[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster]
Politically it has been a strange and tumultuous year, yielding an unusually quiet third and fourth week of August. Usually by this time enough boredom, heat and vacation soaks our vapid press corps into vomits of absurd silliness, the shark attack August of 2001 being the classic splat, but as Atrios of Eschaton noted all seems strangely rational this year, a quiet fear and uneasy expectation muting our bovine scribes. Unfortunately Atrios was also correct in suspecting the insanity of August occurred in the first week with reeking, heinous debt ceiling ransom deal, we should be so lucky to have a month of babbling about fish.
I know which side I’m on, successful web publisher John Cole of Balloon Juice said after being peppered with comment shot too many times for hoisting the Lilly Ledbetter accomplishment flag. When all else fails by all means invoke the classically powerful tribal dictum, do you really want to brave the political world on your own, dude, out there with no people but pleased Republicans and Libertarians? I’m extremely sorry to say it is a cold, lonely place of alleged mental illness and destruction of the Republic. I’m stubbornly at this point leaving the presidential vote slot blank, but with enough sane policy and rhetoric my mind and vote can easily be changed, unlike our hapless policy elites I don’t mind losing face at being wrong, far better to experience that than stupidly staying on the wrong path.
Which is what we should be expecting a lot of, according to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, now that the fools in the Executive Branch have publicly invested so much in the tragically “idiotic” (Dr. Atrios again) path of debt reduction they can never be brought to admit ignoring Keynes was and is the most vapidly stupid, insultingly incompetent act they could have performed in the dire, urgent circumstances.
It very well may be that losing face is the primary reason abandonment of this horribly stupid debt reduction policy doesn't take place, but the “eerie inhumanity” described by Charles Blow of the New York Times in the cruel Chicago school of economics is also partly to blame, without a real journalism corps to humiliate the buffoons who embrace such nonsense enough fools in the administration still really believe it. The prospects of Obama abandoning babbling ancient Republican talking points as we move forward are indeed grimly dim.
Now I know what a battered wife feels like, Tbogg of Firedoglake wanly wrote as he still pledged his vote with tribal fealty. I wouldn’t know, I wouldn’t presume to have the ability to take on that persona, my good sir, but without getting into it the politics of our dear Obama administration do indeed invoke sickening flashbacks of hissing blows cracking in with their terrible terror, yes, I sadly know that battery and abuse very well. Not a good place to be.
Yet here I am still, a good generous liberal, Episcopal gardener, voter, homeowner, pickup-driving little people dude. My mind can be changed about the Presidential non-vote, hell I don’t mind losing face and being wrong at all, do me with good policy and I’ll be back in the tribe lickety-split. Unlike the administration I am not dug in, I can be persuaded I’m on the wrong path.
Persuasion will only be accomplished with empirical policy, not the flapping of lips, although words of contrition and begging always help. Fight like hell for jobs and wages for the little people or shut up, please. No one cares about anything else, political success and redemption are only to be found with that policy, and if y’all think I’m wrong go look at the hurtling approval numbers for Obama and handling of the economy in a total dive over at Gallup and then get back to me. Yeah.
When I can I shall report forth on my little world of tiny things, for if there is one thing that truly alarmed and disturbed me in this hideous month it was the horrible notion that time spent reading, writing and speaking at Daily Kos was politically and civically useless. What total horseshit.
Why do y’all think Murdoch and all those hoary verbose conservatives daily launch Fox News and all their Politico crap into the American political environment? To move the conversation. I may be small, my political movements may be infinitesimally tiny, but I use my voice through the internet. Should enough of us continue to do it change is possible, Glenn Greenwald of Salon says our elites fear that power very much.
He’s damn well right, I am not currently of the tribe but never silent. That is being a good dutiful American, on that I am very much dug in.