The issue I think is complex, but mostly that Obama started out with high rhetoric, but once he got in office, it was all behind-the-scenes action, slow building work that won't pay off for some time, complicated of course by a ridiculously filibuster-happy Republican opposition holding any hint of change up. The Democrats have had opportunities to do more but have failed to capitalise on these opportunities and realistically they have to take most of the blame on that.

I've always believed the function of government is more than the Republican ideal of protection and liberty. And apparently Republicans are so short-sighted as to forget that Bush was hardly small-government. Hell, look at almighty Reagan. Apparently people pay far more attention to the government's actions when it's not their party in charge - and when it is, they just lie back and assume everything is fine.

I'm sorry but your dream of no Republicans is because you disagree with them. I don't think Democrats are right but I wouldn't want them to completely disappear. The point of the second party (although I wish there were more voices, as a Libertarian I wish my party had more power) is to provide an alternative. The country would be a lot worse off if Democrats ruled everything unopposed. I don't like Barack Obama because he has essentially reneged on one of his most important points on his platforms; no new taxes for people making under $250,000. He supports a 1% transaction tax on all Americans (regardless of income) in order to use the money to shrink the national debt. Sure, you may say all politicians lie or it is going to help the country as a whole, but this is going to cause more pain on the working class he has championed than the upper class. Obama's handling of the economic crisis has been poor, and his best excuse is to blame Bush. The policies that set things in motion for this recession were set in place long before Bush and were upheld or added to by Clinton, the Democrats favorite son since Kennedy and FDR. This isn't a zero-sum game, both parties let things get to this point and Obama is using poor opinion of Bush to keep public opinion on his side.

The point is, neither side is great, but they both need to exist because there isn't a right or wrong answer to these problems.

I too wish that everybody who disagrees with me would see their wrongs and accept that I am the bringer of ultimate truth.

Everything would be so much easier if not for that pesky free will that liberalism has fostered carelessly for the past 200 years.

Please do some research before blaming Republicans for all the woes of America. For example, the near-dead housing market was not solely a Republican creation. Clinton and the Democrats made changes in 1993 to the Community Reinvestment Act. Those changes were intended to help the lower class and minorities by encouraging banks and other financial institutions to lend to lower class individuals who would not normally qualify for a loan. This didn't work, the lower income and minority applicants entered into huge numbers of sub-prime mortgages and represented a massive number of foreclosures, ultimately sending the already fragile housing market crashing down.

The economy was already in poor shape because of huge government spending increases that FDR presided over during the New Deal and World War II. Really, most of the current economic problems in America can be traced partially to the New Deal and the fact that it is still being paid off.

To be fair, the idea that the current economic crisis goes back far enough to Clinton, is just another example of Republican spin. Some of it goes back through Bush, and Reagan... Hell go back far enough it's Washington's fault. The issue is that it happened under W. Bush's time in office, and he was the one who started the bailouts.

But yeah, the "it was their fault" routine is getting a bit stale. I loved his analogy about the car though, that the Republicans drove the car into a ditch and then the passengers ask the democrats to help them out of the ditch, and just as they've rolled it back up onto the road, a Republican taps them on the shoulder and asks for the keys back. It paints a pretty accurate picture of public myopia.

Then again, the whole system is screwed up if there's only two choices - especially since the Democrats are far more moderate than equivalent liberal parties are in Europe.

Ignorance is bliss. If people don't know what freedom is then they can't possibly miss it, and seeing the number of totalitarian regimes in human history I'm pretty sure the human spirit can handle being trampled a bit. (A whole lot actually)

I'd argue that the Stalin years were the darkest days of the Soviet Union actually. The glory days were basically post-revolution until the death of Lenin, and they weren't all that glorious, fighting a brutal civil war against the White Armies of Denikin, Wrangel, and Kolchak, national seperatists in the Baltic, Azerbaijain, Finland, and Poland and the Black Army of Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine (among many others), and the poor decisions of the novices with no experience of governance totally ballsing up peace negotiations with the Germans. The Stalin era is characterised by massive purges in the party leading to almost no originals of the October Revolution still being alive by the end of the war, purges in the army of people like Marshall Tukhachevsky who Stalin had grudges with going back to the civil war and whose execution basically set the Red Army back 4 years of terrible leadership, minium. Signing a peace treaty with Nazi Germany, and then in 1941 refusing to listen to the proclamations of a trusted spy embedded in the enemy that the Germans were about to break the pact, military tactics which saw massive losses in the Red Army, with orders that surrender was not an option coming from Uncle Joe himself and being frankly moronic (Hitler was also to make the same mistake. Tactical withdrawl is often the wise choice in battle), then post-war you have the escalation of the Cold War which is at least partially the fault of Stalin's paranoia (Truman also deserves a fair bit of blame here, and the general instinctive and irrational anti-communist atmosphere in America), and you have him responsible for pogroms towards the Jews on a scale not seen in Russia since the Romanovs were in power. I'd suggest things picked up again under Kruschev a bit, but under Breshnev it just became a buearucratic mess that had long since lost sight of why the USSR was formed in the first place, and that was the case until the bitter end.

I should point out now that ACTUALLY my original post clearly in a tone to suggest I was not being entirely serious and was ever so mocking towards the thread starter, yourself. But since you took it seriously, eh, I'll just state my actual political opinion. I am at heart an idealist who would love to see a world where the individual is left to his own devices, and help each other out for mutual benefit. But I'm also realistic to know that people are probably too selfish to openly embrace any sort of anarchistic system on any wide scale and they would work better on a much smaller level where a group of folk get together, buy some land and live entirely self-reliant and have nothing to do with the state. So on a nation-wide level I'd rather put my trust in the state than in private corporations because the state is able to act in the best interests of the nation as a whole than a company whose sole aim (and legal obligation) is to make more profit each year, which is simply unsustainable. And while I am not in any sense a Stalinist or even a Leninist I think there are benefits to a dictatorship. The obvious one being you can actually plan long-term rather than be forced into being short-sighted so that you can have something to show the voters next time they are asked to vote on issues that they no almost nothing about.

The point you are missing is one which I made already. So I'll repeat it. If you've never experienced something then you cannot possibly miss it. That's why there's not huge numbers out in the streets of China or Burma protesting their totalitarian regimes. Freedom such as we experience today in western democracies is a relatively new concept in the scheme of human civilisation and there is absolutely no evidence that it is the best way simply because it's the all you have experienced. There's plenty of old folk living in Russia today who long for the old days where they were secured a job for life, and a decent pension when they retired, where as now Russia has a huge unemployment problem. Or to take another example, Singapore is generally regarded as one of the nation states with the highest standards of living in the world, and it's certainly not a free democracy in the style of America or the UK with major restrictions on free speech, and vote rigging. You use the example of China. A perfect example. And incidentally, on the topic of China, 15 years ago "famished and oppressed"? Nah. Oppressed, yeah sure, but they still are today, China has a horrendous record on human rights, freedom of speech and other similar issues. But famished? Since the death of Mao in 1976 and specifically the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping China's economic situation has improved rapidly and amazingly, but with not even a hint of any sort of personal freedoms being allowed. I like to say that modern China has the worst of both worlds, the economic system of democracy/laissez faire and the political system of communism. But yeah, the Great Leap Forward and the famine that came with that happened in between 58 & 61 so I'd not really call that 15 years ago.

On your last point, you are right. I am the product of an affluent consumer nation. I am lazy, apathetic, and suffer from chronic and quite severe depression. I'd suggest that if I was brought up in an atmosphere where consumerism and individual greed was less prominent then I would be more willing (or probably just resigned) to a hard slog. I'd certainly not say I was a champagne socialist. I'm simply unmotivated in the current atmosphere. But I'm certainly not a "socialist wannabe", I do actually believe in a leftist, interventionist economic system, which is pretty much the only pre-requisite to labelling oneself a socialist. After all, if Tony Blair can call himself one with a straight face, I sure as fuck can coz I'm absolutely to the left of that cunt.

Whether or not living in a dictatorship would be a pleasant experience, I can only guess, but I'd image that it would have both positives and negatives to it. I'm just still not entirely certain if the negatives are outweighed by the positives, because it seems like it's every other day when I'm reminded of the caliber of total fuckwit who is allowed his say in electing a government. I mean Iran has democracy, whether or not America recognises that. And they voted for theocracy. Palestine has democratic elections and about half the country voted for Hamas despite that meaning being ostracised by the world community, fairly or not. In the 30s, lest we forget, the German public voted for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei at least partially because of their openly anti-semitic policies. And even in contemporary Europe the far-right are making gains all over.

If you were offered the chance for economic comfort for all your life and little freedom of expression, or else almost unlimited personal freedom at the expense of an unstable economic system that often leaves people unemployed, exploited, under-paid, and starving. I know which I'd be more inclined to choose.

i understand that, but to get that strong economy, the very first people living under a totalitarian system would be abused and poor anyway, so where wouldn't be their influence to rebel?

A great example is Communist China. Very strong and powerful now, looking positive for the future, but only 10-15 years people were extremely devastated, and still poor per baverage person, having the average per capita is even lower than Russia, a country still recovering from all of those perestroika reforms. Hell, Belarus, Europe's redneck haven, has a higher per capita than china.

So yeah, there would still be a hardship from the earliest of a totalitarian system, and the grassroots is what determines the tree's growth.