6 posts tagged “politics”
What was your reaction to the results of the Iowa caucuses?
I wish I had a betting slip from when I called it a year ago. Once upon a time, I was really good at this.
"One hopes he finds that his God is a more forgiving being than he believed." - Duncan Black
The thing that jumps out to me is that the religious right was a non-factor in American politics until Jerry Falwell rolled out the Moral Majority in the late 1970s. Think about that: this is a movement that more or less owns an entire political party today, and has had a dominant hand in the government for the last six years, and yet this movement literally did not exist 30 years ago.
Makes you wonder where the next untapped source of mass political backing is...
Or put another way:
Don't believe Bill Shakespeare? Maybe you'll believe pictures:
...but it won't make a damn bit of difference here in California. It's a safely-gerrymandered congressional district, and Feinstein wouldn't lose in California unless she dressed up in a Klan robe and chopped up a puppy live on the Daily Show.
Somewhere on the Internet, not long ago, I saw a quote to the effect of "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you aren't entitled to your own facts." It put me in mind of the fairly simple introduction to postmodern thinking I got from my wasted years at a conservative-arts school down South. (Come on, when your biggest major is an unaccredited business program and your day program is 85% Greeks, you can't really be a liberal-arts school.) The nickel-tour version was: everything is constructed from a collection of viewpoints, there's no way to pin down arbitrary truth without taking into account the filters and lenses of the observer, commentary is more important than authority, etc etc. And it's probably all distorted and wrong, I'm sure, and anyone majoring in texts and re-ification will probably want to hit me, but I get a one-inch crack in my skull trying to understand this, and I was actually able to see the sailboat, so...
Anyway, it seems to me that more and more, the problem with politics is that every issue is impossible to put a ruler on. "We are winning the war in Iraq" is the big one, although it seems like there's at least one unprovable assertion on every issue. The real winner, though, was over the weekend when some backbencher from the House claimed that the whole Mark Foley scandal was the result of a Democratic plot to hold the information and spring it at the last minute. The typically-feckless CNN anchor asks "Can you prove any Democrats were involved in such a plot?" and the Congress-critter's response was "Can you prove they weren't?"
Now, if that's allowed to pass as plausible political discourse, we may as well send a letter to the Queen and ask if she wants the colonies back, because that's just fucking sad.
...but all I really want in the next president is somebody who can speak a paragraph in public, extemporaneously, without sounding like he's trying to explain to his wife why the family car is upside down in a ditch and on fire in front of a strip club.
