Christopher Merle

Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Month: November 2008 (Page 3 of 4)

Where did they go?

November 12, 2008 /

My conservative friends have all gone quiet online. Have they retreated to an undisclosed bunker? Are they stocking up on guns and ammo? Are they depressed? Do they think the world is coming to an end? I can only speculate based on what they said before the election. If they don’t want to give Obama a chance and want to be miserable for the next four years, then that’s their prerogative. I gave Bush a chance in 2000. I vote for him. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that my support for him began evaporating. It wasn’t until after the taking of Bagdhad it was gone.

I told them at the outset of this campaign, I wouldn’t say ‘I told you so’ if Obama won and I won’t when he is inaugurated. I was cautiously optimistic about the election, but didn’t want to say anything to jink it. I would not have been surprised if the Republicans stole the election again. There are two possible reasons for why they didn’t. The Bush-Cheney cabal isn’t as evil as I thought they were. Or they’ve so damaged the country not even an Obama led country can fix it. We’ll know in the first six months how bad it really it is and within in a year how long it’s going to take to repair the damage.

Obama has only one year to begin turning this nation around. Why one year? Because in year two the next election cycle begins. It will a spectacle. So will the Republicans work with Obama or will they draw a line in the sand and be obstructionist? Not much was accomplished by a Democratically controlled Congress after they took over in 2006. If the Republicans want real bipartisanship and Democrats resist the urge to steamroll them, we’ll see progress.

Veterans & Remembrance

November 11, 2008 /

My great great grandfather Bear (Yona) Timpson served in the Cherokee Mounted Rifles under Stand Watie during the Civil War. My great grandfather Frank Anton Merle served in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Army in WWI. He achieved the rank of Feldwebel. My grandfather John Merle served in the Fifth Army in WWII. His four brothers all served in WWII, two in the Pacific Theater and three in the European Theater. All made it home. My father did not serve. He did do some ROTC when he was in college, and managed to stay ahead of the draft, first by being married then having two kids, but if he’d been called up he would have gone. I’m glad he didn’t have to. My Uncle Bert served in the Army Reserve and later the Air National Guard. I was in the Air National Guard. Both of my sisters and brother all served in the Air National Guard. My Great Uncle Clyde served in the US Navy either during WWI or shortly thereafter.

There are many reason why men and women serve. You may not agree with the causes they are fighting for. Some were drafted and had no interest besides surviving. Others gave themselves wholeheartedly to the cause. Should we honor those soldiers who have fought for a bad cause when they believed they were fighting for the right cause? Or should we just honor the sacrifices they made regardless? We cannot be blind to why they served. Is it possible to turn a bad cause into a good one? These are not academic questions.

So how do you tell Iraqi vets who’ve served multiple tours that they were sent there for a bad cause? How can you say it to their face? To the ones missing hands, feet, limbs, and faces. How do you say it to those with post traumatic stress disorder. Americans said all sorts of bad things to our returning vets from Viet Nam. That too was a war of choice. Isn’t it hypocritical to say “I honor your service, but you sacrificed for a lie.”? There is no easy way of saying it, but when you consider what some of them have been through, it shouldn’t be.

Ultimately, each soldier has to face that it is a personal choice why they serve. We cannot ignore the social dimension of the sacrifice either. We can only hope that in the grand scheme of things that on some level that those sacrifices were worth it. If it were so important that we invade Iraq, where was the draft? Why were we as a country not asked to sacrifice for the war effort? We were told to go shopping. Why were we hiring mercenaries? Why didn’t we get more support from our allies? As it stands now, what we’ve done so far was not worth it. All we can do is to make sure our returning soldiers get the support and assistance they need.

Fight the Future

November 10, 2008 /

Do I want to get off my political kick? Yes and no. I’d certainly like to move on to other things, but politics still dominates my thinking. I’d prefer to think about things like science fiction or bikini car washes. I am overjoyed that Obama has won and that Democrats have picked up a lot more seats, but I am under no illusion, that things will be tough.

The Democrats really didn’t make that much progress when they took over Congress in 2006. They decided that their one victory on defeating FISA wasn’t good enough, so they went and undefeated it. Obama voted for the new FISA bill. The old FISA was perfectly adequate. It’s just that Bush didn’t want to be bothered with following the rule of law. All those companies to be granted retroactive immunity could have gotten it in the first place, if Bush had been following the law. Again something he seems to be allergic to. And the absolute worst decision any Speaker of the House ever made was to take impeachment off the table. I’m not sure I could ever forgive Nancy Pelosi for that.

There were many things that the Democrats did that helped to enable the Bush administration and perhaps their reasoning was as simple as covering up their own complicity, or some tortured strategy for winning bigger in 2008. If it’s the latter and those responsible for administrative malfeasance are held accountable and the major damage by this administration will be healed, then I can forgive that.

The Democrats need to govern well. They will have to keep the Republicans from being even more obstructionist than they are now. This means there will have be a reconciliation and a real reaching out to the Republicans. They should only compromise when the compromise achieves real progress. I fear the Republicans and their willing accomplices in the media (e.g.- Fox News, Limbaugh, Drudge) will be assholes. Winning the primary was hard for Obama, winning the election was harder, governing well will be the hardest. I think he’s up to the challenge. Time will tell.

I live in the reddest of red states. No other state gave a higher percentage of the vote to McCain, 66%. We beat Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Louisiana, Alabama, and Alaska. Not only that for the first time in Oklahoma history has the Republicans gained control of both houses of the state legislature.

I though Oklahoma had finally joined the 20th century when it banned cockfighting in 2002 (Even though 30 out of 77 counties filed challenges to the ban. Thankfully the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld it.) Apparently, not. I am deeply ashamed that my home state has decided to be so willfully ignorant in this election. It really should come as no surprise as we keep re-electing perhaps the most reviled Republican Senator remaining in office, Jim Inhofe.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m moving to Tucson. Arizona is pretty red, but I’ve been told that Pima county is the most liberal county in Arizona. I’ve checked the election map and that seems to hold up.

Plone Resources

November 8, 2008 /

Although I’ve become a big fan of Django, my introduction to Python was through Zope. Zope led to Plone which I’ve been using for a few years now. Plone can be customized but it’s a steep learning curve. I’ve found a slide show with some tips for customizing this wonderful content management system.

No Rest for the F***heads

November 7, 2008 /

I was on the wrong side when Clinton became President. I listened to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy. I thought Newt Gingrich was smart. They are not stupid people. Their arguments aren’t dumb. My worldview was limited to thinking Ayn Rand was the best thing since sliced bread. As a former libertarian, I thought if only people had the facts I did, they’d come around. The problem was my facts were cherry picked and did not reflect the wider world, it’s history or human nature. I was trying to fit the facts to my world view and not the other way around.

Newt sounds smart and reasonable for about the first two minutes and then you come to realize he’s batshit crazy. Limbaugh was very entertaining. I really enjoyed Paul Shanklin’s conservative parody songs, though I must confess some of them were borderline racist and misogynistic. I should have known better, I was glad to see that someone was making fun of the Democrats and not just Republicans. As for Liddy. He’s someone I could still respectfully disagree with, despite how reactionary he is. He’s by far more educated than most conservative pundits with the possible exception of Michael Wiener (aka Michael Savage).

It feels good for once to be on the right side with the right people at the right time. How do I know I’m on the right side this time? I don’t. Only time will tell. I never felt I could adequately defend my views when I was of a libertarian bent or persuade others with evidence they’d accept. This time I do feel I can adequately defend those views. I know that some would not accept the evidence I’d present but this time I don’t fucking care. If they won’t examine it, that’s their fucking problem.

Winning the election was the easy part for Obama. Now comes the hard part. Bush & Cheney still have 70+ days to screw things up even more. Their supporters, and most especially the pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and Michael Savage will continue to be major fuckheads. These people and their ilk will not stop being fuckheads. In fact their fuckheadedness is just beginning. Obama isn’t Clinton 2.0. There will be no Monica 2.0, no Troopergate 2.0, no Whitewater 2.0, no pick your Clinton scandal 2.0, real or manufactured. Their attacks on ACORN and questioning small donations over the Internet will only get louder and shriller. Who knows where else they will attack? Probably they’ll make complaints of voter suppression and stolen elections. They’ll pretend that didn’t happen in 2000 or 2004. They are not interested in working with us. They are not interested in bipartisanship. They only know how to do one thing, attack.

It looks like the Democrats will be 3 seats shy of a supermajority in the Senate. That will be the Republican’s line in the sand, where we can expect the most obstruction. We cannot be like them. Just because they want to be fuckheads doesn’t mean we can’t reach out to them. We have to show them we can be decent human beings. Isn’t my calling the fuckheads being counterproductive? No. I want them to know how I really feel, but that I’m capable of moving past that. I’ll have to demonstrate that after all this namecalling.

If those on the conservative side of the aisle don’t want to give Obama a chance and work with the progressives, then they deserve to be miserable for the next four years. I will not let them screw this up. There’s too much at stake.

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