We're handed the Gordian Knot.

What really p*sses me off about this whole mess is how the Republicans have so SCREWED UP everything, and now they stand there and curse at us for not being able to come up with a simple answer to magically make everything all better.

It's taken them at least 6 years to create this Gordian Knot, incorporating problems that have simmered for CENTURIES, everything from the Middle East to immigration to education to the economy to growth to pollution to public lands - GD you F*ing name it! And now they have the GALL to point and say, "So, where's your plan? You don't have a plan? Show us your plan!"

The reality of the situation is that there is no simple plan. Certainly not one that can ever be delivered in a sound bite like the sheeple are used to. And to think so is just lunacy. I hope the Dems don't fall for that.

We've endured years of political sodomy at the hands of Rethugs AND Dems. I can only count a handful in Congress who've voted against evil garbage like NAFTA, The "Patriot" Act, and similar.

We're seriously fucked. It will take years to undo, and will get worse before it gets better. We'll have to dig our way out the same way we dug in - one shovelful at a time.

On the one hand, it's a shame that the Dems may come back into power just as things tank. On the other hand, most of the current Dems had a big hand in the devlish dealings.

on manufacturing as much as it should.....will not collapse in any way....on top of all of the other bullshit that needs to be fixed....

If the US dollar devalues sharply - which it very well may do - we're really fucked, in part because we don't manufacture stuff anymore. The prices of all of the Chinese goods may go up sharply.

and things do not look good.

Kunstlers entry today is along these lines.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

Like Lincoln, Obama is not completely formed politically. His lean face, like Lincoln's face pre-beard, needs filling out, as do his ideas and prescriptions for leadership. What he has in common with Lincoln is a gift for plain and convincing rhetoric. After decades of spin, PC euphemizing, neocon proxy speech, and similar bullshit, the public sees Obama as capable of straight talk. He told the last Democratic convention that there were no Blue or Red states but only a United States -- and after the crowd heard that they wanted to trade in John Kerry like a bad wedding present.

. . .

The convulsion that a President Obama might be elected into would be one first of economics. Our industrial economy is going to fall on its knees when global energy scarcities gets traction. There is going to be a scramble for resources world-wide and here in North America, and we are all set up to fracture along ethnic and regional lines as that occurs. The presence of a suddenly overwhelming, non-assimilated Hispanic population will only make things more difficult.

A President Obama would also very probably face a geopolitical crisis as the US, China, Russia, Japan, Europe, and the Islamic nations jockey desperately over energy resources while their own populations grow restive, desperate, angry, and possibly aggressive. In other words, a President Obama would possibly face a world war, a civil war, and a great depression all at once. This is not a happy fate for any leader, and so perhaps in the public perception of Barack Obama, in the rising of his star, so to speak, the public apprehends the outlines of tragedy, just as the historical Lincoln is an incomplete picture without the tragedy of his murder a few days after the resolution of the terrible war he presided over.

I specifically hope he doesn't fall for the slogan-as-strategy trick. Of all the speakers out there, I think he has the ability to get people to listen for more than a second or two, while he explains the intricacies of a particular problem and how we might go about STARTING to fix it.

forcing Bush and his cronies to clean up their own mess

democrats do the tilling, the planting and the growing-

republicans do the harvesting.

and now that the landscape has been laid waste-
it's time for the democrats to come back and clean things up...

but once there's another surplus, the pugs will be back to loot it.

we should guard the fields
and put some rock salt in their ass
when they come a plundering

By holding REGULAR town hall style meetings...TELEVISED

and by having the new people in charge level with the public.. explain it to them in REAL terms..

Like how a family might have a real problem if the drunken uncle got his hands on their ATM card, emptied out their bank account, wrecked their car and burned down their house..

There would be a tremendous amount of order needing to be restored, and it would take a llittle while..

but the first thing is to get that drunken uncle under control and get that card away from him..

Not that it's not a good idea, but imagine: "Gee, should I watch Celebrity Hot Tubbing IV or some "town hall" thingy . . . hmmm"

The informed get informed-er and the dense - well, they get to watch celebrities in hot tubs.

We want to stop the digging. That is our first plan of action. Once we stop the digging we will create a way out of the hole. Republicans insist upon digging the hole deeper and deeper because it is all they know how to do..

And that's a winning argument versus the Repug "cut and run" thing.

Democrats have not been given good information to make the best informed decisions in order to generate workable plans.
How many meetings have been closed to Democrats?
What they want the Democrats to do is to come up with a plan so they can say--AH HA! Gotcha! Won't work. Meeting on such and such a day, this was discussed. Oh you weren't there? So sorry for your luck.
IMHO, Democrats shouldn't come up with a plan until they have full disclosure otherwise if something interferes with the plan that they didn't know about, it can't be used next election cycle as a flip-flop issue.

I think it's faulty thinking to believe that there is a simple fix to everything. Sometimes there just isn't. It's messy and costly and requires OTHER things to be fixed first.

Otherwise I agree totally - they want Dems to formulate some plan without all the info so they can "gotcha!"

It is going to take careful planning and foresight to fix the messes the Republicans have created.
This last 6 years have undone at least two decades of progress--it isn't going to be fixed overnight.

And, though it is quite a mess to clean up, I have every confidence in our ability to do so better than they have in six years. As long as there's justice, I don't mind the hard work.

Along with justice, I'm hoping for patience. And a realization that the reason these things have festered for so long is because they are complicated and difficult. And the bottom line is that there will be winners and losers in every issue (even if the losers are big pharma and big oil and big banks).

Somehow we have to get people to understand that finding solutions means understanding the problem. And I think people can do that if dealt with properly. For example, most people understand what it's like to fix something in your house. You start with ripping up carpet, then you realize your floor has rot. You fix the floor and realize your pipes are leaky. But eventually you fix the pipes and the floor and the carpet, and you just feel a whole lot better about your house. It's the same thing with our current messes. We don't want drilling in ANWR. So we cut our domestic oil production. Then there are "shortages" (which I know - it's debatable, but play along). So we look for oil elsewhere, or we become more beholden to foreign oil. The real solution is to cut our need for oil, but that makes losers out of big auto, who doesn't want to have to pay to retool. But what if we help out our industry to retool (we've done it before) so that they can produce petrol-free vehicles, thus sparing the environment AND our dependency on oil?

But how do you get someone to listen long enough to even grasp any of that? Not to mention whether we even WANT to help big auto - shouldn't they have set aside some of their profits for retooling? And so on.

I agree with what you're saying in general, but I think it's time the corporate influences are immediately removed from our government. They've already gotten their backs scratched plenty, and most of us have only been punished for it. It's time they return what they've stolen, and if that means losses for a couple of multi-billionaires, tough fucking shit. They'll just have to cancel Aruba this year.

we need to slay the hydra known as the republican party, and also sever it's heads made up of the influence of corporate-internationalists, and the religious-wrong.

I don't hear the death-knell of Republicanism quite yet. However, I do see the potential for starving the beast. Why not tighten up our war-profiteering laws so the Halliburton's of the world cannot profit by keeping conflict going? And what about anti-trust? Some of these banks are getting outrageously huge. Those are all very, very messy things to tackle, but unless we make war unprofitable, I think we'll see it forever.