I'm really starting to wonder why I call this "Happy Hour." Granted, the time of day I publish roughly coincides with your typical happy hour, and we run this place with a cantina theme, but for fuck's sake - it's not like the subject matter leaves me with a cheerful buzz. Au contraire, I'm tempted to install a brick wall next to my chair so I have a convenient place to bang my head.
Especially today. I have spent nearly three hours surfing every political site I can lay my cursor upon, searching in vain for political news outside of the thrice-bedamned presidential election. What have I got to show for my efforts?
A headache.
This election shouldn't even be news, people. It's this simple: McCain's a raving, two-faced, lying, blindingly stupid shitsack. Obama is not. The debate should have been over when Bush, McCain et al had to start following Obama's lead on foreign policy. End of fucking discussion.
And yet, here's the "substantial" discussion we're now subjected to:
As part of the instantly mind-numbing “celebrity” attack, John McCain’s ostensible campaign manager Rick Davis said, “Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula.”
This prompted Andrew Sullivan to respond:
They really played the arugula card? For all McCain’s personal qualities, we’re learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions — how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda’s new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? — we are debating people’s cultural insecurities and food choices.
The slow collapse of conservatism as a coherent governing philosophy is not unrelated to this. If you never want to fight campaigns on policy, why bother crafting any?
Why indeed. And McCain hasn't. Republicons seldom do these days. Instead, they resort to character assassinations, lies big and small, and attempt to strangle thought at birth.
All of this brings to mind one of my favorite Savatage quotes: "And lie they do / for lie they must / for they know it's the lie we trust." Republicons have taken this to extremes. It's all lies, all the time:
I’ve been trying to get a better sense of why John McCain’s relentless attacks irk me so much. It’s not that I expected McCain to run a substantive campaign, and it’s not that I expected McCain to be an honorable candidate.
Mark Kleiman wrote something the other day that rings true for me, and touches on why I find the McCain campaign so offensive: “In politics, lying is cheating.”
I think that’s exactly right. There are degrees of cheating, of course. When the Bush administration uses the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against Democratic candidates (or go easy on Republican candidates) shortly before an election, that’s obviously and literally cheating. When the Nixon White House orchestrates the Watergate scandal, that’s obviously and literally cheating.
But in a more principled/philosophical sense, lying is cheating, too. Voters look to the candidates for information. The media passes along this information, but has largely abdicated its role as a “referee.” If a candidate deliberately deceives as many voters as possible, it is, in effect, playing fast and loose with the rules.
There are no rules to Republicons. They'll do anything and everything to win, no matter who it hurts, no matter how much this country needs someone to face the harsh truths and do the right thing. The problem with doing the right thing is, it's seldom easy. And voters are fucking lazy gits who want things to be easy, comfortable, and intellectually simple:
Voters don't make decisions based upon cold calculation of self-interest. They don't rationally and objectively weigh the facts. Rather, political preferences are determined by habits of thought and emotion, and by social, cultural, and geographical context. New work in cognitive science, economics, sociology and political science has shown us that we humans are not the critters we thought we were.
It turns out that political leanings have more in common with genre preferences than they do with traditional concepts of ideology or self-interest. Genres, in popular music, fiction, etc., attract a self-reinforcing fandom. Mystery readers very seldom abandon the genre. Same with science fiction, country music, and, we see now, politics. In fact, socially, politically and geographically, genre boundaries seem to be hardening.
As Bill Bishop explains in his new book, "The Big Sort," decades of economic expansion and unprecedented mobility and choice have led Americans to migrate to what I call Genre Communities, that is, communities of more or less homogenous tastes in politics and culture.
Before Republicons completely screwed the pooch, it was possible for a left-leaner like me to sample a few dishes from their table. It was nice to have a little political variety. I was solidly independent, and proud of it: I didn't want to favor any one political party because I thought they all sucked.
But then the Evangelicals took over. The Republicons gave up what little credibility they had in all areas of policy. And after a long, hard struggle with wanting to stay in the middle, I found myself bounced to the left. And I give you this personal tale to say: not all of us choose a genre because we're lazy and stupid and want all of our answers marked out for us. Some of us choose to stay within a genre because the other on offer is so outrageously offensive, so bereft of reality, ideas and solutions, that there's just no way we could possibly find anything of value in it.
That said, I know far too many people who are reflexively Democrat or Republicon because everybody else is, because they don't trust themselves to understand issues and therefore demand others pick their position, and who quite frankly don't give a damn.
It needs to stop.
That sort of "I'm no expert, so I'll decide my vote on things like personality and what everybody else is saying about the candidates" is what got us into this mess with Monkey Boy George and so many other noxious politicians to begin with. It's why McCain won't debate policy and instead reaches deep into the mud, grabbing double-handfuls of stinking slime to hurl. If voters want simplicity, let's give them simplicity: if the opponent has to resort to personal attacks, if all he can talk about is how awful the other candidate is, that's a sure sign you should be voting for his opponent. Slinging that much mud means he hasn't got any ground to stand on.
There. Problem solved. Can we just stop talking about this fucking election now so that those of us who actually give a rat's ass about the deplorable state of our government can get on with exploring the extent of the decay, and figure out how the fuck to solve it when 90% of Americans are, politically, lazy fucking gits?
1 comment:
Before Republicons completely screwed the pooch, it was possible for a left-leaner like me to sample a few dishes from their table. It was nice to have a little political variety. I was solidly independent, and proud of it: I didn't want to favor any one political party because I thought they all sucked.
Out here in WA, it's still possible to do that at the state and local level. I can't remember the last time I voted Republican for a federal office. It certainly hasn't been recently.
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