The Life and Times of Elliot Pike

I just read a short Yahoo! News article about a recent polling result:

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.

For some Democrats/Liberals this may be a continuation of the cheery news that the 2008 Presidential election is increasingly likely to swing Democratic. But I wonder if this news may be the harbinger of something more profound.
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I suspect most everyone who isn’t a political junkie like myself is so sick of the strange “Attorney General Alberto Gonzolas and the Prosecutor Firings” ongoing news story as to have stopped paying attention altogether. And indeed, as most news pundits acknowledge, the actual firings aren’t as surprising as the Justice Department’s (and specifically Gonzolas’s) complete bungling of the issue.

For those of you who have already tuned out (or never tuned-in) the Senate is eating Gonzolas for lunch, Republican and Democrat alike. Why? Because all his testimonies and responses to our legislative branch have been full of sloppy lies and inconsistencies. In other words, they are responding to the sheer and utter contempt that the Bush Administration has had for the legislative branch since Day One.

For the first four years, the Bush Administration behaved with what I always perceived as complete disdain for the legislative (and judicial) branches of our government, but while the Republicans were in charge, they were far more concerned with keeping their own political party in power than sticking up for themselves. I was constantly sickened by their utter lack of self-respect or backbone—they are after all the sole voice of the people in the Federal Government.

So now Republican lawmakers are finally showing resentment, chagrin, backbone… whatever. It should come as no surprise. After all they’ve probably been secretly swallowing a steady diet of bile for the last six years, and now that there’s no Republican Majority to protect, they can stand behind the Democrats (who are finally doing the job) with tacit support.

In a way I pity them: it must really be lousy living life with no balls.

There’s an interesting adage I’ve heard from time to time. It goes something like this: If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water he will jump out, but if he sits in a pan of cool water and you turn up the heat slowly, he will remain until he cooks to death. Obviously it’s intended to describe human behavior—that we tend to ignore dire threats if they’ve been growing slowly and we’ve been getting used to them.

One example of this is the Avian Flu situation that I blogged about a couple days ago. Another is the Bush Administration and its policies toward Iran.
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I’m ambivalent about the upcoming Presidential race, torn between whether February 2007 is way too early for campaigns to start up or if it’ll provide a needed dialog of ideas.

I remember just a couple months ago thinking that I couldn’t wait for the 2008 campaign to start up. I wanted anything that could distract me from the depressing hopelessness of the current Bush administration. Yes, we’re stuck with him, and even as unpopular as he is, there’s little that can be done to stop him.

(It’s interesting in a way: if a “lame-duck” president has no military engagements, he or she is restricted to domestic policies which can be completely choked-off by a hostile Congress; almost everything depends on proposing bills and getting them passed, even if they’re just spending bills. But as we see with the Senate unable to do much more than pass “Non-binding resolutions condemning the President, there’s little more they can do to stop his management of a war short of impeachment. Hence, Bush has nothing to fear from the Democratic majority.)

There’s something profound about this upcoming election, and I’m certainly not alone in pointing it out: this is the first time in 80 years that there will be no incumbent candidate. Neither the President or the Vice President will be running, so political dialogue will take place in both political parties.

There’s more to this than simply having twice as many candidates—twice as many “talking heads” in the fray. This time you’ll see commonality between moderates of both sides. I will argue that this creates a significant shift of power between moderates and fundamentalists.
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There’s a short-but-good article on The New Republic Online (You can read this article without a paid subscription, but you have to register.) about the Avian Flu. Essentially it points out that while the Bird Flu was a huge headliner for all news sources last year, its danger has only increased over time while its media coverage has dropped to almost nothing.

Idiocy over the Bird Flu isn’t restricted to the media, however. I am a member of a large organization’s committee on Health Care. Last year there was a lot of talk about the bird flu, but ironically whenever my fellow committee members opened their mouths (including a member who is a practicing doctor) it was obvious that none of them had the most fundamental understanding of the issue. I had made a point of reading articles from Newsweek to Wired to the official White House strategic publications, and I’ve got to say almost all of my fellow committee members would have failed a basic factual quiz on the topic.

One example question, the most basic, would be “True or False: The current strain of the Bird Flu is deadly because it is very contagious between humans.” Hopefully all of you readers would immediately say “false”, and then follow-up with the observation that the concern is with the possibility of a mutated strain developing that make it easily contagious to humans. It’s probabilistic time bomb.
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