Congress has just voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Good.

It was a stupid and short-sighted policy from the start. Honestly, it really doesn’t matter what you think about gay marriage or gay people generally. If someone is willing to wear the uniform and carry a weapon, and they’re physically and emotionally capable of doing so, what does it matter who they choose to love or what they do with their genitalia?

For all the good it will do. I try not to be too sour about this and remember that we Americans are privileged to be able to cast our votes and have our voices heard, etc., etc. But I have to say, it’s sometimes difficult to gin up any real enthusiasm for voting when you live in a place that’s so overwhelmingly tilted toward one side of the partisan spectrum… and your philosophy aligns with the other side. Hell, the Democrats didn’t even run a candidate for state-level representative in my district this year. I had a choice between a far-right Republican and a somewhat-less-far-right Republican who’s running as an Independent. And on the federal level, the only Democrat who ever manages to win in Utah — and he’s not even my representative, naturally — is so much of a Blue Dog that he’d probably be called a Republican any other place in the country, and yet he still has to fight tooth-and-nail every election against those who cry that he’s too liberal.

I understand why people don’t participate in the process, I really do. When it feels like your vote and your voice don’t matter, that things are going to go a certain way regardless of what you think or feel or do, and moreover they’re always going to go that way, well, what’s the point? You may as well be farting into a strong wind for all the impact you have on the inevitable outcome. And yet I go and do it every two years anyhow. It might be because my parents and Schoolhouse Rock instilled me with a sense of civic responsibility, even in the face of utter futility. But I suspect it’s something more childish, a simple act of defiance intended to show somebody, somewhere, that not everybody in this state is marching in lock-step, that there is a different opinion out there. Not that my decidedly left-of-center opinion counts one bit in Utah, of course. And so goes another election year…

Jaquandor wrote something insightful over at Byzantium’s Shores this morning:

…a blogger I read recently wrote that President Obama has brought all of his woes upon himself, and that the Tea Party only exists because of his excesses. “The Tea Party wouldn’t exist without him,” this fellow wrote.

 

But…of course the Tea Party would exist without him. The Tea Party would have happened to any Democrat elected President in 2008, because for all the grass-roots mythology the Tea Parties like to indulge, the fact is very simple: the Tea Party is nothing more than the same pissed-off Republicans who crawl out of the woodwork en masse every time a Democrat is in office. President Hillary Clinton would have faced a Tea Party. So would President Joseph Biden, President John Kerry, President…anyone at all from the Democratic Party.

This mirrors something I’ve thought off and on ever since Barack Obama’s election. It’s really not his policies or his personality that have got people on the right foaming at the mouth. I don’t even think it’s his Muslim-sounding name or his race (although I certainly don’t discount any of these things as contributing factors). When you get right down to brass tacks, the biggest problem is simply that a very sizable segment of the population cannot abide the thought of anyone other than a Republican sitting in the Oval Office. Conservatives like to gripe about the culture of entitlement that they think liberals promote, but what else could you call the obstinate conviction that the presidency belongs to their side alone except an overblown sense of entitlement?

We’ve seen this before, of course, during the Clinton years. The Big Dog may have eventually revealed some major (and exploitable) character flaws, but he had enemies searching for those weaknesses before he even took his oath of office, for no good reason that I’ve ever been able to determine other than his party affiliation. A lot of people, especially here in Utah, just couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that 12 years of Republican presidency were over. And I think the exact same reflexive denial took root the moment Barack Obama took the reins from G.W. Bush.

A lot of things from the Clinton era seem to be repeating themselves, actually. The Republicans are once again threatening to shut down the government if they don’t get their way. They’ve come up with a new Contract on, er, Pledge to America. Even Newt Gingrich has raised his beady-eyed, porcine head once again. And on the other side of the aisle, we’ve got a Democratic majority that is disorganized, disheartened, ineffectual, needlessly and inexplicably cowardly, utterly incapable of standing up for itself in the face of all the crazy bullshit, and very likely going to lose big in a few weeks.

The stench of deja vu is nauseating.

I hate to get all inflammatory on such a pleasant Friday afternoon, but I think this is probably worth it. A buddy of mine sent me this chart a few days ago, and I’ve since seen it on a number of blogs. It’s a real doozy. Study it. Ponder it. Think about everything our nation has done to itself and others in the last decade, and then consider the concept of proportionality:

Continue Reading…

I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned this subject before, so it probably appears to be coming out of the blue, but I really liked what Kevin Drum had to say earlier this week about Cuba, and thought it warranted repeating:

I’m opposed to the Cuba embargo because I think it’s foolish policy. But I’m really, really opposed to travel restrictions to Cuba. If the Cuban government wants to keep us out of Cuba, that’s one thing. Cuba is a dictatorship, after all. But the United States isn’t, and my government has no right to restrict where I go. Period. The travel embargo is a policy that fits the old Soviet Union better than it does the United States. America is a free country and American citizens should be allowed to travel anywhere they want.

Hear, hear! I’ve never understood our policies toward Cuba, going all the way back to a tenth-grade social studies course where I shocked my conservative, old-school, red-baiting teacher by questioning why we needed to be afraid of this tiny, impoverished country just because they had a different system of government from ourselves. Maybe the embargo and travel restrictions made sense during the dark days immediately after the revolution and the Missile Crisis, but the Cold War ended 20 years ago. Castro’s Soviet sponsors are long gone, we’ve been trading freely with Communist China since the 1970s, and American tourists are taking pictures of themselves in the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam. Vietnam, for God’s sake. So why is Cuba quarantined as if the whole island is radioactive? It’s not like the embargo has even accomplished anything — Fidel and his brother remain firmly in charge after decades. They’re down there laughing at the impotent giant to the north. And maybe that’s the real reason we stubbornly carry on with a policy that was formulated in the Mad Men era: pride. We don’t want to concede defeat to the hairy little revolutionary who put a stop to the hedonistic party zone we previously enjoyed just 90 miles from our shores. Either that or our politicians are too afraid of angering the Cuban-American voters in Florida, which is probably more the case. Either way, I think it’s stupid to prolong these policies. I hope it’ll be possible before too much longer for me to visit Hemingway’s old house, enjoy a legendary Cuban cigar and a mojito, and marvel at the ancient Detroit steel that supposedly still roams the frozen-in-time streets of Havana.

As for Drum’s comment about Americans traveling anywhere they like without a hassle, I say hell yes! I don’t even like the fact that we now need passports to visit Canada and Mexico. We’re supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but I think we’ve let our post-9/11 fears push us uncomfortably down the road to becoming a “papers, please” society like the ones that were always the bad places in the movies I grew up on…

As previously stated, I have never smoked pot nor do I have any inclination to ever alter that condition. Nevertheless, I have become convinced that it’s time to change our nation’s destructive, expensive, and ultimately futile drug policies. Consider the following (just ignore the psychadelic animation, retro film clips, and moldy damn-hippie music, which regrettably trivialize the otherwise rational argument being presented):

Here’s a little more food for thought: that promised $6 billion in annual tax revenue is exactly the amount by which President Obama is proposing to expand NASA’s budget. You want to go back to the moon or to Mars? It just might be possible — or at least a little more plausible — if we get practical about turning mary-jane and other assorted money-sinks into revenue streams.

My thanks to Sullivan for posting this video. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the “4/20” reference in this entry’s title, it seems that this date, April 20, a.k.a. 4/20 or just 420, has become a sort of counterculture holiday. The University of Colorado in Boulder hosts the pre-eminent celebration of this day; every year, thousands of people gather on the U of C’s quad and light up at exactly 4:20 PM in a sort of communal mass toke. Not my sort of thing, but hey, I’m basically a live-and-let-live kind of guy…

As we go about commemorating what happened in Oklahoma City fifteen years ago today, I’d like to point out a few things that have been forgotten (or intentionally obscured for political reasons) during the intervening years:

Terrorism is a tactic, not a creed, a religion, or a race. Terrorists do not all come from a specific country or speak a specific language. Other people who happen to share a creed, religion, race, or language with terrorists are not necessarily terrorists themselves.

Terrorists cannot be identified merely by the way they look. Indeed, they are most effective when they look just like us. Sometimes, they are us.

Terrorists don’t resort to terrorism because they’re afraid of a “fair fight.” Terrorism is a technique employed by those who don’t have the resources to effectively combat a larger, better equipped military force. Terrorists are not cowards. They may be desperate and/or misguided, they may be lacking what we would think of as honor, they may even be insane, but they are most certainly not lacking in courage. And thinking of them that way only underestimates them.

The point of terrorism is not specifically to kill people, but to make the survivors afraid, to make them lose the will to continue doing whatever it is the terrorists don’t want them doing. The best way to deny terrorists their victory is to “keep calm and carry on.”

Most importantly, there is no way to stop terrorism per se. You can stop a particular terrorist plot or terrorist group, but terrorism itself is an idea, and you can’t destroy those. If we exterminated al Qaeda to the last man, if we finally decided to go all-in and turn the entire Middle East into radioactive glass, it wouldn’t mean that there would never be another act of terrorism.

Just some food for thought as we remember those who lost their lives to the most destructive act of terrorism perpetrated on US soil until 9/11/2001. May they rest in peace.