Abortions for Some, Miniature American Flags for Others

Even though they're a fine source of perpetual blog ideas, politics tend to depress the hell out of me. I only ever began following the great silly game out of a sense of civic responsibility, and a perpetual desire to bitch about stuff. Well, it's not like I feel any more responsible.

I occasionally call myself a libertarian, though I'd expand enough on what government is good for (to include insurance and pollution control as well defense and justice) to push me into some odd leftie version of that. Famously (and appealingly) enough, libertarians prefer to complain about the government than do stuff about stuff, and who can blame them when you think about what governments do with power?

IOZ (shhh, I'm trolling for his readers) had some fun picking on the Democrats today. Yeah, sure, easy targets, what with showing their bellies to the president, proving themselves yet again tools to executive power, waiting their turn. Fucking party politicians: the lure of being a high-level appartchik is evidently stronger than retaining some Constitutionally declared powers for your own house. You'd think that with enough popular demand, the appeal of keeping one's seat would trump presidential awe, but tell that to Ned Lamont. Anyway, IOZ mocked the various netroots goobers for being fooled again. Most important election ever --> horrible policies --> we need more and better Democrats! Lather, rinse, repeat.

But then again, I remember the libertarians complaining ten years ago about the nanny state, whose jack-booted drug-stealing thugs ended up being a lot more subtle than their most dire warnings. The support for the (allegedly) small-government conservatives (never mind the racism and Jesus-throttling and fiscal idiocy) was not always implicit. They've got their useless cycle too, as do the conservatives, with the difference that libertarians don't get to enact their own horrible policies. So I fixed the figure. Hope it helps.

I made a bulleted list of what I care about politically, but I'll save it for when I'm in the mood. Suffice to say that I'll continue to vote for the party that is marginally closer to achieving some of them, and failing that, I'll vote to poke the incumbents in the eye. It's not like any of these assholes is about to swap a trillion dollar war for public health insurance and science research anytime soon. Those wheels just keep spinning each other around like a hot-air powered aeropile.

What do all those gears grind? Sausage, I guess. Politics.



[Sorry, I'm behind in my reading.]