Political Gadfly Designed to Make Everyone Miserable

Watching the debate last night made me angry.  I've been busy this morning so I don't know how it played with the rest of America and frankly, it's irrelevant.  I don't shift my mood to suit the country or my party. 

Neither man showed themselves to have a strong enough or steady enough moral compass to be given the power the Executive branch now wields.  I know as a Pro-lifer, I'm not supposed to upset the apple cart when Mittmomentem is surging toward Election day.  But a person who talks openly about killing with Drones, is not pro-life.  A person who designed the government health care program used in Massachusetts that used state taxes to fund abortions, is NOT pro-life.  A man who keeps "modifying" or "evolving" his position on being Pro-life, is pro-life only on some occasions, which is the same as Not Pro-life.  He keeps saying he'll defund Planned Parenthood.  Absent a line item veto (unlikely in the extreme, didn't someone else propose this, doesn't everyone before now propose this and then not get it and not be upset about it because it lets them sign whatever such that now it's not even been proposed), how is he planning to do this? 

 I can hear my friends in the Conservative Political blogoshere's heads exploding. "SHHHHHHHHH! SSHHHHHHHH! He's better than the alternative."  It is a question of degrees. 

I can't think my friends on the liberal side of the political spectrum are so happy either, especially when the guy in charge for the past four years keeps pretending none of us pay attention to his actions or words and how they disconnect...often.   I know they aren't happy with the employment rate.  I know they're troubled by Fast and Furious, by the Drone strikes, the complete break down in security in Benghazi, the continued existence of the prison in Guantanamo, the 2000th death in Afghanistan, 900 + executive orders to end run Congress, and the erosion of civil liberties including religious civil liberties.  Not to mention the trivialization of women as the sum of their parts. 

So I'm mad because while the moderator tried to ask about foreign policy, the men stayed on their stumps, got out their sound bites about bayonets and budgets.  We didn't have a mature discussion in the arena of ideas. We had two grown men trading high school smug shots at each other while preaching to their laundry list of followers about the Bogey man the other one was and all the goodness that would follow in their elected wake. It made both men look small and the world much more than either could handle. 

Part of our problem is not so secret substituion of the 4th estate with Folger Crystal versions of journalists.  Do we honestly believe we'd be in this state if the media hadn't picked a political side rather than to serve truth first? We've been living on a fast food diet of op-eds from talking heads that sing to our own personal tastes so long, we don't know how to recognize anything but our own choices as having any validity in application of policy or politics.  

Where are our real political gadflies that sting everyone?  Shouldn't the press be discussing the total abdication of duty by the Senate to pass a budget in now 4 years?  Shouldn't the press be discussing the true unemployment rate and why what is political is not what is right, true and necessary for the country's growth. 

Shouldn't someone argue that while all spending may be stimulus, if it is a zero sum game, then for the government to expand, the private sector must shrink.  Shouldn't someone ask beyond slogans of paying your fair share and cutting taxes for small businesses, what is the limit/scope of government and what should be the limit/scope of taxes to ensure maximum liberty while fulfilling civic obligations?  Shouldn't this be somehow, discussed?   If all spending is stimulus for the economy, doesn't that argument eliminate the acknowledgement of any government waste?

 Likewise, anyone who says they'll balance the budget but there will be no pain is also woefully wrong or disingenuous.  It can't happen without actual pain.  It is a bit much however to see a leader who presideded the past four years over a stratospheric surge in spending, talk condescendingly toward anyone who proposes that anything done in the past four years might possibly have been rash, wasteful or excessive.  You can't say you will work to ballance the budget when the budgets you've proposed didn't garner even one vote in the Senate....from your own party.  You're not serious. You're not even trying.

 Lastly, an unpopular question to be sure, why would anyone who doesn't pay taxes, vote to have some? Shouldn't everyone have to kick in at least a dollar?  If everyone must pay in something, then everyone feels keenly the need for the government to be a good steward of our treasure.  Our government has been a poor steward.  We have a 16 trillion dollar deficit and we didn't even get invited to the party.  If we're serious, really serious about this, we need to know what we bought with that 16 trillion. 

Shouldn't the press be screaming Screaming, SCREAMING about the Executive having a KILL LIST?  Shouldn't the press be camped outside the home of every person involved  in the decision not to provide security or send help in the 7 hours after the initial attack on our embassy?  Shouldn't the press be investigating the 2,2 million in illegal donations and why a 15 million dollar loan was needed from Bank of America?  Shouldn't these things be the subjects of investigations from our supposed "Truth detectors?"  Do we have any way of knowing if subsequent scandals and problems for whatever administration follows will be covered up or blown up to suit the political ideologies of those doing the investigations?  If we continue to devolve into having right and left fact checkers, we might has well simply surrender the ground. We're going to be entitled to our own facts. All other facts will be ignored. In which case the slogan for our new Non-representative republic should be: Vote ignorant. Vote often. 

Sigh.  
The checks and balances of our system have all bounced.  

I know, put not your trust in princes.  But I'd like a better option than what we have and a diet version what we have, where you get the same things but with 25% less conviction.   Who wants to vote for ME or me too? 

Yeah.  The debates depressed me. Go Vote Anyway and pray for our country regardless.  Yay America.  Rah.  

Truth, Blogging and Stories

We have a world filled now with stories, opinions, agendas and myths and it is getting harder to get at true information or hard facts and hard news despite the plethora of new media venues. What is, is not what gets repeated or represented; and so an irate mentally unhinged man becomes a poster child for a political movement that some who have power and prestige despise; people who march for life are not covered or are proclaimed to be overwhelmingly old when the vast majority of those who attend are in fact quite young. Nuance has been abandoned for ideology in our modern story telling venues except when it makes an opponent more unpleasant. So we can never know if the story we hear is true True, or myth, revealing truth but being itself untrue; or just a fable, flat out piece of propaganda or absolute lie.

Today, the President's policies and positions are defined by negative space using the theory that if we could see the alternate universe where what he did was not done, we'd understand how good we have it now; and the New York Times posits that part of the reason for all the disbelief and disconnect with the intellectual elites is the greater transparency of the world these days. Sarah Palin becomes a saint to some on the right and the personification of the very worst of all possible worlds to some on the left. President Bush is portrayed as the ultimate village idiot and anyone who doesn't froth at the very mention of his name is deemed a dupe, a rube or too blinded by personal or political loyalty. The very same level of love slavishly lavished on the current commander in Chief is considered pure patriotism and the result of clear thinking about policy.

But Truth is always much more interesting and messy than any of the popular narratives or spins being put through today. All of these people, Sarah, George, Barrack, all of them are possibly greater individuals than their enemies believe, and more flawed than their press releases would reveal. The same is true of all of us. Because the mainstream and alternative medias all wear biases, some with more transparencies than others; we have no sources of pure truth, only story. We get the White House Spin, the Republican's Counter point, the MSM’s angle, the take by Rush Limbaugh, John Stewart, Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, Chris Matthews and George Stephanopoulos. We get the Times and the Post and the Standard and the Examiner and Newsweek and News busters, the Drudge Report, Politico and Real Clear Politics and twitters and bloggers. It's like we're the cop at the accident and we get all the eye witness accounts and even the television footage from the traffic camera and still, we cannot know what actually happened because none of them know or can tell or would tell the whole story. We know incompletely but we forget that we know incompletely because we have so much information. So do all the people who report the stories in their zeal to be the ones telling the stories.

We still are telling stories rather than facing the hard messy truth in the media and politics.  Part of our problem is we’ve decided we can’t know truth. Epistemologists posit that there are multiple ways of perceiving and understanding the world that are culture/time/gender/politically dependent. As such, no one is necessarily lying when they give their spin; it's their way of knowing. The problem remains, that some think truth exists but is unknowable and some think truth does not exist and some think truth is, and can be known and some think truth is, but we can only know partly. All camps claim to be correct despite the readily apparent irony of that sentence. Everyone claims to have a deeper understanding of the world, or that others have a deeper understanding of the world; Rush's "I'm always right." Keith Olberman's "Worst Person of the Week," are two versions of the very same problem.  Everyone thinks they know better, but very very few spend any time discerning anything but that which validates their own opinion.

Ultimately, these multiple arguments about truth, its relevance and its reality matter in politics and life because they determine what we think and how we will act. If all the ways of knowing together make up the composite sketch of the actual reality; then we must perpetually amass as much info as possible looking for patterns from which we can draw conclusions that reveal more truth than otherwise. If reality is ultimately unknowable because we can't understand that which extends beyond our own personal cultural template's standard deviations; if there is no actual truth, then we should only be able to recognize our own echoes; everything else is background chatter or white noise. If such is the case, we are doomed to a perpetual tower of Babel. If we believe that truth actually exists and is knowable in whole or in part; then it becomes our personal obligation to recognize when our own bias is coloring our judgment and when we are seeing things clearly.

How can we know truth? We can know only if we are awake and fully cognizant of why we write and read and think and say certain things. Truth is hard like a diamond. Life or death. Honesty or not. Yes or no. Truth has actions which echo it. "By their fruits you shall know them." A school that values excellence will show by the books in the library, the papers on the wall and the quality of instruction. A school that has lost heart is easy to spot. The same holds for an institution or an athlete or a book. You can see when there is blood in the bricks, sweat and grit on the face, heart in the words that is the art of the piece. The reasons why something happens or someone acts may be myriad, but the truth is still visible and can be seen if we seek.  Truth will out, it reveals dedication, intent, process and time.  Ultimately, if we hold that truth exists, we ought to pursue it ruthlessly as the rare edifying jewel that it is, even if it means we get a less instant gratification and happily ever after style gratification ending. 

Lives, all lives are messy even if they are lived simply; and thus we should be merciful to the foolish, the greedy, the poor spirited, the angry, the proud, the rich, the righteous and the self serving even as we discover them being foolish, greedy, poor spirited, angry, proud, hoarding, righteous and self serving.  All of us need that measure with which we measure to be larger than our lives, because all of us can see everyone else's splinters but none of our own planks. We need God to be unfair in our favor and so we should be with each other and with our hearts and words towards even those who anger or disappoint us.  We ought to recognize that God sees all our messy stories for the messy stories that they are, and still sees through them for the distilled truth that they reveal; how much or how little we believe; how much or how little we seek truth and pursue wisdom, and how much or how little we love.

Sound and Fury of a Noisy Gong Show, A.K.A. the White House Press Core Q& A

If you follow the news and there are times when I truely think I shouldn't, you know about the planted Nico Pitney of Huffington Post at the President's press conference the other day asking about a pre-arranged topic of Iran and its people.

My real question is, "Why?"

Did the President not think that he could have asked anyone other than Fox News to ask a question about what the people in Iran were thinking and hoping for? While it's true that there's been no evidence up to now that the White House Press Core were unwilling water carriers, the regulars at such meetings might have been somewhat timerous about broaching such a relevant topic.

However, I'm pretty sure if Rham Emanuel or Robert Gibbs had said it would further the dialogue and agenda set by the administration and handed out the milk bones, there would have been willing closed rank complicity behind the scenes and we'd have never known about the planted blog reporter except as some vast right wing conspiracy.

Instead, we're treated to a bad version of "the play's the thing" where the reporters get to be outraged that someone is playing with them, and that someone lobbed a pre-planned softball. What they're really mad about is, they didn't get picked to throw the ball.

Of course, when the catcher tells the batter what pitch is coming next, one should expect the swing to send it out of the park, but in this case, it was just a pitch and a bunt of a reply, designed to allow all to say, the President addressed this serious issue and the Iranian people with sincerity and thoughtfulness. Anyone not moved probably needs government health care doctors to examine them for possibly missing a heart, a brain, or a soul. Next question. "Who's going to ask me again about that fly?"

Given the level of toadiness of the media, it's hard to understand how a fly got onto the White House grounds. But then the fly did a better job of invoking a genuine response from the President than the whole Press Corp combined.

So I can't think that the President's people didn't have a reason for putting the Huffington Post so prominently in the spotlight in such a blatant way.

Maybe Rham Emanuel won a bet in a late night poker game, or Adrianna needed more traffic on her web site.

Maybe the President is flexing his political muscles to see just how much the American public will swallow to continue believing what they wish to believe. Maybe he's testing the capacity of the bowing devotees with blackberries in hand, to ignore with their own eyes and their own ears, what is presented before them, for what they wish to see.

We just don't know, and given the level of inquisitiveness remaining in the media in general about (not merely this President but all policies proposed), this is likely to be papered over with thousands of glossy overlays of the scandal involving the South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his South American honey.

Was it a big deal to plant a question? Yes and no. The question wasn't even a real biggie. The answer meant even less. But the reason behind it, well that's a real question. Wish we had a real answer.