US politics suck really, really bad.
Although Bubba Clinton was talking about climate change, he could have been discussing the state of America in the eyes of the whole world via an ugly, laundry-list of dumb-ass crap, from finance to the turmoil in a badly-shod political system — an embarrassing, socially awkward and more-than-pathetic joke.

In August, during some nasty fallout over the horrifying debt-ceiling spectacle, even the Chinese heaped scorn and disgust at the US: “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone…” and scolded Americans to “cure its addiction to debts,” stop being hogs and “live within its means…”
Ouch!

Obesity is an US problem, of course, and in gaining all that fat, US peoples have allowed its system of existence to be hijacked by pure-and-simple greed, and a clear example is politics nowadays — incompetence compounded by incertitude on one side, and across the aisle, nastiness and cruel ignorance.
What a choice for the fat-ass US voter, huh?

In Massachusetts, however, voters there will at least get a chance to put some backbone back in government with Elizabeth Warren’s run for the senate seat now occupied by GOPer Scott Brown.
And Brown’s already spooked — after a Public Policy Polling survey last week gave Warren a slight 46-44 percent edge among likely voters, Brown didn’t want to hear it: “There’s going to be plenty of polls. I don’t think about polls. Never been a big poll guy,” he said.
Good, heard that it could make you go blind.

And Warren’s surging popularity just within days of an announced run, has already jarred the GOP into the attack mode of desperately seeking dirt on Warren, anything true/untrue to sling out into the airwaves, but is finding not much soiled-soil there.

(Illustration found here).

And as a political novice, Warren still talks real.
A hard charge before the starting gate.
During a pre-campaign tour in August, Warren discussed tax increases for the wealthy as being “class warfare:”

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said.
“No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.
Nobody.”
“You built a factor out there?
Good for you.
But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
She concluded, “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless.
Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

And supposedly that’s what’s been generally considered the American way — nothing really new for generations.
Except for nowadays.
The little speech above has become a “kick-ass” video across the Internet, giving Dems a boost and further pissing off the right — but there’s not much to play with when you’re dumb.

Along with being a Harvard law professor, Warren came to the limelight, of due course, as chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP back in the day (2008!) and helped put together the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The director of the new bureau seemed like the job Warren was born for — but nooo!
President Obama showed waffling, and more back-bone-less-ness under GOP nasty looks when he passed her over in favor of this other guy, Richard Cordray.
A move that Scott Brown must now wish didn’t happen, and which now means he has to face reality and become a big poll guy.

And the only decent face on the right side of the street for more than a decade has been near-pure absent from any political discourse this year — former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel.

I’ve always liked Hagel — seemed to be the only GOPer who had sense, had any sort of heart, and usually talked straight.
(Illustration found here).

Hagel is a different Republican bird, and he strongly opposed George Jr.’s venture into Iraq.
From a New York Times profile in February 2006:

Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that’s nearly as rare in the Republican aviary.
He became an internationalist, someone who’s capable of feeling intensely about alliances, multilateral endeavors, the value of global institutions; a fellow traveler of the Council on Foreign Relations, a politician who actually reads Foreign Affairs.
A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don’t begin and end with agricultural exports.
Tellingly, when he was elected to the Senate in 1996, he was the one new Republican whose first choice for a committee assignment was the Foreign Relations Committee, which had declined steadily in prestige since the Vietnam-era days of a Democratic chairman he sometimes mentions as a role model, J. William Fulbright.

Hagal was no follower.

And with Iraq it was no-go from the git-go: ”Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse,” said Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. ”The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.”
The big problem, though, is we don’t believe George Jr. was ever connected to reality.

Hagel has been mostly quiet after announcing in 2007 he wouldn’t seek a third term.
He did give an interview with the UK’s Financial Times in August, and once again let loose some blunt talk about the state of the GOP, especially over the debt-ceiling fiasco and the influence of the Tea Party.
Via The Hill:

“The irresponsible actions of my party, the Republican Party over this were astounding.
I’d never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” said Hagel.
“I was very disappointed, I was very disgusted in how this played out in Washington, this debt ceiling debate.
It was an astounding lack of responsible leadership by many in the Republican Party, and I say that as a Republican.”
…
“I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow.
I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics,” he said.

Again, well spoken.
And due to the most ugly of political scenes, I can understand Hagel’s reluctance to get involved — and due to the GOP being as it is today, Hagel couldn’t get elected dog catcher.
He’s just a footnote — a loss for US peoples.