Howard Dean has kicked up a few anthills recently, and the response to these things always amuses me. How­ever, after read­ing a cou­ple of opin­ion pieces linked from google news, I’m pretty cranky.

I keep see­ing democ­rats (at least, I’m assum­ing from their point of view that they’re democ­rats) talk­ing about how the demo­c­ra­tic party is “let­ting them­selves be defined by the repub­li­can party” and “this needs to stop”. I’ll agree that the demo­c­ra­tic plat­form has seemed a lit­tle weak on the ideals recently, but I can’t fathom how some­one can write an opin­ion piece about how peo­ple need to state their opin­ions with­out actu­ally stat­ing any opin­ions. I don’t know if it’s out of some weird sense of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, but these peo­ple aren’t help­ing their own cause at all.

Here. I’ll demon­strate: I’m in favor of migrant work­ers hav­ing access to the same qual­ity of health care as the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar com­pany. I don’t think the gov­ern­ment should be allowed to know what books I’ve checked out from the library or what web sites I visit, espe­cially if it can (and in the case of cur­rent law, must) be with­out noti­fy­ing me. See how easy that was? Con­vinc­ing peo­ple that these are good ideals is just as easy. Show­ing that the cur­rent repub­li­can gov­ern­ment isn’t doing any of this, and in many cases is doing the exact oppo­site, is easy too.

“We need to stop let­ting our­selves be defined by oth­ers” is about as use­ful as say­ing noth­ing at all. In the same way that pity can be harm­ful, jump­ing on this band­wagon dis­tracts every­one from the real issues at hand, and that hurts. Treat­ing the lib­eral plat­forms as vic­tims hurts, espe­cially when it’s com­ing from within.

I imag­ine it would be pretty easy to get most peo­ple fired up about things like the new patriot act dis­cus­sions. I can’t believe I haven’t heard some­one call the bluff on this. The idea that “we haven’t been abus­ing these pow­ers” is a valid excuse for giv­ing up fun­da­men­tal free­doms is pre­pos­ter­ous to me. There will always be abuses, and by legally giv­ing the gov­ern­ment extreme pow­ers, we’re giv­ing up our abil­ity to fix things when they go wrong. Appar­ently the “sneak and peek” search pow­ers have been exer­cised in “only about 1%” of cases, which turns out to be about 160 searches. Doesn’t this num­ber alarm any­body other than me?

At the time of the civil war, peo­ple weren’t say­ing “we have to stop let­ting slave-owners define our views”, they were say­ing “slav­ery is wrong.” The world is fraught with social prob­lems, and when peo­ple start actu­ally say­ing some­thing about it instead of beat­ing around the bush, maybe we can start to solve some of them.

Tags: politics, rant