Political Junky
Being a political junky is like having a hole in a tooth. You can’t keep from probing the tooth with your tongue, which hurts. The political junky, no matter how hard he tries, can’t leave politics alone. Eventually, poking around the political news raises his blood pressure and sends peristaltic waves of pain and annoyance along every trunk and fiber of his nervous system.
I’m back from vacation less than a week. I swore off politics. I didn’t need the aggravation. The hell with it. Then, without intending to---in an early morning fog---I clicked on Alternet and it started all over again. Grrrr.
This sort of thing happened to me when I was trying to quit smoking. Quit for five months, went to a party, knocked back some tequila and looked down at my hand to see I was holding a lighted ciggy. Rat shit!
So this morning I find myself reading a Molly Ivins column about the dumbness of Democrats. I offer you:
"The unholy combination of theocracy and plutocracy that now rules this country is, in fact, enabled by dumb liberals. Many a weary liberal on the Internet and elsewhere has been involved in the tedious study of the entrails from the last election, trying to figure out where Democrats went wrong. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I can guarantee you where they're going wrong for the next election: 73 Democratic House members and 18 Democratic senators voted for that hideous bankruptcy "reform" bill that absolutely screws regular people." (link)
What is to be done? Well, for openers we should find honest-to-God Democrats to run against the 18 and the 73. Challengers may not win but it’ll remind the incumbents where some of us stand.
After Thought
My days of voting for a Democrat just because he or she is "better than the other guy" are over. Those "better-than-the-other-guy" Democrats too often turn out not to be all that much better. (See Ivins column above.)
I’ll vote Green, or Socialist-Labor; I’ll only vote for someone who stands up for what I believe is right. When I do, and if the conservatives win again, don’t come whining to me that it’s all my fault. Take your complaints to a wishy-washy Democratic Party.
I feel better now.
