Sorry about that

Was working on a post about the upcoming US elections. It wasn’t ready. I had edited it a number of times, and hadn’t gotten my complete thoughts down. Managed to hit the publish button midway though. Pulled it down. It wasn’t ready for consumption. Short version: US politics, always a messy game, is going to be ugly this year. We have hard core ideologues arrayed on the (effectively 2) sides, unwilling to compromise their positions for a “greater good” of the body politic. We have quite profound ideological and pragmatic differences between office aspirants and the current holder of the presidency. These differences are fodder for their respective bases. And we have a media, absolutely and resolutely on one side of this spectrum, rather than taking an ideologically disinterested role, and focusing upon the real issues. The media in the US is so bad that many people here are turning to papers in the UK to get something closer to unbiased reporting … or reporting with known admitted biases.

We have numerous memes being floated by one side in an attempt to reach the basest human emotions. We have grass roots groups, the Tea Party (whom are mostly pissed off middle class US people annoyed at the extremes of deficit expenditure and unwilling to take loss of liberty and increase in government scope lying down), and their … er … reflection on the other side, the so-called Occupy “movement” (which when you look at their rallies on Youtube, Vimeo, and elsewhere, you realize that its some sort of alliance between hard core socialists, communists, often racist or anti-semitic …, often clueless anarchists and other … fun people … who would rather protest and get free handouts than work for a living). Yeah, its gonna be ugly here. Its gonna stink. The world will wonder if we are mad. I know, I know … there are some folks who believe that the current president is the best thing since sliced bread, and we are … racist … racist I say! … if we oppose him or his policies. See what I mean? That meme is already out there. I see a fair number of friends and colleagues tweeting or posting things that I expect of one side of this debate. Sad, but I don’t dissociate myself from people just because their political outlook is vastly different from mine. I generally try to avoid engaging friends in such debates, as nothing gets blood boiling faster over here than a good hard debate over these topics. Most of us here want this to be over. We have another 10-ish months of this torture. Maybe we should just lay back, close our eyes and think of England.