Mooning the Electorate
"The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been."
Fidel Castro said that a day or two ago, in an opinion piece. Now 85 and having long since handed over the Cuban reins to his brother Raul, he didn't have much more than that to add - a far cry from his glory days -- he of the fabled three-hour speeches. But the irony here is that his assessment of the matter is so on the mark that he doesn't appear to be getting much disagreement, even, I suspect, among those Republicans who still retain some small sense of proportion.
For in fact it has been a wild ride so far on the nether side of the Moon, and it is still far from over, though the thinking now is that the original "Crazy Eights" have now been reduced to just two, M. Romney and N. Gingrich, with R. Paul and the Santorum loser still hanging in just because Gingrich's getting this far is a sure sign that anything can still happen there.
Speaking of the Moon, from his past and his Cupboard of Curiosities, Gingrich dragged out another of his wild notions for campaign purposes, during a visit to Florida's "Space Coast." He promised that if elected President, he would see to it that by the end of his second term in the White House, he would have a functioning American colony on the Moon, and that furthermore, soon thereafter, the first 13,000 Americans to be based there would be enough to form this country's 51st state.
This leads me to wonder what the rest of the world would have to say about that, because I assume that by this he sees the U.S. as taking over not just one part but all of the Moon -- for which the precedent would be the endlessly obscene British attempt to take over the whole of the Earth, an effort in which they at least partly succeeded to an unbelievable extent, while seeing nothing at all amiss in doing so. In tomorrow's world it's hard to imagine any one country succeeding in the same way on our lunar neighbor, no matter what overwhelming military advantages that nation might have.
Also the Chinese have just declared their intent to be the next to have its citizens walking on the Moon, and having shown how they can throw up huge skyscrapers in just a few days, nothing can be put past them -- all the more so because, compared to the U.S., they have relatively few foreign entanglements to distract them or to worry about, monetarily or otherwise.
By then they may even have achieved the great miracle of finding the first really worthwhile purpose for putting anything more than our fond gazes on the Moon.
Fidel Castro said that a day or two ago, in an opinion piece. Now 85 and having long since handed over the Cuban reins to his brother Raul, he didn't have much more than that to add - a far cry from his glory days -- he of the fabled three-hour speeches. But the irony here is that his assessment of the matter is so on the mark that he doesn't appear to be getting much disagreement, even, I suspect, among those Republicans who still retain some small sense of proportion.
For in fact it has been a wild ride so far on the nether side of the Moon, and it is still far from over, though the thinking now is that the original "Crazy Eights" have now been reduced to just two, M. Romney and N. Gingrich, with R. Paul and the Santorum loser still hanging in just because Gingrich's getting this far is a sure sign that anything can still happen there.
Speaking of the Moon, from his past and his Cupboard of Curiosities, Gingrich dragged out another of his wild notions for campaign purposes, during a visit to Florida's "Space Coast." He promised that if elected President, he would see to it that by the end of his second term in the White House, he would have a functioning American colony on the Moon, and that furthermore, soon thereafter, the first 13,000 Americans to be based there would be enough to form this country's 51st state.
This leads me to wonder what the rest of the world would have to say about that, because I assume that by this he sees the U.S. as taking over not just one part but all of the Moon -- for which the precedent would be the endlessly obscene British attempt to take over the whole of the Earth, an effort in which they at least partly succeeded to an unbelievable extent, while seeing nothing at all amiss in doing so. In tomorrow's world it's hard to imagine any one country succeeding in the same way on our lunar neighbor, no matter what overwhelming military advantages that nation might have.
Also the Chinese have just declared their intent to be the next to have its citizens walking on the Moon, and having shown how they can throw up huge skyscrapers in just a few days, nothing can be put past them -- all the more so because, compared to the U.S., they have relatively few foreign entanglements to distract them or to worry about, monetarily or otherwise.
By then they may even have achieved the great miracle of finding the first really worthwhile purpose for putting anything more than our fond gazes on the Moon.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 11:40 PM
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