Thursday, February 23, 2012
Anyone believing one of those four Republican contenders is superior to Barack Obama is seriously deranged. They're fighting over what amounts to maybe 10% of the American electorate, the most hardcore, radical right segment of the Republican base. Romney says he's to the right of Santorum on birth control, & Santorum is personally against all birth control but wants to reassure us this won't influence his actions as president. They believe birth control promotes teen age sex & therefore teenage pregnancies. Huh? Try figuring that one out. This is an issue for the general election? Barack Obama is waging an all-out assault on religious freedom (because, of course, he's a closet Muslim, the radical Islamists love him despite the fact that he ordered the take down of bin Laden). They hardly mentioned, you know, jobs in last night's debate. Heck, they wish GM & Chrysler had failed & gone out of business altogether just to make an ideological point that guviment shouldn't meddle in preserving American manufacturing & employment. Rather than challenge the depth of proposed defense spending cuts, a legit conservative thing to do, three of them refuse to acknowledge that any cuts are possible. They believe not only that gasoline can be $2.50 gal, but should be $2.50. Oh, we have no problem with hydrocarbons & the environment. All we have to do is drill, grind up shale & shovel it into our gas tanks, & maybe conquer & occupy Iran & take their oil, since that worked so well for us in Iraq. Romney, if nominated, will have to choose some nutcase as his vice presidential candidate because the whacko Christian right isn't buying any of his heretical Mormon lies about being an authentic conservative. This is the screwiest primary ever. I look at these guys & think, didn't their party produce Robert Taft, Everett Dirkson, Barry Goldwater? Dirkson even supported civil rights legislation, didn't think it tainted his conservative credentials. & they make Ronald Reagan sound like towering intellect.
To win , an insurgent candidate usually has to make voters believe the incumbent is too small for the job. So nailing the incumbent on a series of small issues can backfire. Since voters want to vote for someone who will do something, it's actually quite tricky to run on the premise that the current officeholder is doing too much. That's where the attack on "Obamacare" may fall short, because it matches a president who allegedly did too much against a candidate who would do nothing at all except try to put everything back the way was, which means a case has to be made for the way it was.
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In sort of related matter, the owners of the Empire State Building declined without explanation a request to light the building red in honor of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan's elevation to Cardinal. The Republican congressman making the request was miffed. He seems to have forgotten that Dolan & the Catholic bishops have been at the center of the birth control health insurance coverage controversy, & are still fighting through their political proxies, so it's not just as he says a matter of honoring Dolan because he's a "humble" man who served food to the poor on Ash Wednesday. The public humility of powerful Catholic clerics is a practiced manner, an unwritten requirement, as they rise in the Church hierarchy. New York's Archbishops, the most visible in America, are always "humble," just ordinary parish priests at heart the way Doctor McCoy, most famous, respected physician in the Federation on Star Trek claimed he was just a "simple country doctor, Jim."
Lighting the building red for Dolan a few months ago would have gone mostly unremarked upon. Doing it now would only remind New Yorkers of Dolan's vocal opposition to birth control & marriage equality. It doesn't excuse some of the inappropriate events & people the building lights may have marked over the years. If you can't figure out why the ESB is lit certain colors, it probably shouldn't be lit those colors.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
To win , an insurgent candidate usually has to make voters believe the incumbent is too small for the job. So nailing the incumbent on a series of small issues can backfire. Since voters want to vote for someone who will do something, it's actually quite tricky to run on the premise that the current officeholder is doing too much. That's where the attack on "Obamacare" may fall short, because it matches a president who allegedly did too much against a candidate who would do nothing at all except try to put everything back the way was, which means a case has to be made for the way it was.
***
In sort of related matter, the owners of the Empire State Building declined without explanation a request to light the building red in honor of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan's elevation to Cardinal. The Republican congressman making the request was miffed. He seems to have forgotten that Dolan & the Catholic bishops have been at the center of the birth control health insurance coverage controversy, & are still fighting through their political proxies, so it's not just as he says a matter of honoring Dolan because he's a "humble" man who served food to the poor on Ash Wednesday. The public humility of powerful Catholic clerics is a practiced manner, an unwritten requirement, as they rise in the Church hierarchy. New York's Archbishops, the most visible in America, are always "humble," just ordinary parish priests at heart the way Doctor McCoy, most famous, respected physician in the Federation on Star Trek claimed he was just a "simple country doctor, Jim."
Lighting the building red for Dolan a few months ago would have gone mostly unremarked upon. Doing it now would only remind New Yorkers of Dolan's vocal opposition to birth control & marriage equality. It doesn't excuse some of the inappropriate events & people the building lights may have marked over the years. If you can't figure out why the ESB is lit certain colors, it probably shouldn't be lit those colors.
Labels: religion, THE election
