Croaking Like a Frog

I feel much better but my voice is going and I'm croaking like a frog whenever I talk. I can deal with it but since so much of my verbal interacting with people involves me spouting one-liners, not having a clear voice seriously impairs my ability to communicate.

Last night I watched as the Republicans won big in the off-year election. The Virginia governor race was pretty well in hand long before yesterday, but the governor race in new Jersey could have gone either way up until the last minute. Now New Jersey is a very deep blue state, rife with mismanagement, corruption, and failed tax policies. The Democrats should have long ago been booted out, but people who ardently vote one way or the other do so for reasons that have little to do with rationality. As a wise man once said, "You cannot reason a man out of something he has not been reasoned into."

As a Conservative (but not a Republican unless they're going the same way I am) I used to wonder why "the other side" could not see how badly their side had mismanaged things. Then I came to see that even when they notice that their plans failed utterly, they assume that their opponent's plan would have just made things even worse. We see this today--even though things are actually worse economically today than they were supposed to get if nothing was done at all, still the current power-holders tell us how much worse it really would have been.

This is all just politics, but it is not at all the case that it is played equally by both sides--it isn't. A genuine Conservative would be too ashamed to make that kind of claim (though a lip-service one will say anything). Indeed, that highlights a problem: what are the actual "sides" we're talking about? I see self-identified conservatives on TV that I don't agree with on much, and it goes in reverse with some liberals (and/or Dems, Repubs, Indies, Libertarians, etc.)

Only when you yourself know what you think needs to be done, and have some idea on how it can be achieved, can you intelligently vote for someone who will honestly try to do that very thing. Ideas matter, character matters, but talk is cheap and any idiot can produce his own words, in the end worth every bit as much as the evening croaking of a frog.