Personal Musings category archive

From time to time in these electrons, I have urged my two or three regular readers to “watch what they do, not what they say.”

Occasionally, though, it is sufficient to watch what they say.

I have from time to time noticed that one mark of a really good idea is that, once someone else thinks of it, it seems blindingly obvious.

Driftglass and Bluegal point out, in their latest podcast, that, thanks to the Fox News/Wingnut talk radio bubble, the hate-full Republican base likely believe they are the majority, even though they are not, because they have insulated themselves from other views.

Hence the coming rage when their candidate loses.

Aside:

I got a dollar to a doughnut that the husband in the second letter here is a Fox News devotee. Takers? (Krispy Kreme only, please. Delivery directions upon request.)

Don’t expect much about events at either the Republican or Democratic conventions in these electrons. I’ve long considered what happens at political conventions, like election results, to be something to read about over coffee the next morning.

Besides, at least this week, I couldn’t bear to look, even if I wanted to. Cleveland is already turning uglier than I feared it might.

Aside:

I wonder how long the corporate media can maintain their fiction that the Republican convention is “politics as usual” and that “both sides do it” in the face of events in Cleveland? Yesterday, the headlines at Raw Story and Crooks and Liars looked like stuff the Onion Mad Magazine would not have dared to make up.

(Indefinitely, I suspect. It’s what they are paid for.)

No, despite what you may hear, the whole country is not going crazy.

It’s the Republican Party and its dupes, fellow travelers, and symps that are melting down. The rest of us are okay.

Keep that in mind.

From the Bangor Daily News, William M. Daley poses a question for Bernie Sanders. I’ll paraphrase it:

What’s it feel like playing the Nader card?

I’m a member of the Democratic Party for a very practical reason; I even volunteer in my own small way.

I realized that, after decades of voting, I had only ever voted for two Republicans (Larry Coughlin when I lived in Pennsylvania and Bill Roth when I lived in Delaware, both of them good and decent men, though Roth was in his dotage when he ultimately left political life); neither would be welcome in Today’s Republican Party(TM).

As I try to live in the real world, whatever the details of my ideology might be (trust me, it’s much farther left than you might think-I might even be willing to voter for Franklin Roosevelt, were he on the ticket), I decided that I had to cast my lot in the real world. I joined the party that better represented me, as there are only two realistic alternatives in the USA. (If you have a pipe dream of a third party* in the United States, all I can say is that I want a drag on that pipe, because it must be some really kick-ass stuff . . . .)

Parties are organized and have rules; it’s part of what makes them “organized” “parties.”

You just joined the Party, Bernie, solely so you could run for the nomination and for no other reason. Hell, I’ve been a Democrat longer than you have, and I’m nobody who is younger than you and who officially joined the Party just a few years ago.

You knew the rules going in, and now you want to dictate new rules because your grapes turned sour.

If you lose according to the rules, you have lost. The rules didn’t beat you.

You lost.

Forget the Corvair; Ralph Nader’s legacy will forever be President George the Worst. It would be a damned shame if Bernie Sanders’s legacy is President Ronald McDonald Trump.

Give it up, Bernie; you’ve worn out your welcome. Don’t be another Nader.

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The Washington press corps loves to talk about the “pivot.”

They have a fanciful notion that a candidate can be one person during primary campaigns and turn into someone else, or “pivot,” during a general election campaign. They are waiting anxiously for Donald Trump to pivot, to become “more presidential” (whatever the hell that is–maybe refraining from insulting peoples, cultures, races, and communities for a day or so, maybe not threatening to rain death on foreign peoples as causally as others discuss baseball scores, maybe just not wearing baseball caps indoors–who can say what they mean?).

We recall how well the “pivot” worked for Mitt “Etch-a-Sketch” Romney and John “McMaverick” McCain.

The notion of the pivot highlights the ultimate hollowness of a certain style of political reportage, one that holds no truck with substance. Rather, it believes that strategy is not just everything, it’s the only thing. They care not that somebody’s drugging the race horses and bribing the jockeys, so long as the horse race is exciting. Hell, they’ll quite happily drug the horses and bribe the jockeys themselves if it makes the race more exciting.

They also clearly believe that the voting public is incapable of remembering anything that a politician said or did prior to the most recent pivot. Furthermore, and this is the truly craven part, even as they pat themselves on the back for their “journalistic excellence,” they forsake–nay, they flee–their journalistic responsibility to remind the polity that what some politician said or did yesterday directly contradicts what he or she did or said today.

The true noxiousness of the narrative of the pivot, though, is that it reveals empty souls, souls with no substance and no values, souls which believe only in appearances, which eschew fact, which pay no attention to the men and women behind the curtain.

Aside:

I don’t have any secret methods for identifying who these “journalists” are other than paying attention to the discourse and reading Driftglass, who specializes in analyzing dis coarse discourse, but a good starting point would be a list of the “journalists” who most frequently appear on the Sunday talk shows.