Manhattan Diary
by Cahir O'DohertyRSS 
Recent Posts
- Will New York Senator Chuck Schumer ditch gay couples for an immigration deal?
- If nobody's happy, it's working – the abortion debate and Irish politics of stalemate
- Conservative news entertainment complex claim Barack Obama leader of Al Qaeda
- Why Irish grudges are passed on - a long tradition of never forgetting
- Boston man confronts Infowars conspiracy nuts over 'false flag' claim
Archives
Worst offender this week is Michele Bachmann, of course.
Yesterday Bachmann told Florida voters at several campaign stops that Hurricane Irene and the earthquake that preceded it along the East Coast last week were messages from God to warn 'politicians' to start heeding His divine Judgement.
Back in 2008 the trailblazing candidacy of Barack Obama stunned many media outlets, to the point where they reflexively sought out the opinions of the most conservative white people they could find in the nation.
There was a lot of navel gazing and hand wringing, I recall, online and in print about what the election of an African American president might MEAN.
Perry barely graduated from a minor Texas state college with a degree in animal husbandry, he has no graduate or professional school degree, and now he has serious ambitions to rewrite the United States Constitution and lead this nation?
If you're comfortable with that thought then you're comfortable with hastening the decline of the American century. You have reached the point where your reason has utterly capitulated to your ideology. You've become so used to extremists running the GOP show you can no longer see them.
For Bachmann, and her Tea Party fellow travelers, there is only one RIGHT WAY and there is no longer any need to examine mature alternatives.
We can thank the Tea Party for the creation of this new kind of American candidate: a candidate who runs for government office whilst simultaneously hoping to completely dismantle all functioning democracy.
If you've ever been to Tuscany in Italy you'll know how near to Heaven the region is. Grapes grow effortlessly on the vine, olives and tomatoes can be plucked right from the kitchen window and the air at night is filled with stars.
But Britain, on the other hand, just had the coldest July for 50 years.
Like Ireland, the ordinary working class folk there are settling in to a hard diet of austerity, rising taxes and biting social welfare cuts. Times are getting pretty thin. It's about as far from the perfumed opulence of Tuscany as its possible to get.
That's the conclusion that most economic observers and Wall Street have just come to about the debt ceiling mess.
In response to this perception - and to the recent dangerous power plays to damage the president in Washington - Standard & Poor yesterday historically downgraded the United States of America's credit rating from AAA to AA+.
In these days of social media reflecting trends in the electorate, that's an awful lot of negative attention in a remarkably short time.
Claiming that he didn't want Gay Mitchell for president (or former Eurovision songbird Dana Rosemary Scallon, who is now rumored to be considering a run) one irate Facebook poster spoke of 'Dana with her twee 1960’s John Hind postcard Ireland with a priest behind every ditch. We are only getting away from that crowd in Rome who socially subjugated us for years and now these moral crusaders want to bring us back to the dark ages. 'Christian' and 'Democracy' do no belong in the same sentence!'
Can they actually believe they've just showed mature leadership and vision for the country's economy in Congress?
Because what I and every independent voter in the country actually saw was an absurd internal civil war and outright mutiny that led the nation to the brink of a historic default whilst our 9.2 percent unemployment rate climbs.
