Sanity in the USA

The re-election of President Obama is a victory for common sense.  It is not that he is a perfect politican and therefore deserved to be re-elected without opposition.  It is that the opposition was so detached from reality, so racist and misogynist, so self-serving as to be a parody of the "conservative" and "Republican" traditions.

Even the celebrating Democrats are hoping it will lead to re-emergence of a more rational debate in which truth and facts (such as abortion and evolution) are not treated as opinions.

I hope that the UK Conservative party, who appear to have learned a lot from recent Republican strategies learn something from this election (and not just that you can do very well if you gerrymander the boundaries) and we start to have rational politics again too.

My particular bug bear (though I have many) is the immigration policy that isolates us from genuine students, with their skills, ambition, contacts and (rather importantly these days) money.  When even the Economist calls a policy crazy you have to consider your views if you claim to be a rational pro-business party.

 

The American Constitution

I'm a Brit, so I don't always understand American Culture - but I've become strangely interested in the logic of the Tea Party and other Republicans who have a fixation on the American Constitution. From here, in the land they broke away from to write the constitution (by a bunch of slave owners with holes in the ground for toilets as pointed out by Scott Adams of Dilbert), there seems to have a lot of people who believe all the answers and authority of the US government lies in the constitution as originally written. Now they have Amended the constitution. Does that mean the Tea Party think that all the Amendments should be withdrawn? Or do they accept the amendments? In which case their whole argument collapses (because obviously the original constitution was not perfect, and there is no obvious reason why the current version should be either). Just asking. It confuses me.
I am used to people having holes in their political beliefs (says a guy who is apparently to the left of 98% of the population on social matters, and to the right of 90% on economic matters) - but this seems more aligned with the views taken by religous cults than real politics.


In the UK we avoid this by not having a written constitution, which allows our politicians to make things up as they go along. Note that this doesn't seem to work either.
At some stage I shall get exercised by the government deciding that we can have an extra MEP, but not bothering to going to all the trouble and expense of holding an election - just appointing a Tory off the Midlands list. That is the sort of thing you expect in Egypt! Oh, we could have had an election but it would have cost money, so we decided not to bother...
Even if it is perfectly legal it shows a disregard for the democratic process which is staggering. As did the attempted coup when they pushed for a fixed term government that could not be defeated by a majority of the House of Commons but only a majority +5%. Again, in most countries we call that fixing the parliament.

Oh apparently I am going to rant about it now. Sorry.