catch-up 22

Usually I write these posts directly in the blogger online app. It’s a little balkier and likely to fubar than a desktop word processor, but like a hanging in the morning, I find it tends to concentrate the mind.
I have a lot of bibs and bobs to catch up on, tho, and I’ll feel more free to just catch up if I write and revise this entry offline.
Joseph Stack, for example, remember him? Flew his airplane into an IRS building last summer, killed an apparently nice guy named Vernon Hunter? I felt that Stack might be the starting pistol, so to speak, of informal violent reaction to a Black president, right-wing propaganda, and a failing economy, but if so, it’s taking its time kicking out the chocks.
I was dead wrong that vilifying Elena Kagan would be this summer’s death-panel march, and I’m still surprised by this. It seems such an obvious play for the Right, a way to add to their governmental cock-blocking an actual assertive attack on the Obama administration.
They haven’t been able to make much partisan hay of the Gulf oil spill - and remember, how much of a weapon they can try to make of it has nothing to do with the actual foundation of blame, which is still more W’s than O’s.
I also don’t know that the positing of all Muslims everywhere as The Enemy is going to get much mileage out of the so-called “9/11 Mosque,” although the marketing so far has been a great success. (Quick, what’s the real name of the proposed cultural center?)
I was pondering and pondering the lack of Kagan vilification - what was I missing? - when I realized that maybe the Repubs had simply erred, that I had identified the best play based on their performance in the last 30-40 years but they had not. Evil does not mean omniscient, perhaps they will regret this in retrospect.
It may also be that they are afraid of riling up their Tea Party minions, who have actually been exercising their franchise rights, as if they had a right to choose their representatives or something. The serfs are revolting, and also not obeying their party/corporate masters. The latter don’t want to accidentally further empower the former, lest they lose the whip hand.
...lost track of myself. What was I asseverating? Oh yeah. The sleep of reason producing monsters.
“Sarah Palin will be the Republican candidate for President in 2012,” I wrote, on May Day, and very soon Andrew Sullivan and any number of other folk on right, left, and horseback have dared to utter the same. I see no reason to retract. I’m still not saying she would win. And I have never said that she would lose. It’s crazy, isn’t it? But do not despair. Remember when everybody was talking about that crazy global warming thing? And that never came true.
More fun TK.