Categories
Political

New Political Beginnings

Today is also the start of what could be one of the more interesting political years, if interesting is the word to use. I can’t remember when I’ve felt more urgent about a political race and the potential ramifications associated with the winner. It’s when reading in publications such as the Boston Globe how President Bush is basing his foreign policy on the concept of preemption, and does so openly, that I know I cannot sit passively on the sideline, snapping pretty (or not so pretty) pics, writing equally about travels, poetry, and technology.

However, I’m not going to indulge in rhetorical debates with the warbloggers in our midst, though this does to generate buzz, and perhaps commentary. It’s not that I don’t like buzz or commentary, it’s just that so many of the warbloggers base their arguments on such faulty premises and then use equal amounts of screaming and spit to drown out any disagreement.

For instance, Glenn Reynolds points to a Winds of Change post about how the MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), after careful analysis of Palestinian sermons, have determined that the Palestinians want to destroy us all. According to Professor Reynolds:

THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a “neutral arbiter” in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies.

Hmm. Of course, we all know that the MEMRI is an impartial source of good intelligence and information, as was discussed in this particularly good Guardian article. The fact that the organization is pro-Israeli has nothing to do with its impartiality as regards to reporting on the Palestinians.

(Rebuttal of Guardian article notwithstanding, the MEMRI makes no secret that its primary purpose is to monitor Arab publications for anti-Israel content.)

Aside from issues of impartiality or not though, I wonder at what the warbloggers and others would suggest we do to the Palestinians? Personally, I’m not sure how much more we can make the Palestinians suffer – they have been in a state of permanent exile for decades, given only a token self-government, and treated by both the international and Arab communities as pretty much second-class citizens. Is it then that Professor Reynolds and the folks at Winds of Change suggest that we do something worse? Or is it that we’re supposed to then support Israel in all of its actions?

Come on guys – I wasn’t born yesterday.

However, not all warbloggers are as equally simplistic. Steven Den Beste wrote an essay recently on white male voters and our electorial system and had some observations to make that were uncomfortably close to my own viewpoint, though our reception of same may differ.

In particular Den Beste writes the following which is an uncanny echo of what was on my mind, as I made my trip cross-country these last few weeks:

Regardless of which candidate ultimately prevails at the convention, this would mean that the intraparty sniping would continue until early August. The winner would then have 3 months to try to heal the divisions inside the party and unify it behind him (or her), while also trying to moderate the party’s message enough to have a chance of appealing to the unaligned middle of the American voters who would be repelled by the extreme messages which had dominated party rhetoric before the convention.

Meanwhile, Bush is not facing any significant opposition for renomination within the Republican party. He’ll do some campaigning during the primary process, but since he is already certain to be the Republican candidate he will campaign for the November election. Instead of tuning his message for the Republican faithful, it will be aimed right at the unaligned middle. It may not even be necessary for him to engage in negative campaigning about the Democrats, because they’ll do him the favor of taking care of it themselves as the Democratic candidates continue sniping at each other.

As long as the Democratic nomination is still in doubt, Democratic candidates won’t be able to begin to moderate their message so as to begin to appeal to centrist voters. And by early August, the centrist consensus may end up as “A plague on all their houses” – especially among white men, who are especially repelled by rhetoric which appeals to the Berkeley-left inside the Democratic party.

We can pretend that there is no doubt that a Democratic candidate will be elected this year all we want, but we have a real battle ahead of us – not helped for the most part by any candidate behavior. Saying this is not being ‘disloyal’ to the cause: it’s being honest, and reflecting now on the problems while we still may, may I want to empathize, be able to bring about a change.

Personally, I am not going to indulge in any of the Berkeley left rhetoric being slung about by one Dem supporter or another – it doesn’t sound all that much different than the silly stuff being trumpeted by most of the warbloggers. However, there are enough interesting facts to write about that will hopefully keep fresh in people’s minds that for all of the ‘centrist’ talk of President Bush (who will be in Missouri on Monday), he and his cabinet are anything but centrist.

However, I am pulling my political discussion into separate weblogs. Two separate weblogs in fact. I find it difficult to indulge in a lengthy essay on the inaccuracy of unemployment counts in telling the true story about unemployment, and how President Bush’s lack of support for extending unemployed benefits continues to hide the true statistics of same, then follow it up with a romp around San Antonio and a photo of a child in a square, playing with pigeons. And I don’t want to knock at the door of a group weblog, such as Open Source Politics and ask if I might join. I’d rather control what I write about, and when I publish it.

Besides, I’m not sure I want to carry ‘Burningbird’ along with me into these discussions.

Categories
Political

Works for me

Two political items from Sheila Lennon:

First this, on single women and our voting power:

“Never-married, divorced or widowed women constitute a whopping 20 percent of the electorate and 42 percent of all registered women voters. In the 2000 elections, they represented the same percentage of the electorate as Jews, blacks and Latinos combined. In terms of voting muscle, few can compete with the girl power of this constituency.”

From Reno Times

I’ve always known I’ve had power.

And then this post on which Rock The Vote commercial was voted best and Clark’s winning entry, Sheila wrote:

Clark is sitting around a table with college students. he’s just said he’s pro-choice, believes in affirmative action, and, in the same no-nonsense voice, continues, “I don’t care what the other candidates think, I don’t think Outkast is really breaking up. Big Boi and Andre 3000 just cut solo records, that’s all” followed by a high-five to one student.

Gone is the arrogant general who is always right with this ad. If Clark continues bringing into the elections this same wonderful, dry humor, and matches it up with a strong pro-environment and pro-labor stance, support for universal health care and equal rights, an effective solution for withdrawing from Iraq that won’t leave that country in the hands of the religious fundamentalists, as well as a solution for our horrifying deficit, he just might win a vote from this member of the single women voters.

Yule Heibel also wrote about the Clark ad, noting something I also noted – with the same uncomfortable and worried feeling:

Clark’s video on the other hand announced a new style, and while I was glad to see it being used by a Democratic candidate, seeing it as so clearly superior to the other crappy video spots made me sit bolt upright, because I realized that this is the approach which smart conservatives/ Republicans have been deploying.

Categories
Political

All thinking Americans

I’m not much into link and commenting, but a New York Times editorial by Nicholas Kristof caught my eye, and not only because I love the name.

As Kristof writes:

Many Democrats so despise President Bush that they don’t appreciate what a strong candidate he will be in November, and they don’t grasp how poorly Mr. Dean is likely to fare in battleground states.

He then goes on to list the reasons why Dean will most likely not fare well against Bush, and there’s not a point he raises that I haven’t also raised, and worried about. As he notes, outside of Kennedy, the only Democrats who have ever won an election are those from the “Battlefield states”, and this does not bode well for someone who does tend to reek of Eastern Elitism and New England pugnaciousness. As Kristof writes:

You get the feeling that if Mr. Dean and Mr. Bush were stuck together in a small Missouri town, Mr. Dean would lecture farmers about Thomas Paine’s writings, while Mr. Bush would have the cafe crowd in stitches by doing impersonations of Mr. Dean.

I’m not being disloyal to write this, but I don’t see Dean playing well in Missouri, or any area of the country that is a little bit of Missouri at heart.

I must assume that Kristof is trying to generate interest in Clark, but if Dean won’t fly in the South, I don’t see Clark flying in the North. To be blunt, I think Clark would be a lousy President. But then, we already have a lousy President.

This is going to be a long year.

Categories
Government

I missed this

When I started reading references to the FBI and its new spying tactics, I assumed it had to do with the FBI spying on protestors against the Iraq war. I didn’t realize there was a second story, this one about the FBI’s expanion of powers through NSLs, or national security letters.

Seems the government not only wants to know about us when we protest, it also wants to know about us when we breath.

Here’s a solution to the St. Louis crime problem – if we can get half the city residents to attend an anti-Bush rally, we’d generate enough interest to probably result in a whole lot of FBI people being assigned here. Since we assume that they would actually act on a real crime, rather than just imagined ones, they should help cut the crime rate here. If nothing else, all those suits hanging around wearing dark glasses and peering into windows should make for an interesting time, and it can get kinda dull sometimes in the winter here.

See, my mama always told me to make the bad stuff work for you.

Categories
Political

Beating Swastikas into Nose Rings

Recovered from the wayback machine.

I’ve been visiting some weblogs lately where the discussion ranges about the ominous similarity between the Bush administration’s use of PR and spin doctoring and the Nazi’s use of the same before the WWII – with some implications of the awful consequences of said actions on gullible ne stupid populace.

(I’d link all the gentlemen having this discussion but have a suspician that doing so would peeve some of them so I exercised the better part of valor and leave them unlinked – but not out of disrespect.)

This discussion is based, in part, on the assumption that the American voters are both blinkered and easily led – just say the magic buzz words, and we’ll react on cue, like Pavlov’s dogs. More so: Pavlov’s dogs were assumed to be intelligent.

Here’s a flash for you: The American people are not stupid. We may be conservative, or frightened, or insecure, and this combined with our beliefs may make us rigid or gullible at times, but we are not stupid. Nor are we especially self-centered, or no more so than any people in any part of any country on this earth. The only reason that the American people are getting so much attention right now is that the American government is the power, the Bitch with the Pull if you will. However, fifty years ago it was Germany and Japan. About two hundred years ago it was Britain, and about two thousand years ago it was the Romans. Throughout the ages there have been people who have used their superior arms to invade or control, and they’ve usually been led by a man (or a woman) who knows how to use PR effectively. But that does not make the people being led, stupid.

This ability to play on people’s fears or to people’s vanities in order to dominate or invade was not invented by Bush. It was not invented by the Nazi’s, either, and stop giving them so much credit. It was not invented by Napoleon, or Alexander the Great for that matter. It was not even invented by Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or King Soloman.

Og saw that Nu had more meat and fertile women than he did, and he desired these. He told some of his people that Nu wanted their women, and scared them. He told others that they were strong and invincible, and flattered them. He then convinced all of his people to go to war so that he might have this meat and screw these women. Og, you might say, is the inventor of tools used to propagandize war and greed used by men like Bush and the Nazis. Og is also the inventor of brutality, genocide, persecution, fear, avarice, and the death of hope.

We’ve had these traits from Og all along. We know this. We don’t need a swastika to be reminded of this, and the consequences. We are not stupid.

Once we’ve established that the American people are no less intelligent than spider monkeys, dolphins, and Jorge, the bartender at that cute little place on the beach in Spain, we can proceed to have conversations that are not based on assumptions about players following stereotypes – current or past.