I hope everyone is having a great weekend even though it has been raining for two days straight. I am going to enjoy this first week of college and professional football. That means instead of thinking about things like crime, health care and the future of my city, I will be focused on beer, hamburgers and The Saints not embarrassing themselves and losing to Detroit. I will be at that game tomorrow and hopefully my boy won't have to drive my truck home because I am in a state of shock. When I come back to my blog sometime next week I may have to take a break from writing about anything political unless something crazy happens like Lil Wayne entering the mayor's race or Glenn Beck having a rational idea about anything. Before I go I do have two things to get off my chest.
Living in the south is a funny experience. There is probably no place in the country where black and white people live so close together but politically they act like it's 1955. I'm watching this SEC Conference game and looking at all these people in the stadium cheering for these brothers. I bet you some of these same people kept their kids home Tuesday when Obama was speaking to the kids. What if black people in the south decided not to go to any SEC schools anymore and went back to HBCU's like the old days. Florida A$M, Southern and Grambling would be in the top ten rankings and Obama would win 40 states next time. America leads the world in rhetoric that doesn't match doesn't match our lifestyles.
The second thing I want to say is that Democratic leaders must have been the kids who got their lunch money stolen as a kid the way they get bullied by Republicans. I think they try too hard to be intellectually superior over everyone so they won't get in there and scrap. They could have gotten together and pushed through health care reform, combined that with a good immigration bill, and when the stimulus started working locked down the next two election cycles. Instead they couldn’t unify to push through what they wanted and they are too concerned with coming up with a plan that every single American is going to be happy with. That is impossible. Also, at the time of their greatest political power, they let a few talk show hosts rally their opposition and have been getting slapped around for months like they were the losers last November. Everything that happened during the eight years of President Bush’s term makes sense to me now. When President Obama calls out the Republicans for scare tactics he better call out his own party for sitting there and taking it because it appears to me he is fighting against everything by himself.
Now I am done talking about politics. Enjoy Tyler Woods and my new anthem.
5 comments:
Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints? Hey, at least you're not a Seahawks fan like me!
I just finished reading an interesting book -- more like a long essay -- called The Death of Conservatism (Tanenhaus). The author maintains that the party in power isn't the one that attracts the middle, but instead is the one that can form a consensus and govern from it. That's where the Dems are now, which is inherently more difficult to do that throw bombs.
The problem -- and I'll write more about this book on Citizen K when I get back to Seattle next week -- is that the R's aren't respecting the consensus that has formed, something that the minority party traditionally does, especially at the beginning of a new administration.
The modern Republican party has been taken over by bomb-throwing, anti-intellectual yahoos who have no respect for traditional conservatism, much less the traditions of adversarial politics. I think that the president and the Dems gave them their chance and are now prepared to proceed without them. Obama, BTW, gave a real stemwinder of a speech in Minneapolis today.
The problem is that the media reports on both parties and insists on doing so from a false standard of objectivity. Plus, the wingnuts make news when they call the president a liar during a speech to Congress, although I think they could do without that kind of news.
Anyway, let's not give up! The president is a terrific counterpuncher, and I do think there has been some rope-a-dope going on. Like Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank said, the loonies (his word) say the ridiculous things they say because they have no ideas.
In the long run, the literal or objective coverage of outrageous behavior by Republican extremists will backfire on them. It forces a decrease in the percentage of reasonable people willing to call themselves conservative. I would venture to say that those parents who didn't want their children to be forced to hear President Obama's encouraging beginning-of-school-year speech belong to this "wingnut" or "looney" group, and are an extreme, silly minority. It's the consequence of our continuous presidential campaign, even during the first year of a new president's term. Just like Christmas starting in October, it gets wearisome. sp, n.o.
How wet did you get Sunday?
I got drenched.
My shoes were still squishing when I left the dome after the game.
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