Fiddler on the Blogosphere

The problem with the right and left in this country is they are intellectual bullies. They rally together, form online packs and then assault everyone who dares to stray from their collective philosophy. This produces a dialog that is more about attacks than resolution and contains more sarcasm, ridicule and antagonism than fact and fresh ideas.

What a sad state the political dialog in this country has become, when the left is spending the majority of their online real estate ridiculing a defeated vice-presidential candidate, and the right meanwhile is already condemning a new president-elect over one cabinet appointment.

Both threads, are so stratified and ironically so distant from one another, and both come at a time when the three major American car companies are screaming for billions of dollars of welfare.

This is an industry that was handed 25 billion dollars just 30 days ago, and now all three are saying they are so cash-poor that they can only stay in business until the end of the year, or they will collapse. In short, these companies are holding our own government ransom for more cash-injection. This is the same industry that spends millions of dollars lobbying our government to avoid regulation on fuel and safety standards.

Yet, our blogosphere is still screaming at the opposite side of their spectrum, vilifying them, demonizing them and mocking them from afar.

It would make Nero proud. Let’s send Markos, Rush, Hewitt and Huffington each a fiddle shall we?

Here's what I intend to do: I am going to spend this weekend, scouring newer, fresher and less-known blogs that are talking about facts and solutions, rather than just "rallying the troops" of the left or right. I will report those sites here.

It's not much, but we need newer, fresher voices out there, that look beyond their own bias, and political party and start dealing with the difficult times ahead.

Conservative Litmus: George Will

Do you want to know if you're a genuine conservative? If you demand a conservative litmus test, personally, I'd leave the final verdict to George Will.

His verdict on Sarah Palin is not a good one. This editorial from him is outstanding reading.

My two favorite quotes from this are below and my commentary follows:

Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin's never having attended a "Georgetown cocktail party" is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents "are in charge of the United States Senate"?
-- George Will

Later in the article George Will attacks the scapegoat tactics, that have demonized Obama's fund raising:

Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.
-- George Will

MY COMMENT: Palin was a farcical pick, a "sugar rush" that provides instant momentum for McCain's campaign, but then crashed and burned when it was obvious that even the most basic question from the press (say a question like "what newspapers do you read?"), had her stumbling for words, and struggling to deliver a single coherent sentence.

On campaign financing, Will makes superb commentary, but missed why McCain is making noise on this issue. While we all agree, public financing of presidential campaigns, need to go the way of the dodo (public financing does far more harm than good), the reason why McCain is raising the issue isn't because he defends public financing, it is because it is setting the stage for the inevitable Republican response to this election.

That response will be: fraud, fraud, fraud.

Obama's campaign financing will receive massive scrutiny in the weeks ahead, and his use of e-Commerce to raise hundreds of millions, will be called into question, and there will be enough odd cases of fraud, that the cry that his entire victory was fraudulent will sadly gain traction in the press.

Still, Will's commentary is laser sharp in the above editorial, and ends on a "delicious" piece of trivia about potato chips. It's worthy reading, from a worthy voice in our political landscape.

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