Perspective

The other day, I was chatting with Liss about how disgusted I've gotten with the Democratic primaries. What really pisses me off are the extreme diehard supporters of each candidate who refuse to see anything bad about their candidate, or anything good about the other candidate.

Me: "It's almost like we have two baseball teams in the same town, and you got these rabid fans of each team who want to do nothing short of kill each other."

Liss: "It's actually even dumber than that. It's like one baseball team with two great starting pitchers whose rabid fans each want to do nothing short of kill each other."

This severe standoff between the extreme fans in each camp does not at all foster the kind of frame of mind we all need to be in come November. The ironic thing is that we were all there prior to the primaries. For 7 years, we've all been on the same page about what has to happen and now we seem to be in bizarro-land.

Don't worry, though. As a public service, I've come up with a way to realign everyone's perspective.

Following are true inescapable facts of life:

• Death.
• Taxes.
• Bad drivers.
• No urgent need to defeat Bush in next election BECAUSE HE'S NOT RUNNING.
• McCain is a shitty candidate, and will lose the presidential election. (Note: I won't debate this. Trust me, he'll lose. Even if it takes my inspecting every Diebold receipt.)
• The Democratic winner, regardless of who it is, will fuck up more than once while in office.

That last one bears repeating, so here goes:

The Democratic winner, regardless of who it is, will fuck up more than once while in office.
It would do very well for progressives to remember that fact because of what will happen when the fuckup inevitably comes: Either disengagement or blind defense. The diehard supporters (i.e. those who refuse to see anything bad about their candidate or anything good about the other candidate) might become disillusioned with their candidate's lack of perfection so as to disengage them from politics and give up; the last thing we need is more apathy. Even worse would be the diehards blindly defending any action their candidate takes, no matter how fucking stupid or harmful, instead of calling him/her out on the carpet for the mistake; not only have we seen this very thing before, but we've also seen where it's gotten us. FSM help us if the lesson learned from the last 7 years is that we need to emulate the Bush cultists.

It's going to require a lot of time and effort for this country to climb out of the negative scale just to make it back to zero and reverse all the shit that has been wrought by Republican rule. It's also going to require holding our president's feet to the fire, not aiding and abetting leadership failures as a result of blind allegiance.

It's big picture time, folks. So, put on the 3-D glasses and start looking at it.