• Bush-1 gave us Bill Clinton
• Bush-2 gave us Barak Obama
• We don’t want to find out how this pattern plays out

And on a related topic, it’s bad enough that libertarians are socialists’ best friends.   But why do TownHall conservatives have to be 2nd best?   I wish they’d be satisfied with 3rd or 4th.   In the past few days there has been a lot of blather among them about Congressman Tim Whatever and this-or-that presidential candidate.   But there has been not a word  about Tom Coburn’s efforts to eliminate the ethanol tax credit.    An important key to bringing down Leviathan is in the fight between Coburn and Norquist.  But they are letting it go unremarked.    (Coburn gets a Leviathan Ankle-Biter award.  Norquist does not.)

This means voters are telling the truth when pollsters call. That isn’t the sign of a healthy democracy.

…Ms. Murkowski … said over the weekend on CNN that Mr. Miller had only prevailed because of “lies and fabrications and mischaracterization.” She then denounced the “pretty radical things” that the Republican nominee supposedly supports, including “You know, we dump Social Security. No more Medicare. Let’s get rid of the Department of Education. Elimination of all earmarks. …

WSJ URL

Does this mean he’s weighing the possibility of NOT doing a media assault against the GOP? How would that work?

And then I read the message and found in the very first paragraph that they want me to send $5.

Isn’t that a lot like the indulgences that Martin Luther railed against?

The Senate primary in Arkansas is our best hope to save the soul of the Democratic Party and win real change in Washington. Every Democrat in Washington is watching to see whether corporate lobbyists or grassroots progressives will prevail. And this is the last chance to help out­ – the Halter campaign is making their final spending decisions in 24 hours. So we need at least 3 donations from Battle Creek today. Can you chip in $5?

I’d think the phrase “McCain Strategist” would be the last thing anybody in politics would want on his/her resume or business card. Even something like “Edsel Product Manager” wouldn’t have quite the same stigma. Better to leave a gap on the resume for the time spent on that campaign.

Not that I’m complaining about the way they did their job. If they had been any good at it, they might have suckered me into voting for their guy.

I’ve been in rooms with both oblivious types (pro- and anti-) in the past couple of days. I managed to keep my mouth shut and save it for my blog.

On Jan. 20, 2005, George Bush was sworn in as president of the United States. On Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. The University of Virginia decided to suspend classes on only one of these important days. Can you guess which one? … Based on the actions of the UVa administration, George Bush’s Inauguration Day was somehow not “an educational moment” or an “exercise in democracy.” This explanation is suspect. Furthermore, neither Garson’s e-mail nor the official press release announcement that the suspension of class on Inauguration Day is a new policy that will be implemented well into the future regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat is elected.

I’ll be busy working during the inauguration ceremonies. I’ll be no more giddy about this inauguration than I have been about any other. I certainly hope there won’t be anything memorable about the day. With any luck, Obama’s supporters will be too busy celebrating to start the pogroms just yet.

The only time I watched an inauguration was in 1961, and that was because my teachers took the same approach as UVa.

googlemap

I attended the District #3 school at Bazile Mills, Nebraska. The school, a frame two-room building that had been built in 1884, no longer exists, but I’ve marked its location on the above google map. The boundaries of the schoolyard are still visible, as they were in 1995 when I visited the area at the beginning of my first-ever multi-day bike ride.

I was in 7th grade that year. The teachers arranged for the entire population of the school, from grades 1 through 8 (if I remember correctly) to go to a neighbor’s house where we could watch the inauguration on television. I’m pretty sure it was the house at the location shown at the bottom of the route that I’ve marked. We all sat in the living room and watched. I’m not quite sure how we could have all fit in that house, so maybe I shouldn’t be so sure that the lower grades went, too.

I don’t remember much about it other than the walk to the house and all of us sitting on the floor of the living room. I do remember Robert Frost trying to read a poem. Well, there was the line about “Ask not what your country can do for you…”, which was a good one. The memory of that has been reinforced by many subsequent retellings.

I’m still angry that during the election campaign, our teacher told us that only one of us was thinking for ourselves. This was an eighth grade girl who supported Kennedy, while her parents favored Nixon. The rest of us favored whichever candidate our parents favored, and our teacher took that to mean none of us were thinking for ourselves. I credit that incident for saving me from becoming a typical 60s radical. I decided then and there that I was going to agree with my parents whenever I felt like it, and was not going to be obligated to rebel against them.

Anyway, it was obvious that our teacher (of whom I have otherwise fond recollections) favored Kennedy. I am pretty sure we would not have made a field trip to watch the election on TV if Nixon had won. We certainly would not have gone to that particular home to watch it.

I had favored Nixon during the election and just rolled my eyes at this display of “educational moments” and “exercise in democracy” or whatever terms were used at the time.

Some years later I was cheering for Nixon’s impeachment. Watergate turned me against him well before the 1972 election. (I say this because of all the people who say Watergate didn’t become an issue until after the 1972 election.) That was just the beginning of a string of impeachments that I favored. If Obama abuses his power the same way the Clintons did, I’ll be favoring his impeachment, too. But who knows. He could surprise us all. Maybe he’ll even give a good speech (as Kennedy did that day in 1961). If so, I’ll be able to read about it afterwards.

Whatever the case, there is a problem with that statement. It betrays a set of misordered priorities.

I really don’t care whether there is a Republican revival, and maybe Republicans shouldn’t care so much, either. I care a lot about whether we can avoid sinking further into a welfare-police state, and whether we can regain a government that protects rather than destroys human rights. Whether that’s done with or without a Republican party is of minor importance to me.

If someone wants to make the case that the only way it can be done is through a strong Republican party, fine. Just so long as that is not the end, but the means.