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Tag Archives: politics

The Dangerous Self-Delusions of Some Hillary Supporters

06 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

government, Hillary Clinton, politics, POTUS

image
Like these here folks

As we’re in the home stretch (fucking finally) of the 2016 election cycle, and Hillary Clinton is now the official nominee, there are some trends that I’ve been seeing for a long while that, in the big picture, are kinda scary, and I wanted to talk about.

First the obvious:  In the abstract, it is absolutely amazing we finally have a woman at the top of a Presidential ticket.  Women are woefully, absurdly under-represented in the public sector (outside of folks working as administrative assistants, I would imagine), and it is far past time we had a woman at the top of the ballot.  And I think the excitement among many women generated by her candidacy is pretty damn understandable.

Still in abstract mode:  It’s good we have a qualified candidate on our ticket.  No matter what you think of her, Clinton has been involved in politics for a long, long time, had an intimate look at how a Presidential administration works, and has accumulated some good legislative and diplomatic experience since Bill left office.  No matter what the right-wing nut jobs (RWNJ) say, this lady is qualified.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, Hillary Clinton is a terribly-flawed candidate, something that caused me to vote for someone else in 2008, and made me lament this election season, “Does it have to be this woman?”  Even more unfortunately, expressing that kind of thought has been, if not exactly dangerous, a good path to get inundated with charges of sexism and misogyny.  Pointing out her very real non-progressive policy problems doesn’t seem to help; if you were for Bernie against Hillary, you must be a sexist, patriarchical pig (in some quarters).

But now I’m seeing some genuine delusional thinking among Hillary supporters, and it’s kind of scaring me.  It’s scaring me for Hillary, because she might actually lose to Trump and, despite my dislike of her as a candidate, she is so much better than him it’s scarcely worth talking about why.  But I’m also worried that by allowing themselves (and this includes the folks inside the campaign) to continue on with these delusions, they’re going to endanger a very real chance of taking over the Senate or House.

There are two main delusions working here:

She is being unfairly treated by the press, but once people “really” get to know her (or “once she gets her message out”) they’ll see she’s great.

And the response to this is a simple negative: No.  No they won’t.  Hillary has been in the national public eye for more than a quarter-century, and a plethora of polls show that people have made up their mind about her.  Another huge set of polls show her negatives are higher than her positives; ignoring Trump, she is the most widely disliked candidate to ever run for President since polling started.

Lots of people hate Hillary, everyone has made up their minds, and that’s not going to change for many people, if any.

And the dangerous delusion is that this will change.  That people will actually give a shit about her “official policies”, or listen to her speeches, or be convinced by the endless articles about how unfairly treated she is by the press.  Or by going to her rallies.  Or by anything.  People’s minds are made up, and the best thing her folks can do is work hard to get people to the polls.  Not just to save us from Trump, but for the down-ballot folks who can benefit from a higher turnout.  Higher turnout, Dems win.  It’s that simple.  And this leads us to the second, even scarier delusion:

There’s no ‘enthusiasm gap’.

Again, a simple response is available: Yeah, there is.  It’s very real, and there’s been a ton of polls and articles that support this.

This delusion was displayed in stark terms today with dueling columns in the New York Times, where Paul Krugman pooh-poohed the idea there’s an enthusiasm gap (with a pointer to an article by Michelle Goldberg from April, aeons ago in political time), and another article talking about how Millenial black women are indeed very unenthusiastic about Hillary’s candidacy.

I’m a very leftist Progressive, one who has advocated for GLBT equal rights for decades, who believes we need single-payer healthcare, who thinks the government needs to stop financing monogamy, etc. etc.  Hillary is a New Democrat Apparatchik who is a war hawk (Henry Kissinger, FFS!), has close ties to Wall St., and has followed her husband’s trailblazing path by not just ignoring her base, but (with encouragement from the Beltway press) actively and publicly scorning them and their policies.  That she has now paid us lip service by including some of our policies in the party platform is nothing but window dressing, given no one really pays attention to the party platform after an election.  (Note none of this has anything to do with her gender.)

One might argue I’m an outlier.  But in addition to the Bernie folks, you’ve got plenty of Progressives who distrust Hillary because of her defense policies, her Wall St. ties, and other issues where previously (as a Senator or Secretary of State or even early in the campaign) she said and did one thing, and then (mostly after leftward pressure from Bernie) she changed her tune, or seemed to.

There are also more than a few people with Clinton Fatigue.  Almost all these folks  are well aware she is treated unfairly by the press, that her reputation for lying/sneakiness/whatever is something the RWNJ press has been hammering into the public consciousness for decades.  And they don’t care.  They’re sick of hearing about Benghazi, emails, Vince Foster, lame jokes about Monica, and on and on and on.  And the only way they’re going to be relieved of that fatigue is by the Clintons stepping away from public life.  So you can imagine that looking forward to another 4-8 years of Clinton nonsense feels these folks (and yes, I’m one of them) not with excitement, but a fatal combination of dread and ennui.  These are the people who saw her lose in 2008 and breathed a sigh of relief.  One that was premature, as it turned out.

This is a group that includes people like my mom, whose feminist cred dates to the early 70s and indoctrinating her son with Ms. Magazine and Our Bodies, Our Selves.  My good bi friend who actually worked with Hillary in the mid-90s.  My wildly progressive friend in Portland.  My ex-gf, who applied to be a Bernie delegate at the convention.  And on and on.  This is anecdotal, of course it is, but it’s backed up by plenty of polling data.

But Paul Krugman and other Hillary boosters seem to want to deny this is an issue.  They have a double-barreled strategy:  1) There is no enthusiasm problem, and 2) Even if there were, what are those whiny progressives going to do about it anyway?  Vote Trump!  Ha ha ha ha ha!

It’s a problem.  And not just for Hillary, but for the down-ballot folks so important to getting any of the progressive agenda into the conversation.

Personally I don’t understand Hillary’s whole candidacy.  We found out from the whole DNC/Debbie Wasserman-Schulz debacle that what most progressives suspected was true: “The Establishment” had put their thumbs on the scale in favor of Hillary.  But why?  Aside from her high negatives, she has a terrible relationship with the press, is a desperately boring (or annoying, depending on who you ask) speaker, scorns her base, and has negative numbers that strongly suggest winning would be a very difficult, uphill battle.  Why did everyone decide she needed what amounted to a coronation rather than a primary season?  Why did so many other, very qualified women (Elizabeth Warren leaps to mind) decide to stay out of the race?  Hell, why did so many men decide to stay out?  WtF kind of party decides even before the primary season that there’s basically only going to be one candidate?  What the hell?

And The Democratic Establishment wonders why so many of the “rank and file”, so many of the progressives, so many of the millennials, so many African-Americans, so many college-educated men, weren’t all immediately sold on the Hillary narrative.  Why people keep saying their out of touch.  Well, duh!

So I hope to God the Hillary boosters’ delusions are either popped (though I see no evidence that’s going to happen any time soon), or it ends up not making a difference because Trump is so awful he drives people away and into voting for Hillary and the other Democrats.

I hope.

Link

A Virtual Secession

17 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

business, GLBT, hypocrisy, politics, religious freedom, transgender

image
They will defend your right to discriminate to their dying breath!

Recently there have been a raft of “religious freedom” bills throughout the South (and elsewhere, unfortunately). Most of these seem directly targeted against the Surpreme Court’s recent recognition of marriage equality, although now (e.g. in North Carolina) they seem to be targeting trans citizens.  In my opinion, these bills have fuck-all to do with religious freedom and are simply a method in which bigotry can be re-enshrined in places where the courts have outlawed it.  (To try to tell whether they’re really about “religious freedom”, look at a law and ask, “If this applied to blacks/Jews/Catholics/Asians/whatever, would it be discrimination?” and that should do it.)

I find this cynical and reprehensible, wildly hypocritical (“It’s all about religious freedom!”; no it ain’t, it’s all about being able to be prejudiced without being called on it), and quite frankly unChristian.  How is it in line with the Golden Rule to want to discriminate against your neighbors?  Obviously, it isn’t.  But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Unsurprisingly, most of these bigoted laws have come out of the South, primarily states that were part of the former Confederacy.  There have been laws in Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina to force trans citizens to use the bathroom of their birth sex rather than their gender.  And usually people shake their heads at this stuff, say, “Yeah, that’s the South,” and move on.  But something surprising is happening this time:

A bunch of businesses, organizations, and artists are saying they’re done.

In case you haven’t seen, the draconian North Carolina law has caused businesses like PayPal and Deutsche Bank and performers such as Bruce Springsteen and Cirque d’ Soliel to pull out of performing there.  The NBA is also threatening to pull next year’s All Star game from there as well.  As you may imagine, hard-right folks are calling the companies and performers everything from “bullies” to “child molester supporters”, and trying to pretend their happy Springsteen et. alia aren’t coming to their state.  (Which wee all know is BS, but never mind.)

And it made me wonder.

It seems like we’ve been relighting the Civil war over various areas of bigotry and discrimination multiple times over the last 150 years.  (I’m hardly the first to point this out.)  There was the Civil Rights/anti-Jim Crow fights of the 60s; the battle over women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s; the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon; and the recent battle over marriage equality.  A (depressingly) huge number of folks in the South seem to want to keep their region firmly in the 19th Century, and get angry and resentful any time they’re forced to confront their bigotry and prejudice.  And now they’re actually being punished for it.

So I wondered if this isn’t sort of like a slow-moving, virtual secession.  I mean, I don’t anticipate the South actually breaking off from the rest of the country legally, but what if the region were slowly but steadily to suffer the same fate staring North Carolina in the face?  (A fate that caused the right-wingers to back down in Arizona and Indiana, by the way.)  What if these states stood by their “principles”, and were cut off by banks, job-rich high tech firms, entertainers, sports leagues, and the like?  What if the Titans were removed from the NFL, and the Predators from Nashville, the Hornets from Charlotte?  No more visits from Taylor Swift or big rock acts or what RedState insists are “has beens”?  What if the Federal government started denying Title IX funds because these states were breaking anti-discrimination laws?  What if the amount of tax dollars that flow into these states?  (“Red” states receive far more tax money than they contribute to the Federal government, while “blue” states pay in far more than they get back.)

Maybe “the South” wouldn’t be legally cut off from the rest of the U.S., but they kinda would be, wouldn’t they?

No, I don’t think it would actually happen.  And if it did, I doubt the right-wingers would be particularly happy to finally get what they want (and they would blame the Left for their poverty, lack of jobs, increased infant mortality and teen pregnancy rates, etc.).  But it seemed an interesting thing to think about.  And I have to think it was fear of something like this—or at least a portion of it—that caused Jan Brewer of Arizona and Mike Pence of Indiana to step back from the brink.

I used to wonder how far to the right the right would have to go before the left finally got off their lazy butts and pushed back hard.  Now we know.  And it’s kind of satisfying, don’t you think?

How to Talk to Politicians

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Huffington Post, lies, politics

family_circus_notme21
Politicians basically do this when asked questions
Copyright the Bil Keane estate, all rights reserved, I’m sure

As a guy who grew up watching Ron Ziegler dance around Nixon’s lies, and has observed (usually with horror) how people like Scott McClellan, Dana Perino, and their ilk dissemble and outright lie to the press, it occurred to me that there is a one way to demand answers from politicians:

Treat them like children.

I have two kids.  Kids are past-masters at lying, deception, and attempts to change the subject.  The only way that I personally have found to consistently get information is to not allow myself to be distracted.  Like this:

“Who left this crap in the living room?”
“I haven’t been in the living room today.”
“That’s not what I asked.  Did you leave this crap in the living room?”
“That’s not my stuff; it’s [other kid’s] stuff.”
“That’s not what I asked, either.  Did you leave this crap in the living room?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“It doesn’t matter.  Did you leave this crap in the living room?”

And so on.  It’s a pain in the ass, yes, but eventually you find the culprit (granting that you are more stubborn than your kids which, in my case, is a good bet).

This is exactly how spokespeople, politicians, and their ilk should be treated.  They don’t want to answer the questions they are asked in a straight-forward way?  Fine; treat them like a 9 year-old.  Keep asking the same question.  Demand an answer to your first question.  And if the spokesperson or politician won’t answer?  Well, after 7 or 8 iterations of this, it will be obvious to all involved that they are dodging and lying, and their credibility will go down regardless.  Either they answer or they look like idiots; either one is fine by me.

Consider the issue of torture.  Just once, I wish a reporter had the balls to press and press and press Cheney:

“Mr. Vice-President, do we torture?”
“We have instructed our interregators to remain within the law at all times.”
“That’s not what I asked, sir.  I asked you, do we torture?”
“As I said, we remain within the law.”
“Sir, water-boarding is considered torture by all civilized people.  Do we torture?”
“I believe I have already answered that question.”
“No, sir, you haven’t; do we torture?”
“I cannot talk about sources and methods.”
“That wasn’t my question, sir.  Do we torture?”

And so on.  If these bozos want to act like 9 year-olds attempting to cover up the fact that they have been lighting fires in the back yard, then they should be treated the same way.  Heck, I would even put them “in their room” (and cut off all external access) until they admit what they’ve done.  It’ll be even funnier than those times politicians (and other jerk-wads, like Martin “let’s gouge people for AIDS medicine” Shkreli) keep repeating the same answer over and over, no matter the question.

I dunno; I guess I’m just feeling vindictive.  I’m pretty tired of the Cavalcade of Clowns we’re stuck with on the Republican side, any one of which would be a disaster if President, and any one of which may actually end up President.  As much as that horrifies and frightens me, it’s true.  As true as the fact that the Republicans—despite having a “brand” so eroded that no voters will actually admit they are Republican—are in control of the House and Senate.  (Go ahead; ask a random right-wing bloviator on Twitter or Tumblr or wherever if they’re a Republican.  It’s always “No.”  They’re “Libertarian”, or “Independent”, or whatever, even if they’ve never voted for anyone other than a Republican in their lives.) Which is plenty scary, too.

I’m not too thrilled with triangulation artist & “realist” Hillary Clinton, either, except that I know she’ll be better than anything the Republicans finally throw out there.

But for now, I’d settle for Meghan Kelly pinning down Trump or Rubio or Cruz and refusing to let up until she has an actual answer.  Say, on wars.

“Senator, given the disastrous results of the Iraq War, why is it your foreign policy seems to only advocate more war?”
“Well, I don’t know as I’d agree with the premise.”
“Almost all Americans agree it was a disaster, so why do you advocate more war?”
“Meghan, the question is whether or not America is strong and a leader.”
“Actually sir, the question is why do you advocate more war?”
and so on.

I’m not holding my breath, though.

The Meaningless Scramble for “Scoops” and “Exclusives”

05 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

media, newspapers, politics, press, TV

nwsppr
This concept was dead before I was born
(image courtesy of Technapex)

Recently, a news crew from MSNBC bribed their way into an active crime scene and exposed information that could damage the investigation.  And why?  To get a “scoop”!  Because getting a scoop, or landing an “exclusive interview!” is important, right?

Oh bushwah.

It was disgusting.  It was journalistic malpractice.  And it was completely and utterly useless.  It gained the public no additional understanding of what had happened, it didn’t help the police, and it brought nothing but opprobrium down on the network that put out the footage.  Good work, there, MSNBC!

Look: I was watching a video on YouTube, and the (typically baritone and serious-sounding) news anchor informed us proudly that this was a story that “you’ll only see . . . on NewsChannel 3.”

 

Of course, I was watching it on YouTube.  Not only did I not know where “NewsChannel 3” was, hell, I didn’t even know what time zone they might be in.  Or when the clip was posted.  Or by who.  Nor did I care a whit.

And that’s a problem that I see with Big Media:  they’re wedded to “the scoop” or the “big get” “exclusive” interview.  And aside from a very few people that I like to see doing interviews—Jon Stewart (when he’s on his game), Rachel Maddow—I simply don’t care who has the “get,” or “the scoop,” or “broke the story.”  I don’t think anyone does, honestly.

It’s time that news organizations realized that, in an era with news aggregators, YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Instant Messaging, and other news-gathering tools and methods, the old rules of “scooping” simply don’t apply (if indeed they ever did outside the minds of reporters).

I don’t care who has a particular story “first,” by days, hours, or minutes.  I care about the information, and I care about whether the story is accurate, but as to whether the story came from Salon of the New York Times or “NewsChannel 3”?  Nope, don’t care in the least.  But it sure seems like the Times, the Post, the networks, Fox, and places like “NewsChannel 3” do care.

And that’s the thing; if those outlets are spending their effort going for the wrong goal–the “scoop”–then they’re not providing the public with what it wants.  And they’re not going to get an audience that is after facts that are accurate.

And as for the “exclusive” interview, these days its basically a meaningless term.  If you’re talking to Donald Trump, it’s not an “exclusive” even if The Donald wasn’t willing to talk to you last week.   That guy can’t stop talking; no interview with him can possibly be an “exclusive”.  Which goes for pretty much any other public figure, and doubly-so for politicians.  Yes, I’m interested in an interview with Elizabeth Warren, or Wendy Davis, or anyone else on my “I wonder what they’re thinking” list.  But whether it’s “exclusive” to Fox or NBC or whoever plays absolutely no part in my decision-making process.

And further, by next month or next week (or hell, sometimes even the next day), the same person will give out another interview (often also touted as “an exclusive!”) to another outlet.  With even highly-public folks posting selfies, having their own Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or whatever accounts, the “exclusive” is a dead concept.  Sorry, mainstream media, but it is.  Get over it.

In this turbo-charged, highly-connected, text messaging and web-based culture, do we want stuff fast?  Sure we do.  But does anyone really care where the facts come from, and who gets them “first”, and whether it’s “exclusive” (whatever the heck that means any more)?  No one that I know.

Get the facts right, MSM—because if you get it wrong, it won’t matter if you’ve got an “exclusive!” or a “scoop!”; people will stop listening to you, reading you, or paying attention to you.  And they definitely won’t shell out any money for you.

So can we declare the “scoop” and the “exclusive” dead now and move on?  Please?  Because I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t care.

Election “Year” “Reporting”

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

election, government, media, politics

mcgovern_wide-366a38df2ba8951f1079a4176502abec076be77a-s1100-c15
“The boys on the bus”, image courtesy of NPR

Yes, I put both “Year” and “Reporting” in scare quotes.  Know why?  Because something that starts two years (at least) before election day is not a “year”, and because the “reporting” the reporters do from the campaign trail doesn’t qualify as true reporting, in my opinion.  Maybe “election season gossip” would be closer to the mark. 

Which is the main fact behind my whole point.

There are a couple of really irritating aspects to election reporting that I think about often, especially during election season (and especially during Presidential election season).  The first irritating thing, the reasons behind which are easy to understand, is that the vast majority of election reporting are “reports” on “the horse race”, i.e. who is up, who is down, who is moving up, etc. in the polls.  Nothing about people’s positions, who might actually make a better office-holder, what a given candidate might do in a particular situation or facing a certain vote based on their past behavior (or past votes), or hell even what their past behavior has been.  No, it’s all breathless discussions of “the polling”.  (And equally breathless discussion about how shallow modern political discourse has become in that we only discuss “the horse race”.  Which is kinda absurd, since my memory goes back to the Nixon years, and I don’t remember a whole lot of reporting on the issues back then, either.)

The reason for this is simple:  That kind of writing is easy.  I can sit here, right now, make up some poll numbers and write a story about it.  Seriously.  It’s absurdly simple, the only research it requires is looking up poll numbers, and it can easily fulfill your word quota (or minute quota) of the day.  And everything is reported in this box. It’s not “How would Candidate Jones’ statement on Israel effect his future Israel policies”; no, it’s “How does Candidate Jones’ gaffe about Israel effect his polling?”  Writing all your stories according to a pre-existing narrative is way easier than coming up with something original.  It’s like writing a new fantasy story based in Middle Earth or Westeros instead of coming up with your own fantasy world.  It’s lame, reductionist, a cop-out of your responsibilities, but it’s easy and understandable.

What I don’t understand is:  Why is there a pool of reporters traveling with each candidate at all?

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the last, oh, say 20 years of Presidential elections, it’s that reporters and commentators are constantly talking about how useless and news-less campaign events and speeches are, how little access they have to candidates, what a pointless exercise campaign reporting seems to be.  Expect these stories to start flooding in soon; New York Magazine got off an early salvo–the proximate cause for this blog post–just last week (20 months before election day!).  And as I read all the whining in this post, and anticipated all the whining to come in the next 20 months, I kept thinking, as John Oliver would say, “Why is this still a thing?”

One would think that reason enough to do something about campaign reporting.  But we have been hearing about–and observing–for nearly two decades now the vast shrinkage in “traditional media”.  Newspapers folding or being “consolidated”, network TV ratings dropping like rocks (along with their budgets), magazines going out of business or migrating to the Web, etc.  Money is tight in media.  They’re closing overseas bureaus all the time.  And so I get back to my John Oliver question:

Why is campaign pool reporting still a thing?

Cover campaigns, absolutely.  And I can understand why the Washington Post, New York Times, and a few other papers and TV organizations with national reach cover them.  But do CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, Bloomberg, and God alone only knows how many other networks really all need individual reporters on the ground for every candidate for every event?  Do we need reporters from the Des Moines paper going to New Hampshire in December of 2015?  You get the picture.

What I don’t understand is, with every network and paper crying pauper, why are they still doing this?  Why don’t they designate one or two people to follow these people around–particularly the right-wing nitwits who have absolutely no chance of winning–and leave it at that?  They can share their “news” with the other outlets, and write their feather-weight “news” pieces from that.  Or they can just stay home, look at the poll numbers, and write the exact same stories.  But either way, sending dozens of reporters howling after this election season’s Herman Caine is absolutely idiotic.

That’s what I think, anyway.  How about you?

Support Sex Workers on Sex Worker Rights Day (repost from Facebook)

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

civil rights, labor, politics, sex work, work

sex-workers-rights
Photo courtesy of Julia Laite at notchesblog

First posted on my Facebook feed.

I know this will be controversial with some folks who follow me, but: Today is Sex Worker Rights day. This is NOT about the approx. 22% of all human trafficking victims who are trafficked for sex work. (The majority of trafficking victims are for the agriculture, garment, and construction industries.) No. This is about people–men, women, and trans folks–who for whatever reason choose sex work in which to make money. By choice. I just want to be clear.

I absolutely, unequivocally support sex worker’s rights, their right to have their work treated as work rather than stigma; their right to have their industry decriminalized; their right to be safe in their work; their rights in general. Sex workers–particularly those who are people of color or transgender (or both)–deserve respect and safety, rather than being subjected to harassment, assault, and stings by police whose primary motivation is (this is true, I promise) money.

Look: I’m not stupid. I know we live in a fairly Puritan/Napoleonic Code-based social framework, which looks askance (to put it mildly) at anything of a sexual nature. But I ask you to look beyond that and realize that sex workers (for the most part) are just doing a job. “How can you do a job so demeaning?” 1) It doesn’t have to be demeaning just because it’s sexual, and 2) There are plenty of other jobs that are plenty demeaning that aren’t sex work. I have laid sod and landscaped hillsides during a heatwave; worked graveyard shift as a security guard; cleaned restaurant toilets and floors as a janitor after hours; and plenty others. These were demeaning.

And I’d like you to consider the positive aspects of sex work you might not have thought of, or dismissed as silly or absurd. What if you are a man with some kind of mental disability who has never had sex before because your disability makes you unattractive to potential partners? What if you are physically disabled and your partner can’t deal and needs help? What if your partner simply lose interest in sex but you don’t? What if what excites you changes completely over time but doesn’t for your partner? These and many other areas are places where sex workers help, not only individuals but entire relationships.

Sex work is work. They deserve respect. Please give it to them.

Sex Work is Work, and Prohibition Doesn’t Work

14 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

politics, prohibition, sex work

296262_213517032048928_126283397438959_539715_1762546722_n1
Photo courtesy of caans.org

In many ways I feel incredibly lucky to have attended UC Santa Cruz.  For one, it’s simply a good university; high quality, good instructors, wonderful campus, good facilities, etc.  I received a damn fine education there at a quite reasonable price.  (It’s not particularly reasonable now, but that’s a post for another time.)  I met some–hell, most–of my lifelong friends there.  All good things.

But in many ways the most important thing was living in Santa Cruz, and being absolutely immersed in a social matrix that was wildly, spectacularly, incredibly left-wing.  A place where the majority of the town council was, like Bernie Sanders, openly Socialist–That was their party affiliation, not just their political philosophy–and given this was spang in the middle of the Reagan era, that tells you just how leftist it was.   A place that was doing “take back the night!” marches in the early 80s, that occupied the campus library in 1985 to protest Apartheid and demand divestment of UC assets from South Africa; a place that was my introduction (as a Freshman) to loud, emotional protests (for tenure for a professor name Nancy Shaw, in I believe Women’s Studies); a place that had a class called “Birth of a Poet”, where you were required to write down your dreams every morning.

That kind of place.

And I’m glad, so very glad, I went there, because even though my parents were quite liberal (and my dad amazingly so for a Naval officer born during the Depression), growing up as a military brat narrows your view of the world pretty considerably.  Middle class all my life, rarely exposed to many minorities, almost totally unfamiliar with religions other than Catholicism, it was a major eye-opener, to put it mildly.  And a time I absolutely cherish.

Which brings me, in my time-honored style of burying the lede, to sex work.

It is a cliche to call sex work “the world’s oldest profession”.  But the fact is, we all know about the existence of sex work, and like any teen I was familiar with the bold outlines when I started college.  Indeed, I probably had a somewhat different view than most, as I had read a lot of science fiction in which sex work was either a normalized part of life, or even societies where it was an honored and exalted profession (viz. how it is treated in “Firefly”).  But like everyone else, I had imbibed by osmosis the Madonna/whore dichotomy, along with the usual john/pimp/ho’ cliches.  I probably wasn’t as bad as some, but I was still a pretty ignorant middle-class, white, teen male.

But it was at UC Santa Cruz where I was first exposed to the actual concept of sex work as it collides with the real world.  It was there that I first encountered the term “sex work”; there that I was first exposed to actual sex workers; there I saw sex workers supported by non sex workers, advocating for their rights, the organization COYOTE setting up tables and giving out info on campus, students writing papers and articles in support of sex work and sex workers rights, and so on.

And to be perfectly frank, all that in combination to the already-fertile, science fiction-tilled ground of my brain, radicalized me.  The arguments of sex workers seemed so logical and reasonable when weighed against the almost-hysterical inveigling the anti-sex work crowd engaged in.  Sex workers wanted their victimless, consensual, non-coercive work to be treated as exactly that:  Work.  Difficult work deserving of dignity, recognition, and a lack of persecution.  Work that they had chosen, and that they believed was deserving of treatment equal to a schmuck like me toiling away in a cafeteria dishroom to put himself through college.

Seemed pretty reasonable to me.

By contrast, the anti-sex work crowd had many, many arguments against it but, not unlike arguments against marriage equality boiling down to “I think butt sex is yucky and no one should do it”, it always seemed at base to rest on “It’s against my moral code”.

Now, it didn’t matter that we separate church and state in the country.  It didn’t matter that it didn’t match the moral code of plenty of other people.  It didn’t matter that many of the people espousing draconian punishment against these Evil Whores used their services themselves (think David Vitter).  And it certainly didn’t matter that the “oppressed” providers were themselves saying, “Hey, no; I’m not oppressed!  I want to be paid a fair wage for my difficult and involved work and not be at risk of harassment and arrest just for my work!”  Or as they put it now:  Sex work is work.

I am bringing all this up for two reasons:  There have been a raft of laws proposed or passed recently (like #C36 in Canada, or the law in Alaska) in an effort to eliminate sex work, and today is Speak Up for Sex Workers Day (h/t Maggie McNeill).

Now, like every other political effort nowadays, this isn’t what the proponents of these new and draconian laws say.  The efforts in favor of what is called “the Swedish model” or “the Nordic model” say that by following this model will “end demand”–i.e. they target the clients rather than the sex workers–and thus give the oppressed sex workers the incentive to find “legitimate” work.

That “end demand” hasn’t worked with alcohol, cocaine, crack cocaine, crystal meth, marijuana, or any other thing we’ve tried to “end demand” on, doesn’t detract these social warriors.  That prohibition doesn’t work is something they don’t acknowledge.  Hell, they outlawed absinthe, and people are drinking it again.  And we’re talking about sex here, not drugs.  Do they really think putting laws in place will cause people to stop?  They know this is nicknamed “the oldest profession”, right?

They are convinced it will work, and refuse to listen to the sex workers who keep telling them a) It makes their work more dangerous and b) They don’t want rescuing, thank you very much.  They are convinced they have The Solution, a solution that literally has eluded every single society since the beginning of history.  I mean, seriously, think about that.

After much reading on the topic it’s pretty clear that the advocates both on the far right (religious folks) and far left (radical feminists) both just think sex work is eeeeeeeevil, and this is one way to try to eliminate it.  I’ll leave as an exercise for the student the weirdness of radical feminists and fire-and-brimstone Christian fundamentalists being in bed together on this (and yes, that was deliberate).  But their purported reasons don’t hold up; they want to remove the choice of work from the sex workers.  They know better.  The sex workers to these people are “fallen women”, victims, deluded; they only think they want to be engaged in sex work.  Once they realize the error of their ways–either that it’s immoral, or an oppressive continuation of the patriarchy, depending on who is arguing about it–these sex workers will be happy to be church secretaries or telephone sales people or whatever.  They’re just deluded and need to be educated, or victims needing to be saved.

I’ll let you go ahead and think about the epic level of condescension required for the point of view.  Me, I am immediately suspicious when Person A purports to be doing something for Person B’s “own good”.  “It’s for your own good” is generally a smokescreen behind which lays “I think what you’re doing is icky and wrong”.

One of the big ways anti-sex worker activists (and their name is legion) push their agenda is by intentionally blurring and obscuring the line between human trafficking and sex work. (Not to mention continually repeating the same exploded myths and statistics about sex work, like “the average age of entry is 13”, which is just flagrantly untrue.)  Let me be crystal-effin’-clear here:

Human trafficking is evil.  I tell you three times and what I tell you three times is true:  Human trafficking is evil; human trafficking is evil; human trafficking is evil.

But here’s the thing:  The majority–the vast majority–of human trafficking is not for sex work.  Nope.  22%.  Yes, that’s still terrible; but why are we harassing sex workers who are in that business by choice (i.e. they are by definition not trafficked) and their clients over that 22%?  Further, since the vast majority of sex workers being abused by the police and courts are in that job by choice, we are not even helping that 22%!  And why are we so focused on that 22% that we are basically ignoring the other 78%, who are stuck in garment factories in lower Manhattan, or out on farms living in hovels in essential slavery in the Southwest, or doing dangerous construction work all around the world?  Aren’t those people deserving of our attention?  And why are we wasting money and effort on sex workers who aren’t trafficked and are doing their work by choice when that effort could be spent helping all those other trafficked people?  Where’s the logic?

And the answer is, the unholy left-right anti-sex worker alliance isn’t using logic; they think sex work is icky and should be ended, and there’s no evidence to support the idea that they give a rip about the other trafficking victims.

So what can we do, here on this particular day during this particularly time when seemingly every small hamlet and big city wants to “crack down on those prostitution rings”?  Glad you asked!

First, you should read up a bit and not swallow the anti-sex worker propaganda whole.  Here.

You can’t argue against someone who has religious convictions; like in the anti-abortion fights, the best you can do is fight against them.  And the folks who believe that sex for pleasure is evil are living in a completely different universe than the one I occupy.  Frankly, I think they need clinical help.  If God gave you the ability to get pleasure from sexual stimulation, doesn’t it make you more godly to seek that pleasure?  Where in the Torah does it say self-pleasure, or pleasure with a partner, is evil?  (Pro Tip: It doesn’t.  But boy, you should read some of the rationalizations some folks try to use to justify their “no masturbation!” perspective!)

But you can shine a bright light on government agencies (police departments, prosecutors offices, etc.) who waste enormous amounts of money running “sting” operations on “crimes” that have no victims.  Is that what we want them doing, rescuing “fallen” women who haven’t asked to be “rescued”, and busting men who are just seeking pleasure and are willing to pay for it?  Wouldn’t public monies be better spent, oh, hey, I dunno:  Serving and protecting?  (And this isn’t even going into the profound, astonishing, ridiculous hypocrisy where the same police officers who expect to use a sex worker’s services for free later turn around and bust the same sex workers.  And yes, it happens all the time.)

But most importantly, you yourself should start treating sex workers–in your own mind, and by your behavior–as workers, just as deserving of respect as tech writers, or computer programmers, or electricians, or police officers, or soldiers.  Sex work is work.  Like with any work, sex workers are doing it to pay the bills (though many enjoy their work), and how many of us love our work?  I mean, I do, but I’m well aware I’m in the minority.  Sex work is work.  Keep telling yourself that.

And then go out and tell others.  Cuz that’s the only way the word will get out.

Musing on a Guy’s Feminism

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

feminism, politics

Joseph_Gordon-Levitt__big
Joseph Gordon-Levitt nails it IMO

Because of when I grew up, and in large part because of who my mom is/became, I have been thinking about feminism, women’s rights )reproductive and otherwise), feminism’s relation to sex, how men can (or can’t) be feminists, and so on a good chunk of my life.  Lately, as seems to happen on a regular basis, I’ve seen another round of posts, articles, and thought pieces on whether women can or can’t have it all, and which one is a more feminist approach.

Now, my opinions on the answer to this are inherently bogus cuz I’m not only a guy, I’m a straight, cis-gendered, white guy.  I’m well aware of my privileges and advantages, and how they benefit me basically every single friggin’ day.  Heck, I’ve even written about how much it pisses me off.  If you don’t believe me, or want to tune me out because of that, that’s totally fine.  I’m not trying to mansplain’ here; I’m just musing about what I think.

Now that I’ve qualified my place in the feminist movement, my answer to the “can/can’t she have it all” question is simple:  It’s the wrong damn question.  And this is kind of what I’ve decided feminism boils down to for me:  Equality for all, regardless of gender.  (With gender having the modern, more elastic definition, i.e. including trans folks & etc.)  That’s it.  Pretty simple, and something I have hard time anyone would not want to support.  Which means the question about “having it all” should really be asked this way:

“Don’t you believe everyone, regardless of gender, should have the opportunity and freedom to pursue their dreams in life?”

If you want to try to “have it all”, you should have that freedom (whether you’re a man or a woman!); if you want to just pursue your career, you should have the freedom to do that, without having to face the stuff I’ve seen in high tech; if you want to stay at home and raise your kids (like I did for more than a year!), you should have the freedom to do that.  That’s feminism to me:  The ability to have an equal chance to pursue your dreams, your desires, whether you “want it all” or not, dammit!

Freedom and opportunity; that’s all.

Now, the right wing has done an exemplary job in throwing enough mud at the word “feminism” to make us lefties disown it to a lesser or greater degree.  I’ve given this considerable thought, and on the one hand I think the word “feminism” really sucks–right away, it makes me feel as a man that my help in pushing this really reasonable goal of equal opportunity and freedom is not wanted.  Or worse, actively discouraged, as indeed it is by the radical feminism side of the world.  You know: The folks who believe all penis-in-vagina (PiV) sex is rape; the wymyn who believe any male/female sex is assault.  And the second wave feminists, by saying things like “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” haven’t helped.  You hear that, and it’s pretty reasonable to respond, “Oh yeah?  Okay; fuck you, then!”

And of course, you get a vocal minority of these types of feminists who object to anything that is remotely sex-positive.  Porn is evil; PiV sex is evil; male/female sex is evil; BDSM is evil; kink is evil; opening doors for people perpetuates the patriarchal paradigm; getting married is demeaning (and evil); etc.  You get enough of this and you think, “Yeah, I don’t want to be part of that.  Combine that with the right making you feel bad about it anyway, and the pressure to disown feminism is pretty strong and widely held.

But you know what?  Screw those people!  “Feminism” means equal opportunity and freedom no matter your gender, dammit!  That’s it!  We’re all equal partners in the workplace, the home, raising the kids, forming relationships, sexual play, governing the country, state, and locales, and everything else!  Opposing that is not only sexist and bigoted, it’s anti-American, durn it!  We hold these truths to be self-evident, and all that.

So yeah, I think it’s not a good term for the principle (and “humanist” is worse), and wish we could come up with a better one like when “gay marriage” morphed into “marriage equality”.  (“Genderism”?  “Gender freedom”?  “Gender equality”?  I’m open to suggestions.)  But it’s what we have right now, and the first thing is we need to reclaim the word from the right-wing dipsticks like Rush “Feminazi” Limbaugh and his fellow idiot travelers and make it our own again, just like “liberal”, and to heck with them.  And the second thing is, we gotta get more men on board.

Anyway, that’s what this one guy here thinks.

shapeimage_6
I’ve been this guy & the haters can still suck it

GenX is Middle Aged & the World Yawns

08 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Baby Boomers, Boomers, GenX, John Updike, Morgan Freeman, Obama, Office Space, politics, Reagan

Unknown
Our dreams are modest–a bit of payback would be nice

Recently I read in Salon that the generation with which I most closely identify–GenX–is now reaching middle age.  The writer repeated a lot of common GenX tropes about how we’re all a bunch of loser slackers who do a lot of whining about our lot.  And as a (more or less) GenXer at the outer edge of middle age, I naturally had a few thoughts on that score.

I may have been born in 1963 and so am, technically, a “Baby Boomer.”  But I’m not.  When people were sticking flowers in guns, I was watching “Romper Room” (and wondering why that damn magic mirror never saw “Doug”).  When women were burning their bras, I was diggin’ on Morgan Freeman as “Easy Reader”.  I wasn’t watching Mrs. Robinson; I was watching “The Brady Bunch.”  You get the picture.  My “generation” came right after the Baby Boom.  We’re a wedge generation; too early for being Gen X; too late to understand sock hops or free love or all that.  We’re not even really a generation; we’re more of a condition.  A state of mind.  A longing, perhaps.

Put it this way:  When I tried to read one of Updike’s “Rabbit” novels–supposedly one of the major literary voices of the Boomer generation–I found it stultifyingly, brain-numbingly tedious.  “Get over yourself!” I kept yelling.  “Stop pining over your lost youth and do something, you useless git!”  If this was a typical “Boomer” voice, not only did I want no part of it, I couldn’t even relate to it.

Why?  Because it seems like as long as I’ve been a conscious entity aware of what was going on outside of my immediate area, the country has been in decline.  It started with Vietnam, of course, but then we had the various economic stuff of the 70s (Gas lines! Stagflation! Runaway inflation! Etc!), Watergate, the constant sense of impending nuclear armageddon (until 1990 or thereabouts), Reagan & Bush I running up the deficit and exploding the deficit and building up the military to a ridiculous level and wedging the income gap wide open, Iran/Contra, the S&L crisis, the housing bubble, the Great Recession, two profoundly stupid wars (which the Boomers got us into)–three if you count the recent mess in Syria, the fact that more than half of our parents got divorced, and on and on.

It’s just been one damn thing after another, as they say.  Sure, no World War III, but it’s not exactly been one long party, has it?

So why is my “generation” the way we are?  Because we’re busy, that’s why.  We have a lot of messes to clean up (some of which, admittedly, we created our own selves, like the tech bubble–though let’s be honest here: We had plenty of help from the Boomers in that one).  We don’t have time to wallow in angst and self-pity like Rabbit; we have to deal with shit.  And we have to do it with less money and more debt (personal and governmental) than previous generations.  And hey, thanks a lot for all that, by the way.

But if you’re wondering why we sometimes whine, there it is.  Sometimes it gets wearisome.  I can’t tell you how many of my friends are so, so, SO tired of having to continue to keep re-fighting the social values wars of the 60s.  Gay rights, women’s rights, sexual freedom, freedom from religion, minority equality, reproductive health and self-determination, even effin’ birth control, for Pete’s sake!  We thought that had been taken care of.  We look at the Tea Party types and their fellow travelers on the far right and want to scream, “You lost those battles!  We won!  WHEN will you get over it?!”  (I’ve personally reached the conclusion, much like Andrew O’Hehir writes in his post on Salon, that we just have to wait for demographics.  i.e., we have to wait for these older, white, cis-gendered, Protestant, heterosexual Republican voting folks to–let’s be frank–die off.  Yeah, yeah; there are some younger folks who have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but believe me, they’re a minority.  I just hope and pray they don’t destroy the country entirely in the meantime.  And frankly, I don’t have much hope.)

Now, you may make fun of some of us for moving back in with our parents, taking longer to get married, staying in school longer, etc.  I understand.  But we’re facing some serious shit, here, and we have fewer resources with which to deal with it.  It’s all downsizing, and out-sourcing, and off-shoring, and “make do with less”, and “work smarter not harder”, and rising productivity with no corresponding rise in wages.  Why do you think the tech worker’s social ur-Text is “Office Space” with its “dream of doing nothing”?

So we’re doing our best, which sometimes means living in Mom’s basement while we desperately look for a job that pays us exactly the same in real dollars as they paid dear old Dad in the 70s, with no hope of catching up to the Romney’s, Trumps, Kochs, and the like.  We don’t have the money to just dive into marriage, or buy a new house.  (Sami and I needed a loan to get married!)  We’re struggling, to be blunt about it, but we’re scrubbing away at the mess, and we’re doing our best.

I would never call folks my age and in the bracket 20 years behind me “great”, though I think we do pretty well.  But bear this in mind:  The “greatest generation” was to a large part in a similar boat.  They dealt with the aftermath of WWI, absurd income inequality, a crushing Depression, and a World War that, literally, threatened democracy.  They had Gilded Age jerk-weeds wanting to lord it over them just like we do.  They had Victorian-era blue-noses that wanted to control their wild kids’ sexuality just like we do (though ours are 50s-era).  And I betcha they complained plenty until they hit retirement age, at which point they only complained about kids on their lawn. (Rim shot.)  Will we get that kind of epithet when we retire and people look back on the period of, say, 1990-2020?  Who knows?  But I betcha money we’ll come off better then than we do now.  What we basically lack is a Roosevelt, a member of the rich, monied group who “betrays their class” to stitch society back together.  (If only!)

So yeah, now we’re moving into middle age (some of us are deep in!), and hardly anyone is writing about it.  That’s okay; we don’t seem to get noticed except when we complain or invent the iPhone or something (Jon Ive is a GenXer).  And we don’t seem to go all batshit crazy just cuz we come up with a good idea that makes a lot of money (I’m looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg, member of the “millennials”).  We just keep plugging along and, when it gets to us as it inevitably does, we complain.  So apparently we’re a bunch of slackers who don’t do anything.  No, we don’t; we just clean up messes.  Cuz someone has to.

Note: Some of this content is a repeat of a post I put up on Open Salon in 2009, shortly after Obama’s first Inauguration.

When Being Correct Doesn’t Help

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

economics, Ferguson, police, politics

right-wing-predictions-that-were-wrong-L-hnq1pU
Image courtesy of PaperBlog

Ever since they shuffled onto the scene in the guise of long-haired hippies in the 60s, the progressive left has been a) continually dismissed and even bashed by elected officials and the mainstream media, and b) been right about a ton of issues, over and over.  So, one item at a time.

“Hippie bashing” is a popular sport in the media and with politicians, especially politicians in Washington.  (Though it’s not limited to them; think Reagan in the 60s and how he treated any kind of left-wing protest on UC campuses.)  The first President I can remember is Richard Nixon, and though he made some nods towards youth, he mostly detested those “dirty hippies”.  And he was hardly alone; when asked in a Town Hall by a caller about drug or marijuana legalization, Obama simply laughed and moved on to the next question, as if it were such a silly notion it was beneath comment.

Now, of course, weed is legal in several states, “medicinal marijuana” in several others (despite heavy federal crackdowns by a nominally Democratic president), and even the most establishment of figures are saying the War on Drugs is a waste of money, time, resources, and causes people guilty of picayune crimes to be tossed into jail alongside murderers and rapists.  Not to mention that the busts are disproportionately minorities despite the fact that it’s caucasians who are most likely to be toking.

And this is my point:  When Reagan launched his huge escalation of the War on Drugs (alongside the phenomenally idiotic “Just Say No” campaign, the 80s answer to “abstinence-based sex education”, though more anodyne), many, many, many progressives said it was a waste of time and resources; that it would send people to prison for minor crimes to be jailed alongside murderers and rapists, and that it would disproportionately effect the poor and minorities.  And we were derided as dirty hippies, probably stoned, told to shut-up, and assured the government knew what it was doing.  And here we are, 30+ years along, and it’s clear we were dead right.

The same is true for a number of critical, key policies.  The dirty hippies were absolutely right in predicting a war in Iraq would be an endless quagmire that would do no good.  (And despite Bush&Cheney’s efforts to make it appear so, the vast majority of people on the left did not believe Saddam Hussein was better off alive than dead.  Although many Iraqis these days might disagree.)  The dirty hippies were correct in predicting that supply-side economics would cause huge budget deficits, increase the federal debt, and greatly increase income disparity.  (Look, righties:  Supply-side economics doesn’t work.  It doesn’t.  It got a more-than-fair trial at both the national and state levels, and it never works.  Get over it!)  Heck, the list of economic issues on which the progressives have been right and the right-wing wrong alone could fill a book–the effects of increasing the minimum wage (it doesn’t cost jobs); the effects of increasing taxes on the rich (it also doesn’t cost jobs and does increase tax revenue); the effects of regulation on business; and so on.

We hippies insisted that “abstinence-based sex education” would increase the incidences of teen pregnancy and STIs; it does.  We said making abortion outlawed or more difficult to attain would increase illegal abortion rates and the mortality rate among pregnant women; it does.  We said allowing marriage equality would have no negative effect on heterosexual marriage rates; it doesn’t.  Don’t even get me started on the negative impact of militarizing the police and greatly augmenting their numbers, which has led to things like Ferguson and the unbelievable increase in effort and money spent busting sex workers (which I personally believe is the “Drug War” equivalent for this and the next decade, i.e. pointless, expensive, and doomed to fail).  And on and on.  And this isn’t even taking on such Fox “News”-driven nonsense as “unskewing polls”, or their claims about the size of the federal workforce under Obama (it’s decreased dramatically), and all their other crazy nonsense.

(I hate to break it to you, folks on the right, but we progressives have been right a lot. A lot more often than y’all.  You want me to go on?  Injecting capitalism into everything doesn’t work–for-profit prisons, colleges, and health care have all been an expensive disaster.  Industries don’t self-regulate; where pollution restrictions are relaxed, the air, water, and soil becomes more polluted because it is economically better to just keep polluting and pay fines than to clean up your factories; it’s cheaper to just ignore safety violations and let people die in coal-mine explosions and pay the fines; etc.  Printing money in certain situations such as a liquidity trap does not cause inflation.  And on and on.)

And yet, we’re still not taken seriously, despite our track record of accuracy and correctness.  Politicians make fun of us; our questions, comments, and opinions are cast aside as coming from “the crazy left”, even when we’re to the right of Eisenhower; the news media delights in running us down.

It’s even worse, because the way for nominally left-wing politicians to appear “tough” and “manly” (even when they’re women) is to bash them dirty hippies, and the mainstream media absolutely loves it.  I am not entirely sure why; trying to overturn accusations that they’re “too liberal” themselves (which is a load of hooey); embarrassment at their own individual liberal leanings; having been on the outs in high school and wanting to be accepted by the Kool Kids; I have no idea.  But it’s disgusting.  Doubly-disgusting given how often we’re right.  Not to mention the fact that lots of us have short hair, aren’t dirty, own houses, have jobs, are in long-term relationships, etc.  Triply-denigrating, you might say.

And the point is this–and it’s a disheartening one: It’s not enough to be right.  My side of the political spectrum has been right over and over and over for almost as long as I can remember, and 34 years on from “the Reagan revolution”, we’re still not listened to.  The only way you get listened to, apparently, is to use exactly the right words (“inner-city youth” instead of “damn n*ggers”), play to people’s fears, and keep calling the opposition liars even when the opposition is actually, ya know, correct.  (Climate change; endless wars; the effects of Obamacare; etc.)  We’re learning to do it, a bit; calling gay marriage “marriage equality” was a good move.  Referring to global warming as “climate change” was also smart, not to mention more accurate.  But when it comes to fear and demagoguery, the GOP really runs us ragged.

I like to think it’s because folks on the left are, at heart, more honest and good-hearted.  I know that I personally don’t want to resort to those tactics because I keep thinking that if I just lay the facts out for people, they’ll realize that they’ve been hoodwinked, fooled, and lied to, and accept the left-wing policies that have been and continue to help them with open arms.  But alas, I don’t think it’s possible.  But I keep hoping so, because the alternative is a right-wing-led national car crash, and to be honest, I really like this country and want it to succeed.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll do something to cheer myself up.  Watch “Singin’ in the Rain”, maybe, or some Chuck Jones cartoons.  Oy.

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