It was perfectly okay to call President Bush a “chimp”, but any such comparison involving Barack Obama is racist. Portraying Barack Obama as The Joker is “dangerous”; doing the same to President Bush was “brilliant.” Say Anything quotes a DNC Press release that says that “anger and discord did not serve Republicans well in 2008,” while descriptions used to describe the anger and discord accurately describe the sort of things seen from Democrats as well. President Bush’s warnings that rogue nations could get nuclear weapons and provide them to terrorists were “fearmongering”, while President Obama’s declarations that unemployment could hit double-digits if the stimulus package wasn’t passed (oops) and that we must pass healthcare reform if we ever want to improve the deficit (huh?) are, well, not fearmongering at all, you right-wing fascist!

All of this makes me very tired. It reminds me of a bumpersticker that Kevin Baker (I think) has posted before, which read “Dissent Is Was Patriotic – Now that we’re in charge, shut the hell up” (or something along those lines).

I believe that most^[a] people who want to give the government more power to intervene in the economy, healthcare, and pretty much everything else honestly mean well. I think they’re misguided and dangerous, but I think they mean well. Many of them are intelligent and honest and I enjoy discussing issues with those people. The problem is that they’re largely drowned out by those people who believe all of the things that appear in the top paragraph above.
All of this is part of the reason why blogging has been slower around here lately. I don’t care for the Republican party, but I care a hell of a lot less for the Democratic party, since the freedoms they want to infringe upon mean a lot more to me than the ones that the Republicans tend to step on. So, the current Democratic control of both the Legislative and Executive branches of the federal government (not to mention their control of my state government) is somewhat disheartening.

There are also other reasons for the slower blogging. I’m still participating in the Read 100 challenge from the Kanawha County library system, and have picked up my pace there considerably. I’ve taken up a small project outside of work that’s eating up some additional time, and I’ve volunteered to help the church’s choir by manning the sound board during services.

Of course, there’s also the fact that I’m married now, which provides me (much to my wife’s chagrin) an actual live human being in the house who can listen to my rants. That somewhat reduces my need to write about a lot of these topics.

All of that said, I’m going to try to do better starting this week. I’m going to aim for at least one post a day Monday through Friday, and I’ll try to get a weekend post in as often as possible.

1. Not all, by any means. There also exist, on both sides of the political spectrum, those who take up the arguments of well meaning people simply because they see those arguments as a means to an end, where the desired end is “more power.” [↩]