Monday, February 20, 2006

Politics on President's Day

Over the course of my readings today--done while non-unionized student laborers are building a new fence outside my window--I came across four articles that really stimulated my attention. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Mark Steyn (don't you just love him?) excoriates the US press for its hypocrisy by telling Americans that we have a "right to know" about Dick Cheney's hunting accident but have no need or right to see those cartoons that have caused riots, death, and destruction all over the world. The comments to this post are fairly entertaining as well.
2. I've never thought about it this way before--why do the 1st and 4th Amendments have so many interpretations, umbrellas, and hidden meanings, but the 10th Amendment is ignored?
3. Howard Dean has apparently ticked off many homosexuals by reorganizing the DNC's political outreach efforts, focusing more on "getting out the vote" than on identity politics. Imagine! Apparently this has happened before.

The moderate middle in American politics, he (DNC Chair in the mid-1980s Paul Kirk) contended, was coming to the conclusion that Democrats were more interested in a short list of favored tribes than the broad mass of individual voters who traditionally had been attracted to the party around an array of economic and foreign policy concerns, as well as civil rights, that encompassed all Americans, white and black, gay and straight, male and female.

Those in the party enthralled with identity politics reacted with the vengeance of aggrieved faculty senators, and chose to see an intelligent broad-based outreach as an insult to the party’s Washington-based minority advocates....

With a foolish focus on internal party affairs, left-libs in LGBT (gag me with a verbal spoon) politics seem to prize feeling good about how many staff members they get at the DNC more than winning elections that decide who gets to name Supreme Court justices and wage disastrous elective wars.

4. And lastly, Jimmy Carter tells us that not supporting Hamas and the Palestinian government will only punish innocent Palestinians--you know, the ones who voted to put a terrorist organization in charge of their government in the first place. Next thing Jimmah will tell us is that we should send money to al-Qaeda as well. What has happened to this man? Has he never gotten over his trouncing in 1980? Is this a glimpse into Al Gore's future?

Happy reading!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really don't understand how Hamas won in the first place. It wouldn't suprise me if there was election fraud.

Carol said...

I read all four. Thanks for the suggestions. Don't forget that the press has also decided that we don't need to see photographs of 9-11 since they will needlessly upset us. Interesting, isn't it, how the press decides what we should and shouldn't see. Their interpretation of "Freedom of the Press" is based purely on their own political agenda.