QUESTIONING: Puritans Rule!

I am speaking very loosely indeed on this one, as the situation is in early days, and more will emerge, no doubt, of details that will skew the whole picture one way or another. Probably both.  

David Petraeus did a bad thing, he cheated on his wife, a thing to deplore.  Not an unusual thing, not among husbands, not among leaders of nations, not in the history of the world.  Pretty damn common, actually, and it was a very common thing to do. A very human thing to do.  

David Petraeus has served this country well, he is a man of greatness, in many ways. His contributions to American, to the world, perhaps, have been of note, both in his military service, and his work heading the CIA.

Only in America, this nation that grew from some life-hating seeds of Puritan ethics and judgementalism, does such a man have to commit professional and political harakiri for this kind of error in judgement.

Clinton did it, then lied and tied the country in knots for a while.  He's doing okay.

Roosevelt did it, and probably everyone around him knew it, likewise, John Kennedy, but the nation only found out years later. The nation handled the news.

A number of politicians in more recent years have had affairs that were discovered, and while some of them walked away from their careers in disgrace, and lost all credibility with their public, others said, simply, Yes, I did it, it was dumb, I was dumb... and held onto their careers.

I wonder--Should this man be dismissed from his post, because of this exercise of deplorable judgement in his personal life? Suspended for a while, maybe, to sort out with his wife and family and himself, to get back on track.  Can we afford to give up one of the leaders who has shown much better judgement in other areas, and kept us on track as a nation? It is not as if we actually know him or his wife or the Other Woman, or any details of the situation.  

A revelation of impropriety may expose many areas of corruption in a person's life. Or it might be a complete anomaly. I am thinking, at this point, anomaly. Time will tell.  

I would not have accepted David Petraeus's resignation quite yet.

CELEBRATING: This Time...

When my daughter woke me this morning with the news of the election results, I felt a literal lightening off my heart.  

I am more than happy, I'm delighted that Americans leaned just far enough my way, that I am celebrating this morning, instead of angry, resentful, disheartened, dismayed...

I'm sorry that so many others are feeling that way today. 

Smart or right or helpful, or not, we have become so tightly polarized to Parties and particular ideas and people, that the day after Election Day is not just an 'oh well' day for those whose causes and candidates lost.  I don't think it is helpful.  On the contrary, we remain angry and polarized for some time, even all the way to the next Election Day.

How do we all, winners and losers, take that gracious step back, and see in clearer focus that one man, one idea, one term or two, cannot destroy this nation? We have so many safeguards, and we have so many voices, so many opportunities to shape our world, and it is ideas and beliefs that impel us one direction or another: there are few absolutes in the world, and even fewer in a society like ours that is founded on freedoms of belief and speech.

Our success as a society and as a nation lies in our ability to work with what we have, whether it is natural, cultural or personal.  We are weakened when we expend our energy fighting against what we have: King Canute stood on the shore all day, ordering the sea to retreat until he prevailed. 

Sure, the tide eventually went out, it always does--but what a waste of a day!

I will try to remember all this, next time the tide turns again, and my guy, my causes don't do so well.

SIGHING: If campaigns could only tell the uncorrupted truth,

If all, or at least the vasty most of us, could see through the blandishments and manipulations, the contrivances and devices made to persuade, designed to trip alarms and get us acting from fear instead of fact...  If only we all knew how easily our feelings and minds are managed, because of the many things we don't know, but think we do... If we could see our own susceptibilities and guard against their exploitation...

But, no.  

I am sure it was the same in Pericles' Athens, and in the Roman Republic: that votes are to be gotten by whatever means, vote and voter are nothing sacrosanct: the process has little truth in it, except that we are, in the end, stuck with reality.

COMMENTING: Vote for Substance

Some of us have committed our votes already, gotten it out of the way. Why wait? I knew long ago that nothing was going to change my opinion of the only viable choice, and subsequent events, words and debates could not influence my vote further.

Some of these things I have asserted before:

No president we ever elect will be perfect or ideal.

No president will ever be best in every arena he or she must enter over the four years of the office. 

Sometimes, we must look most at who we believe will do the least damage, or who has the strongest principles, or the most or least objectionable advisors. We can observe how one may be of greater or lesser influence in the world around us: we may be a large part of a continent, but we are not an island, isolated from all else passing on the planet.

The next President will not have nearly the power that we are misled to believe, to fulfill the promises of campaigning: It takes Congress and others working with or despite the President, and the sense or lack of it, of the American people, to determine how our economy will function. A President cannot pass laws alone, or decide all policies alone. 

A body of antipatriots has proven its ability to sabotage the best offerings of a President, standing by its own stated declaration that their entire effort from the day of his election would be aimed at defeating him in the next. 

We are all witness, aware of it or not, that a single truth out of original context, and spoken of by master manipulators, such as the people who 'handle' candidates, and candidates themselves, can become lies.  Lying by misquote, by manipulation of truth, is the hallmark of campaigning, especially by those who lack substance of their own.

Campaigning for office is not the office itself.  Persuading voters to vote for them is a candidate's job, but as we've seen this very week, it is not the job of the office itself. We've seen the President be President when and where we needed him to be. His choice in that matter, to drop the campaigning in order to do the job that is his for at least one more week, shows what we can count on in the future.

We have spent four years training a man of integrity, to do the job, we have some notion which way he will jump on a problem. And many of the things that are not as better as we'd wish them to be, were never in his power to make that much better. He announced from the beginning the intent to be everyone's President, not just his own Party's, and that in itself was refreshing.  He did not appreciate, I think, just how cemented-in-place were the partisans he had to deal with, how much power they had, to sabotage, create obstacles, and lie, without accountability.

From a lame field of dogmatic irrationalists, America was offered... one of them.  Not one in that field has the capacity or qualifications to be President.  That candidate has been 'handled' this way and that, to appear qualified, to appear truly willing and able to represent the whole American public.  And a lot of people--about half of the voting citizenry, it appears--are buying into it, because it is so much what they want to be true.  

If that candidate wins, he truly will represent this nation which seemingly and appallingly is passing from a democratic republic that we call Democracy, to a land of Idiocracy, where ignorance is celebrated, science and knowledge are despised, and entertainment inspires more votes than political realities.

Yes, I voted for Obama.  There is no other rational choice. 

I am not a Democrat.  If the Republicans ever put up a rational, capable candidate with integrity and substance, he or she just might get my vote. But this time... they have not done that. Not even close.