I certainly picked an odd week to start a political blog. When your political obsession revolves around balanced budgets and not participating in stupid wars, when you hate both political parties, and when Congress is full of extremists and devoid of moderates, nothing good ever happens. You just get use to losing all the time. I’m not use to not being miserable.
But this week? Kasich wins Ohio, Rubio drops out, and now Judge Garland is the SCOTUS nominee. That’s freaking awesome! I’ve got my first glimmer of being high on the horse in years… and I’m not use to it… I’m feeling dizzy…
Since I’m actually happy, it’s a good time to talk about when I was happy with this whole political nonsense and it’s also a good time to fill out some background on this blog about where I stand on things. Unfortunatly what that entails is a 44 year old man talking about exploits as a politically motivated teenager in the 80s but there’s not much after that as I fell off the scene going off to the Army and got fed up soon thereafter.
Just this one time indulge me though as it’s the one entrance into politics and I got soon disenchanted.
As a teenager in the ’80s, I was a big fan of President Reagan and all Detroit sports teams. During the 1984 election, the Detroit Tigers were also on a great run atop the American League and it came to my attention how when the American League won the World Series in October, the Republicans won the presidency in November. It was when the National League team won that the Democrats won the presidency. I guess the one year it was off was the “Dewey defeats Truman” election. Well this was welcome news as I was all in on the Tigers and Republicans in ’84 and we won both like in ’68 with the Tigers and Nixon.But I liked the Republicans for more than just baseball superstition. The failure of liberal Democrats was readily apparent just across the street in Coleman Young’s Detroit as I was growing up.
My hometown is the inner ring suburb of Eastpointe (until 1992, known as East Detroit) just north of Eight Mile in Macomb County, maybe 400 yards outside of Detroit city limits with no recollection of the city in it’s glory, witnessing only it’s ongoing, steady decay. It was a blue collar, labor union, ethnic Italian-Polish-German-Irish area, with some southern white Kentucky/Tennessee transplants mixed in. Almost no blacks, although the demographics have been steadily changing and the area is majority black now.
Younger black professionals leaving the blight of the city can find clean streets and occupied homes at very reasonable prices there where they mix in with older white residents and their families who have stuck around. When last I visited Eastpointe in 2015, although the residents are now mostly black rather than overwhelmingly white, it still felt safe and looked very much the same as I remember it as a kid. The neighborhood just south of ours in Detroit had still been fully occupied and viable in the 80s but is no longer viable. Blight has pushed all the way up to Eastpointe city limits and 80% of the homes across the street in Detroit are weed-strewn/neglected/abandoned.
This area was heavily Democratic but I was a Republican as a teenager. My state senator was a fellow named Gil DiNello, a Democrat who gained national attention for endorsing Ronald Reagan. Macomb County was the national epicenter of the Reagan Democrats, Gil DiNello was the biggest face of that movement and I worked spaghetti dinners and passed out bumper stickers for him as a campaign volunteer. I was never a Democrat as a matter of fact, I won statewide office as treasurer for the Michigan Teenage Republicans (until I resigned from the post when I joined the Army in August 1989) but I worked on Gil’s campaign because we both knew Republicans could never win where we lived. Soon enough Gil, who had long been openly hostile to the Democrats, had enough and switched parties himself.
Actually I volunteered for a number of local Republican races, Gil, being a Democrat, was the only one I ever won. I worked on Dick Chrysler’s unsuccessful campaign for governor. I got to go to the Republican Mackinac Island as a teen volunteer for Jack Kemp’s 1988 presidential campaign, and was at the nightmarish 1988 Michigan GOP convention in Grand Rapids where I worked for Mitt Romney’s uber-hot ex-sister-in-law Ronna Romney’s successful bid for re-election as Republican National Committeewoman. In 1988 “the Bush People” and “the Robertson People” had a big fight, the Bush team won the rules challenges, the Robertson people walked out and held a rump convention and both elected a rival slate of delegates to the National Convention. I was fantasizing in vain of a Mrs. Robinson experience with Ronna Romney, er I mean, I was working for her but pulling for the Kemp campaign. Kemp was the overwhelming favorite of the Michigan Teenage Republicans.Maybe Trump/Cruz/Kasich will be like that in Cleveland in 2016 will be like Grand Rapids in 1988. I already have experience in what it’s like to be in third place going into those circumstances.
So I had some good times, I went in the Army and came back a war veteran but I’d lost touch with the GOP being gone so long and the few I knew were out of office. Plus I was getting more disillusioned.
As a political junkie kid I’d watch the Sunday morning talk shows discussing current events. I quickly picked up on the National Debt as my pet cause (along with containing Soviet expansion as this was deep in the Cold War that didn’t look like it would ever end). When the middle aged pundits were talking about how this would negatively affect the children, I heard how it would negatively affect me and my friends, and so opposition to unbalanced budgets has been a consistent companion to me throughout my life. I’ve always been hyperalert to anything that would grow it.
Newt Gingrich’s 1992 Contract with America, I still to this day endorse in it’s entirety. If the Republican Party had stuck to those items, I’d have never left. John Kasich was a top lieutenant in Gingrich’s revolution and thus my enduring affinity for him. The Clinton Impeachment trial really shook me. He was the opponent in all the political fights of the era, I was always on Newt’s side in those showdowns, but I guess I had more respect for the guy than others did. The Monica Lewinsky scandal, although it made President Clinton look like a sleazeball, didn’t bother me too much. President Clinton had been instrumental in balancing the budget and had gone along with Republican efforts at welfare reform and criminal justice rules. So he really wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have the fire in my belly to remove him.
Come the 2000 election I was still a Republican. I was a big supporter of John McCain but hated George W. Bush. McCain had come out of New Hampshire with a win and had a big lead in South Carolina polling. The Bush campaign did something incredibly disgusting, shady and underhanded, faulting him for adopting his daughter Bridget out of Mother Theresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. It was the most despicable line of attack imaginable, taking something both incredibly admirable and personal and bashing him for it with racist dog whistles. I seethed.
So George W. Bush, who I already didn’t like because his tax and spending policies seemed to indicate (very much so as it would turn out) a disdain of trying to sustain the balanced budget that guys like Gingrich, Clinton, Dole, Kasich and others made huge compromises to balance. He clearly didn’t care and never would care. Instead he’d later fire people if they’d bring it up. So, with his blatantly racist attacks on McCain’s daughter, and the moron SC GOP voters who ate it up and rewarding him for it by swinging over to Bush in 2000, they lost me on the spot. And then slammed the door.
I was already freshly done with the Republican Party before the Iraq War began. As a war veteran freshly out of uniform myself I was particularly enraged by the decision to go revive the war, to “finish the job.” We’d already finished the job. Does Kuwait not look liberated? Now this coward who was hiding out in the Texas National Guard during Vietnam and surrounded by a cacophony of chickenhawk lackey foreign affair advisers who’d also every last one of them like himself, dodged the draft in their day – except Colin Powell, the one person with war experience and also not coincidentally the one who he chose to ignore- wanted to go put US troops in harms way in Iraq again for no good reason.
As a war veteran freshly out of uniform myself, it was an outrage. I didn’t like but also fully understood being called to serve in the Gulf War. It was my job and it was a good cause. I hadn’t signed up for war, I was hoping to avoid it. When I signed up, we hadn’t fought a war since Vietnam and I didn’t remember that one. I was hoping my time in service would continue to be war-free. It wasn’t but since I was able to justify in my head the cause being just: one nation invaded another, the country is/was dependent on oil from that region, I was OK with the decision to go.
Afghanistan was one thing, Osama bin Laden had attacked the US on 9/11. Another viable use of US troops. If the president is going to put us in harm’s way, well, I hope he does so with due diligence and as a good reason. We’re willing to put our lives on the line for the country. In exchange we expect the country to not ask us to pointlessly risk our lives. I’d have gone to Afghanistan but the 2002 invasion of Iraq was just such an unconscionable war that should never have been fought.Iraq was a distraction from the legitimate war and soon far eclipsed and was 90% of the focus of the either war. Outrageous. And worse, it was poorly thought out, poorly handled, with no defined goals or missions. I’d angrily skim the list of US deaths looking for names I’d recognize and housing nothing but pure hate to the man who sent them there (and also refusing to pay for it violating my main tenet in both foreign policy as well as domestic politics).
As a war veteran, not long out of service, four years at that point in 2001, I fumed over my friends and former colleagues being forced to put their lives on the line for a pointless war that should never have been fought. It wasn’t just pointless but incompetently run, had no defined goals, no exit strategy, a distraction from the legitimate but far lower priority war in Afghanistan, and a colossal failure all around.
As a citizen who’s primary policy interest is fiscal responsibility, watching the President scrap Paygo, fire Paul O’Neill as treaury Secretary, cut taxes, start two unpaid for wars that blew up the deficit, I was outraged as well.
And while I never liked the Democrats, the Republican Party members who lamely went along with all of it were all dead to me. And that with, with a few exceptions, all of Congress.
John Kasich had resigned from Congress the session before any of this Buhstarded nightmare happened, it’s why his reputation and spot in my heart remained intact all these years later and why I’ll continue to go to bat for him for as long as his longshot campaign has life. I never forgot.
A young war veteran
Watches his friends and colleagues
Dying pointlessly
–
A young citizen
Cries for his beloved country
Drowning in red ink
–
A young man betrayed
Disillusioned and bitter
Leaves the GOP
–
An angry old fart
Typing in an unread blog
Remembers his youth
———-
Young folks are angry
Another class graduates
Underemployed
Workers are angry
Blue Collar jobs drying up
Shipped off to China
Voters are angry
Politicians out of touch
Demagogues rising
Angry Protesters?
These ones can shut the fuck up
The cops keep us safe
But I’m angry too
Angry that we’re so angry
Seems we’ve lost our way
Maybe this will pass
Can we all come together?
I’d like to think so
~~~~~~~~~~~
Judge Merrick Garland
The perfect SCOTUS justice
Can he get confirmed?
Dems are unenthused
Repugs don’t want him either
I’m dancing with joy
Moderates are rare
Only the extremes succeed
We’re invisible
Voltaire Politics 