2 posts tagged “politics”
Today is an interesting day. There is a little known holiday in America today known as Loyalty Day. Think about that. In a country whose founding tale involve that of a band of noble men launching open rebellion against their far-away ruler, and whom a large segment of its population romanticize a less noble rebellion against this very nation roughly four-score after its founding, and that politicians to this day invoke open rebellion to gain political support, that there exist on the books a holiday called Loyalty Day is pretty ironic. Perhaps it's no coincidence that also on this date, another event would take place that would teach us all about dramatic irony. Yes, today was the day, six years ago, Bush would produce the piece of stagecraft that would define his presidency: "Mission Accomplished". Unfortunately, it would define his presidency in the exact opposite way than he intended. Now, even the phrase itself can only be used in ironic fashion.
For those two reasons, I wish to declare a new holiday for today. Irony Day.
What an interesting campaign season Campaign 2006 turned out to be. It has been over a week since the Democratic Party won control of both the House and more improbably (at least by predictions of the majority of pundits and of the Iowa Elections Market) the Senate.Given some of the hyperventilating of the conservative blarghosphere, I was expecting to wake up to scenes of this last Wednesday morning. Maybe Apocalypse starts on January 4th.
Mining through the handy archives of the conservative polling and news aggregation site "RealClearPolitics", I got the chance to see how coverage and opinion flowed about this campaign. It's nice to have the filter of history to give a sense of neutral detachment to the endeavor, as well as freeing me from having to come up with something to say quickly enough for it to be relevant, but to focus on snark. Such as cruelly mocking this article by Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times which was hopefully optimistic on the Republican Party's chances of retaining control of Congress. Titled "GOP's uptick just in time for Election Day", it was published on September 26 -- forty-two days before the election. Or the day before the widely-read Wonkette blog would link to explicit emails that Representative Foley sent to a Congressional page. Two days before ABC News published a story about those emails. Three days before Foley resigned, and a scandal broke that helped to destroy a party. Three days after the Hallow declared that all was well.
