Blog Retirement

I'm retiring this here blog. You've been a swell 7 readers. Please join me over at the new spot.

The problem with democrats is....

I went out to dinner on my birthday with some good friends to my favorite restaurant. As we scooped up various delicious comestibles with oddly spongy read the talk turned, as it will, to politics.

Midway through the conversation, a couple of the people I was dining with were explaining to me why Barack Obama was sure to lose the 2012 election.

We live in an America where the G.O.P led House just passed a budget killing Medicare. We live in an America where the Republican senator from New York held actual hearings because of his racist perception of some nebulous threat of Islam in America. Speaking of Islam, Republicans from Oklahoma recently passed a law banning Shari'a law because Oklahoma was thisclose to electing an Imam as governor and mandating burquas. We live in an America where women's reproductive freedom is under attack. We live in an America where Republican fiscal responsibility means taking money away from poor and middle-class people and giving it over to corporations.

And all my progressive friends ever want to talk about is why Barack Obama, who has had the most legislatively successful first two years in modern presidential history, who has advanced a genuinely progressive agenda, is such a disappointment.

I'm willing to throw some good money down that Barack Obama not only wins in 2012, but wins easily. The only legitimate candidate that the GOP can seem to find is Mitt Romney and he seems shockingly willing to run against his own record in order to pander to the loud and reactionary Tea Party wing of this party.

But, in the meantime, it would be nice if we on the left could invest some real energy exposing the madness of the modern GOP - their rank and file commitment to racist and sexist politicking while reaching their hands into the back pocket of every American who isn't G.E. or Viacom instead of whining about how disappointed we are in the president who actually PASSED healthcare reform and is willing to use the word "abortion" as something women have a right to.

Laney Gets Her History a Little Confused... But, Unlike Glenn Beck She Accepts Corrections

In the car on the way home after dinner, out of the clear blue sky, Laney says... no, she pronounces as though she's speechifying in front of a classroom:

Martin Luther King, back in slave times, told black people to stop riding the bus.

Don't worry - I clarified and explained where she'd gotten her facts a little mixed up. We talked about how Martin Luther King didn't live in slave times and what Jim Crow laws were and how deeply messed up the rules were back then. It was, as the Prez would say, a teachable moment.

Still, I thought the way she strung those words together was kind of hilarious.

Statues and Marriage

I love statues. I wish we still lived in a world where people built statues of great leaders. The problem is that we seem to have lost our ability to see leadership since we can't look without the lens of politics. But that's depressing and not really what I wanted to write about.

This here is a statue I love. I pass it every morning, and Laney and I say "Good morning, General Grant."



One morning recently, Don was driving in with us. And it was winter and snowy and when we passed (and greeted) General Grant, I remarked to Don how lonely and sad I thought he looked up there. I told him that I thought that statues of great men like that underscore how lonely it must have been to be General Grant.

Don replied that he didn't see anything sad at all; that, instead, he thought it looked like General Grant was up there protecting us and looking out for us. He finds statues like that really comforting.

You know, I think that might sum up a lot about how we work as a married couple. We have a lot in common. We agree a lot about how we want to raise our daughter. We have remarkably similar political proclivities (y'all, if anything, Don is even more liberal than me... I swear). We like baseball but not as much as we used to. And we both find ourselves re-developing a passion for the Bulls. But we often see the world in strikingly different ways.

I think this works well for us, because we each help the other one to see the world in a slightly different way. It keeps us on our toes. And, you know, one of our vows was to stay interested in each other. It helps that we see things differently.

Other times, though, it's annoying. Like when we get into bed at night and decide we want to watch TV. Don likes to put horrifying war documentaries from the military channel on because he finds the boring voices of the people talking about whatever atrocity is being discussed soothing. I, on other hand, prefer mindless TV shows about vampires or forensic anthropologists. It all comes down to tone vs. content for late night TV for us.

We should probably just read books before bed instead.

Idiot

I just watched a clip on Rachel Maddow where the new Ohio governor (a Fox News Tea Party darling) kept referring to a trooper who pulled him over as an "idiot." And he did it with this voice just dripping with contempt.

I've been pulled over a lot for speeding. And every time I was pissed. But you know what else? I was speeding.

I've often wondered how I'd feel being married to a cop. And I think I'd be scared and nervous a lot. And I think one of the scariest thing that this cop would be doing would be walking up to cars on the side of a highway.

I've seen some cops do some shitty things in my life. But when you break a law and get pulled over? Even if you didn't see the emergency vehicle? Hell, I didn't know I was speeding at least twice when I got speeding tickets. But, irritated and annoyed as I might be, silly as I might find a 65 MPH speed limit to be, the cop is just doing his job.

And cops have a hard, dangerous and vitally important job to do.

I suspect if the same trooper pulled someone over on suspicion of something (like being Mexican in Arizona or paying dues to a teacher's union or something), Kasich probably wouldn't have been so quick to cry "idiots!"

I'm starting to kind of enjoy America getting a glimpse of what a Tea Party GOP really means. I'm starting to smell a hippie pinko feminazi homo juggernaut.

Tribalism

A while back I was following some of the happenings at CPAC, which is this big event where conservatives get together and lay out their plans. One of the things I noted with some happiness was the presence of libertarians. Now, I'm of the school of thought that thinks libertarianism is hopelessly naive and, as such, a pretty dangerous political proposal.

To wit: if it weren't for a USDA, I'm pretty confident mad cow steaks would be on sale for .49 cents a pound at Dominicks right now; I'd be willing to wager that unless I lived in a posher zip code, my water would come flavored with sewage; I'd bet that cars with glass that shatters and front ends that crumple would be the purview of folks who could afford them

The purpose of business is profit. And there's not a damn thing wrong with that. Contra the unfairly earned reputation of liberals, I'm all for businesses running a profit. I love rich people. I'd really love to be one.

But, libertarians believe that civil rights would happen eventually because they would. They believe that cars would meet basic safety standards because more people would want to buy them. But there's a large swath of people that'd be happy to keep black folks out of the restaurants they frequent. And car manufacturers would be happy to sell deathtrap cars on the cheap.

And so government, which does not function to run a profit and which can withstand debt far more easily than any family or business can, has a worthwhile and valuable role in civilized society.

So why am I happy to see the libertarians with a voice at CPAC? Because they're not the tribalistic motherfuckers who've taken over modern politics. I say tribalistic, because it's a real us vs. them thing out there. Hatfield vs. McCoy. Capulet vs. Montague. Sharks vs. Jets. And no unholy alliances like the one between Lizardman Carville and Mary Matalan will put an end to it.

Libertarians actually have a platform, silly as I might think it is.

Which brings me to the George Will column that was so roundly mocked today. The quote:

...the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

There are layers and layers of why this is dumb. The main one, of course, is that most of us have a hard-on for trains so we can stop taking airplanes and what, sweet Oprah, makes you feel more like chained up chattel than modern air travel?

But George Will is probably not actually a dumb guy. But he's happily laying aside the libertarian banner to reach out to the tribe. He's making shit up, yanking rationales out of his fevered imagination, because he wants to feed into the desperate dimwittedness of tribalism - these other folks want trains because they want to strip you of your freedoms! Ignore that implementing high speed rail infrastructure would create a lot of jobs, would make travel far easier, and would just, again I cry out to Dear Oprah, be so cool! Ignore it all, because it makes for a convenient way to reach out to the tribe.

Sadly, Libertarians won't get the liberal back on high speed rail because that'd be government spending and all government is bad (another glass of poop-flavored water please! Can I get mine with a soupcon of arsenic?).

I wonder if ask the Libertarian brethren to consult their bible and they rediscover about how Atlas Shrugged was totes about railroad barons, maybe they'd jump on board...

Politics Bubble

An Ezra Klein tweet directed me to this blogpost today, ordering me to read the last two paragraphs. And I was glad he did, because I found it very edifying:

I've said this before...to get a sense of what politics is like for many Americans, I suggest thinking of something that you do encounter in some way all the time, but that you just have zero interest in. Perhaps sports in general -- or, for sports fans, a major sport that you don't pay any attention to. Perhaps it's current pop music, or HBO shows, or celebrities. Me? NASCAR, the NBA, and any games made since Missile Command and Stargate Defender. The idea is that I actually do encounter and, in a way, retain a fair amount of information about those things in the nature of headlines that I see but skip the stories, or references made in other things I do read or watch, or conversations I've had that veer off in that direction. It's not as if I know absolutely nothing. It's just that the stuff I've heard is not organized at all, and I'm sure I've picked up misinformation along the way, since I don't scrutinize any of it.

Anyway, when you're involved in what's happening in Wisconsin, or Libya, or the budget negotiations in Washington, just keep in mind that most people aren't paying any attention at all.

Doesn't that just clarify things for those of us who live inside the political bubble (AKA, those of us who feel an obligation for understanding what's happening in the world around us).

Then I read on TPM today, that barely half of Americans even KNOW that the HCR law that Obama signed into law last year is, you know, still the law.

A good chunk of the country is walking around thinking that that orange, weepy guy managed to get rid of death panels. Wow.

I hate what I'm about to say (I normally get so irritated when other people say things like this), but I'm saying it anyway: it breaks my heart to think of the people in Libya today who are literally dying for the right to representative government, and we live in a country so spoiled that most of us cannot even be bothered to understand even vaguely the things happening around us.

I have the flu, so I'm kind of bummed in general. But this is the kind of thing that just makes my normally unflagging optimism wane.