I followed the Massachusetts Senate special election hardly at all. Shortly before the election, I heard the Democrats were going to lose the seat. Today, after that happened, I’m hearing a lot of discussion about “what it means.” Mostly, it seems to mean that the person offering the opinion will project their own preferences as the Will of the People. (“The People” seem to be a lot like God in that respect.)
I can’t tell you what it all means. I hear Coakley was a craptacular candidate. To hear some tell it, the election was a rejection of all Democrats and revulsion at their communo-fascist policies; perhaps even a longing for the good old days of 5 years ago. The corpse of Ronald Reagan is apparently being re-animated to lead the 2010 resurgence. Democrats should be Republicans, just to be safe.
I think there is a lot of inchoate anger out there. People don’t like the way things are, but nobody can quite pin down what’s gone wrong. You just can’t win. If you work hard, out of control lenders will take what you make and, if there is anything left over, some do-gooder will want to take it to give to the poor. The anger is like a static charge that will zap whatever comes close. At the moment, that probably means Democrats. But, unless lawmakers right the ship, it’s going to be whoever is in power at the time — or, if it gets bad enough, a redirection of the anger.
Give folks someone to be mad at, and they won’t bother too much about whether their anger is properly directed. Maybe it’s the gays, maybe it’s the illegal immigrants, maybe it’s the fat cats on Wall Street or the lobbyists in D.C. Elect me and we’ll get ’em! The message is the same even if the “me” and the “them” get shuffled around a bit.
All we want is a reasonable shot at prosperity if we work hard and play by the rules, maybe some friendly people as neighbors and a decent education for our kids. That’s all. Is that too much to ask? Oh, and police protection against people I’m scared of. And firemen ready to come help if my house catches on fire. And the streets should be paved and the stoplights should work. If someone owes me money, I should be able to go to court to enforce my rights. And the bad guys should definitely be locked up. And someone should come pick up my trash. And I’d be awfully mad if bad drainage reduced my property values. And I don’t want to breathe filthy air or drink tainted water. And my food should be safe. And my medicines. And my workplace. Come to think of it, I’m a little nervous about my ability to support myself when I get old and am unable to work. What if I get sick, how am I going to pay for that? And someone should be checking to make sure the doctors I see are properly qualified. I’d prefer not to see people begging on the streets; can we give them enough so they don’t have to beg or at least have someone kick them off the streets where I walk? And I’d rather not pay property taxes, or sales taxes, or income taxes, really. But I’ll be kind of pissed if someone doesn’t pay their fair share, so we should have someone making sure other people pay their taxes. Grrrrrr. . . . . Screw it. GO COLTS!
inchoate?
One up on me. ;)
Formless, undirected.
Y’know, if you follow politics this sort of episode, where everybody and his brother is sure to express some half-assed opinion developed, not by knowing anything about the issue, but by half-listening to what everybody else’s brother has to say about it, is like having your favorite band or microbrew gain widespread popularity. The guaranteed disappointment that something once promising and satisfactory will soon begin to Totally Suck is exceeded only by the apodictic* certainty that those same idiots who flocked to it will be making the same arguments to you six months from now, convinced that they know something you don’t. And that they’ll keep doing so until something else bright and shiny catches their attention.
Put another way: the prospect of being forced to watch the full hour of next Sunday’s Meet the Press would have be giving up al-Qaeda’s number 2 man in under fifteen seconds.
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* take that, inchoate.
I chuckle a bit at how folks are running around with their hair on fire about the awful it is no longer having a 60 vote filibuster-proof Senate supermajority is. As if some kind of ages old Camelot circumstance has suddenly come to an end and the result will forevermore be legislative chaos.
Get real, folks……the almost exclusively normal situation is NOT to have such a situation. It came about only after some unusual things happened. Republican Arlan Specter from Pennsylvana switched parties. Alaska elected a Democrat after Ted Stevens was indicted, convicted, and didn’t run (and then had his Bush Justice Departmenrt conviction set aside by an Obama Justice Department finding of prosecutorial misconduct. And a tiny handfull of Republican votes in Minnesota would have kept Al Franken still just an SNL alum.
And then there’s the question as to whether it was ever really 60 given the behavior of Joe Lieberman.
Some pretty big, tough, and controversial legislation has managed to get passed when what’s the normal situation in the Senate, namely the absence of a filibuster-proof number for one party. That status is as rare as total moon coverage in a solar eclipse. Maybe it’s better everyone except that and get back to finding out how it’s been done.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, Doug. I knew what the word meant, I just don’t think I’ve ever used it in a sentence. lol
On the other hand, I had to look “apodictic” up in the dictionary. So, I guess DR is my big word winner of the day. ;)
I would never willingly compete against Doghouse in a word measuring contest.
I think a lot of the frustration is because when Republicans have 50 +1 in the Senate, they get everything they want except ANWR drilling. When Democrats have 58 +1 ?+1, they suddenly become incontinent.
T, do you think that is because the Republicans are a bunch of jerks that don’t compromise on anything, or because the Democrats couldn’t organize something as simple as a kegger?
What really slowed down the process was the ideological,sometimes testy debate between moderate and liberal Democrats (I use these terms because thats how the media divided them) Im trying to figure out how Republicans got bills passed without Cloture as ideological as they are and Democrats had 60 Senators and couldnt get health care done a month ago.It should have been over and we should have been moving along.
I think Obama was MIA.
In the Congress, I think the Republicans have been whittled down to a more unified ideology, and, more than the Democrats, they’re Republicans first and lawmakers second. So, you don’t find them straying from the pack when the party disciplinarians tell them not to.
Consider the political distance between Barbara Lee or Dennis Kucinich and Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman. I don’t think you have that kind of political gap with the Congressional Republicans.
Spot on Doug, The public is fickle (and in some cases has a convenient memory), and reminds me of the saying “I don’t care what it costs as long as it’s not in my back yard.” If Obama can find a way to get across to the American people the asinine practices of some of the health insurance companies and make the reform process more transparent he has a real opportunity to complete what Teddy Roosevelt tried a century ago. I may have a utopian view of this but if he could have the negotiations and hearings conducted on C-Span as he indicated when he was campaigning for President and have Republican input for such ideas as making insurance marketable across state lines he would pick up a lot of support from a skeptical public. There have been several studies made of tort reform and it seems the consensus is that medical malpractice is a small portion of the overall cost. Extreme right wingers who tout medical malpractice as one of the factors in health insurance costs seem to be misinformed. I do like the Republican idea of making health insurance more competitive across state lines to increase competition. A case in point for me personally even though it doesn’t involve health insurance across state lines is a situation that occurred a year ago in our firm. We are a small CPA firm and had our health insurance with a large insurance company whose headquarters happen to be here in Louisville. They increased our premiums 30% last year when our premium came up for renewal. We shopped around, found health insurance for us at a greatly reduced rate and informed our previous insurer of that. When they found out we could get pretty much identical coverage they offered to drop the increase from 30% to 15%. We said thanks but no thanks and changed health insurance providers. We were Ok thanks to the fact that no one in our firm had a pre-existing condition. If Obama can get a bipartisan deal made using some of the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans and making it transparent (using C-Span or whatever media is going to make available to all Americans the opportunity to see all of the negotiations and hearings), and stays away from any special deals such as that given to Ben Nelson of Nebraska he may yet make it happen. That does sort of remind me though of another old saying “Don’t watch legislation and sausage being made.” But at least he would rebuild some of the support that elected him.
Whatever it means, I’m just glad the special election was held, rather than a successor to “leave ’em for dead” Ted anointed by circumventing the democratic process.
Believe it or not a while back I saw, and half read, in Sunday New York Times,magazine section, an article by Chief Justice Scalia making a point that the word ‘inchoate’ is not appropriate language in a high stature legal document ..So I looked the word up and decided it meant like ‘rudimentary’ at that time having never focused on the word before. It seems obscure enough to me to be in a legal document. Two exposures to ‘inchoate’ in less than 2 weeks.
oops, I think Justice Scalia was commenting on Chief Justice Roberts writing