Monday, October 1, 2012

  1. Have you any deal-breakers?
  2. The Fractured Table.

1

I’ll be glad when the election’s over, if only because I’ll no longer upset nice people by rehearsing Romney’s inadequacies (nobody who knows me is likely to mistake me for a likely Obama voter).

I sympathize with them. I remember how angry I was eight years or so ago when one of my fellow Vast Right Wing Conspirators opined, with corroborating detail upon request, that the GOP was no good, and began toiling for the Constitution Party.

Now I’m him, angering Romney backers who, for whatever reason, have not seen what I’ve seen or have interpreted it differently.

I’ve been told that not voting for Romney is like voting for Obama. I said the same sort of thing to my fellow Vast Right Wing Conspirator in 2004. But in 2012, I think I can vote for whoever I please in the Hoosier state without effectively voting for Obama. Romney’s going to win Indiana’s electoral votes, so I don’t have to decide if he’s the lesser evil.

No matter which of the two major party candidates wins, I’ll be concerned about certain characteristic evils he will visit on the land. But I’ll not be in despair. We’re probably past the point of no return, headed for economic disaster whoever‘s elected, and for that collapse, both parties remain clueless and deserve extreme punishment. The rest of us are just collateral damage.

For any relentlessly partisan readers who still aren’t even comprehending what I’m saying, maybe it would help if you’d read a conscientious liberal’s reasons why he can’t vote for Obama. As he says, “Have you any deal-breakers?” I do. There’s no particular point naming them.

How about if all of us who find deal breakers with both parties all vote for Gary Johnson (great videos, by the way); and then all of those voters in states where “the lesser of two evils” is projected to win handily by the opinion polling (as Romney will win Indiana, for instance) also vote for Johnson since doing so won’t be the equivalent of voting for the greater evil; do you think that might get their attention?

2

“It sure is hard to have people over to dinner these days,” the food writer lamented, at a talk I attended the other week. She told a sorry tale of a dinner party involving two vegetarians, their father who expected to be served meat because he couldn’t get any at home (“poor man”), and a guest who was lactose intolerant. Everyone chuckled. It’s becoming the stylish refrain of the decade, that people’s food choices and fad diets and principles and medical ailments have so splintered us that we can’t break bread together any more ….

David J. Walbert (a new contributor, methinks) at Front Porch Republic, writing about The Fractured Table.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.