Jeff Ventura

Here's your winner, from Ann Sensenbrenner:

One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd's eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn't seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic.

Although I have to say I still find this runner up funnier.

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I voted Republican in every election since this last one.  Since making that decision, I've been called a liberal (which I am not) more times than I can remember, both in jest and with venom.  I've been told I am a bleeding heart, someone who doesn't appreciate the value of personal achievement and hard work, and someone who believes government should be larger, not smaller.  I've been called far worse, epithets commenting on my perceived affinity for our current President's racial origin.  Basically, I've been told that I'm everything the modern GOP opposes, because as their problem-child poster-boy GWB says, you're either with them or against them.

I suppose, then, I'm against them, only now it's occurring to me as to why.  And this is on a true ideological level, not the level that makes such a decision easy.  Listening to Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin is too easy, and quite frankly unfair: anyone can use the bombastic morons as examples of why something is broken and stupid.  For more rational folks, it runs deeper than that.  It has to.  We're talking live-perspective framework value systems here, not who makes the best margarita.

For quite some time since making the egregious decision not to vote GOP in 2008, I've tried to explain to people that I'm a moderate, a centrist, but in today's polarized, polemic view of social and fiscal stances, moderates are looked at as Libertarian loonies and relegated to either irrelevance or Leper Island.  It's hard to fit in when you have to wear a red or blue label to do so.  And in my experience, most people who claim to also be moderates are anything but, and a quick five-minute conversation usually reveals the plumbing.

I do believe in smaller government, but I don't believe privatization run amok or unregulated corporate GDP engines are the answer. 

I am smart enough to know free markets aren't always free.  I don't trust corporate interests as far as I can throw them.

I believe there is some form of climate change problem despite the actuaries flinging shit at one another over the data and its proclivity to be shared openly -- or not.  I do question exactly how much humanity's occupation of this planet is contributing to this.  My position in this debate is susceptible to the whims of new evidence, data and discoveries.

I think that overt consumerism and greed was the ballroom partner to predatory lending and loan schemes that securitized so many mortgages that made it impossible for banks to know who they owed and who owed them. 

I believe that Obama's fiscal policies are trending off course but he's inherited a hell of a mess and everyone seems OK with ignoring that. 

I believe that in order to affect meaningful change -- of which time and history will be the judge and jury -- there will be pain and gnashing of teeth and calls for military coups so that the superwealthy entrenched firmly in the beltway's ass can remain so.  I believe like everything that requires hardline change, difficult decisions have to be made, and difficult decisions, by definition, mean people get pissed off.  Anytime someone has to look out for the long-term welfare of a group people will be pissed.  That's leadership.

As I'm learning, in the two-node political spectrum we have today, I don't really fit in.  I've spent the last year watching all sorts of news channels and reading blogs of all stripes, and it finally occurred to me that maybe, during what I consider my political awakening, my old party moved away from me as much as or more than I moved away from it.

So it's apropos that today I come across The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan saying he's leaving the right.  His reasons are his reasons, and his claim that he's been resistant to partisanship and cliquery is certainly true, in my experience.  Nonetheless, his manifesto as to why he's leaving nicely crystallizes what I've been struggling with for quite some time.

So here goes.  I thank Mr. Sullivan for putting words to the thoughts and frustration I've been feeling lately, but at some point, you've got to look it in the eye and call it what it is.

Below is Sullivan's manifesto in its entirety.

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I'm not alone.

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First, read this from Bloomberg:

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

via Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder – Bloomberg.com.

Then, read Matt Taibbi's take, especially this quip:

On the funny side, there are several things to consider. There’s the image of Goldman guys walking into Dean and DeLuca’s nervously grabbing at their holstered nines as they buy espresso and soy waffles. There’s the idea that some of these dorks might actually think that they’re going to forestall proletarian rebellion by keeping guns in their Hamptons beach houses. There’s even the impossible-to-resist image of a future accidental shooting of some innocent hot dog vendor on Park Avenue, followed by the inevitable p.r. response from Goldman in which the bank claims that the only thing its employees are guilty of is “being really good at shooting people.”

I think I agree with Matt: this is a solid 7 or 8 on the Funny Meter.

And probably the same on the Sad Meter.

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