Normally, I just delete comment-spam and notify Typepad — there’s a button to click on that does both at the same time, not that it does any good in the long run, because the stuff keeps coming.
But this one is so timely, so relevant, so enterprising, so egregious, so offensive that I just have to take note of it.
Someone reacted to this post with a comment steering us to this site — to save you from clicking on it, I’ll just tell you that the site features T-shirts in various styles, all bearing the offensive question spoken by the woman (the obnoxious woman, the woman that I struggle to find a word to describe) in the video.
This is a specimen of the disease eating away at our body politic. This slimeball might actually make some money off of this. Meanwhile, people who care about this country worry that if Mrs. Clinton (or anyone else with the name "Clinton" or "Bush") is elected, we might actually see an escalation of the virulent partisanship of the past 15 years, if that is possible — all because of the kind of people who would ask this question, or have such T-shirts printed up, or, worse, buy the damned things.
Looking at that Web site makes me want to reach through my laptop and give somebody a good slap up ‘side the head. I wanna go all ad hominem on ’em. But I don’t know how.
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“This is a specimen of the disease eating away at our body politic.”
I personally think this description applies more to the woman in the video than the jerk selling the t-shirts. She is an example of one of the things that is VERY wrong with politics in the US as they are currently being practiced.
Parties in the abstract, in and of themselves, are not a bad thing. In fact, they provide a very useful function. They are quite the economizing device in that, assuming one came to her or his partisan leaning in a rational and deliberative manner, they save one the time and energy required to research every candidate under the sun (there are well in excess of 500,000 elected offices in the US). The party “label” provides a useful information “short cut.”
HOWEVER, the basic structure of the modern party system creates a sort of oligarchy where the most involved tend to set the agenda and define the public discourse. Who are the most involved? This sad woman and her Democratic doppelgänger! (let’s not forget that for every irrational Clinton hater like this woman, there is an irrational Bush hater)
These people are IMPEDIMENTS to good government.
Finally….I don’t mean to bash your boy, Brad, but….Senator McCain could have showed more class. Speaking with vitriol about your opponents is one thing, but allowing the use of vulgarities such as this without admonition is tantamount to a tacit approval of the term.
He could have even gone with something incredibly mild like, “Well, the decorum of the Senate means that I don’t personally apply such terms to someone even though I think they (would be terrible for the country/ are a bad human being/ have horrible ideas/ whatever)”
I would suggest anyone who believes this woman (and the Democratic version of her) are the “norm” for partisans and are truly indicative of “red state” and “blue state” America read Morris Fiorina’s “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.”
Hate? No, not for Mrs. Clinton nor the Democrat rank and file.
Distrust? You bet. They want to divide what little money I have between their supporters and dilute my rights, too.
The disease eating away at our body politic is not partisanship. It’s the transparent insincerity and selfishness of the politicians bred and boosted by the Clinton era.