Politics and The Annual Hawk CountEach fall, intrepid, eccentric birders head out to the ridgelines and shores to count migrating hawks along the nation's flyways. Hawks, eagles, and ospreys inhabit the top of their food chains, so hawk populations are an indirect measure of environmental health, plus plenty of folks just dig hawks and eagles for their size and grandeur.
A wise pal (MM - thanks) warned me in the Fall, during an Audubon hawk-count, that if the Dems end up without either the House, the Senate, or the White House, they would go berserk and get wierd and dangerous. Man, was he correct. In just a few weeks, we see Teresa Heinz, Bill Moyers, Jimmy Carter, Screamin' Dean, Harry Reid, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, George "Bong-Man" Soros, Teddy "Hic" Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Dan Rather, Barbara "Fang" Boxer, and God knows how many other members of the Liberal Establishment, go bonkers. In public. Plus even the Big Media - the only "Big" anything they don't bitch about - is in trouble. Even if they still have their easy day job, powerlessness makes some folks nuts, especially when they are accustomed to having it. The only one not going nuts is the Man With The Plan - Hillary the Re-Born Conservative.
And it's not just the election - it's the fact that Bush is doing well. How can an assumedly idiot (Andover, Yale, Harvard) Republican succeed in anything? When I heard that Kennedy had suddenly removed his famous negative speech (from just before the Iraq election) from his website, I knew these guys were in deep trouble. All they can hope for is a recession, a major reversal in the ME, or really anything bad.
The Great Rushbo has been saying for years that if ANYTHING goes right, it hurts the Libs. For years, he has been pointing out how the press can find the one negative statistic out of 100 good ones, but I figured that was his typical hyperbole. It isn't. I believe they hope for trouble, because trouble will help them, and invent crises if they can't find them. Forget the Country, forget Freedom. Dr. Joy Bliss, our Blog Shrink (every blog needs one), always says that power is far more corrupting than money. Power is psychologically intoxicating to weak people - it's a drug - as mind-distorting as heroin or TV. Money just sits there quietly, and it's never enough anyway.
(Well, power is what democracy is about. It's the brass ring, along with job security and a pension anyone would envy. I guess we have to be glad that some people are willing to do it. But it's not like the good old days (?) when regular folks would run for elections as a brief public service, an interruption of their normal life. It's become a career, so you get careerists. Will not term them professionals.)
Anyway, we are seeing people - a political party - in acute withdrawal. A Detox Ward. People in DTs. But instead of seeing the traditional pink elephants, all they are seeing are Republican elephants.
Well, it's been a long hard climb for sanity to enter Washington, DC. We "normal" folks had the power to get it, but do we have the power to keep it?
