Political Interlewd

Huh. Well. So some of my additional news (which I didn't get to over the weekend; sorry) was that I voted. Absentee and online, which probably means that whatever I marked, I voted for McCain and Palin. Well, as I've been saying a lot these days, gosh, I'm glad I'm out of the country. What follows is what began as a reply to an email I got yesterday with a couple of poliblog links. Good old-fashioned paranoid liberal mind-rot, which, in this day and age, means terrifyingly likely liberal mind-rot. I recommend reading the blog posts, because they're interesting and insightful political commentary, and ignoring most of my commentary, because it's not. Except for the bit about Obama and FISA. Call me nutty, but I actually think that's important.

--- On Sat, 10/4/08, D____ wrote:
From: D_____
Subject:
To: "T_____" , "C_____" , "Niko" , "J_____"
Date: Saturday, October 4, 2008, 5:27 AM

I am sending the links to these articles only to you four, unless I get
a bite from G_____ or U_____.  I should have the confidence of my
convictions, namely the guts, to send it to them anyway, but I don't. 
This is information you probably already have but, in case you don't, I
send these to read.  The stakes are very high this November.  We really
need to take back our country.  To me, that Congress passed the
"bail-out bill" is a very, very, very bad sign.


---D_____


http://themovingtarget.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/news-from-the-vp-
debate-the-mccain-palin-coup/



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/the-battle-plan-ii-
sarah_b_128393.html

As to whether to send these on to G_____ or U_____, I hesitate to say, except to consider this: the ideologies referred to in the articles, and the ideologies of the Bush/Cheney/Rovian cabal of the last eight (or fifteen, depending on when you want to start counting) are emphatically not traditional Republican concepts. Traditional Republicans are fiscal conservatives (remember the "tax-and-spend Democrats" of the eighties?), not $630 billion war-mongers or $810 billion bailout advocates. More importantly, traditional Republicans are mostly interested in limiting centralized (i.e., Federal) government, and advocate deconcentrating power by turning it over to the individual states. They certainly aren't interested in heaping it all in one wing of the White House. Republicans, all things considered, are relatively sane folks.

These psychos aren't Republicans (as G_____ pointed out to me a couple years ago, during what was, admittedly, our one and only conversation about politics); they're Neo-Cons. And Neo-Cons are, as far as I can tell, more or less indiscriminate power-mongers. What I find deeply upsetting about them is that they appropriate Republican language in order to further their own radical goals. "No tax-and-spend" became "No new taxes," which turned into tax cuts and deregulation (for businesses and the wealthy). And, since Republicans have always tended to have more faith in laissez-faire capitalism, there's your rationale. Even Sarah Palin kept going on and on about how government has to "get outta the way" of individuals (and individual businesses), which, amazingly, is why she's for expanding vice-presidential executive power.

And, of course, what fuels all of this and gives it legitimacy is fear, both realized and imagined. Both sides tell us America isn't safe, as though safety were all that mattered. (Here is where I digress and point out that one thing that I do not like about Obama is that he voted for the FISA bill this year. You know, that bill that grants immunity to all the telecom companies like AT&T who assisted the government in its illegal wiretapping? Yeah, Obama okayed that one. And apparently Joe Biden and I are the only ones who think that wasn't cool. Chill out, kids, I still voted for him.) I often like to suggest that security and liberty are a zero-sum game -- the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Hey, the safest neighborhoods in America are Mafia 'hoods.

Another thing I like to suggest (with a certain gleeful self-righteousness these days) is that everyone go traveling. Of the vast myriad of things Americans are scared stupid of, one of the most prevalent, insidious, and long-lasting is "dem damn furriners," particularly the brown varieties. A little worldliness gives a little perspective and dispels a lot of one's extraneous, if systemic, racism.

I'm preaching to the choir, of course. And I imagine that I'm continuing to when I say that, despite my misgivings about Obama (he's really not that radical, he really is that inexperienced, and there's that damn FISA vote), and despite the apparent shallowness of saying so, I voted for him, and not in small part because he's black.

This is an interesting assessment of Palin succinctly articulating the lingering, not-quite-conscious fears people have about Obama. Hint: it ain't the "inexperience."

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo....

In her character attack, Palin questions Obama's association with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground....

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

So there you are. Obama, I strongly suspect, is not the messiah the lefties hope for. But I don't think he'll completely suck, either. And I'm pretty sure he isn't the smiley-faced spearhead of American fascism that Sarah Palin is. The thing is, as long as he doesn't completely bollix the job (and hey, even if he does, right?), we have at least four years to get used to a presidential face that isn't fish-belly white. We might be a little less terrified of "not like us." Next go-round, we might be willing to consider another one or two, or maybe a woman, or maybe even -- gasp -- a homosexual. Call me batty, but I think a little more flavor in the stew is a good thing.

Who am I kidding? 59 million Americans, remember? See you in the re-education camps, kids.