John Huntsman caught some political flack for pointing out how fucked up the Republican Party is this week. Newsflash: He’s right. The GOP is all fucked up. It is, in fact, a complete fucking trainwreck. Hopefully they’ll realize that after they get the ever-living Hell beaten out of them in November this year, but unfortunately, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that that’ll happen.
What makes it worse, though, is the way that the political media is covering the thing. They make it sound like Huntsman has sour grapes—and to be fair, he probably does, considering that he was probably the best qualified candidate in this year’s GOP primary field, and yet he never polled above about 5% in his party’s primaries. But his actual point, that the Republican Party has gone so far to the right that they’ve actually alienated the county’s center, and that having done that, they’re now doubling down and pruning centrist non-believers, is spot on. The GOP has no ideological base right now save that they don’t like President Obama, and to be honest, even that is couched in terms that make the guy out to be a bunch of things that he in reality isn’t, i.e. Muslim, Socialist, not a citizen, etc. Bottom line, the sitting President is “different” than what these guys think a real American ought to be, and they’ve completely lost their shit about it. And now they’re losing their party’s ideology, too. Certainly they lost me.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I honestly believe that I’m a perfect example of why the GOP is gonna get pounded this year. With the exception of the second Bush-Cheney election—when I re-registered Democrat and actively supported John Kerry to the extent of even baking something for Fairfield County’s “Support John Kerry Bake Sale”—I have been a lifelong Republican. I voted for Bob Dole. I voted for Bush the Elder. I voted for John McCain. Hell, I even voted for Bush Jr. when he had Colin Powell on the ticket. But I am not going to vote for Mitt Romney because:
a) He has already held every possible position on every topic of interest in every ongoing national policy debate. IMHO this makes him a unique kind of political spineless jellyfish.
b) I would never vote for a guy who has so little empathy that he’s actually capable of strapping his own family dog to the roof rack of his car for a cross-country drive. A man who can do that simply cannot be allowed to make foreign policy decisions. If he doesn’t care about his own family’s dog, I don’t believe for an instant that he would care about the lives of American soldiers, either, except in that excessive deaths among service members would make him look bad. I don’t know about you, but my personal bar for Presidential character is a little higher than that.
c) He wants to cut taxes more? Seriously? I’m sorry, but I care about my kids’ futures a lot more than that. We’ve already run up the tab on the charge card. Now it’s time to start actually paying on the balance. Or, shit, at least we ought to pay the interest on the balance.
I simply don’t understand what all these right-wing assholes are thinking when it comes to the budget. Honestly, they take the concept of Voodoo Economics to a whole new level. This is not just Voodoo Economics; it’s full-on Economic Satanism.
Like it or not, Huntsman was the only member of the GOP who was willing to meet the President half way last year and actually balance the budget. All those other ass-clowns merely talked about balancing the budget. Only one guy was actually willing to do it, and he couldn’t even get a whiff of support amongst his party’s fiscal-hawk rank and file. And people wonder why he’s mad? I don’t wonder. I wish the guy would go through on his threat to form a Centrist party and give what I sincerely believe is a solid majority of Americans someone who’s worth a rat’s ass to vote for. People are tired of the ideological bullshit. We want and deserve governance. But right now we have a system where one party doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and the other has completely broken faith with its founding ideologies. The “Party of Lincoln” now hates black people. The “Party of Theodore Roosevelt” no longer cares about the environment and actively supports business monopolies and trusts. People, this is not the way to set up a successful system of governmental checks and balances.
Why are serious folks talking about a third (Centrist) party? Because we are desperately in need of one, even if it is only, in John Huntsman’s words, a vehicle to bring some basic ideas back into the big tent of the base of the Republican Party.
With all of that said, let me admit—in the interest of full disclosure—that I did, in fact, vote for Mitt Romney in Tuesday’s Connecticut State Republican Primary. I did that because—SURPRISE!—John Huntsman wasn’t on the ballot.
*sigh*
In the end, I decided that the best way to voice my disapproval of the GOP’s Tea Party influence was to vote for the most moderate guy on the ballot, even if he is an insincere dog-abusing ass-clown. That’s still better than being either a homophobic reactionary fundamentalist or a serial adulterer/faux-intellectual who thinks planting a Moon Colony is a viable foreign policy. Beyond that, I’m willing to admit that Ron Paul is an interesting and important voice in the Party—because, like Huntsman, I am a Big Tent kind of guy—but I personally am not a libertarian, nor am I looking to become one. Paul may be a smart man, but his ideas would be disastrous for the nation, and I’m not going to vote for them just because I happen to find the candidate himself intellectually interesting or entertaining.
But, of course, as we’ve already established at some length, there is no one for me to vote for this time around.
* * *
Speaking of moon colonies…
Asteroid mining has been one of the backbones of near-Earth science fiction for as long as I can remember. As a kid, one of my favorite books was Ben Bova’s The Privateers. More recently, I enjoyed the first of John Ringo’s Troy series, Live Free or Die. Both books employ asteroid mining as a central plot point.
Well, now there comes word that James Cameron and the founders of Google are launching a real-life asteroid mining venture called Planetary Resources. The plan is to use unmanned spacecraft to mine asteroids for gold and platinum as well as for water, which they plan to break down into hydrogen and oxygen by way of creating rocket fuel outside of the Earth’s gravity well. The article claims that most scientists are skeptical, but after reading a few of these articles for myself, I think I’d describe it more as intellectually skeptical but also curious and cautiously excited. The founders are all certifiably smart guys after all, and they have deep pockets.
Is there money to be made here? Who knows? Still, it’s nice, at least, that some part of humanity’s business community is still willing to dream big and to aspire to something more uplifting than simple profit-mongering.
* * *
Need a job? The Pentagon is apparently reorganizing its spy-type efforts, creating a new Defense Clandestine Services agency. Now I’ve read several articles on this thing, and frankly, I still have no idea exactly what these guys are changing. It sounds like they’re developing a human intelligence asset inside the Pentagon, and I guess that’s fine, but I’m not sure how it’s anything but redundant with the CIA’s existing clandestine services branch. Maybe they’re just developing an analysis branch inside the Pentagon to analyze what they already get from in-country SF teams? I don’t know. That makes more sense, but if that’s what it is, I don’t see the point in announcing it to the press. I mean, who cares?
True story: I got recruited by the CIA’s clandestine services folks back when I was at Fordham Business School, and I damn near took the job. Apparently, they recruit at Fordham a lot. Who knew? In any event, Sally and I talked about it for a good long time—she was in the Peace Corps for 4 years and knew quite well what I was asking her to sign up for—but ultimately I decided that for better or worse, that ship had sailed. One, I didn’t want to send our kids to an American School in Kenya or Moscow, and two, I felt like if was gonna kick in doors, I should’ve stayed in the Army where I’d at least have had a tank company to help out with the heavy lifting.
I mean, signing up to do covert research and analysis on Moscow’s evolving financial markets would’ve been one thing; recruiting disgruntled assholes in some backwater province of Iraq was a totally different story. I was not gonna leave a good job in the City and take a pay cut just to go to some shithole. And since the CIA doesn’t make guarantees, that was a deal-breaker.
* * *
One of my co-workers put me onto this: PBS’s series America Revealed is doing a segment on the electric utility industry called Electric Nation, and apparently the New York Independent System Operator is going to be involved. I don’t personally work for the NYISO, but I certainly work with them, so if you’ve ever wanted to try to understand exactly what it is that I do, you might want to watch.
Watch America Revealed: "Electric Nation" - Preview on PBS. See more from America Revealed.
‘Course I’m not saying that there’s any actual reason for anybody to want to know more about my job. I’m merely pointing out that if you do happen to want to know more, more is apparently going to be out there pretty soon.
***
It’s been a Rest Week for me this week. I took Monday and Tuesday completely off, swam easy with my Tri Team on Wednesday, and I’m taking tomorrow completely off. Then on Sunday, Sally and I running theWestport Minuteman 10K. It’s kind of a hilly course, especially towards the end, but I managed to go under 50:00 last year—for the first time since high school—and I hope to do well again this year. I suppose we’ll see. In any event, I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it later.
Have a good weekend!
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