Stupidity

OK, I know this has been all over the blogosphere the last several days, so I'll keep this brief.

If, by your own admission, you don't know all the facts, then don't go accusing one of the parties of acting stupidly—especially if you might be a little biased toward the other party.

We’re Skewed

I used to characterize my political views as “conservative centrist”. I saw myself as having political views that, while right of center, were for the most part moderate; I tend to use the terms “moderate” and “centrist” synonymously.

Recently, however, I decided that I could no longer call myself a centrist. It seemed to me from media reports that, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, centrism had left me—that is, that the normal distribution, rather than being a bell-shaped curve, had become skewed to the left, with nothing to the right anymore except a long tail.

Of course, everyone knows about the liberal bias of the mainstream media—as Bernard Goldberg says in his book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, it’s not that the mainstream media outlets are biased toward liberalism intentionally, it’s just that mainstream journalists are never exposed to anything else. Thus, I’d been able to take comfort from a recent poll showing that, “[d]espite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal.”

Now, courtesy of Andrew Thomas, comes word that Obama wants to claim the mantle of “moderate” for himself to avoid being “branded as a liberal by his own party.” As Mr. Thomas says, “If Mr. Obama is a ‘moderate’, then what is a ‘liberal’ in this brave new world?” For that matter, what is a “leftist”, a “statist”, a “socialist”, a “fascist” in this brave new world?

This from the man who claims that words matter.

Princess Barry

I’m bummed. Here I was, all ready to write a blog post about the reasons behind why the One’s personal popularity has remained high while the respective popularity of each of his proposals is in the toilet and Quinnipiac had to go and ruin it by releasing a new poll showing that his popularity in the bellwether state of Ohio has fallen below fifty percent [insert (sad face?) (happy face?) (ironic face?) here].

Ah, well. Even though it’s lost some of its immediacy, here is the germ of my theory:

McCain was even more right than he knew in calling BHO a celebrity candidate. Obama was elected not on the strength of the popularity of his proposals but solely on the strength of his personal popularity—not so much to be the country’s first Black president as to be its first celebrity president. (And before y’all go callin’ Reagan the first celebrity president, recall that he’d actually been elected to two terms as Governor of California before seeking the nomination for President. [Note to those who know me: You know I must think pretty lowly of the current President if I compare Reagan favorably to him—I harbored a personal grudge against Reagan for a long time; the current Administration’s micro-management of the AIG bonuses cured me of that, though.])

The electorate didn’t expect him to actually do any of the things he promised (or threatened)—they just expected him to sit there and smile prettily for the camera while reading from a teleprompter. But they got more than they expected—they forgot that, unlike Princess Diana, he’s actually in charge of setting policy; they forgot, too, that with a Democrat in the White House, there would be no restraint on the Democrat-led Congress. Let’s just hope we’re still able to vote by the time 2012 rolls around.

Independence Day

I read an article lately describing how some Blacks in America do not feel any particular affinity for the Independence Day holiday, the celebration of a document asserting the rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that was written by Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner and the first President from what would become the modern Democratic Party.

I suppose that, for Blacks, another choice for Independence Day could be Juneteeth, the commemoration of the date when slaves in Texas learned that, as a result of a second internecine conflict, they had been freed by Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president.

LBJ may have signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it took a Republican-controlled Congress to pass it.

How is it, then, that the Democratic Party can claim to be the party of Blacks in America?