Do they think at all?
Just off the cuff: Tonight is McCain “I humbly accept your nomination to be the Big Cheese” Night. It’s also the first night of play for the NFL.
I know which one is on my TV right now.
Entries Tagged as 'Politics'
Back into the mud
Otter likes to run and watch GMA as the start to her day. The discussion today was on Sarah Palin as a VP pick for McCain and some of the Obama responses to her selection. “Inexperience” and “cynical political ploy” were gist of the discussion from what I heard. This brought up a connection in my mind that I haven’t seen anywhere else that is really relevant since Obama says Bush is really McCain’s running mate:
Obama looks a lot like George Bush right now. In order to overcome a derth of experience at the national level, he selected an old Washington hand (Biden, Cheney) to take care of that. Given how well Cheney has worked out in being too active in the government, isn’t a neophyte in the VP slot a better choice? Hell, Bush at least had some executive experience which is what Palin has as a previous mayor and governor in Alaska. No one else on either ticket can say that.
I think this election season is going to be very interesting. 
E: Dang it, other people are smarter than me. Of course, the author also points out a lot more points of congruence between Obama and Bush. Agent of More of the Same, here we come!
Legalized theft
Yay for being done. I was good this year and finished in March. Tax Freedom Day this is next week Wednesday, 23 April. After that, everything we earn we will be generously allowed to keep by our overlords in Washington, D.C.
Wishlist for changes:
Tax day moved to election day. Think of the fun that we’d have if everytime we went to pay our taxes, we could decide who got to spend them!
Withholding abolished. Right now, 95% (made up statistic!) of the people who pay taxes in this country never have to cut a check to the Fed. This makes them happy to get a refund back. Along with this, the interest penalty for underestimating taxes needs to go away. The government is not a for-profit endeavor, and therefore has no need of any kind of interest on money.
Slightly more out there, tying taxes to voting. No taxy, no votey. Mmmmmmm, no more old/knocked-up people voting themselves a share of my pocketbook. So nice…
Edit: One day, I will write something funny and long, much like Dave Barry talking about taxes.
Politics for real people
David Mamet wrote an article a few days ago called Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’. Besides him being a very good writer, the takeaway that I get from it is this:
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
[...]
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
[...]
I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting). (Emphasis added)
He’s getting a crapton of blowback, but that last line is why I am so opposed to idealogues and the extremities of opinion that go along with them. Life is built upon give and take but so often in today’s politics people are elected on the marginal case. What happens after the election? They move to the middle as much as possible so they can stay in power. It’s not worth it to stay in power if you don’t have a lot of it, so then each and every politician works to increase her power through the mechanism of the government. And the Government sucks. I don’t really care about any of the Big Government types in this year’s election because none of them will fix what is wrong about government but instead work to increase it at the expense of you and me. Otter is casting my vote this year.
I know nothing, nothing!
What follows is random, disjointed thoughts on things of a political nature. Click through only if you want some badly formed opinion.
[Read more →]Ptooey
One day, they might just find out what I think and then there will be some real contempt charges.
Left/Right
I think the below quote sums up my political thinking quite nicely. I’m pretty happy with the inclusion of Reason into my feedreader.
[T]he ideologies that pass for liberalism and conservatism today are too weighed down with authoritarian elements for either to lay claim to the real American center.
Opinions
Let’s be clear. I used to post a bunch of stuff on politics and our civilian leadership. I did this because I was a) stupid and b) really stupid. I don’t anymore because TBH there isn’t any such thing as a leader in the area of Capitol Hill. A slight modification to Shakespeare might be in order
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the [politicians].
Now, Naye has some problems with an article I linked to as a reference for ganking a tagline. Throw away as far as I am concerned. She has some issues with the comments attached to the article in that they tend to give a lot of weight to the opinions of military members.
With that said, why is it that they believe I should take their opinions as fact simply because they’re military? I used to read military blogs because they were giving me an honest heartfelt opinion on what was happening. I had friends in the military that I’d email and ask questions. They gave their opinions and experiences although sometimes they were very carefully wording their responses.
Now it seems that all military has the same opinion. To me, they are living in fear. They believe that people are not supporting them. People are turning against them if they do not agree with the job they military was sent to do. Maybe they fear the whole Vietnam experience. I don’t know.
I don’t think you should take my or anyone else’s opinion as fact. Period. I don’t care if they wrote the original paper in a subject, unless they can back it up with data it is opinion not fact. Facts are concrete and objective, opinions are fluffy and subjective. We know what I think about fluffy.
Right now the country as a whole has a huge issue with what is fact and what is opinion. It is exacerbated by the fact that the primary means of news in regards to the war is being deceived by our enemies. Whether this is intentional or not is up to you to form your own opinion on. The situation is also affected by the fact that certain people in leadership positions had the same opinion on a set of facts and then switched to claiming that hard evidence (facts) wasn’t there at all. I’ll give you that the interpretation of facts (i.e. opinions) can change, but you can’t wish data out of existence.
I’m not sure what opinion Naye thinks we in the military all have. I know people who voted for Gore, for Kerry, and will probably vote for Clinton. I know people who disagree with the war. (Contrary to CW(Conventional Wisdom) those two positions are not the same.) I do know that those of us who watch domestic politics have a huge fear of what is going on in the media and on Capitol Hill because Vietnam was a win that turned into a loss thanks to opinion. We know that the people support us, but when we take our local successes (read some of Michael Yon’s reporting) and get slapped in the face and told we’re losing on a daily basis because that is someone’s opinion, it gets really really hard.
Fuck yes I fear the Vietnam experience. It destroyed the heart and soul of the US military, and it took us decades to recover from the apathy and distrust that Vietnam left in the military. It sucks that we have to look at people who use our protection of the First Amendment to attack us and what we are doing. We’ll continue doing our job anyways. Right now, that job is defined by the Commander-in-Chief – using his delegated authority from Congress – as trying to keep the fight in someone else’s backyard and not ours. We can have differing opinions on whether that’s the best choice and still get along, can’t we?
Lee at Right-Thinking posted while I was responding to Naye. He linked to a list by Rod Dreher about how his thinking has changed in the past couple of years. One of his items is this:
4. I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone. I mean, I thought nothing could stand in the way of the strongest military fielded since the days of ancient Rome. No more.
If anyone honestly thought this they were deluding themselves. The military and its attendant use of force is solely predicated on killing people and breaking things. The second sentence is still absolutely true, we can defeat any force that comes against us and this is including the guerillas in Iraq. What we cannot do – but have been put in the position of doing – is build a civilization in an area that by and large has rejected it every opportunity that they get. Where we as the military are falling down is in the PR arena where every fart by Al Queda is proclaimed as a smashing victory and our control of 90% of Iraq is greeted with yawns. We need to work on that and get better. We are doing a pretty good job once you get past the mainstream reports.
This got far too long. For you non-readers: Opinion needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Fact-check your -news-opinion sources, never accept anything at face value.
I’m not lonely, he’s a reporter
A couple of weeks ago, a picture was published which shows that Senator Kerry was sitting alone in one of the IZ DFACs. It is claimed that he was having “an off the record conversation with two reporters.” Sure, that sounds like a reasonable explanation and we’ll even allow for plausability. Let’s just talk about the DFAC arrangements a little bit though. In the IZ, you have more self-important snobs than probably anywhere outside of the Quai d’Orsay or Washington, DC. One of the things which the organizers of events like Sen Kerry’s jaunt to Iraq have the option of doing is getting a private room in the DFACs unless the primary requests an open forum. My favorite places in DFACs are usually those rooms (when they aren’t reserved) as they are much quieter than the main room in the DFAC. In fact, the main room is probably the last place on Earth that you want to have a conversation that is off the record as at least three tables worth of people can hear you (even if you do think they are stupid). Not to mention that the main rooms are loud with close to 200 people eating and talking. Given the time frame involved, we’re also looking at one of the busiest meals of the day during peak hours and they happen to have an empty table (which seats upwards of eight people) for you.
So, while you’re having a quiet little conversation for three, how was the rest of the trip? I know for a fact that there were three people in our area interested in meeting the individual while the normal turnout for people like him is upwards of a dozen. Bill O’Reilly was the desired meet’n’greet that day…
Farewell
The other day was the final trip to the sandbox for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. As he was headed out, I went out to the flight line for hopefully my only handshake of more than 4,000 DVs that have transited my area. Otter planned it all and did a bang up job as usual. I did get to shake his hand and say thank you, Smash did as well (back in DC). Regardless of what some people think, those of us that worked for him and didn’t get our dicks stepped on because we couldn’t change and adapt think he did a pretty damn good job.