As regular readers might or might not have noticed, I haven’t been posting all that much for a long while. Part of it has been due to the fact that I’ve been busy in my (paying) day job, and part of it is due to the fact that my wife and I are expecting a child, and so I’ve had to spend a lot of extra time on preparing for the addition to our family.
But also part of it has been a shift in my political thinking. I really do feel estranged from the culture of the blogosphere as it’s grown to be. Maybe it’s gaining wisdom and perspective as I get older. Maybe it’s because I get tired of all the shrill attacks on Obama and McCaskill from the left. I mean, if anything, they are going as far left as they can legislatively and probably a good deal too far left. For example, can we really afford all this debt that they keep racking up?
In any event, I’m announcing here that I’ve quit blogging for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate that is a lot more real and important to me than shouting into the wind.
Take care.
UPDATE: There is one site I’ll probably be hanging around at that better reflects my views nowadays. You can find me there now and again.
and certainly understand the need to deal with the real life issues that are more immediate – and nothing is more immediate than the demands of caring and providing for a new baby.
Since you were, if I remember correctly, the first mover behind this blog, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to do just what you deplore – shout into the wind with my little voice, no matter how ineffectual that voice may be, or how obscure my soapbox.
I am older than you so perhaps I am losing the wisdom and perspective one gains earlier as I descend into senescent childishness, but I do still value the current left blogosphere, not only because it is comprised of a number of individuals valiantly facing a very strong wind indeed while trying hard to stand together on a very uneven terrain, but because it offers a place for working out contrary opinions within the left – those shrill attacks on the likes of Obama and McCaskill that you deplore, along with discussions about whether or not the debt is really precisely as severe a problem as it is represented. That said, you are right that not all voices are as powerful as others, and shouting into the wind can seem awfully futile at times.
Since I have been responsible for many of the attacks against McCaskill on this blog, I think that I should explain that I do really understand that she, along with the Obama administration make strategic concessions for what are often good political reasons. Nor do deplore “politics” defined as the art of the possible.
I will withhold opinion about the strategies of the first Obama administration until its over. He’s the only game in town right now, and since he will bear the responsibility for outcomes, he gets to decide what he wants to do – and, so far, his administration has done lots of good in a difficult environment.
However, I do believe that the appropriate place to exert pressure in a progressive direction is at the congressional level. By working to shift congress in a progressive direction, one makes space so that Obama and future Democratic administrations do not need to move so far toward a false right/center pole. The way to do that is to refuse to reward blatant pandering on the part of our congress people and to call them out when we think they have let us down.
At any rate, despite my backhanded mea culpa re shrill leftishness, I wish you well in your endeavors.
…that I just love this blog and the people associated with it?
As my uncle used to say to us when we were little kids, “Wiseacre.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHXHjN1CVTE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0%5D