And yet, with summer coming to a close and Labor Day marking the beginning of Midterm Mania, I have extended my summer vacation rather than diving back into blogging.  The main reason?  Election related news this year is really fucking depressing.  (Non-election related news ain’t so hot either).  It isn’t simply that Democrats are going to lose and the Tea Party is going to celebrate, it’s especially depressing because I was naive enough to think that something had fundamentally shifted after the ’06 and ’08 elections.  Ignoring my own observation that most Americans just aren’t that invested in the ideological struggle between left and right, I thought that the massive gains by the Democrats in the last two elections showed that America had realized that Republicans can’t govern, that the culture wars were just a front for maintaining big business’s stranglehold on government, and that a younger, more diverse, more tolerant generation was prepared to rule the nation.  (Just like John Mayer predicted!)  But, alas, the same old rules apply:  when things are shitty, voters will punish the party in power, regardless of who actually is at fault.

Against that sad backdrop, a quick thank you is in order to Delaware Republican primary voters for providing at least one bright spot and nominating an unelectable crazy woman over a more moderate candidate who had been heavily favored to win the seat.  So, thank you, Delaware Republicans, not just for greatly improving the Democrats’ odds for holding the Senate but also for giving me an excuse to link to an anti-masturbation video in my return to blogging.

-AR

The second point is that Americans in general are not very ideological, at least about the size and scope of government.  The popularity or lack thereof of government programs is dictated by whether they are seen as effective and, more importantly, whether they benefit whoever you’re asking.  Even the Tea Party, which in general presents itself as opposed to big government as a matter of principle, is willing to fight for big government when self-interest so demands.  As Potts points out, Southern concerns about the size and role of government have always been tied up with race, going back to slavery.  Potts also could have pointed to the South’s continuing support for the Democratic Party through the New Deal, which dramatically increased the size and role of government.  Put another way, Southerners were fine with the federal government providing electricity, jobs, and income security, but not saying who gets to drink at which water fountain.  Conservative politicians and commentators like Rand Paul, Barry Goldwater, and William F. Buckley may be sincere in opposing/having opposed the Civil Rights Act on “role of government” rather than racist grounds (which of course doesn’t excuse how callous and misguided their position was/is), but it simply isn’t accurate to ascribe that sincerity to white Southerners in general.

-AR

I am so sick of hearing about this allegedly awesome tea party.  Time Magazine has just published a longish article on the subject of Why The Tea Party Matters, thus demonstrating that a) the general consensus is the tea party does not matter; b) to the extent it may matter, it takes three long internet page-jumps to explain why it matters; and c) Time Magazine no longer matters.

I know, I know, Scott Brown.  But you know what, even Scott Brown doesn’t care about this dumb tea party.  As far as I am concerned, a bunch of ill-informed, reactionary white people does not make a revolution — that’s just business as usual.  You can’t invite a couple of xenophobic teddy bears to the tea-table and call it a legitimate national movement.  That’s just a xenophobic teddy bear you’re pretending is your friend, and the whole thing is weird, frankly.  In fact, it’s embarassing.

So please, let’s get back to the time when we made teabagging jokes and appreciated how funny it was that Fox News managed to galvanize a few hundred people around probably one of the few Historic Events they managed to learn in spite of the American education system.  Whatever we do about this super-lame garden party of sorts, let’s just make sure we don’t take it seriously.  After all, dumb things we start to take seriously have a bad habit of becoming real.

-AS