Holy Gucamole!!! 80 comments in 1 day aint bad!
Island Dog-
We often disagree on well, just about everything. But I do respect the fact that you stick to your guns and often enrich a debate rather than detract from it.
In short, I disagree with just about everything you say, but respect you regardless of the politics.
If I may throw in my 2 cents, I don't think you really have much to worry about no matter who becomes president. Much has already been pre-determined:
Whoever takes office is going to inherit a mess, economically, militarily and politically. This is unavoidable, and is exactly what happened to GWB.
What many people don't understand is that ever since the 70's when N. America moved away from a production economy we replaced it with a fairytale financial economy in which money trades hands and magically creates more wealth without anything actually being done or produced (this is called the FIRE economy- Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) The only way this can happen is through the creation of bubbles, which are entirely unsustainable. Under Clinton, the economy seemed to be doing great because he had his term timed perfectly for the tech bubble. When he left office, everything was peachy and then things burst during GWB's first term.
This would have hapenned regardless of who was in power at the time.
With GW, while I disagree vehemently with his policies across the board, all he was doing was the time honored and well established tradition of fueling another bubble, this time predominantly housing. There's also the national security bubble which has seen over a trillion dollars of public money pumped into private companies that were making peanuts before but that bubble still has a while to go yet.
However, whereas Clinton was able to get out of office before his bubble burst, GW is not so lucky. He was close though- if things would have held a couple more months he probably would have gotten away with it. So whoever comes into power now is inheritting the colapse of another bubble.
On the domestic side Obama's policies will be a little more populist than McCain's but overall the core of their beliefs really aren't that different. Yes, Obama may raise taxes on business but this is pretty much inevitable considering the current situation (Bush did reduce government revenue while increasing spending.... hhhhmmmm....) Anyway, I'm sure there'll be ample loopholes to recover much of the new taxes anyway! If you do a comparison, you'll see that both politician's believe in Globalization and have a fairly similar foreign policy outlook. Obama will be a little slower to bomb other countries but he'll still do it nonetheless.
