One advantage of being off the grid for half of September and half of October, and then of being extraordinarily busy over the last two weeks, is that I have not had the exposure or the time required to respond to our political culture with the aneurysm that it deserves. What’s been going on in the media has been so shameful, superficial, shameless and stupid that even a passing acquaintance with it has set my pot on a low boil. If given any amount of time to write, I would surely explode in a venomous outpouring of disgusted bile. In reality, I am only half as pissed off as I would normally be. What we have, instead, is a very grumpy BooMan who hasn’t been granted even the courtesy of his customary avenues of venting in print.
So, I owe you two things. First, I owe you my final Senate predictions. Second, I owe you an epic rant on the current status of our country and everything that goes into its political culture.
Right now, I’m angry about pretty much everything that is out of my immediate control. And you’re going to hear about it.
Excellent. I look forward to both — your predictions and your rant.
Second that!!
Let ‘er rip, BooMan.
I so look forward to my own self-evident frustrations being vicariously vented through your insight and fine propensity for putting into words exactly how I feel, yet sometimes have difficulty artfully expressing.
Unfortunately, I have not been “off the grid”. I feels as if I have been in the belly of the beast these past few weeks and months. And I have a very sick feeling that when I go to bed tomorrow night, the beast is going to be celebrating and the beltway is going to be rejoicing. And I will be as depressed as I have ever been since the days of Bush’s deathly criminal ventures. All I can do is hope that I am wrong. If so, I will gladly and willingly eat a boatload of shit-covered crow.
Don’t rant. You can only rant if you are disappointed; and you could only be disappointed if you hadn’t been paying attention — not for the past couple of months, but for the last four hundred years.
Don’t feel helpless that we’re about to refight the Civil War (of 1861-65). Feel helpless that we’re about to refight the Civil War (of 1642-51).
Don’t fret about the effects of television or social media and the fact that those effects are not at all understood. Fret about the effects of the steam engine and the fact that those effects are not at all understood.
Everything new is old again: the one constant is that history is locked into repeating itself, because the only way for the cycle to break would be for people to learn, and that is the very last thing that will ever happen.
An excellent rant-prompt.
More beheading than Reconstruction? Not saying it couldn’t happen.
Small comfort, to be sure, but if the Republicans do take the Senate we are likely in for some fireworks:
Something to look forward to expectantly. They left their Tea Party laying around and Cruz snatched it away from them. In other words:
Your move. Enjoyed your comment. The arc of history bends toward justice… Or is it an optical illusion?
Better hurry with those predictions. At least before 9:00PM CST tomorrow.
All I’ve heard all day is how the Republicans are going to sweep everything. Yahoo thinks that will be good for the economy (Austerity??? good for the economy???).
Looking forward to it. I am equally enraged.
You should put your rant on Youtube. While holding a gun. Maybe more people would listen if you did that.
Here’s some more fuel for the fire. Phoney notices hitting the mail here saying “your polling place has been changed”. Just a handful reported so far, but we’ll see. We’re correcting the bad info during our GOTV calls.
Good.
The more pessimistic you are, the more honest you are, about everything.
Pessimism is simply stating all of the bad shit that exists, that you usually avoid because it is taxing on the soul.
What good is a soul if it isn’t taxed by the evil in the world. If it isn’t, you might as well vote R and complain about how 8 year old orphans are really trained al-Qaeda agents bringing ebola into the country at the behest of ISIS.
Meh, on the Islam front a more import story is Malaysia taking further steps down the road to Islamic Theocracy.
Not nearly as important a story as the US taking further steps down the road to Christian Theocracy.
😛
Air force is pretty fundie.
It doesn’t really deserve to be called a culture IMO.
“Right now, I’m angry about pretty much everything that is out of my immediate control. And you’re going to hear about it.”
Good, because so am I. So I want to hear about it.
My prediction is that we’re going to do better than expected by CW. Whether that means actually keeping the senate, I do not know. But to listen to these bozos, you might think it was a foregone conclusion, and it is not.
The public and voters are currently distressed and don’t much like the status quo. But the national media and GOP crowing that a GOP “wave” has developed is factually wrong. One of the 2010 GOP wave winners, Corbett, is going to be crushed in his re-election bid. The very red state KS is looking set to toss out its extreme experimenter Gov they elected in 2010 and may toss out their long-term GOP senator as well. Walker in WI may well not survive either. Nor are Snyder in MI and Scott in FL cruising to re-election. Only OH, for unexplained reasons, hasn’t turned on Kasich — possibly because they would have to admit the error of tossing out a perfectly decent governor in 2010.
ME and AK look set to replace their GOP governors. And even GA doesn’t like theirs. Yet several other DEM and GOP incumbent governors are doing fine; so there isn’t a national anti-incumbent wave either. If Malloy (CT) and Hickenlooper (CO) hold on to win, they won’t be the only Democratic incumbents to do so. At the end of the day in statewide races, Iowa doesn’t have a track record of going with the RWNJ. A few House RWNJs may wake up Wednesday morning as stunned as Cantor was a few months ago.
listened to some of the Minnesota senate debate on npr today – GOTP spouting lies and distortions as facts. horrifying state of affairs, thanks to pernicious media
I hope this rant is followed by a decision by progressives that government is so completely broken that it is no longer useful to us. It’s time to stop pretending that it can work and instead dismantle it.
We all know that it only really serves the interests of the super-rich, that the US military is a violent terrorist organization sowing chaos around the world, and that the surveillance apparatus is out of control.
Why would anyone want to further invest time and effort in building up such a corrupt organization?
Why do progressives think this government can be reformed? It cannot.
So rant all you want (I just did) but then answer the question.