Read Joe Gandleman's post Are Bloggers Merely Bullies With Computers on The Moderate Voice. It goes a long way toward the kind of discourse we need in politics.
And... I hafta say -- I LIKE Mirror on America. Maybe it's the rakish photo of WEB DuBois, or maybe the link to the Sports Illustrated article about Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron. Maybe it's that I miss canvassing for independent voters' signatures in a black sea of hot asphalt at this time of the season (petitioning)... Ahh, The Season: It's hot, it's July, I knock on an independent voter's door, I ask for a signature... They invite me in for a bottle of water... The Game is on.... I have to tear myself away to go to the next door!... Maybe it's something I learned from Fred Newman about life and baseball. Call me crazy, but I just hafta say --- I LIKE Barry Bonds.... and I like Hank Aaron too... Smart. Independent. Anyway, I have to take a shower... back to the blog: Check it out!
2 comments:
So Gandleman doesn't want us to be angry about the war. Let's just have 500 Americans die in the next year. Cut the Iraqis killed by U.S. air strikes in half. Moderate center. Reason. Oh, I'm angry. Shame on me!
And here I thought independents had their own voice, they weren't just some point on the spectrum between left and right.
We are engaged in a brutal war of choice. There were no WMDs, and the Bush administration put a "hit" on those who would dare to tell the truth. Now over 600,000 Iraqi people are dead because of those lies.
I don't feel polite about this.
We watched New Orleans left to drown before our very eyes. The living personification of Grover Norquist's great dream of a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.
I don't feel polite about this.
American citizens can be taped without a warrent. We are keeping people in Kafkaesque prisons in Gitmo, with no charges leveled against them for years. We subject them to inhuman forms of torture, thumbing our nose at international rules of war.
NO! I DON'T FEEL POLITE ABOUT THIS!
So I'm not interested in a polite dialog with the Right anymore than I'm interested in unicorns. I'm not interested in unicorns because they're not real. I'm not interested in a polite dialog with the Right, because the potential to reach common ground in such throughly polarized times is about as likely as finding that unicorn and keeping her as my pet!
We may want all sorts of things, but we have to deal with the material conditions at hand. There's a FIGHT going on and good people need to take a stand, they need to take sides!
That's what those "bully" bloggers are doing and I commend them for it.
Post a Comment