Michigan and Florida

Fang here. Still here, still a bit queer. Not like that, just odd, out of place.

My buddy The Nutty Professor wrote me tonight, asking me if I’m okay, due, I assume, to my lack of recent online activity.

I wrote him back, because that’s just the way I roll. I said something like, “Thanks for asking. Been spending all my free time on projects unrelated to The Forum. Everything is good. Going to take the Man Cub to visit my Mom for 3 days next week.”

In addition to my [redacted] endeavors, I'm going through scores of old home videos, looking for stuff to extract before the tapes disintegrate. And processing movies is fucking time-consuming, even on my lickety-split new computer, and takes all its computing power when I do it. I can’t even surf the web without my browser quitting on me. Just this morning, while I was messing with video files, Michael Stipe became gay and according to The Last Boy Scout (my mole within the Republican party), “The U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Clarence Thomas, just ruled against the Washington State Republican Party and in favor of a commie-lib plan for conducting primaries.”

Miss a morning, miss a lot.

Plus I’ve been re-watching the last season of “The Wire,” a bittersweet experience. And watching “John Adams” on HBO. The second episode was all about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is old news to me because I have seen “1776” at least that many times. I’m disappointed that HBO’s version omits all the singing and dancing, but gratified that otherwise it hews closely to the historical record.

Also, because I am becoming an old man, my lower back has been killing me, and sitting at my desk is torture. So I’ve been limiting my computer time to the compulsories. Plus I think my eyeglass prescription needs updating (appt. tomorrow) and have been dealing with headache issues. So the big picture (family, dog, job) is fine, but the day-to-day has literally been a pain recently.

Haven’t even been watching the news much. It’s all too depressing. Six weeks of in-fighting between Hillary and Barack before the next big-ticket state primary is not a spectacle I care to witness. Liked his speech about race, but think he could’ve tightened it up some. And for all his glowing press, I’m still just not that impressed with his alleged oratorical prowess. It’s a simple formula. Start quiet and slow and build inexorably to an emotional crescendo. Applause, applause, the end. Hitler was good at it. Louis Farrakhan has it down. I’ll bet even Barack’s now-former pastor has it going on. But Barack just speaks haltingly in a flat monotone, with little peaks and valleys sprinkled throughout. His speeches read better than they play, which is not my definition of great oratory.

At least Tucker Carlson got canceled again. So I got that going for me.

Bush’s approval numbers are in the toilet again, which is always welcome news. Means people are paying attention. Do you suppose it was all the dancing on the portico, or maybe the singing at the Gridiron dinner, laughing about Katrina and pardoning Scooter Libby?

Whatever, I’m just glad that everybody isn’t buying his tired old bullshit anymore.

Strangely enough, what pulls me out of my blog semi-retirement tonight is an issue that actually seems to promote my vested interests (getting Obama elected), but appears all fucked up to me anyhow. How is it two of our 50 states are going to be denied participation in the primary process?

I get it that Michigan and Florida (Oh gawd, not Florida again) played fast & loose with the Democratic party rules by moving their primaries up and that the Dem leadership felt it had to punish the wayward political bodies involved, but stripping two American states of their votes in a presidential primary seems fucked up and wrong to me. It was the party muckety-mucks who flouted the rules, but it’s the states’ citizens who are being denied their opportunity to vote. Why are the Dems punishing John and Jane Q. Sixpack for skullduggery perpetrated by party leaders? It seems downright un-American to me to refuse to let citizens participate in the electoral process because a few well-placed party buttheads shitcanned a set of rules that sounded awfully arbitrary to me in the first place.

I know the conventional wisdom is that bringing those two states back into play would advantage Hillary, but that’s not the issue. It’s bad enough we don’t have a one-person-one-vote system in this country, but for the Dems to disenfranchise their own voters in two entire states just flies in the face of what I reckon democracy ought to be about.

I say let everyone vote, and let the chips fall where they may. Right now, all the Dems are doing is giving McCain a free ride while they tear themselves to pieces internally. Why hand the White House to another Republican president?

Oh yeah, that’s right. Because that’s what the Democratic party does in election years.