A nagging question for marginal bloggers (such as I): Why Do This At All? A corollary query: what the hell does a dude living in the sticks, who has chicken shit on his boots, who drives a ’95 Camry Wagon (with pride, I might add), know about politics? And (questioning myself again here, but echoing a persistent line of my dad’s, rest his soul), What Makes You So Smart? There are EXPERTS out there, and you act like they are always wrong and you are right. Do you think you know more than George Stephanopoulos?
And at no time do I feel more like I’m just being a jerk than this week, as many of my friends and peers are basking in the glow of the truly impressive pageant that was the inauguration. Quibbling about Obama’s ongoing wars, kill lists, drone attacks and secrecy obsessions; his imprisoning whistleblowers; his Austerity Lite–why complain about this? Now is NOT the right time. (It never is ….)
And I … I … just sigh, and wish we had a president who looked more like the French model from the State Farm commercial, someone lacking the kind of charisma that obscures the actual policies….. Obama is for liberals what Reagan was for conservative middle Americans a generation earlier, a smooth operator who can elide, obscure, prevaricate, misrepresent, flat-out lie to you in a speech, and yet you just watch and say, “What a soothing way of speaking this man has.”
So … I have not given up on this, yet can’t think of any new ways to say what I think, or what I wonder. A two (and only two)-party system is pretty much the same thing as a one-party system. No one ever ran on the neoliberal ticket, yet that is all we have to choose from. How did we get here? How do we get out?