Useful advice for this (or any) blog:
“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes to learn. When in short, you have only your emotions to sell.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once upon a time, we had leaders who transcended partisanship and self-interest:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
On the drawbacks of being a smart person in America:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ” — Isaac Asimov
With respect to marriage equality:
“You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of…love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out. Just don’t extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know… it is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person.” — Keith Olbermann
Lastly, on the simultaneous privilege and responsibility of being human:
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us, ‘The Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein
It’s easy to write an intelligent-sounding blog when you use other smart people’s words.
Oh, those party-people, the ones who call themselves Republicans. They make the sounds your ears want to hear: that someone is on your side, fighting your fight against injustice. And the injustice of utmost concern to them is the injustice being visited upon you every day of your life: namely, that someone is trying to take your hard-earned money from you, literally grabbing it out of your wallet, like a thief on a dark street in a bad section of town. Or, a bit less violently, like the federal government. Same difference, so they say.
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The Republicans know their constituency (a fancy-pants liberal word for “true believers”). The Republican constituency believes the money they earn is more hallowed than the money other people earn. Republican money should not be defiled by taxation, but instead should be invested in something called “The Free Market”. Republicans know (by wisdom passed down from generation to generation) that The Free Market is wiser than any man or woman or collective of decision-makers, such as a representative government.
You would think that Republicans would especially value money that is earned literally by the sweat of one’s brow, by factory workers, farm workers, workers who have so-called “dirty jobs”. Interestingly, though, the Republican idea of “hard-earned money” is better represented by money made sitting at a computer trading futures on corn, soybeans and West Texas Intermediate crude oil. Or money made by Goldman Sachs from selling credit default swaps on European debt. That is the hard-earned money the Republicans respect and want to protect. That is the money they identify with. That is the money that will be donated to their next election campaign.
The notion of “your hard-earned money under attack” is just another in a long string of sales pitches that conservative think-tanks have co-opted in order to enlist adherents. The Republican Party does not care how hard your money was earned. They are much more interested in soft money, the kind best provided by their investment bank donors. Or as Republicans running for office like to call them, “job creators”.