gonewest

I’ve been stuck at home doing an oncall rotation this last week, but that finally ends this evening.

I hope the weather is good this weekend because I really need to get out and breath some fresh air.

The Bush administration is [finally] going down in flames. The only wonder is that it took so long for public opinion to sour on what may very well go down in history as the worst president this country has ever had.

29% and sinking….. (don’t click more unless you want to read a strongly political rant)

But hidden in this welcome turn of events is a very disturbing tactic popping up in conservative circles of labeling Bush as a closet liberal (it is beginning to be commented on in several liberal blogs but Digby was probably the first to predict it). It is one thing for self described conservative leaders (bloggers, pundits, journalists, etc) to get a clue and try to disavow the cement block that is Bush before he single hand-idly sinks the whole movement, but claiming that Bush is bad because he is actually a liberal goes far beyond simple inaccuracy.

Speaking as one of the many liberals, none of whom have ever given a shred of support to the embarrassment that is the Bush administration (excepting the rare liberal who grudgingly supported the Iraq invasion early on — and now regrets it), I have to say that the image of “Bush the liberal” is as silly as it is insulting. You conservatives may not like Bush and his cronies (though you all seemed to think he was peachy king back when he was still popular), but to attempt to insulate yourselves from the fallout by labeling this administration as liberal reveals just how unprincipled you can be as well as how empty that term really is for conservatives.

The simple truth is that the word “liberal” has just become a way for a modern conservative to call someone a [insert expletive here] without getting bleeped or told to watch their language. In the conservative mind it seems, all that is good must somehow be “conservative” while all that is bad must somehow be “liberal”. After all, when you are certain that your ideology is the “right one” and most of the tenets of that ideology are as rigid as conservative philosophy has become (case in point: try to get a “real conservative” to name a tax that isn’t bad), then any failure of conservatism must be remade a failure of a practitioner of conservatism; otherwise the whole world view begins to crumble. Yin-yang, good-bad, conservative-liberal; this is the false dichotomy that conservatives have internalized to simplify their world view (and conservatives just love for everything to be simple). If there is an appropriate dichotomy here, then it is conservative-radical, but even that does not imply a uniform match up with good-bad.

Liberalism, on the other hand, is built upon very general principles (such as that government is responsible to help ensure the welfare of its citizens rather than program X=good or bad, government=big or small or taxes=good or bad) while pragmatism and empiricism help determine the more concrete tenets and goals. Because of this, liberalism is not so tightly tied to specific value statements and can adjust to “self correct” when necessary without damaging its validity as a world view. Liberalism can therefore tolerate much more introspection and self criticism from its practitioners than can conservatism and, in fact, you can argue that such self criticism is necessary for liberalism to thrive. All of this introspection, of course, is not conducive to the ways of modern media which leads to the “mushiness” and lack of catchy sound bites for which liberals are so often faulted on the talking head shows.

This “Bush the liberal” tactic should be hilarious as almost everything he has done (while sometimes more radical than conservative in nature) is the polar opposite of what a liberal would do. The danger is the fact that the tenacity, message discipline, and pervasiveness of the conservative media machine makes it conceivable that this deceitful and disgusting tactic might actually work (long enough at least to fool the dups who helped vote in Bush and the current batch of corrupt Republicans to get duped again in November).

So, for all you conservatives out there who think you are capable of expanding your horizons and moving past this “liberal is a four letter word” stage, then please learn a little about what conservatism and liberalism really mean. And for those of you who would prefer to simultaneously run away from Dear Leader and smear all of us liberals by trying to foist that miserable failure on us, then I say fuck you and the worst-horse-in-the-history-of-this-country that you rode in on (see, we liberals don’t need to hide behind a fake definition of conservative when we want to insult someone ;-)).

I have been very interested in the whole EV movement for quite a while and have wanted to buy a street legal electric scooter like one of these for several years (a battery electric car would be better but no commercial options exist yet — maybe if I bought a Prius and this?…).

Unfortunately, an EV of any kind has not been an option for me because I am an apartment dweller and my parking spaces have never had access to an outlet for charging.

I recently got a much better parking assignment at my current complex (my car is parked just outside my front door now instead of two buildings away) and I noticed just this morning that there is a padlocked green metal box not five feet away from the new space. This box looks to house a distribution panel which could be for either phone, cable, or power.

I am hoping that this turns out to be a power panel; because if it is, then I should be able to talk the building into letting me have a metered outlet hooked up so that I can finally get into the whole EV scene (and then my 2-3 month refuels will probably extend to six months or more).

IMG_1518.JPG, originally uploaded by lordjoe.

The recent weather in Seattle has really improved, so the rainy season must be over. I’ve posted a handful of pictures that I’ve taken from a ferry ride from Seattle to Bainbridge Island a few weeks ago and a quick walk through Discovery Park yesterday. You can find the photo set here.

I had to fill the tank this morning at a cost of $35 for my little Miata. Here in Seattle the going price for regular unleaded is about $3.35 (though you can find it for around $3.10 if you get at least ten miles away from downtown) and premium runs around $3.55. We are into the annual summer spike right now so prices should relax a little by the fall, but I am starting to wonder if we might see $4 gas before they do.

I am a believer that peak oil has (or is just about to) hit and that gas prices have begun a relentless upward spiral that will not stop — allowing for seasonal ups and downs, of course — but I have been assuming that gas would not hit $4 until next year and $5 wouldn’t hit until a year or two after that. Our economy is heavily dependent on energy (the cost of trucking materials and products long distances is factored into practically everything we consume) and I feel that the US economy will start to nose dive over energy costs somewhere not far above the $5 gas point (this assumes, of course, that it has not already tanked for other reasons such as our ballooning deficit).

I believe that we can avoid a lot of the pain of high energy (read: high oil) costs if we act intelligently and start preparing now, but how much hope can we have that a government that still is not doing much to help New Orleans recover from Katrina will do anything about a coming oil shock? So if the government won’t prepare, then we as individuals have to — but that takes time.

I am really hoping to have at least 2-3 years to get ready for any shocks to our economy, but if we breach $4 this year, then my confidence that we have a few more years to prepare will be greatly shaken.

I guess I should at least be happy that I need my car so little out here (I’ve been here for about three months and this is the first fill up since the post-drive-to-Seattle refuel). Another plus is that Washington state is the #1 hydro-power producer in the US, so while all the commuters may be dumping half their paychecks into their fuel tanks in the coming years, at least the utility bills should stay fairly low.