The last time I was this sick, the spouse and the significant other were existentially wrestling over whom it was going to be to put crap up my nose. While I was praying to Tiffany for the blessed release of an OD and sweet death based on equal parts crank and heroin, they were struggling with Qtips covered with Aloe Vera and similar stuff. Naked. In a mud bowl...or, maybe that was the drugs. Cynical C's spouse is using some Haitian potion brewed tealike on him...and, Mrs. AXE, given that she has the field to herself, has taken to brewing tea for me. Is it a women thing -- excuse, wyrd Sisters of Shakesville, wymyn thing -- to pour tea down the throat of suffering men and Qtips of crap up the nose of the sufferers? Momma AXE used to put together a concoction of milky tea with honey and a shot of whiskey. We weren't so well off to have it have been Bushmills, I assume it was something awful like Canadian Beaver Musk, but I can recall the taste.
Is doctrinaire Republican conservatism the new "New Left?" Culture Wars has a piece basically repeating things from Kathleen Parker about what happened to her and to Chris Buckley over Sarah Palin and McCain. Now, the NR crowd never really liked McCain, so if he's all they got going for them at this point, they're fucked anyway. Barry Goldwater supposedly wasn't that high on McCain. Hell, the people who were highest on McCain were anti-government intrusion Democrats back when he had ethics, integrity and benefited from not being George Bush. So, the fact that Parker and Buckley, and Powell, and on and on and on are all opposed to this ticket and the party as presently manifested should cause some thought.
However, the Left consumed itself back in the day. Bill Ayers and Tom Hayden make an interesting contrast here. Hayden married Jane Fonda and has been a semi-mainstream liberal ever since, serving in government and running for elections, trying to change the system from within. Ayers came up with the Weathermen, which morphed into the Weather Underground ( The forecast inside the the salt mine is -- dank, damp and cold? Power to the People) and then discovered that bomb throwing had some problems...he got a PhD and is a professor of Education at a state-funded university.
Hayden and Ayers confronted a simple, existential question --Do you want to be right, or do you want to make your life and ideas work? Effectiveness versus some form of ideological purity? Hayden chose making his life work; Ayers has vacillated. He still wants to be right; he's done some very good things. But, he's still dealing with the idea that a bigger bomb might have done better. Which frankly is absurd...a bigger bomb would have done worse. The average human being is really not that into ideology, or principle, or whatever. They have other things to do. The Chattering Classes, as George Will describes them, on both sides of the spectrum, don't. The Haydens of the world get their hands dirty and their boots dirty and get things changed incrementally. Enough incremental change, and you have something totally different. Viral video, viral social and political change. The Ayers of the world want a big bang theory change...ultimately, like the Weatherperson Underground, they either self-destruct or blow up a men's room. And, talk of the tragedy of the self-destruction (If I hadn't been such a douchebag, I coulda been a contender! Goddamn system) and whimper and moan.
Well, if we look at Will, Buckley, Parker, Noonan, Brooks, Powell et al. as being like Hayden, I think it's safe to see Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Krautheimer et.al as being like Ayers. Ayers calls himself a "small c communist," which is absurd in real life, although semantically possible. I'm not a Christian, I'm a christian; I'm not a Catholic, I'm a catholic; I'm not a Democrat, I'm a democrat. Punctuation is not a part of human speech. Air quotes are absurdities. Speech is actual; punctuation is potential. It is not possible to separate communism from Communism in the understanding of the western world. Call yourself a Marxist or a Hegelian or a Jeffersonian Marxist (I think that would translate at some point into Maoist thought) or a Jacksonian Communist (which would be some sort of paternalistic anarchy at some point) or do something. Ayers has accomplished some things in Chicago and they appear to be good things. He appear to be a decent man today -- but, Hayden can say, "I didn't change, what we were doing didn't work so I did something else) and he can point to accomplishments on a bigger stage. While I prefer the city of Chicago existentially to the entire state of California, a smaller impact in a larger system probably produces more change than a relatively larger impact in a smaller system. Whatever the fuck that means...
Using the George Bush popularity quiz from the 2000 election, whom do you think Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater would rather talk to and work with? Hayden or Ayers? Biden or Palin? Obama or McCain? If Buckley was the intellectual of the conservative movement (hey, whatever happened to Edmund Burke, Aquinas and Plato), Goldwater was the quintessential hands-on, get it done, do the best for the country type of guy. Who could they forge an agreement with? Palin would make Buckley cry, and McCain pissed off Goldwater. Buckley might want to give Biden some rhetoric lessons (Slow down, you Irish clown. You think faster than you can talk, so pause every now and then to let your rhetoric catch up with your mind) but I think they could find a lot of common ground. Obama's JFK style similarity would probably work well with Goldwater, as would the practical approach. Let's remember, that JFK and Goldwater were discussing doing something similar to the McCain proposed townhall meetings for the campaign in 1964.
That would have worked because they could talk to each other. Practical men with different beliefs but a common ground. So, the center-right conservatives and the Democrats have more in common with each other than the center-right conservatives have with the hard right. The hard left has been reduced to bomb-throwers and wannabes in Harvard Square and Berkeley. It's funny, but Barrack Obama might turn out to be Ross Perot. If Perot were black, not crazy and not from Texarkana...
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