Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Damn This Bleeding Heart

Listening (by coincidence) to Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Tears for Fears

I don't like talking about politics.  Not because I am opposed to sharing ideas, but because political discussions are so rarely about sharing ideas, and instead focused on explaining to the other person (who is obviously a dim bulb in the first place or they wouldn't disagree with you to begin with) why you are right and they are wrong.  

The current fiasco in Washington doesn't make me angry, nor righteously indignant.  No, it makes me sad.  Sad that the motivation of certain House members is not the good of the people of their districts, nor the people of their country, but instead obstructionism, attention-seeking, and grandstanding.  Sad that people willfully elected these wingnuts who spout bullshit and sometimes can't even form coherent sentences, and that their domination of state legislatures means that  US Congressional Districts have been redrawn to insure that their brand of wing-nuttery will prosper in the future.  Sad that American conservatism can be held hostage by a minority (between 30 and 80 house members, depending upon who you ask) and that the speaker of the house won't do anything about it.  

My problem isn't that these house members - and ostensibly their consituencies - are conservative, nor that they label themselves as Republican.  My problem isn't that they're religious and I'm not, nor that they own guns, and I don't.  My problem is that they are willfully ignorant, intolerant, reactionary, and somehow all believe that they can gain their party's nomination  for president in 2016.  My problem is that they believe what they believe because they believe it, and for no other reason.  My problem is that they have been elected to serve but  instead are using their position to extort extreme concessions on a bill that both the Supreme Court and a voting American populace have upheld - concessions intended to knock the President down a peg, concessions intended to demonstrate the power of their particular brand of zealotry, and concessions that, worst of all, are intended to get them time on TV. 

And now they won't back down, because to do so is to admit defeat and to accept humiliation.  So government will remain shutdown, and this faction will no doubt convince their district that they are martyrs, like the defenders at Masada.

Editor's Note: The Affordable Care Act is not socialized medicine, not in any meaningful way.  HOWEVER, There are some ways in which socialized medicine is actually really cool.  Just the other day I heard that a strong correlation has been found between a pregnant mother's level of gluten autoimmunity and the chances of Autism in her offspring.  Essentially, a mother that has a significant autoimmune response to gluten (whether she knows she has it or not) is far more likely to have an autistic child.  Was this correlation unearthed by private industry?  Nope - it was found by analyzing blood samples and the other exhaustive records kept on every Swedish infant - records that exist because of the country's socialized medical system.  


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