I have been relatively silent on political issues since the 2010 elections that saw Republicans take back the house and fill some seats in the Senate. Why this is I don't fully know; part of it was probably my disappointment with the election results. But I think the rest of it may have been because I was starting to feel that my commentary had become a bit too caustic. Too much focus on the personalities that hog the limelight and not enough talk on the issues that those personalities are trying, in their own haphazard and clunky way, to resolve.
I think this may have been a reflection on the news I was watching and listening to; if your main national news source in CNN, you tend to focus on what they are focusing on. Politics may be number one at CNN, but unfortunately politics is mostly made up of personalities. Add to that an attempt to try and hear things from the "other side" by listening to Sean Hannity and reading Glenn Beck and Larry Schweikhart and you make one very antsy American who loves nothing more than to heap coals on the likes of a Palin or Limbaugh (though the second one probably deserves it).
This has all changed. I have stopped watching CNN and, aside from checking the website a few times here and there to make sure the World hasn't blown up (they would be the first to know), I really haven't had anything to do with them. I don't listen to Sean Hannity anymore, and I have been delighted to find that Palin has returned to Alaska to hibernate for the winter and think about whether she wants to run for president or not. For that matter, I rarely have the opportunity to watch The Daily Show any more, though I listen to The Bugle every week.
Have I abandoned the news altogether? Oh no, far from it. I still subscribe to my local paper, which I feel I do more out of charity than anything else, but its my best source for local news. I listen to NPR (which is National Public Radio or Nazi Public Radio, wherever your political heart takes you). And, in an amazing conglomeration of old and new, I have started subscribing to one of our better known communist rags, The New York Times, which gets delivered to my Kindle everyday over the vast network of tubes that constitute the Internet. It's amazing to me that everything old is, in its way, new again.
Thus, if I am not better informed (The New York Times is hardly infallible, as has been seen with some recent ethical issues), I at least feel that my information has a little more depth and along with it a little more detachment.
I have always felt that is our duty to discuss and debate the issues of the day so that we might be better citizens. And so, in a new state of mind, I re-enter the political blogging arena.
All that being said, it's incredibly ironic that my very first post dedicated to politics concerns my delight over Glenn Beck leaving his television program. It's doubly ironic that I found about this when John Stewart gave him a resounding send-up and send-off on The Daily Show, on one of the rare days when I get to watch it. Seriously, when I found out I did a little jig in my living room (though in the future it will be shown that the jig was the product of British Propaganda, and is cut from film footage of me saluting the cat on completing yet another day in her long and illustrious life). John Stewart does a hilarious impression of Beck, though its naturally over the top..way over the top.
My joy was arrested by the thought that, perhaps, in being struck down Beck will become more powerful than we can ever imagine in some kind of Obi-Wan Kenobish kind of way. It's already known that he will keep working with Fox, and maybe in addition to that he's going to criss cross the country in 2012 getting people riled up for the presidential elections, the end of the world, or both. Or perhaps he will hover in space, and as Sarah Palin is flying her x-wing down the trench that holds the only weakness in Obama's diabolical political machine, her eyes glued to a GPS unit, Beck's ghostly voice will tell her to use the Force (which in this case would probably be the power of Christ, as "the Force" is probably too pagan/comsic and largely under copyright protection by Lucasfilm)...
Well, I guess not much has changed after all. Like I said; everything old is new again.
Notes for the uninitiated:
Larry Schweikhart wrote A Patriot's History of the United States, among other books. It is a history written from a very "Republican" point of view. Basically, the founders were awesome, virtually everyone else increased the size of government, and Reagan is a god. I found that it was very selective in that it focused on things large and small that fit into his narrative on our nation, while ignoring many of the things that didn't fit. I didn't like it much at all, but I struggled through the entire volume.
"The Bugle" is a podcast released from the "The Times" of London where Daily Show Correspondent John Oliver and British comedian Andy Zaltzmann lampoon the news as best they can, delivering a healthy dose of bull shit and bad puns along the way. Free in t-tunes. Worth every penny.
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