Ongoing Reports From The Long October

I'm trying to come up with some poetic-sounding names for the Shutdown Showdown of 2013, and right now "The Long October" is about as good as I can think of a name.

Because for the most part we're now expecting the current Shutdown to merge into the scheduled Debt Ceiling crisis set for October 17th, simply because the House Republicans are driving the nation off the cliff (via Jonathan Chait at the New York):

...Last Tuesday, House Republicans shut down the federal government, demanding that Obama abolish his health-care reform in a tactically reckless gamble that most of the party feared but could not prevent. More surreal, perhaps, were the conditions they issued in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this month. Lifting the debt ceiling, a vestigial ritual in which Congress votes to approve payment of the debts it has already incurred, is almost a symbolic event, except that not doing it would wreak unpredictable and possibly enormous worldwide economic havoc. (Obama’s Treasury Department has compared the impact of a debt breach to the failure of Lehman Brothers.) The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, plus tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends...

We're basically unable to do anything about the current Shutdown: the Democrats are attempting to force a vote on the House floor for a "clean Continuing Resolution" using an obscure mechanism called a "discharge petition", but to pull it off they seemingly need more than 17 Republicans to commit publicly to vote for it.  And while there's a solid number of anonymous House Republicans complaining about the Far Right taking their own party hostage during these "negotiations", only two of them have been brave up to stand up... because if anyone else did so they'd be primaried within a heartbeat.

Molly Ball at The Atlantic makes the observation that Republicans are the one voting bloc that refuses to compromise (the poll is linked from her article):

Republicans, it seems, are different: They value compromise far less and principle far more than other Americans. In refusing to give ground, then, Republican politicians are reflecting their base's priorities.

This result helps explain more than just GOP intransigence, it seems to me. It also helps explain the parties' mutual incomprehension. Since Democrats value compromise by such an overwhelming margin, they assume their opponents do too. But Republicans, it turns out, are wired a bit differently.

Andrew Sullivan makes the observation that the Republicans aren't so much refusing to compromise, it's that they can't accept the reality of the situation and are grasping at anything:

They say they want to reverse what they see as the end of American freedom because of the dawn of public subsidies for private insurance policies, based on a Heritage Foundation idea and implemented by their last presidential nominee in his home state. Okay, so how about running a campaign for Congress and presidency that explicitly promises to repeal Obamacare entirely? Oh, yes, they already did that and lost. How about upping the ante and making it explicit in the campaign that this is the very last chance to end Obamacare and save America? Oh, yeah, I forgot. They did that too. So what do they want? I’m not sure they even know.

Even though there's another poll, this time on approval ratings for the parties involved - Obama, Democrats in Congress, and Republicans in Congress - and showing why this is still a serious problem for Republicans continuing this path to self-destruction:

Problem with that poll is while the numbers show the Republicans in trouble with Americans overall (at 70 percent disapproval), the House GOP are only worried about the Americans (Tea Partiers) in their gerrymandered districts (and yes, the gerrymander is one of the things at fault here), and most of them are in the 24 percent bracket still approving of their hostage-taking BS.

This is going to be a Long October after all.

I only hope this won't interfere with trick-or-treating... 'cause if our kids can't trick-or-treat due to an economic collapse then we are going to see some SERIOUS street riots led by kids dressed up in superhero costumes and wielding plastic pirate swords.  CANDY OR DEATH!  CANDY OR DEATH...!

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Presidential Character: Week Thirty-Four, Why DID Everyone Like Ike?

So, Professor Barber, why DID everyone like Ike, uh Dwight D. Eisenhower?

...Furthermore, Eisenhower often displayed optimism; he was certainly no gloomy Gus in the White House, though he was often irritable and depressed... (Presidential Character, p. 179)

...Eisenhower did not feel a duty to save the world or to become a great hero, but simply to contribute what he could the best he was able... Yet Eisenhower very much wanted to make a contribution.  Once while laboring over a speech he said, "You know, it is so difficult.  You come up to face these terrible issues, and you know that what is in almost everyone's heart is a wish for peace, and you want so much to do something..." (p.182)

To this, even with Barber's assertion Eisenhower was a Passive-Negative Character:

The key orientation is toward performing duty with modesty, and the political adaptation is characterized by protective retreats to principle, ritual and personal virtue.  The political strength of this character is its legitimacy.  It inspires trust in the incorruptibility and the good intentions of the man... (p.182)

Eisenhower came to the Presidency as the commanding general of European forces during the Second World War, one of a select group of non-political generals - Washington and Taylor - to do so (other generals like Grant, Hayes and Garfield - mostly from the Civil War - had been converted into true Republicans as part of their response to the war and Reconstruction politics).  How he came to be the general-in-chief of a major theater of war speaks to his basic character traits of Modesty and (for the Passive-Negative) Duty.

Eisenhower was not the best-known candidate for the job of representing the U.S. among the Allied forces against Hitler's Axis.  He'd been a middle-of-the-pack officer pretty much from West Point onward, and while he'd worked hard to earn his promotions up to colonel by 1940 he still lacked a few things such as battlefield experience.  But he knew tanks and how to deploy them, impressed during the training exercises before the U.S. entered the war (by 1940 FDR's administration and the Army both knew war was coming), and got promoted up to brigadier general on the eve of conflict.

One joke floating around was that General George Marshall, the head of the whole Army at the time, promoted Eisenhower to head up Allied efforts in Europe because Eisenhower had served as an aide to General MacArthur, and that the experience of massaging that huge ego made Ike the best expert to keep the British and French allied generals in line.  But the truth of it was Marshall saw in Eisenhower the organizational skills needed to manage such a massive endeavor, and the sense of Duty to the cause to make it work.

Marshall must have seen something else, the unique trait Eisenhower had that no other P-N character showed: Ike was unusually optimistic and forward-thinking.  He didn't see disasters as such, he saw them as opportunities.

During the beginning stages of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, Eisenhower met with his subordinate generals about counter-offensives.  Rather than take the gloomy approach that the unexpected German offensive could divide the Allied front and prolong the war, Eisenhower saw it as a chance to finally get the Germans out in the open and finished off rather than slogging through a potentially massive defensive effort.  He's on record saying "The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not a disaster.  There will be only cheerful faces at this table."  He then turned to General Patton - his blood knight - and asked how quickly they could relieve the American paratroopers at Bastogne.  Patton said 48 hours, and pulled it off.

Making the call on D-Day.  The weather for early June 1944 was wet, rainy, windy, terrible for beach landings and paratrooper drops.  The Germans, having developed excellent profiles on opposing generals, figured Eisenhower's overly cautious nature would never give the order to go in bad weather.  And in most cases for a P-N character they'd be right.  But there was that optimism: the Allied meteorologists told Ike there was a chance the morning of June 6th would have a slight window before dawn to work out.  Knowing that June was the last best chance to get into Europe before summer turned into winter, and that he needed to go sooner or later, Eisenhower went against his nature (ironically, his sense of Duty to get the landings over with made him do it) and made the call.  Even then, he knew it was a giant risk.  He wrote one letter praising the troops and cheering them onto victory.  He wrote a second letter in case the landings failed, and insisted that any blame be put on him ("It is mine alone.").

It was not only Eisenhower's judgment... it was not only Eisenhower's organizational skills... it was Eisenhower's Modesty, his acceptance of Duty, his non-Negative sense of Optimism in others that made him so likable.

And that likability made him the hot political ticket once World War II ended.  Like his predecessor Taylor, Eisenhower had made it a point to not even vote in elections up until 1948 or so (both Democratic Party leaders and Republicans sent out feelers).  He preferred at the time to retire out as Chief of Staff (having reorganized the entire military into the Department of Defense) and serve as school President at Columbia U.  By 1950 he accepted the call back to duty by becoming the commander of NATO forces and used his organizational skills to make that nascent military alliance work.  By 1952, with the nation deeply mired in Korea, and pressed ever more by the people around him, Ike acceded to the demand he run for office.

And he won in massive landslides (1952 and re-election 1956).  "I Like Ike" being one of the most successful - and obvious - campaign slogans of all time.

But Eisenhower didn't enter the White House at an easy time.  Solving Korea - with an armistice that has yet been resolved to this day - was one thing but the Cold War - an ongoing chess match with the Soviet Union over Europe, Asia and the Middle East - was something else.  The Cold War affected domestic issues in the form of political witch hunts (the Red Scare) led by a glory-hogging Joseph McCarthy.  And other domestic issues involved the growing Civil Rights movement that started with Truman's desegregation of the military and was moving on towards public services and education.

Eisenhower's Passive-Negative traits did not put him in with the Far Right forces of the Republican Party, obsessed as they were with hunting down suspected Communists throughout society.  But it made it difficult for him to openly confront the likes of McCarthy.  To Ike's credit, McCarthy self-destructed by going after too many targets that wanted to fight back, especially Ike's beloved Army, and he used that distance to let McCarthy bury himself which pretty much quieted down the anti-Communist fervor for the rest of the Fifties to a low boil.

As Barber noted, Eisenhower may have fit for the most part into the P-N category but as President Eisenhower defied certain traits through both his habits and his optimism.  By habits I mean his organization: the West Wing as we know it - with a Chief of Staff, organized departments handling communications, interdepartmental issues, and policy essentials - came entirely from Eisenhower.  By his optimism I point to how Eisenhower not only kept New Deal era economic policies that worked (where the Republicans would have considered them no longer essential once the economy was chugging along and the War Effort was over), but pushed his own national agendas such as the Interstate Highway system.

If Ike had weaknesses it was a maddening level of complacency, his hands-off approach to how the various departments in the Executive branch handled themselves as well as a hands-off approach with dealing with Congress.  On one hand Eisenhower's two-term administration was relatively free of scandal - the worst was that his Chief of Staff was caught lying about an oriental rug and fur coat his wife had received as gifts - but on the other the administration allowed some branches - especially the CIA with their activities in Iran and Central America - a wide scope of questionable activity.

And while Eisenhower continued Truman's work on Civil Rights - Ike declared discrimination a "National Security issue" because Communists used it as an argument against American democratic ideals - he didn't pursue it as aggressively as Truman had.  He worked with Congress to pass legislation to create offices for civil rights investigations in the Justice Department but left them ill-defined and underfunded.  In the best respect Eisenhower's greatest achievement was calling out the National Guard and 101st Airborne to Little Rock Arkansas to enforce the court rulings to desegregate schools.  But past that Eisenhower's administration did not aggressively pursue methods to end segregation in businesses and communities: Ike would only go so far in the use of executive authority.  Passive-Negatives do not like using the full weight of the Executive branch the way an Active-Positive or Active-Negative would.

Eisenhower's legacy as President was mixed when he left office and it wasn't until well into Clinton's tenure that a better understanding of Ike's performance as leader could be seen.  The argument against him was that Eisenhower didn't "do anything," (my own father, Old School Republican that he is, said this today as I was writing portions of this article over at the parental units' home, they needed help updating their computer stuff, anyways I digress) especially in the face of McCarthyism and the growing Civil Rights fight.  But in other ways Ike did in office what was expected of him: the mentor figure, the retired general / father figure neither passionate nor angry, reserved in judgment and basically right on all matters.  He focused on the job at hand and oversaw a relatively stable period of post-war growth and adjustment.  His pursuit of the Interstate Highway construction proved one of the biggest job creating government programs in history - bigger than any New Deal project - and had a major impact on interstate commerce, population growth and dispersal, and development of cultural trends (car culture, travel, etc).

Above all, much like his Passive-Negative model of old - George Washington - Eisenhower may well have been the last true non-partisan figure in American 20th Century politics.  Republican more by necessity than ideology, Eisenhower was a self-described moderate who sought to balance out the Far Right McCarthyist elements of the party through his personal example and calls for common sense solutions.  Conservative only in action rather than thought, Eisenhower today is the go-to figure of moderates (whoever may be left) within the modern GOP.

Next up: The key word is survival on the New Frontier (sorry, I keep thinking of that Donald Fagan song)

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The Cooper Union Speech Shows Us the War Is Not Really Over

(NOTE: Had to edit for an accidental grammar error)
As the Shutdown Showdown of 2013 continues unabated - and in fact may get worse - more and more critics of the modern GOP's hardline stance find themselves referring to Abraham Lincoln and the Cooper Union speech he gave before the November 1860 elections (before he even won the nomination for the Republican Party of that age).

Here's a link to the Cooper Union speech as provided by the National Parks Service:

Oops.

Here's another link that might still be up.  Most of the first half of the speech is Lincoln setting up his lawyer's argument about how the Constitution came to be, how the Founders themselves spelled out their opposition to slavery's extension, and how the Republicans of 1860 were adhering to that argument - stopping slavery's spread not slavery itself - against the wild accusations and demands of the Southern Democrats.  The Southern states even by that date were threatening open secession unless they got their way.  Lincoln eventually gets to the meat of the speech to argue against that, the part of the speech everyone's quoting:

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

If the arguments, nay demands, of the 1860 Southern Democrats sound a lot like the rhetoric of the 2013 House Republicans and their Far Right spokespeople in the media, don't be surprised.  A lot of this has to do with the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party under Nixon back in the 1970s.

The South as a voting bloc had been virulently pro-slavery since the 1820s (perhaps even earlier), and when slavery bit the dust post-Civil War and post-13th Amendment the South went virulently anti-Black.  That region of the nation was basically allowed to act that way for roughly 100 years because the North got tired of trying to fix that shit and collectively gave up.  The only reason the United States took the Civil Rights efforts of Black Americans seriously by the 1960s was because of public relations: as a global power pushing for liberty against the wave of Soviet oppression, it was hypocritical of us to deny our own citizens their own freedom and rights under the law.

As the Democratic coalition fractured by 1968 with the Dixiecrats falling in power within their own ranks, the Republicans behind Goldwater and Nixon took notice and realized the South as a voting bloc was surprisingly tight (and growing as business markets shifted southward into Texas and Florida) and could be merged to the economic and religious conservatism of the GOP.  By the time of Reagan in 1980, he was able to put together a cultural/economic/religious voting bloc that led to a dynamic pro-Republican shift in the electoral system.

But now we're seeing the problem of going with the Southern Strategy.  By allowing a platform for the basically racist elements of the southern conservatives, the Republicans unwittingly (or even worse, willingly) allowed that strain of hate to spread to the other conservative elements of the party.  Why we're seeing Republicans from non-Southern places like Iowa and Ohio and California railing against social welfare services like food stamps is from the underlying belief that the primary recipients of social aid are Blacks and other minorities.

Joan Walsh in her Salon article:

Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they've been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for Birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power...

Obama's brought all this hatred out in a big way.  Part of the open hatred the GOP and the Far Right have towards Obama is that he's a Democrat interrupting the Glorious Pax Reaganicus Era of tax cuts, deregulation, and Commie-bashing (even though tax cuts didn't work, deregulation is why we're in our current mess, and Commie-bashing went out when Communism did).  But a lot of that hate is because of who Obama is as a person: they flat out can't accept him as an American at all, which is where the Birther obsession and the Kenyan Socialist obsession and Secret Muslim bomb-thrower obsession all come from.  That's not because he's a Democrat: Clinton never got this level of outrage, at worst he was a philandering pot-smoking hippie to them.

But racism is only part of the problem here.  The Southern Conservative mindset is obsessed with "their" rights above the rights of everyone else.  To them, they've got a right to abide their own laws, they've got a right to ignore laws they don't like.  The old strain of Nullification, the belief in State Rights that under the 10th Amendment they can do anything at the state level and to hell with anything federal law or Supreme Court interpretations of federalism - say, the court's approval of the Health Care Reform law (aka Obamacare) - have to say about it.

The Southern Conservative - the template of the modern Far Right wingnut - has no true love for the Federal Government, especially not a Federal government that insists on civil rights or regulatory practices.  The Republican outrage towards a 14th Amendment that both applies due process to all states and recognizes equal citizenship to all Americans is as much a target of their anger as Obama himself.

And all that anger, all that frustration has led them to this shore.  To a point where they don't mind - hell, they WANT to do this - shutting down the federal government the Far Right wingnuts view as The Enemy.

The Civil War is not over.  Not as long as there are wingnuts out there convinced of their radicalism - as Sully notes, this hasn't been true conservatism in ages - against the very concept of a United States of America.  No matter how much they try to wrap themselves up in the Stars And Stripes, they've made it abundantly clear they are the banner carriers of the Stars And Bars.  The Far Right Wingnuts want to Nullify laws they don't like.  They want to punish - if not banish - political leaders they don't like.

The Far Right Wingnuts want to rule or ruin.  We've seen them rule and it wasn't pretty.  Now they want to ruin.  At all costs.  And the way the situation is now, they're ruining us no matter what the rest of the nation wants.

For the LOVE OF GOD, stop voting Republican.

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A Thing Or Two About Anonymous Comments

Just to let you know, there is a practical reason for NOT posting as Anonymous to this blogger.com hosted site:

Anonymous comments can end up in the SPAM folder.

I'd also like to add another thing about Anonymous comments:

I'm not a huge fan of them.

So far, my experience with Anonymous posters have been bleak and rude and very unhelpful.  I've found that the Anonymous people accuse me of being things I'm not, relishing the fact that since I can't tell who they are I can't return the favor other than pointing out their folly (which they'll ignore anyway).  I've found that the Anonymous person to be something of a coward, refusing to put their name to a political position, preferring to hide in the shadow and think themselves clever for hiding so well.

If I ever post an Anonymous Trolling Comment of Little Worth, it's because I want to make a point of how foolish that troll's comment really is.  Most of the rest of them I leave in the SPAM folder.

If you want to leave a comment, do so.  But have the decency to put your name to it, especially if you're going out of your way to insult somebody.  If you're insulting me, heh, I can laugh it off.  I've survived middle school: I've heard worse.  Insult someone else, you'll get called on it.  But own up to what you write: you owe yourself that much.  If you can't respect yourself to put your name to your opinion, how the hell should you expect us to respect you for it?

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I Miss Shardtober and City of Heroes

Anybody else here from Champion Server?  Remember when I would host Shardtober task force runs every October weekend?

Sigh.

I miss playing hero.

Dear NCSoft: I hope your stock sinks to pennies on the dollar so we gamers can buy it up and bring City of Heroes back.

cross-posting with my other blog

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How To Survive The Impending Shutdown In Three Easy Steps

Considering we're facing the last day before October 1st when a new budget has to kick in - either with a Continuing Resolution or an actual budget - and that the odds are very high that the Republicans' demands will be rejected by the Democrats... we're pretty much facing a government shutdown.

Having survived the Shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, I would like to offer up my expertise on the matter and provide some emotional and spiritual support in these trying times.  So here now is a simple, three-step guide to surviving the Shutdown Showdown of 2013:

1. Don't panic.  The ones inflicting the shutdown - the Far Right - are in fact counting on a lot of people freaking out and calling their elected officials to scream about getting something done.  While the House GOP will get those calls same as the Democrats, the Far Right are so out-of-touch with voters... so willingly out of touch with voters... that they will easily ignore the shouting in their own ears.  They are sociopathic enough to know that while they can endure the screaming, their Democratic opponents - who actually want government to work - may well buckle under the pressure and give in to a handful of demands... at which point the Far Right knows that hostage-taking works and will continue to play this game of destruction.

Now, there will be a lot of people inconvenienced by the shutdown.  That's the whole point of it.  The thing not to do is give the ones pushing the shutdown any satisfaction.  You're just going to have to endure this and wait for the financial sector power leaders to dopeslap enough Republicans for them to pass a clean CR bill.

Voters need to realize something: Washington doesn't really listen to protests anymore unless it's a protest they themselves organized.  When hundreds of thousands marched in the streets against the Iraqi invasion in 2002-03, the media ignored it or dismissed it and the elected officials didn't give a rat's ass.  When hundreds of thousands marched in the streets in favor of immigration reform in 2005-06... take a look, we're still stuck with a broken immigration system.

The only thing our elected officials even pay attention to anymore are election results.  They only care about who wins and who doesn't.  The reason the Far Right Republicans pay no mind to protests is because they've insulated themselves into gerrymandered districts where they can always get re-elected by pandering to the base, not the masses.  Which brings us to...

2. Change your voter ID information.  This will take some time on your part.  You can go online or to a location that will carry voter registration forms - while the federal government agencies are closing down for the shutdown, the county and state offices ought to stay open - and fill out a change of voter identification form.

This step is very important: change your voter ID from whatever party affiliation you've got - Republican or Democrat - to No Party Affiliate or Independent.  Also, change your Ethnic identification - if it asks for one - to Other.  That's all.  This is important because this will eventually screw up the political parties in a variety of ways.  And while it won't do much good right now, hopefully if enough voters change their identities over to NPA as well as hide their ethnic identity on the records, it will screw up the parties' ability to craft out gerrymandered districts.

Now, the deal is the states are not supposed to be creating districts for partisan gain.  But the law is one thing: the practice is another.  Parties dominating in a state use specially designed software programs to calculate out the best ways to carve out districts by ethnicity - some states by law have to carve out minority-majority districts - and by party affiliation (they're not supposed to, but they know the loopholes to mask what they're doing).  This is why here in Florida even though there's a 800,000 voter advantage to Democrats over Republicans, the Republican-controlled legislature still figures out how to create more Republican districts than Democrat.

Ah, but what if a massive majority of registered voters were suddenly No Party Affiliate?  There's a good 2 million now out of 11 million registered in Florida... what if it's suddenly 6 million, more than the Dems and more than the GOP put together?  The state lege could still figure out a few things by ethnicity - Black-majority communities by census are bound to be Democratic by default when 98 percent of Blacks vote that way - but now they can't tell exactly where to make their cuts into urban and suburban areas to ensure GOP-friendly districts.  No more safe districts in Florida for Republicans.  If they gerrymander the wrong way they could make it more Democratic-leaning than if they just did it by population density like they're supposed to.

It's also pretty liberating to not be tied down to one party.  You'll still get their junk mail begging for donations, but you're no longer under any kind of peer pressure to subsume your political beliefs to a group that will just ignore 'em.

Meanwhile...

3. When the time comes, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Don't listen to the "both sides do it" bullshit.  The Republicans are totally on board with crashing the government and ruining the nation's credit rating.  Yes, the Democrats have voted before against the debt ceiling and they rail against the Continuing Resolutions that make do for budgets when they're in the minority.  But the Democrats don't schedule an entire government shutdown around it.  My God, some of the Republicans came out of their Saturday pep rally openly cheering what they were planning to do.

The Democrats never held up an entire government like this to pass basically an entire Presidential platform (Romney/Ryan's 2012) that got rejected by a solid majority of American voters.

And the Democrats never pushed an agenda like this that was so sociopathic, where the Republicans want to kill off a health care reform package designed to help more people, not less.  We're talking about a Republican Party so obsessed with punishing poor people they are willing to cut food stamp aid by $39 billion under the argument that "the poor just gotta suck it up".

And we're talking about a political party in the modern Republicans who refuse to negotiate on good faith, issuing demands so far to the right there is no room for Obama or anyone on the left to see a point on which to compromise.  A Republican Party that keeps thinking it won everything in 2012 and so ought to get all the pretty prizes it wants.

The Republican Party is going to keep taking hostages and ruin our nation's credit and credibility until they get voted out of power for good.  And even then they may not accept the reality - mostly because the real party leadership (hi Fox Not-News!) aren't elected officials, meaning they won't get burned if the GOP no longer has legislative or executive powers - but at least they won't be in any position to ruin our lives for a good long while.

So there you have it.  Just follow those three easy steps and you'll get through this showdown crisis just fine.

Also, stock up on a lot of bottled water, portable battery extensions for your tablet devices, and food for yourselves and your pets.  ...You know, just in case.

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You Know, I Thought This Redshirts Guy Was Familiar...

There was this article I read a few years back - I think TBogg over on Firedoglake website highlighted it or something, or maybe on Balloon Juice - about the three primary types of political ideology in the United States.  Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian.  And how the blog writer despised all three.

It was titled "I Hate Your Politics."

It was hilarious.  It oversimplified the political traits of all three, true, but sarcasm or satire work best when it's correct on the details.  I could copy/paste some of the article quotes from there to here, but that wouldn't be fair to you.  You HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE THING.  Click that link above.  Read it.  Learn it.  Live it.  You'll laugh, you'll cry, it'll become a part of you.  Then come back here because I crave your attention and still have a few more things to say.

(insert chamber music here).

Okay, you back?  ...oh okay... quick bathroom break, see you in three minutes...

(awkward wait)

Anyway, so here I was about a month ago reading up on the Hugo Award winners - as both a librarian and a sci-fi / comic book geek, I have an interest - and I see the winning novel this year was Redshirts, a meta-fictional delving into the lives of the ill-fated crew members who tend to die on science fiction space opera shows.  And the author's name is John Scalzi.

And I think to myself Wait, I know this guy.

I admit I don't read as much science fiction lit as I should in order to keep my geek cred fresh - partly because my collection management duties focus more on non-fiction - so I hadn't really noticed that Scalzi has been penning a few good novels here and there (I'd been reading more Iain M. Banks and Terry Pratchett lately, so that's my excuse).  I merely recognized the name as someone who'd written a blog entry about politics that I recalled was twisted and funny.

So, yeah, I go diving back in and find that I've got the Whatever article still saved as a bookmark on my browser.  And yeah, it's him.

And so now, a lot of things about what Scalzi wrote about libertarians makes a whole shitload of sense.

Here, I will copy and paste this part:

Never got over the fact they weren't the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board...  Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn't actually involve real live humans... Libertarians blog with a frequency that makes one wonder if they’re actually employed somewhere or if they have loved ones who miss them... Socially slow — will assume other people actually want to talk about legalizing hemp and the benefits of a polyamorous ethos when all these other folks really want is to drink beer and play Grand Theft Auto 3. Libertarianism the official political system of science fiction authors, which explains why science fiction is in such a rut these days... 

Back when I first read it (about 2007, maybe earlier), I wasn't entirely sure why Scalzi was chewing out libertarians for screwing up modern sci-fi literature (unless he was tuned out by John Ringo's stuff).  I hadn't noticed Scalzi was getting his works being published when I first read this (he's updated / upgraded the blog site since last I visited, back then I didn't see the About The Writer or a link to his books).  But now I'm looking at his career and I see why he's pissed.

Scalzi's been involved in publishing and editing for more than a decade, some of it in traditional markets and a few years working with science fiction pubs.  As such, he's probably been exposed to more horrifically bad science fiction story submissions than the average Human,Vulcan, Klingon, Minbari, Silurian, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

This is part of the Sturgeon's Law: that 90 percent of everything is shit.  Since Sturgeon was an acclaimed sci-fi writer, he came up with what he called the revelation when he got tired of defending science fiction as a genre when the critics kept using the worst of sci-fi - the bad aliens, the bland ideologies, the squicky sex - to belittle it.  And in a way, Sturgeon is right about 90 percent of the stuff out there is bad, regardless of genre or format: 90 percent movies, 90 percent music, 90 percent art, 90 percent fashion, some of that shit is bad shit.  It's just that the worst of that 90 percent, well it rankles on you if you're a fervent lover of that music/fashion/art/film/literature genre.  You live for the 10 percent that wows and enjoys and delights, but if you get nothing but shit most of the time it's gonna make you jaded at best.

So in a way I see where Scalzi's coming from when he dumped on libertarianism like that in his article.  He's probably seen one too many sci-fi fantasy stories of a Randian-inspired utopia filled with bland archetypes and bad sex.  And he's pretty much right about it dominating and ruining a lot of current sci-fi: a lot of libertarians love to write speculative fiction / alternate world stories where their ideology can flourish (since, as I've noted meself, utopias don't flourish in the real world), which gets it shoved into the science fiction shelves at your local ebook retailer.

I hope this means I grok Scalzi's political stance.  Probably not, there may be nuances to his ideology that drives his world-view.  But I'm damn certain I know why he hates libertarians: it's all that self-indulgent terrible writing (and it's getting worse now that there's cheap self-publishing and no editorial control).  Damn you, libertarians: why can't you write more Harlequin romance novels and leave us geeks alone...

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