Election 2008

I'm happy with the way the election turned out. American will be a better country for it.

McCain ran a terrible campaign. He didn't do a good job of defining himself; the thrust of his campaign was to associate Obama with unsavory characters. Poor strategy: (i) many of us instinctively ignore negative political ads, and these were fairly stereotypical in that regard, and (ii) while a good portion of Americans do care about that sort of thing, they were mostly already in the McCain camp to begin with.

Of course, McCain's disastrous blunder was his choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President. She clearly appealed to the Republican base, and appalled everyone else. The killer was the meta-effect: you didn't want to vote for any ticket involving Palin, and you were scared to vote for someone who either thought she was competent to run the country, and/or didn't really bother to carefully vet someone for such an important position. Yikes.

Who knows how well Obama will govern, but I look forward to him rolling back some of the more damaging actions of the Bush reign, and restoring America's honor and moral strength.

The Failure Of The Republican Party

I've been a lifelong liberal, but have generally tried to appreciate what the Republican Party brings to the table, and that most of us are trying to do the best for our country.

But I think the Republican party has been heading down a wrong and disappointing path in the past decade or so. Instead of having core principles, they have defined conservatism as some combination of whatever Bush wants and whatever Democrats want.

One of the few conservative groups to maintain their integrity is The American Conservative, and let me just steal some items from their current cover. The Bush Administration has managed to

• Start an unnecessary war under false pretences


• Shred the Constitution


• Crash the economy


• Expand entitlements


• Ruin America's reputation


• Nationalize banks


• Spy on citizens


• Try to federalize education

Not exactly compatible with core conservative values. And yet the Republican-controlled Congress and courts went along with Bush without much more than a whimper; certainly with no serious opposition. I expected better from the Republican party. I expected more people to stand up for what they claimed to believe in.

George W. Bush will not be treated kindly by history; certainly he has been the worst president of my lifetime so far, and has been shamefully enabled by his party.

Quick-Blogging

Haven't been doing much blogging lately. I love it, but would rather spend my free time doing things than talking about things.

I've been doing a sort of mental blogging in the car during my daily commute: thinking of things to say, and organizing and phrasing thoughts. It's fun, but doesn't give me that final feeling of getting things off my chest. I miss that.

I decided last night that I'm going to try to resume blogging, but will try to minimize the time hit by giving myself a limit of ten minutes to write a post. Starting with this one. I'm curious to see how that will turn out. Will I start writing junk? Or will the time limit help me focus, and filter out verbosity that didn't need to be there.

Not sure if ten minutes is the right amount; maybe five minutes or fifteen will be better. We'll see.