ArmedBear,
Responding to damn near everything with the same sentence, reworded, is tedious.
Must have been a pregnant sentence I used somewhere, because you've got several pages of response to my posts on this thread.
Colin Powell was not a well-respected voice. He just bought himself some attention for a day or two.
Note the passive voice-if you rearrange the sentence to identify exactly by whom Colin Powell is not respected, it will be much more informative. Simply saying "he's not respected!" doesn't really address the issue of how far his statements will go, or what effect they have on the race.
Powell likely has higher approval ratings than anyone in the game at this point except, perhaps, for Barack Obama. Of course, the effect that Powell's general polling for honesty and integrity has on the election will be tough to measure, given that it was already a virtual done deal before Powell made his endorsement.
Moving on to the economy, we have this:
The arguments about cutting corporate taxes are not over, primarily since the global economy has made it feasible for corporations to go where their expenses, taxes being one of them, are lowest.
This would explain why Europe and Australia are experiencing massive capital flight, wild fluctuations in their markets, and have been impoverished by financial crises that ate up nearly half of their countries' invested wealth in the past year...
Oh wait, that was America, not Europe and Australia, where taxes, expenses, labor regulations, and unabashedly socialist policies do govern. The scare tactic of claiming that corporations will abandon America because of regulation and taxation is just that-a scare tactic, and given the level of mismanagement on wall street and the public outrage over the bailout plan, one that is unlikely to influence the next administration's policy.
OTOH, I find Obama's opposition to missile defense puzzling, at best. I've always wondered about this peculiarity of the American Left. Why NOT neutralize the threat we've lived under for so many decades?
While I don't think it's clear which side is right, there is an obvious and sensible argument in support of the left's position on this. Missile defense systems reduce the security of the other nuclear armed states like Russia and China-it means that, in a moment of crisis, they will have much itchier trigger fingers and be more likely to undertake blindside attacks, rather than risk being attacked and unable to respond.
Reducing the amount of time that another ICBM armed nation has to decide whether or not it should pull the trigger, and also raising the stakes for its failure to launch a first strike, is nothing to play around with.
You're right that the fundamental problems and "oh, we'll do this to fix it!" will be back: My point is that the conservative response will definitely
not be sold in terms of the Reason-Bush continuity, as that brand is badly damaged, and McCain is losing because of his association with it. The language that those interests use to lobby the voters is going to change drastically, just like it had to with Nixon and then Reagan.
The whole line about privatizing every service (to be managed by friends of the guys who managed Lehman Brothers and Enron) and blaming all the failures on welfare moms, terrorists, and liberals is simply not going to work anymore. The scope of the failure, and the identification of the conservative movement with it's engineering, is too much this time.
