Posts in the Politics Category

So it’s the day after April Fool’s Day, and guess who the joke is on?  Anyone who believed George W. Bush’s environmental campaign promises.  You know, last time I checked Washington, D.C. was a coastal city, so it will be one of the first to feel the effects if sea levels do rise to any significant degree.  Apparently Bush is okay with flooding many of our national landmarks, damaging and perhaps destroying them.  Maybe he’s hoping that the sound of waves breaking against the Capitol building will lull Congress into a relaxed state, thus making them more prone to civility.  It’s so crazy, it just might work.

• Monday, 2 April 2001 was published on Monday, April 2nd, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

The lead story on CNN.com had the following lead-in:

As the House of Representatives debated, President Bush said today he was “confident they’ll do the right thing” on a Republican tax bill that will reconfigure the tax rate structure.

Somehow, I think the President and I have a very different vision of the outcome of the House doing “the right thing.”  (How like a conservative to assume that there is only one “right thing.”)  If you’re at all interested, one of my co-workers did an analysis of the effective raise people would receive as a result of the competing tax plans.  Note that the x-axis is logarithmic, so each major tick is a tenfold increase in yearly income.  It turns out that (if you believe these numbers) the very poor get a 5% raise, as do people with an annual income of $600,000.  While I can’t absolutely guarantee the accuracy of this chart, I dug through the numbers and they seem right—plus, the lines are more or less what you’d expect from each party’s position.  Of course, the beauty of this kind of chart is that each side of the debate sees it as ringing support for their position.

Gonna be a long four years.

• Thursday, 8 March 2001 was published on Thursday, March 8th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

I was recently asked what I thought, as a liberal-type not-quite-Democrat, of the investigations into the Marc Rich pardon.  I hadn’t actually thought about it much, but was surprised to discover I had an immediate response: “From what I’ve heard, the pardon stinks to high heaven.  But unless there’s some reasonable chance of prosecuting Clinton for it, I would ask the Honorable Congressmen to please stop masturbating in public.”  Besides, isn’t anyone bothered by Clinton’s pardon of his own brother for drug-related charges?  Is nepotism less reprehensible than bribery?  (Note: I have no idea if there was any bribery involved in the Rich case or not, but that’s what everyone seems to be screaming about.)

For the love of Mike, people, he couldn’t be convicted while he was in office and had much bigger things to distract him, like nuclear proliferation and terrorists.  What makes anyone think the teflon will suddenly peel away now that he’s a private citizen with plenty of time and money to devote to his own defense?  The only thing conservatives are managing to do it perpetuate media coverage of a man they’ve worked so hard to bury.  This is your big chance, dittoheads.  You wanted Clinton gone.  So why do you keep dragging him back into the spotlight?

Irony patrol: the guy heading up the pardon investigation is none other than Dan Burton (R-Ind.).  Yep, mister “Bill Clinton is a scumbag; did I mention I fathered a child out of wedlock during an adulterous affair?” is once again presuming to pass judgment on the morality and decency of our ex-President.  Pot, this is kettle; kettle, pot.

• Monday, 19 February 2001 was published on Monday, February 19th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Thanks to the addition of another negative review on Amazon.com, my book’s approval rating effectively dropped to 90%.  If I were a politician, I’d no doubt be wetting myself, but as it is I’m feeling downcast.  This morning’s radio show, which was plagued by technical problems and good-old-fashioned boneheaded mistakes on my part, didn’t much help.  In the grand tradition of my countrymen, I’m going to assign blame for my glum mood on external factors:  the approaching holiday, which almost never fails to depress me; and last week’s long-awaited resolution to the electoral situation.  It’s not for me to judge to the outcome, but my reaction to the players and tactics used in the whole long process were almost uniformly negative (I grumbled about this at the beginning, and things only went downhill from there).  Lord knows, I wanted to find someone to respect in the whole thing.  Only at the end did I get it, and that was while watching Gore’s concession speech.  So in other words, the only thing which gave me any hope was the loser’s exit speech.  Oh, that’s just great.

• Wednesday, 20 December 2000 was published on Wednesday, December 20th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Books and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Well, I’ve learned something today.  What I learned was this:  when your ham-and-provolone-on-white-bread sandwich suddenly begins to taste like a banana, it’s time to throw it out.  Now I share this lesson with you.  No, don’t thank me—that’s just the kind of guy I am.  I basically can’t help myself.  (Neither can anyone else, I suspect.)

I’m starting to get back into the swing of article-writing, with two new articles in front of editors as I type this, and another two or three pieces brewing on my hard drive at home.  Whether or not those simmering pools of language ever see the light of day is another question, of course; sometimes a piece which starts out full of tasty promise ends up being the fallen soufflé of writing, if you follow me.  All the ingedients seem correct, and the cooking process is roughly the same as all the other dishes I make, but nevertheless I occasionally end up with something that, if writing results may be equated with food taste, closely approximates a cigarette-and-coffee omelette.  Or worse.

At any rate, I keep getting Election 2000 stuff in my mailbox, but recently it’s swung from being solidly anti-Democrat to become sort of a turgid bipartisan mix of shrill laughter masking pessimism, vitriol, and bleak resignation.  It’s kind of like hearing the body politic whistling past the graveyard, and the tune is just as fractured as you might expect.  So if you’ve come across any particularly funny election-related humor in e-mail, do me a favor—delete it, will you?  You’ll feel much better.

• Monday, 4 December 2000 was published on Monday, December 4th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Some thoughts on the ongoing electoral fun:

“…don’t assume that no matter who wins and no matter what happens, it’s going to be bad for America. It might be quite good, because it might be sobering for the country to realize we’re in a completely new era, nobody’s got a lock on the truth, we’re all trying to understand the future.”

Wise words from Bill Clinton in a recent CNN interview.  Of course, in observing that nobody has a lock on the truth, he’s espousing a very liberal point of view.  As far as conservatives are concerned, they do have a lock on the truth, and anyone who doesn’t agree is either morally corrupt, weak-willed, or just plain dumb.  This from the ideological camp which gave us Rush Limbaugh.

Things are settling down at long last.  Kat and I have no significant travel plans for the near future, which in its own way is quite a relief.  It’s nice to look at a calendar and know that (barring unforseen events) we won’t be leaving the state until 2001 at the earliest.  This blissful state of affairs will let us concentrate on things like properly configuring the steam radiators in our house, for example.  Or try to figure out which painting or other piece of art should go where.  I’ll be able to set up a regular writing schedule for the next book, and even play the occasional video game to relieve my frustrations at Word 98 for being… well, for being Word.  Kat and I can go on dates, even have friends over for parties and family over for the holidays.  It’s all so domestic, we can hardly stand it.  (Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to survive.)

• Monday, 20 November 2000 was published on Monday, November 20th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

We’re back.  Again.  Not that twelve days in San Francisco and Ragged Point is anything to complain about, really, but we discovered that we miss home after a while.  This even though the weather during our trip was as close to perfect as one could possibly ask, and the venues were nothing to sneeze at either.  My talks and other activities at Web2000SF were what scientists call a “huge peck o’ fun,” but even better was meeting and greeting so many cool people.  Some I already knew well via e-mail, like Molly; and some I’d met before, like Tantek and Jeff and Sherry (from Terry!); but many others were effectively met for the first time—Bryan and Lori and Jennifer and Steven and what seemed like dozens more.

In a way, I felt bad about the situation at “Real World CSS,” my Wednesday presentation.  I didn’t have any network access, so the presentation suffered, and the room was packed to overflowing (and fire code violations) by interested audience members.  The interest was profoundly gratifying in an ego-centric fashion, but it wasn’t the best job I could have done, and the environment was less than ideal for those trying to find seats.  The Friday talk was less of a hit—especially among those who didn’t want to hear that the user controls the browsing experience—but there was very good attendance without the need for sitting in the aisles, and a lot of appreciative comments and exclamations from the audience, so that was good.  It was interesting to be giving a talk called “CSS For Anarchists” while the President of the United States of America was giving a speech a floor above me.  As I’ve always said, timing is everything.  I don’t know how many background checks got run on me, but I’d like to know.  Fortunately, the Secret Service decided to not arrest me for seditious activities or some such thing.  In sum, I don’t know about others, but I had a darned good time.

So did Kat, who got to play tourist and jaunt down to L.A. without me to see various college friends.  It was a short jaunt, and she got back in time for the election.  Being on the West Coast, we could watch most of it unfold without the massive sleep deprivation which the network anchors, all based in the east, were obviously suffering.  We were watching ABC when Florida was moved back into the “undecided” category for the second time; the sense of history-in-progress was fairly palpable.  Or else we were starting to experience sleep deprivation ourselves.

I’m not going to comment on the election process beyond this: the whole situation is intellectually fascinating, and I’m very ambivalent about how I’d like to see it resolved.  In process terms, I mean; I know who I’d like to see win—but if you think I’m going anywhere near that particular bear trap in a public forum, you’ve got another think coming.  The closest I’ll come is to say that, as I write this, I’m finding that every time a campaign spokesman from either side opens his mouth, my opinion of him drops.  Every time.  That’s just, you know, depressing.

Just a side comment: the format of these posts has shifted from “third person objective reporting” to “whatever Eric feels like saying, generally at some length.”  You probably noticed that already, but I thought I’d mention it explicitly.  Mostly because I can.

• Friday, 11 November 2000 was published on Saturday, November 11th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Politics, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.