Pages

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

I wonder how much they had to offer her to go on Hardball...

I haven't taken Government since my senior year of high school.  Granted, I may have been absent the day we learned about the executive branch, but I'm fairly sure the role of the Veep is not "to be in charge of the United States Senate."

Chris Matthews reduces Palin's spokesperson Nancy Photenhauer to a stammering mess in this clip:

On a related note, let's get the media to root out all the anti-Americans in Congress!

Having finally finished with the Puritans, my AmLit class is moving on to the Enlightenment.  I am making them read the introduction to The Assault on Reason by Al Gore and crossing my fingers that maybe one or two of them will get it.  And no, it's not because I'm voting for Obama and want to use my position of power to feed my liberal agenda to the impressionable minds of today's youth, but because that section has everything to do with what the Founders had in mind when framing the Constitution: that it was necessary for a conscientious, informed public to use reasoned, rational thinking to enact the best policy decisions.  The review from the NYT explains better than I could, and with quotes even:

Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.

That's my rehash of recent politics.  Go nuts, kids.

2 comments:

k said...

And to your intro by Al gore, I offer another book, Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl. Allow me to paraphrase: when the burden of democracy had become more than the citizens wanted to bear through such endeavors as staying informed... well we know how this ended don't we.

I am in bed, I look up the page, etc. later. It was one of the most frightening passages I have ever read. No, it wasn't by Anne Frank, of course. I can't remember, but I think it's in the intro by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Tyson said...

Wow Erin! I would Soooo want to date you if, you know, we weren't already married.
And damn, I really don't think Sarah Palin HAS read the constitution. It is impossible for someone to "mispeak" that severely if they actually knew beforehand what the constitution says about the role of the VP.
Scary.