The Downfall of the Democratic Party (written in 2005)

Yet another blast from the past in the form of an old newspaper column I wrote for the Jan. 7, 2005 edition of the Snowdrift. In it I make a mention of Barack and Joe B as being a direction the Dems need to move toward, not avoid. I'm not saying I predicted the future, but I guess even a blind nut finds a squirrel every once in a while, also, it's interesting to see how much it still applies to the BS we're dealing with today.

The Downfall of the Democratic Party

The political climate was primed for change. A faltering economy along with an extended (Which nowadays means unsuccessful) war effort overseas had left President George W. Bush vulnerable to a lot of criticism. He also isn’t the most eloquent public speaker and couldn’t debate his way out of a paper bag. John Kerry had the election within his grasp, then he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What’s been going on with those Democrats lately anyway? Of course they’ve lost the last two presidential elections with two less than inspiring candidates in Al Gore and “Ketchupman” Kerry, but what about all of the Congressional seats they’ve been losing –With November’s election the Republican Party picked up sixteen Congressional seats to increase their majority to forty— The liberal wing of our political system has been hemorrhaging for years, and there’s plenty of blame to go around.

The biggest problem with the Democratic Party is shoddy organization. In other words they’re like your 16-month-old nephew, no control of when they make a mess of themselves. Would you ever see a member of the Republican Party get on stage at the Democratic National Convention and bash his party’s presidential candidate? Not unless he wanted to endure a few rounds of Chinese nipple torture he wouldn’t.

Okay, so he’d really only lose all of his reelection campaign contributions along with any powers he may have had in the backroom committee meetings (a.k.a. “smoke-filled room shady dealings”) until he would ultimately be replaced come election time, but you get my point. But what happens when Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) jumps on stage at the GOP Convention and bashes Kerry? Nothing, unless you call punishment scratching “Zell Eats Poo” on his office desk with a penknife.

Democrats also have a tendency to try to be too much like Republicans. When Republicans lose to Democrats, do they turn around and say, "Gee we need to be more like them in order to win"? Never. But that's what Democrats do when they lose to Republicans. What does that do? It softens support among the base, it seems phony to moderates, and conservatives are going to vote real-deal Republican, not Republican Lite.

Since when was “liberal” a dirty word? There are great aspects of liberalism, just like there are great aspects of conservatism, yet John Kerry spent his entire campaign hiding from his liberal label and the party as a whole did their best to hide from their more liberal members in Howard Dean and Sen. Joe Biden (D-CT) instead of standing up for themselves and describing what the whole vision of liberalism is about a la Barack Obama (D-IL) ““If there are people in this country that are going to bed hungry and sick and sleeping in the streets, my duty as an American citizen has not been fulfilled.”

If the liberals would wake up from their fantasyland they would see a great opportunity lying before them. There is currently no party that truly, completely and unapologetically represents the interests of working-class Americans who are finding their jobs vanishing, their benefits shrinking, their towns falling on hard times, and their economic interests being ignored. That’s the party of the Old Left, that party is now dead.

Democrats need to return to their roots if they want to win. They have to find their spine. They have to rediscover their purpose and their vision. Because if liberalism is such a bad thing, why should anyone vote Democrat?

What I learned this semester

After spending two years away from the world of academia I made my much anticipated return to college life at a new University in a new state. It's been an interesting semester, so in order to celebrate it's ending (finally), I'm going to jot down a few things I learned since August.

• I don't miss Utah's embarrassingly ridiculous liquor laws

• You can try to take the South out of the University, but you can't take the University out of the South

• Refereeing a flag football game is more difficult than most people would think

• Frat games are definitely the worst to officiate.

• Cutco knives are very sharp. I almost lost the tip of a finger to one

• Kneffel is filling
  

• Deep-fried pecan pie is delicious.

• A deep-fried Snickers bar isn't worth the money.

• Clark Dining Hall is the red-headed stepchild of the NCSU dining halls.

• The NCSU Volleyball team would cut off their nose to spite their face.
  

• Wood Hall is the red-headed stepchild of the NCSU Residence Halls. On the edge of campus, no convenient bus routes to North Campus, basically an afterthought.

• Getting drunk at 10 a.m. isn't as much fun as it sounds
  

The Two-Party System: American Politics

Last week somebody from the UK asked me how the American two-party political system works, and if they have any sort of permanent leaders. Here's my answer:

Each party has a national committee that determines the party platform. This platform that the parties stand on is actually very fluid, hardly a platform at all really. If you compared the party stance on issues from fifty, or even twenty years ago, and compared them with how they feel about things today, you would find huge discrepancies that would make it seem that the two parties don't really have any ties whatsoever to the parties of today, which would seem like a big deal seeing as how they love to channel Kennedy and Reagan, but that's really not a big deal because the only goal of the Party is to get their members elected and in power. So staying consistent isn't really a concern, in fact, staying consistent quite often leads to a loss of power over the course of a decade or two. We Americans are awful flighty when it comes to knowing what we want when it comes to politics.

Anyway, the party National Committee takes the platform that they think best endears them to the largest group of voters and dictates it to the regional party committees who filter that on down to the state party committees who pass it on to the county parties, municipalities, etc. Think of it as an enormous multi-tiered fountain, but as opposed to an awesome fountain of chocolate or cheese or even Sierra Mist this is a bullshit fountain, dispensing wave after wave of excrement to the huddled masses below. The lower rungs of the ladder tolerate this because along with the bullshit, the fountain also dispenses large sums of money. This leads me to the National Committees most important function: Fund raising, because you can't get elected unless you can buy thousands of dollars worth of advertising that promotes the tawdry details of your opponents sexual escapades (true or not). The party committee doles out the cash to the candidates with the understanding that they use it to build a bullshit cannon to fire like grapeshot at unsuspecting and otherwise ordinary Americans.

But I digress.

The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee have chairmen, at the moment Howard Dean leads the Democrats and Mike Duncan for the GOP, but they are elected (or appointed? Don't know, don't care) and replaced so often that most Americans have no idea who these guys are, and those that do don't pay them much attention. The chairmen are most visible at the party National Conventions every four years when a Presidential Election comes around, only to retreat to their bullshit cave three days later never to be heard from again.

Jerry Falwell is dead!

I'm not even joking.

This from the Associated Press

LYNCHBURG, Va. -- The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority and built the religious right into a political force, died today shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University, a school executive said. He was 73.

Ron Godwin, the university's executive vice president, said Falwell, 73, was found unresponsive around 10:45 a.m. and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital. "CPR efforts were unsuccessful," he said.

I guess now he'll find out if God really is a Republican, as he suggested.

I hate to bash a dead man, but Falwell was the epitome of evangelical Christianity. For a religion based largely on tolerance Falwell was an agent of intolerance. In 1965 Reverend Falwell gave a sermon at his Thomas Road Baptist Church criticizing Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, which he sometimes referred to as the Civil Wrongs Movement. He often spoke out in favor of the racist position in those days. His views eventually shifted and was against segregation in his later years.

In the 1980s Jerry Falwell was an outspoken supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. When president PW Botha was elected President by the White South African minority, Reverend Falwell went to South Africa and made statements supporting the government there and urging American Christians to buy Krugerrands, a coin issued by the South African Government.

In 1984, he was ordered to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, California, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches "brute beasts" and "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven."

When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did, Falwell refused to pay, and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was made to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

He also used his position of power to further his political agenda. In 1994, Falwell released the straight-to-video documentary "The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton." The video connected Bill Clinton to a conspiracy theory involving Vincent Foster, James McDougall, Ron Brown, and an alleged cocaine-smuggling operation. Despite the theories being discredited by all major investigations, the video's sophisticated production techniques served as effective exposure, and sold over 150,000 copies.

Funding for the film was paid for by the Citizens for Honest Government, to which Jerry Falwell paid $200,000 in 1994 and 1995. In 1995 Citizens for Honest Government paid two Arkansas state troopers to make allegations supporting the conspiracy about Vincent Foster. These two troopers were Roger Perry and Larry Patterson who also were paid for their allegations in the Paula Jones case.

Falwell's infomercial for the 80-minute tape included footage of Falwell interviewing a silhouetted journalist who was afraid for his life. The journalist accused Clinton of orchestrating the deaths of several reporters and personal confidants who had gotten too close to his illegalities. However, it was subsequently revealed that the silhouetted journalist was, in fact, Patrick Matrisciana, the producer of the video and president of Citizens for Honest Government ."Obviously, I'm not an investigative reporter," Matrisciana admitted (to investigative journalist Murray Waas), "and I doubt our lives were actually ever in any real danger. That was Jerry's idea to do that ... He thought that would be dramatic."

In an interview for the 2005 documentary The Hunting of the President Falwell admitted, "To this day I do not know the accuracy of the claims made in The Clinton Chronicles," but failed to condemn the poor research.

I'm never happy when somebody dies, Falwell wasn't a monster and there are far worse people in the world, but I hope the intolerance he preached will fade as he slips further into the history pages.

More Thoughts on Politics

I recently read a Time Magazine article about ann coulter, and the drift I caught was that if you regarded her as an entertainer or a comedian that her remarks made more sense.

I took the writers advice, I read one of her slander columns as a humor piece, and I found it mildly humorous. Good for her, but for the sake of her career she probably ought to stick to hateful, venemous punditry, it's more lucrative, and her humor is only lukewarm and wouldn't sell. For somebody that calls herself a champion of the Right, the side of the political spectrum that claims to be 'moral' she sure gets around. As her former close friend David Brock once said of Anita Hill, coulter is "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty."

Note: I have nothing against promiscuous women (call me!), but I have everything against hypocrites, especially loud ones.

The reporter had a point, but 'jokesters' like coulter and those of her ilk such as Don Imus, Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Bill Maher, Sean Hannity, rush limbaugh and others are being regarded by many as commentators that ought to be taken seriously. In reality they bring nothing of substance to any sort of discussion or debate. They only bring hate and anger, which is poluting our cultural and political climate while they reap the rewards of ratings, appearance fees and book sales.

Political Apathy

Around November I kept up real well with the political scene. I was a real polemic, I had very strong opinions, it was great fun.

Since then my drive has fizzled. Not my interest, just my energy toward the modern day politics, in particular anything to do with Presidential candidates. I read the news and try to keep up with things, but when it comes to the '08 Presidential race... eh... I'll care in a year, I'll see who's left standing and go from there. I don't want to spend all kinds of time studying the positions of these potential candidates just to find that they wont be in the race a year from now.

I like Obama, but we'll see where I stand when his platform comes into focus; Edwards is okay, but I still have nightmares about his debate with Cheney in '04; I know very little about Richardson, he's mildly intriguing, but I don't much feel like researching him because like I said I'm apathetic, so we'll see what happens.

On the republican side, it looks like McCain is crapping out already, and I don't see much hope for Romney. First of all his name is Mitt, and second he's Mormon, which seems to rub almost everybody the wrong way (almost to the point where it's comical).

Things I Think v3

A little more long-winded this time around.

• Solid reporting again from the Associated Press. This article answered many questions I had that were left unanswered by other reports on this story.

• I didn't notice the DOW Jones Industrial Average fell more than 400 points today, did you? It doesn't seem like much, only 4% of it's total, but it seems like a whole lot more when you consider that $632 Billion was lost. $632 BILLION!

• So why the Hell are they moving Daylight Savings Time around like a chess piece this year?

• I'm thinking of getting a digital camera with my newly discovered wealth and photobloggin' a little bit.

• I watched parts of Airborne on HBO last night. It's not half as cool as I remember it being. Seth Greene is in dire need of exposure to sunlight, Shane McDermott really isn't all that cool, but Jack Black was amusing. I don't remember him being in the movie. He has short hair too, very strange.

• I was debating politics with somebody the other day and he says to me, "it's not about Russia and China, that's a red herring." WTF does that mean anyway? It just makes me crave tuna.

• One dare I would never take is to spend a week in Saudi Arabia amongst the locals. Same with Iran and Pakistan. I couldn't feel safe there.

• NCAA Basketball beats the NBA for drama and entertainment on any given night. You can't play 82 games and give it your all in every single one. I don't care who you are.
  

• Being a nerdy coin collector I feel comfortable saying that Euro coins are a whole lot cooler than our plain Jane stuff.

• "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" is based on a true story. Who knew?

• A lady looking to be in her late fifties came in today and placed an ad for an Estate Notice for her husband that had just died of a brain tumor. Like a lot of people in this area she proceeded to tell me the whole story, and I listened mostly because she probably just wanted somebody, anybody to listen. She told me about the last eight months of his life, how much he loved his cars, and how he would never admit to anybody that he was going to die soon. It was very hard to listen to and I'm sure it was much harder for her to experience. I deal with half a dozen of these notices every week and I've never really thought about the people these names belong to.
  

Things I Think

I keep a piece of paper in my wallet. I use it to record things I think about that day. Sometimes thoughtful, rarely profound, and mostly useless. Anyway, I'm going to post them here.

• I'm not much of a clothes shopper, unless it involves the Old Navy clearance rack and pants that look great on me.

• I'm usually pretty easy going. I don't get mad at people often, but if you really want to piss me off mention in my presence that you believe the internment of US citizens of Japanese dissent during WWII was a great idea.

• Who is Ricardo Montalban?

• Am I the only person that doesn't care that Britney Spears shaved her head?

• I'm told people here have had complaints about my ability to stay on top of things here. I wish they would talk to me about it so I know which areas I need to work on. All I know is that I work my ass off and I don't take a smoke break every hour. I barely have time for a lunch break.

• I don't think there are any cameras in this building...

• That article left too many questions unanswered. I don't give a rats ass about her home design business. I want to know why her husband decided they weren't returning to the US. How was she finally arrested? Why is her daughter choosing to stay in Kuwait?

• I have a racist relative. He says he isn't racist, that he hates everybody. That may be true, but he also happens to really really hate Mexicans and anybody that might look Mexican.

• A buttered piece of toast always lands buttered side down. A cat always lands on his feet. If you strap a piece of toast, buttered side up, to a cat, does the cat defy the laws of gravity and fly?
  

Pompous pundits that are hurting America

I used to watch the Fox News Channel (fair and balanced? HA!) and feel lucky that the left side of the political spectrum in our country didn't sponsor (or at least we didn't take them even semi-seriously) pompous windbags that skewed fact and manipulated emotions in order to spin their viewpoint in a way that makes them appear as not just opinions, but as facts that no red-blooded, flag-toting American would ever imagine questioning. Frequently they will bring on guests that have an opposing viewpoint, but when they do they make sure to have a couple right-wing hitmen of their own in the wings to properly gang up on the guy and interrupt him so often he has to yell in order to get a word in, which in turn makes him look like a douche.

So like I was saying I was feeling somewhat smug that liberals didn't support this type of pundit when I stumbled upon one: Bill Maher, host of HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher. That guy is a Grade A Douchebag. His perches in his power chair and spouts off commantary that is aimed more at getting what turn out to be light chuckles from his audience as opposed to making any kind of sense. His solution to a guest that has an opposing viewpoint that brings up any evidence that he can't find an answer to is to yell and holler and call George W. an idiot. I used to like to watch him on Politically Incorrect on ABC when I was 15, but then I grew up. His comedy is drab when it isn't completely unfunny and is often borrowed and/or rehashed from somebody else. Hell, the guy can't even cause controversy on his own terms. In 2001 he said on air regarding the War on Terrorism: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." Afterward companies pulled sponsorships and his contract was not renewed by ABC, and at the same time he was awarded received the President's Award (for "championing free speech") from the Los Angeles Press Club.

Seems pretty controversial right? It would be, except for the fact that Maher was only repeating what his guest, Dinesh D'Souza, had just barely said. On the other side he can take credit for another controversial remark where he said that "...dogs are like retarded children."

I know what the conservatives are thinking: "At least our pompous windbags are upstanding, moral gentlemen." To that I have three words: Those Who Trespass. None of these guys are perfect, so let's not try to justify and/or dignify anything here.

Nobody comes out clean in this argument. It's all a load of crap that just needs to go away. Why does the modern political landscape have to be so damned mean? We need open and honest debate in this country now as much as ever. So let's stop demonizing those that disagree with us. Let's stop questioning their mental state and patriotism. Let's compromise and actually try and find solutions to our problems. Let's get rid of all this hot air and start talking again.