Creeping toward the exit

...patting myself on the back as I go.
I have spent enough time reading and getting upset and posting and finally blowing hours I should spend working just to do a particular kind of blogging. Not Jewish, not Buddhist, not Humanist, not wise, not even witty, just political outrage. The time has run out, and not been well spent. I bore even myself. This post is not my last but I hope it is the end of the perfunctory, egotistical repeating myself and others. I don't have time to write this...something must be boiling over somewhere in my so called life.

I will plead that it is easy to become obsessed. The rewards however are scant. I can, with no better sources than a few on-line newspaper articles, develop a slight sense for what crap should hit the fan next, or at least, writing two million characters of indignant posting, a few sentences are bound to match a footnote or a headline somewhere. Yesterday I protested we should be told what deals Cheney cut with the oil companies. Today TPM peels back the wraps on those old meetings. A few weeks ago I sarcastically suggested we give Bush a third term. The idea is so nauseating, MoveOn, coincidentally, used it in an email plea last week that began:

Dear MoveOn member,

What would a third Bush term look like? Endless war in Iraq, continued torture and spying, more ultra-conservative judges, more and more people without health care, and so on...it'd be awful.

But that's impossible, right? Well, maybe not...

What does it mean that my anger becomes tuned to the anger of the reality based? What have I sunk to? What have we all sunk to? Am I so different from or any less formulaic than a Limbaugh or a Coulter? Did my hit counter's success not hang upon the outrageousness of my topic vis-a-vis our liberal values more than upon its significance to any wider audience or even its accuracy? Judgments of accuracy may be a matter of perception to some extent but I call myself a liberal because I found more accuracy on that side. What have we given up in order to get a little attention? Are we damned from the start when we decide that to slant things a bit is justified if being ignored is the alternative? Must hyperbole and emphasis of only the grotesque be adopted if those are the techniques of the other camp? I do confess I hate those who push corrupting and degrading half truths but why would that make their methods worth emulating?

For example, look up some puddle of poo like this presumably real plea for a third Bush term. Easy to find with google. Easier to throw rocks at. So easy I get tired of it. This could become habit forming but it is not respectable blogging. Enough.

I have heard you can dislocate your arm trying to pat yourself on the back but I am good at it. There is a callus back there big enough to make me look like Dumas' bell ringer. But the hunchback did not let his soul become grotesque.