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Dabbler273

Listed below are comments made by Dabbler273 between Tuesday, 30th September 2008 and Friday, 19th December 2008.

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Obama's Republican fans 11:14am on 19 Dec 2008 "Republicans in general, unlike Democrats in general, believe that elections have meaning, even when they lose, and cooperate in transitions.

This is in contrast to the Clinton-to-Bush transition, in which the incoming Bush office staff arrived to find the offices trashed, and office equipment vandalized. Many computer keyboards, for instance, had the letter 'w' pried off. The Bush folks downplayed the incident, in the interests of moving forward, but it was truly a Clintonian farewell."

I imagine a lot of people were smarting over the Florida vote counting ... it's hard to respect the winning candidate when it looks like someone cheated on his behalf, after all. Mind you it would have been amusing to see the USA revert to being a Crown Colony if the arguments had carried on much longer.

I don't seriously think either side is whiter-than-white or in any way morally superior to the other, or respects the democratic process more than the other. Some do, some don't, some are bad losers (and winners) and others are dignified and graceful. Obama and McCain both seemed to handle the electoral challenge with a great deal of the latter, and GW has chosen to depart in the same vein, which is to the credit of them all.
Exile on Main Street 1:37pm on 30 Sep 2008 Hindsight is wonderful, but perhaps all of this could have been averted when it first appeared if the US government had been willing to spend this money not on relief measures for Wall Street, but for the sub-prime borrowers who encountered difficulties. A system of housing benefit to help them through the short-term would have perhaps stopped the complete collapse of the market. The banks would have learned to be more responsible in future, the people in danger of losing their homes through the banks' failures' would be in effect 'insured' against such loss ... and it probably would have cost less, too.

... but perhaps this smacks to much of welfare reform and social care to be palatable to US lawmakers.

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