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| Thursday, July 22, 2004 |
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When it is 
The Tea Party system
| | The two party conventions are the biggest events in the poliblogosphere since Howard Dean's Icarus act. Should be fun. |
| | But What's Actually Happening is bigger. According to my sister (retired Navy commander, War College graduate, also smarter than me), "this is not about electing Kerry, it's about recalling Bush." (The antecedent of "this" is the Democratic side of the race.) I agree with her, and I'm not saying that as a partisan. (For what it's worth, I'm a registered Independent.) I'm saying that as an American who was, like many others, deeply disturbed by the last presidential election. No, not by the outcome; but by the way it happened. |
| | Rationalize the election of George W. Bush any way you want, it was still a huge train wreck with a highly compromised outcome that carried no popular mandate and should have prompted a constitutional crisis. Now we're having that crisis, only it's not playing out in the papers or on television. It's happening in Do-It-Yourself-ville. |
| | Blogs are getting plenty of well-deserved credit, of course; but let's not ignore what's happening, say, in movies and on radio. I'm no fan of Michael Moore, but I have to give the man props for moving the center of movie industry gravity out from under Hollywood and in a distinctly Flintward direction. Same goes for Jim Gilliam with Outfoxed and MoveOn with its advertising. Also with Howard Stern, who didn't even have a useful Web site until the FCC starting fining the shit out of him. Nobody has a better finger on the popular pulse than Stern, and his influence is non-trivial. Just ask Chirstine Todd Whitman and George Pataki, both of whom might not have become governors without Howard's help. |
| | What we're watching (among more savory things) is a new game of political hardball. Rather than the old game, played by campaigns and their monied backers, using the Usual Media, this new game is being played by anyone with a keyboard, a microphone, a camera, some talent and a Net connection. And it's more like a stoning. If you're Bill O'Reilly or George W. Bush, it's not pretty. But it's also not just about "hating bush," which is how many on Bush's side see the phenomenon. |
| | The plain fact is that democracy didn't work in the presidential election of 2000. This might not have mattered a great deal if the Bush administration hadn't operated as if it were carried into office by a neoconservative pro-war mandate. But it did. And now we're watching the results. |
| | Some links I'm following... |
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