5: Watch this. And this.

CONCEPT

Watch this.

Under heated discussion. Numbers One, Two, and Three.
I feel like I'm directing you to the eighth circle (Malebolge specifically), but all I can suggest is that you ignore the popups and avoid Yahoo! at all costs.

And this.

Which in the end, I just find incredibly moving. Neutral? No. He isn't neutral. But he is correct. It's nice to see, occasionally, the power of bias working on my side, and to see that when it does the passionate rhetoric of the moment is directed by my most rigorous calculation to act consistantly with the facts.


And here's another thing.


As I mentioned I felt more on September 11th this year than I have any year since the thing happened. I've acknowledged that a lot of that emotion, if not an indulgence, is at the level of instinct, since the threat to me specifically has never been more than abstract.

At the same time, one can't feel eternally jaded and cynical, or so wrapped in the momentum of careers and daily routines to ignore thoughts so thudding and unsubtle that they almost seem rhetorically excessive.

That thought is that before my eyes, in the last six years, the nation I live in and love has become much uglier, meaner, and darker than I like, and I don't think it's just because I've aged.


And here's another thing.


At work I've been working on a textbook on the 1970s, writing citations that have required me to read and analyze a large chunk of the information itself. After Vietnam and Watergate, the tone overwhelmingly suggests disenchantment and cynicism with government and politics, and this tone was so pervasive that it permeated the decade through Democratic and Republican presidents, all the way down to a speech President Carter gave in 1979 on a "Crisis of Confidence." A full five years after President Nixon resigned and Ford pardoned.

And I can't help but feel jealous.

Because as the enormity of what Nixon had done became clear, he lost his supporters one by one; there may be some disagreement over the extent to which he received the reckoning he deserved, but there was a reckoning. The man left office because a congress split between two parties was ready to throw him out, because his public abandoned him, and because he'd fired his most loyal supporters.

With Bush, with this congress, with this war, with these policies, there has been no reckoning.

Will the public see, in a meaningful way, what has been under all of our noses since the very beginning?

They did with Watergate.

We shouldn't be in Iraq. We shouldn't be racially profiling. We shouldn't be torturing. It's wrong. It's all wrong.


Therefore, I'm jealous.


I prefer Watergate. Any day.

END OF POST.