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So, some of you have heard Plaidder family politics sagas before, but I thought I would share the latest one:
Had lunch with my parents and my partner and her parents this past Sunday. Politics reared its head late in the game. My mother says she's 'probably' going to vote for Kerry, despite having been a huge Bush apologist for years because she's friends with some of his distant relatives. My father, who's a lifetime pro-business Republican white affluent executive type, said that he didn't think Bush had done a good job but he couldn't see himself voting for Kerry.
I wasn't surprised to hear him criticizing Bush because he's done it before; he thinks the Iraq war is a disaster, among other things. Not that imperialism bothers him, but he just couldn't believe the lack of long-range planning; as he always said, "It was never in question whether the most powerful army in the world can defeat Saddam Hussein; the problem is gonna be what happens afterwards." And as we can see, there was no fucking plan for that, apart from "Everybody profiteer!" Anyway, during this most recent discussion he also used the words "Someone is going to have to raise taxes because something's got to be done about the deficit," which startled me because my dad is probably in that 2% bracket that Kerry plans to hit. And then he goes on about how the Democrats should have a better candidate, and I said that we'd have a better candidate if we had a better media, and he said the media is biased toward the Democrats, and at that point I fear I sort of stopped being calm and rational.
One thing I can say for my career as an amateur pundit, though: I have all kinds of information at my fingertips that I never had before. I went through the whole thing about Judith Miller pumping Chalabi's fantasies directly into the NYT and Bush being an absentee president and I wound up saying, "You keep saying you think George W. is a good man. I don't think he's a good man. I don't think he or any of his crowd have the country's best interests at heart. I think they've basically been pillaging for the past four years and that's all they're going to do if they're re-elected. They started a war based on false premises that they now have no idea how to win and I don't see why anyone thinks that if you give them another four years they're going to be able to solve all these problems that they've created."
He said, "Well, see, that's the argument Kerry should be making." And I just kind of went, 'ARRRRGH!'
Eventually it was over and my parents were trying to tell me it would all be OK in the end whatever happened and I was thinking, for them, this is just a game that they enjoy playing with me the way my brother likes to argue, and they think this is just a normal election and we're just having a bracing exchange of views. For me, that's not what's going on here. This is a serious, life-or-death moment in the history of the country, and it's bigger than whether you're conservative or liberal or Republican or Democrat, it's bigger than America even, and come on people, you have to GET that.
So I left thinking, well, that was all a waste of time, I'm never going to convince anyone because I can't talk about any of this without getting upset. Then I got a voicemail from my mother, saying that on the way home in the car, my dad said, "Well...I *guess* maybe I could think about voting for Kerry."
Better than nothing! But I sure am tired of this, and I hope November ends it, because I'm about tapped out.
One brain at a time,
The Plaid Adder
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