Political Potpourri

While I have been contemplating hagfish, amphibious assaults and jury duty for the past couple of weeks, the political life of the nation has rolled on in its usual inimitable fashion. I actually spend a lot of time trying to find things to occupy my mind other than my frustration and disappointment at our failure to live up to the ideals of our founding fathers, and the sadness of how often those ideals are twisted into unrecognizable distortions by selfish and ignorant people, but my therapy is writing down my thoughts for the whole world to ignore, so, at random, here:

Dr. George Tiller was recently murdered by some douche-bag moron. Dr. Tiller was one of the few physicians remaining in America willing to perform late-term abortions. These abortions were, based upon court review, legal, and were sanctioned by the medical profession based upon a set of criteria for necessity which were consistently met by Dr. Tiller’s patients. Whatever a person’s opinion of the morality of such procedures may be, if you respect the law, you have to operate within the law. If you don’t respect the law, you are a scum-bag. Period. The implied natural right to revolution against authority for just cause does not extent to imposing your own individual morally arguable views by force. Revolutions, like all things in a democratic society, must be democratic; one man does not get to decide who lives and who dies, no matter how strongly held their beliefs are. God knows there are plenty of people in this world that I would like to take a chainsaw to, but that would be surrender to primitivism, which is unacceptable. Fortunately, the leaders of the national anti-abortion movement distanced themselves from the cowardly act by saying “we didn’t have the guts to do it ourselves, but we aren’t unhappy it happened”.

Speaking of scum-bags, Newt Gingrich, the moral and intellectual light-house of the Republican Party, recently said that the idea of being a “citizen of the world” is “intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous”. I am tempted to simply say that such a statement stands on its own and needs no commentary from me, but it occurred to me that Dr. Gingrich has been living in some other world for quite some time now, so maybe he already has citizenship there. I’m not going to bother bemoaning the arrogance and xenophobia represented by such clever remarks; I will just point out that Hammurabi and Rousseau were not Americans; Martin Luther and General Lafayette were not Americans, and Jesus Christ was not an American. Oswald Spengler and Benito Mussolini were also not Americans, but they sure seem to permeate Dr. Gingrich’s philosophical musings. I guess we will have to wait for the next meeting of the American Liberty League for more of the wisdom emanating from Dr. Gingrich’s bloated ego.

Our President (the one I actually voted for) recently gave a speech in Egypt were he espoused principles of fairness, accountability, practical realism, managed co-existence and compromise. These horribly anti-American ideas were roundly criticized by people like “The Dick” Cheney, who noted that calls for fairness and reason were tantamount to surrender to our enemies; which, from his perspective, must certainly be so, since Mr. Cheney’s principle enemies have always been fairness and reason. Many Americans expressed concern on how Blackwater would make its payroll if people started following President Obama’s dangerous ideas and quit killing each other. Fortunately, there is not much probability of that.

The controversy over President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court continued to simmer, much to the apparent disinterest of most everybody but Republican Senators and the news media. Sotomayor, who once had the almost comical temerity to suggest that a diversity of backgrounds and views might enhance the quality of a public policy debate, has a documented history of trying to make sense of the law, which should disqualify her from any responsible position in the American justice system. She will, however, probably be confirmed by the Senate, because they can’t get the very popular autographed pictures of the President for their constituents if they don’t.

Most everybody has forgotten that the people of Minnesota are still being taxed without equitable representation since they only have one Senator an almost full seven months since the disputed election between Norm Coleman, the incumbent and the well-known intellectual Al Franken. I have to confess that I will support anybody that writes a book about how lame Rush Limbaugh is, so I am hardly an objective observer of the process, but I do know that Al Gore had the class to put the interest of the nation above his own, something Mr. Coleman apparently didn’t notice. Doesn’t anybody in America know when they are making an ass of themselves anymore?

Adlai Stevenson was once quoted as saying “I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends; that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them”. While I certainly endorse the sentiment, I cannot honor such an agreement. As I approach half a century on the divine planet Earth, I have less and less tolerance for the greed, ignorance, indifference and foolishness of people. I know that the reality is much more complex than just Republican versus Democrat and I know that Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi are no alter-boys; I am pretty imperfect myself, but we can no longer afford, as a nation or a planet, philosophies rooted in fear, arrogance and mediaeval thinking. I’m not sure if there is a God, but I do know payback is a bitch and my children, all of our children, are now going to have to deal with the thing that is scratching at the door.