Wednesday, November 08, 2006
And the Winners Are . . .
Well, I sort of expected the Democrats to make some substantial gains this election. The Senate thing sort of surprises me a little. In Nevada the Republicans did about as expected, which is to say pretty well. The Democratic candidate for Congress from my district, a 29-year old woman named Tessa Hafen, came amazingly close to beating out the incumbent, which means of course that you’ll be hearing about her in the future. Her opponent’s biggest mistake was in trying to label her an outsider. Her family moved to Nevada in 1860; there’s an old tire store down the street named Hafen’s Tire Store. They’ve been in Henderson since before it was called Henderson. So he did himself some damage, but to come close, and in fact to force him to win by a plurality, not a majority, means that this former assistant to Senator Reid will be heard from in the future for sure.
More broadly, as I always imagined, rule by bluster and repeated untruth generally falls under its own weight. That’s not a Republican thing: any party that takes over the entire show will fall apart in a few years. That’s just the nature of things. However, for the record, I would like to repeat some points I’ve made over the past seven years that I’ve been writing for the Internet.
First, earnest belief in something doesn’t make it so, no matter how much you want it to be so, will it to be so, and can convince yourself that you believe it to be so. True believers are dangerous, because sooner or later they tend to get around to killing whatever challenges their dearly held beliefs. That’s Osama Bin Ladin’s followers, for example. They’re wrong, but they’ll fight to the death for their right to stay that way. That, amazingly, also seems to have been the attitude of the Executive branch for the past six years. I guess that’s, as Mick Jagger once wrote, all over now. Luckily, it fell apart short of the killing the infidels stage, but some people were worried and not without reason. Myself, I have faith in a free society, which will only stand such tripe for a limited time, so like I said above, I’m not surprised.
Second, you can’t defeat an enemy unless you first understand that enemy’s point of view. Being sympathetic to someone you’re trying to kill isn’t stupid; it’s necessary if you want to have a chance to succeed. The biggest failure, in a military sense, of the past six years has been the utter failure at the top to acknowledge and come to understand our enemies’ points of view. I like to put it that “everyone is the hero of his own movie.” Hitler, for example, was a great guy, loved dogs; you could’ve asked him. Everyone who’s out to get us for being the “Great Satan” has a point of view. I wrote last year that, from the point of view of a Palestinian Arab, Israel is a bit difficult to understand, to say the least. You see the result when the top guy thinks, or acts like he thinks, that Israel is there by divine right. Mistakes get made, and much more death and destruction than necessary is the result. Sure, Israel has a point of view, too. I’m not advocating getting rid of Israel, it’s far too late to even consider that, but I am advocating considering the points-of-view of Israel’s enemies. Bin Ladin, like everyone, is his own hero. If we could understand his point of view, we’d know where he was, and we’d be rid of somebody nobody in this country would be likely to miss.
Third, and this has been implicit in a lot of my humor, but maybe I’m too subtle. You tell me. It is the nature of a republican government (I mean a “res publica” or “public thing”, which is what “republican” means) that nobody gets what he wants, virtually never. What we all get is a rough consensus over time that isn’t what anybody really had in mind, but that over the centuries actually seems to work fairly well, and also seems to keep making life better, one generation at a time. Insisting on only voting for a politician that will do things “your way” is idiocy. You are not always right; nobody is always right. Give a little, get a little: it won’t kill you.
And fourth, well, fourth is the idiocy represented by Libertarianism. Heck, I don’t have the energy to do that rant this evening. I’ve been busy writing a book. Later, folks . . .
Labels: Politics
