Double Flee A

Yesterday the wife and I received a really great belated wedding present. Some very thoughtful friends gave us four tickets to a Saint Paul Saints game (minor league baseball, the kind that is actually outdoors and not in the marshmallow dome), specifically, tickets that allow you to watch the game while sitting in a hot tub, and they give you all kinds of stuff. Eight hot dogs and towels and so on. You don't have to bring four people, though. How cool is that?

Bad pun o'the day:
Yesterday I fixed a 1948 Babe Ruth watch for a friend. That afternoon we talked on the phone.
Neal: "Thanks to you, the Babe's still swinging."
Me: "The Babe will never strike out on my watch."

Name-calling, all grown up, is what the far right wing in this country got good at that the left, didn't. If you repeat the world "liberals" often enough and derisively enough, it becomes a bad word. The way the word sounds in your mind changes when the cool people rip on it. That's the whole story; the long and the short of how that word's meaning has changed in the popular consciousness. It's also important to know that the popular consciousness is very stupid.
Now take the Iraq war. By calling Democrats "cut and runners", Republican think-tanks and media personages have seemingly scored another touchdown in the game of "identify the other guy and stay popular". They're the terrors of the playground, basically walking around poking everybody with a sharp stick. If you've ever heard people in a name-calling contest, you may have noticed it's not the person who's right that wins. That's why it's "degenerated into name-calling." It's usually the catty girl or the thug who's intimidated people into casting them as the winner of the insult contest that comes out on top in those, and that's all the time you get to talk about issues in soundbite America.
That idiot Sean Hannity's future depends on the stability of this situation. If the average Joe starts wondering "hang on, who gets to decide what's "patriotic" and what isn't", the right wing of this country would very quickly begin to look like the island of Doctor Moreau after the cheetah guy gets a taste of cooked rabbit. I have no doubt whatever that that's all it would take to turn this situation around in a hurry.
But the constantly embattled Democrats do have to fight the cheerleader from Andover. Cheerleaders are notoriously good at catfights, and at yelling whatever is necessary to stay on top.

And yet they see a cowboy:

Rallied by Bush, Skittish G.O.P. Now Embraces War as Issue - New York Times

posted by dale @ 8:05 AM