I can't think of a better way to start off a new blog than the topic of the 2010 General Election.
I was a VERY good boy yesterday and avoided all media coverage of the election. No need...I knew it was going to be bad and that our national media would do their usual awful job of bringing cogent analysis of what it really means for our country. It's more fun to get an extremist on each side and have them yell at each other.
SO it wasn't a surprise to learn the results of the election today. Over the next couple of days I'm going to take some time to give my perspective on the Winners and the Losers in Election 2010. I'll begin with the Losers because I'm one of them.
LOSER #1: Democrats
Duh.
LOSER #2: Gay people in Iowa.
The ouster of three Iowa Supreme Court justices will NOT mean an automatic reversal of Iowans to marry someone of their own gender. But it still has to make them feel like shit. It quantifies what they already knew...that bigotry runs just as deep in Iowa as it does elsewhere. If 55% of Iowa voters care enough about denying constitutional rights to people based on their sexual orientation to actually vote that way, how many others are equally as bigoted and didn't show up at the polls? And I'm sorry conservative friends, yes you are bigoted. It's like the people who say, "I don't mind black people, I just don't want to live by them."
It seems that some people want to pick and choose among the ideals of our Founding Fathers. What about the separation of church and state? If legal marriage is an institution of the state, how can you deny it based on a religious principle? No one has ever been able to explain to me why that is not a contradiction. Even if our nation was founded on "Christian principles", the Fathers took pains to make sure that those principles don't impinge on the rights of non-Christians.
And tell me, how is using religious principles to decide human rights any different than what the mullahs are doing in Iran?
LOSER #3a: Planet Earth
I haven't been optimistic about our chances of stopping global warming for some time now, but the election will pretty much put the nail in the coffin. Even with Democratic majorities, legislation to try to stop and reverse the damage from man-made global climate change didn't happen. Now there's no chance.
LOSER #3b: American energy independence
One of the side benefits of tackling climate change from our country's perspective is that it would carry the side benefit of helping us extricate ourselves from the societal slavery we are in to master oil. I doubt that there will be serious efforts now to tackle energy independence, except for more cries to "drill, baby, drill". And when we can't find enough oil to satisfy our appetite, even if we spoil every pristine acre of ground, we'll just keep buying it from those people a half a world away that will take our money and use it to teach people to hate us.
LOSER #4: Your car's suspension
I think one of the reasons that so many people voted against Democrats is that they don't like road construction. You see, Democrats (the stimulus bill nationwide, I-JOBS in Iowa) invested money in roads and bridges which had been ignored for years. Fixing roads means road construction, and road construction makes people angry.
Seriously though, how else do we maintain our transportation infrastructure if we don't spend money? Extending the Bush tax cuts will not fix a single pothole or prevent a single bridge from collapsing.
LOSER #5: Civility
OK, civility has been a loser for a LONG time. But this election year proved that, as much us Americans claim they want their leaders to stop being so negative, they crave it like a crack addict craves his next fix. If we as a nation seriously wanted a return to civility, we'd stop feeding the beast and quit watching the media purveyors of it (on both sides...Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are two-sides of the same coin and need each other), and we'd quit voting for the politicians who practice it so well.
There's always been negativity in American politics. But now its become so pervasive in our society due to the massive crush of media that it's just become a part of all of us. And that's not going to change anytime soon.
Tune in later for a list of the Winners of Election 2010.
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