian president. It’s just not going to happen. So voting libertarian is a stark waste of your time as a voter. “But Og, it sends a message!” Yes, it does. It does send a message. THe message it sends is “I love to smoke dope, and I’m bad at math”.

That’s fine. I really don’t care, and more power to you. Far be it from me to harness your freedoms to my wagon, I neither desire to do so nor desire that anyone else do so.

Being a realist and a pragmatist, it’s clear to me that voting Republican is a way of incrementally shooting myself in the foot. “Missed! Missed again! oops, there goes that toe!! Missed, missed, missed!” The Republican party will always be staffed by neer-do-wells because we can’t get anyone with any integrity and the ability to withstand the process to run. Who the hell would want to? Palin is just the damned VEEP, and they’re shreedding her like coleslaw.

But voting democrat can only be the domain of the single issue voter, or a voter only concerned wiht a few issues, and here’s why:

Democrats in the house and senate, at a federal, state and local level, have a long standing and proven track record of removing our freedoms, shitting on the constitution, and overregulating our lives, our businesses, our churches, our health care, to the point where no corner of our republic is safe from them. The only way you can possibly believe they can be good for anything is if you have a pet issue or a group of pet issues that binds you to the flawed ideology of liberalism.

I’m not saying Republicans don’t do this too, a powerful lot of them do. But the libs are the unequalled masters of it.

Pelosi, Frank, Paulson and Reed don self congratulatory smiles for voting themself the power to fuck up our lives more, in response to a manufactured crises THEY MANUFACTURED.

Sorry. Where’s my rope again?