I spent the day today catching up on my RSS feeder, downing about three hours worth of blog material, almost Robot Chicken style - very quickly and somewhat schizophrenically.  There are two things that I learned:

1. Republicans have no idea what to do with themselves right now.  A fine piece detailing some of this is Tom Coburn’s op-ed on the Wall Street Journal - yes, he’s a religious loon from Oklahoma, but he’s a religious loon from Oklahoma that just wants the government to leave everyone alone (mostly).
2. Democrats are just ecstatic that they’re not Republicans.  After dealing with Daily Kos, FDL, TalkLeft, and Huffington Post, I can safely say with a certain measure of certainty that there were far more articles either detailing their future advances after the primaries (fair enough) or detailing all the different ways that McCain is screwing up.  The general narrative that I’ve been seeing from these places is something along the lines of, “Republicans want to take your civil rights, they got us into a stupid war, and they’re letting corporations run roughshod over you.”  The solutions, in order, are to ditch the PATRIOT Act (fine by me), pull out of Iraq as soon as possible (looks like it’ll be a moot point soon enough - and in a good way), and increasing taxes (now?) to fund social welfare programs.  If any of this sounds vaguely familiar, well, it probably should.  I’ll grant that left-leaning blogs don’t necessarily have to sell left-leaning ideology to the masses at this point; heck, just “not being Bush” will probably be enough to convince 40% of America to at least give it a shot at this point.

Therein, though, lies the problem - are these really the best ideas that anybody can come up with?  Are our health care choices, for example, really stuck between “Let the people that gave us the DMV run the show” and “Let insurance guys and the people that gave us the DMV run the show”?  While I’m at it, why aren’t there more co-ops, more “health unions”, a la credit unions?  Are our foreign policy choices really between “Nuke everyone and let God sort it out” and “Let’s talk to anybody with a pulse so we can feel good about ourselves”?  Are our choices really between a party that can’t find its soul and another party that’s just happy it’s not having to look for one?

Here’s what I want to know:  How many Democrats are actually excited about the platforms being presented by Obama and Hillary?  How many of them realize that the only reason either of those two are getting any national press right now is because they’re political freak shows (Blackula vs. Bride of Frankenstein!) that just happen to not be part of the Bush family tree?  Didn’t Kerry have the exact same platform as these two?  Didn’t Gore have a similar platform?  Didn’t both of those guys lose?  Is the new packaging really that compelling?

Can I ask another question?  Of course I can - it’s my own damn blog!  Deal with it?

What a lot of people seem to forget about Reagan is that, yes, he did have some attractive packaging (California actor and all), but he also had some pretty creative policy ideas.  He was the first Republican since Hoover (Coolidge?) to not jump on the Rockefeller Republican bandwagon (a.k.a. “Dynamic Republicanism”, or “Democrat Lite”).  Meanwhile, Clinton was the first Democrat to jump away from the reflexive FDR-Johnson “New Deal”-style liberalism that left the Democratic Party in a funk.  There is a theme there:  People don’t like the government telling them what to do. It’s a basic concept that politicians only seem to get about once every 20 years or so if we’re lucky… and, sorry, but we’re not going to be lucky this time around.

After re-reading this to see if this is actually going somewhere, I realized something - this post derailed faster the monorail in the Simpsons.  Jesus - I’m waiting for Leonard Nimoy to beam in and “save the day” or something.  It’s embarrassing.  Hell, Hunter Thompson wrote more coherent thoughts than this.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to apply the opossum/fire extinguisher to the problem here and just call it a night…

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