If you’re like me, and if you read this blog you probably are, your in-box is full these days. The hours are ticking down until the midnight reporting deadline for political campaign funds, and, judging by the emails, it’s a matter of life and death that I give today. I imagine the few right wing readers I have (and I know you’re out there) are experiencing the same thing. No doubt their missives are even more frantic, as each and every beggar is the last bulwark between liberty and socialism.
To those on the left, the threats are many, and most of them are real. I’d feel better if I thought that those grasping for my money would actually do anything to defend us from them, but the past, as they say, is prologue. James Carville, for instance, reminds me of the threat posed by a Republican takeover of the Senate:
They get their crazy ideas through the House, and the Senate stops ’em. Thing is, they flip four seats, and their ideas will fly right on through.
He’s right. They will fly right on through. But James, why didn’t our ideas “fly right on through” in 2009 and 2010? For that matter, why don’t they fly through the Senate now? Why does it take sixty votes to pass something when the Democrats are in the majority, and only 51 when it’s the Republicans?
The DCCC, on the other hand, warns that the death of NPR is at hand. If you read Dean Baker, you might wonder why we should care. The Republicans have succeeded in doing with NPR what they have done with all other national media: made it a purveyor of their talking points while demonizing it for liberalism. Only Fox escapes the demonization, because it’s so enthusiastic about the purveying.
All these people are promising to fight for me, and yet somehow, once they have my money, they never seem to do so.
But hope springs eternal, so I just gave some money to Elizabeth Warren. But that’s it. I don’t even care if I’m giving up on a chance for dinner with Obama. At this point, I’m not sure I could remain civil if I won.
Tomorrow the emails all stop, and “for this [future] relief, much thanks”, but like Francisco “I am sick at heart”.
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