What's At Stake?

Monday

Good to see that W's folks are worried enough that they've begun the mudslinging and flag-waving... and that it's not (yet) working well for them.

And that The Economist quoted the American Queen Mother as saying something along the lines of, "It's starting to feel like I've seen this movie before."

(What a blogging faux pas, I know: electing to cite what I remember rather than rummaging around the piles of stuff to find the exact quote!)

Disappointing that the Washington Post, of all papers, should have wagged its editorial finger at the Spanish electorate for having thrown out a government caught lying to its people one too many times about the whys and whos of violence. As if the refusal ever even to SEEM to give Terror a victory were more important than getting the "You misheard us! We never said it was ETA. We said [Al-Qa]eda!" folks out of office. Is a nation really to be expected to vote back into power a group that lies to the public about who might have attacked them? What's next, leading them into a war for fabricated reasons?

Hmm...

But best of all to see this past weekend, as Spring arrived, the pics (of the mass itself and of the faces comprising the mass) of the more than 1M people out in the streets of Rome for peace and against terrorism.

As it turns out, these folks marching past the ruins of the Forum remind us, it's possible to be against terrorism AND against empire.

Monday

About a week back, myself, Friday and a friend were talking about whether we thought Gens X & Y were, for the most part, (to caricature the conversation) still opting-out of the political process, and if so, why that might be.

And given recent attention (check this and this out, for example) to this question, thought I'd rain on the optimism parade a bit.

It SHOULD be no surprise to anyone that economic hope is now a key issue for these generations. But can KERRY genuinely mobilize that hope, specifically in the swing states?

Being the lesser of two evils on this is OF COURSE not sufficient to bring out the youth vote. And, at least right now, it doesn't seem like Kerry is going to rock the youth vote.

I know that some of my fellow Days of the Week here feel that consistently and vociferously clarifying how JFKerry is the far lesser evil than W. will accomplish all that a blog of ordinary citizens can politically accomplish - more dedicated bloggers can provide better flashlights, but the objective is the same.

But what about for the folks who aren't going to change their vote or get mobilized to vote in the first place out of outrage at misuses and abuses of power? Their answer to "What's at stake?" is "Not enough promise to bother."

All that said, there's cause for some cautious optimism in the current Gallup results on the breakdown in 2000's Red, Purple, and Blue states:
- withOUT Nader in the race
- WITH Nader in the race (takes away from Kerry only; whatever about 2000, he's unambiguously a spoiler this time)

Monday

As Friday said to me the other day, it's actually somewhat interesting that W. is going to some length (though what a risk-free length that is) this early in the campaign to ensure that the Fire-n-Brimstone Brigade continues to consider him Their Man in Washington.

Or, more precisely, tries to ensure that they come out and vote at all.

Could it be that he's trying to get check his ideological boxes early so that, later on in the season, he isn't giving Kerry's folks more fodder every day for the Extremism angle?

Unlike Mr Bill, Kerry'd hardly be likely to make his first act as Prexy anything related to the Closet, so it's hardly a question of choosing between a bigot and a champion of gay rights in November, but I couldn't resist closing with Teddy K's observation that W. will

go down in history as the first president to try to write discrimination back into the Constitution.

Ok, actually, I couldn't resist closing with a few bits of entertainment from, ah, let's say a pretty different perspective on what's at stake in this election:

- this niceness

- and this gem, about which I have only one question: isn't the use of the word "agitprop" in the quote below a DEAD GIVEAWAY that the putative conservative is, in fact, an unregenerate MAOIST SPY trying to cover her true allegiance with a veneer of zeal for America? (As her supposedly-unjustly-shrugged-off Atlas, Senator Joe McCarthy, would have said, "Ma'am, you're saying exactly what I would say if I were, in fact, a Communist spy.")

From Hiss to Clinton: How, at every critical moment for the Democratic Party for the last 50 years, liberals would wage monstrous campaigns of disinformation and liberal agitprop

If it weren't for the fact that such vitriol is coming out of the halls of Congress and the Oval Office, we could all laugh at this stuff, however popular it's proving at the bookstores, but as it is, I just keep wondering when we're going to see the Patriot Act's re-up renamed the Alien & Sedition Act, Part Deux...