I think I should apologize to the handful of people who do the the honor of checking this blog out fairly frequently. I know that you guys mostly stop by for my "Dave Barry Wannabe" stuff, like when I write about my dogs or tell old drinking stories or embed good stuff from YouTube.

But you had to know from the very name of the blog that I'm a politics addict. Politics is to me what sports is to normal guys. And an election year, especially the last couple of months of an election year, is Superbowl time. Right now I'm having a blast.

Some of the folks who stop by here are in the same boat as me. Like Cube and Unseen and Paul. They're conservative political junkies, too, and I know they can relate.

But most of the folks who're kind enough to read some of my junk and leave comments are looking forward to me getting back to adolescent jokes. I promise, mid November is coming. The anti-Obama bumpersticker (and link) in my header will be gone shortly after the election and I'll get back to writing about Metallica and movies and such. You know, doing what I do best: the blog equivalent of funny armpit noises.

I think that part of the reason I'm having so much fun with politics this year is that I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm a conservative and there isn't a conservative running this year. (Hell, the last time there was a conservative running was in '96 ... but that's a whole nuther.) No matter who wins, I'll be stuck trying to make the best of a crappy (or crappier) choice ... so it's nothing personal.

I have developed some affection for Sarah Palin ... and that could translate into political loyalty if she walks the line. But right now I'm just not that vested, personally.

Anyway, once this thing is wrapped up and either the unsatisfactory candidate or the utterly inept candidate get in there, I'll get back to my usual mundane irresponsibility. I promise.

Meanwhile:

• I've been trying to get up to date about the situation in the Caucasus. The more I read, the more I wish I hadn't read anything. This is some scary shit, man. And Georgia is just the tip of the iceberg. This is from the current issue of the only news source I trust, the National Review. The emphasis is mine:
  

  As with Georgia, Putin did everything he could to derail Ukraine’s democratic revolution: Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko Suffered dioxin poisoning, possibly at the hands of Russian agents. The agreement that the Russian fleet may use the Black Sea port of Sevastopol runs out in 2017, and senior Russian officers have already declared that this is an interest they will never give up.
  
  In a dramatic display of solidarity—and alarm—Yushchenko, President Lech Kaczynski of Poland, and the three Baltic presidents flew to Tbilisi for a joint press conference. Determined to defend their independence, Ukraine seeks NATO membership while Poland has hastily concluded an agreement to have an American missile-defense system on its soil. Russian spokesmen threaten both countries with nuclear strikes. Marxist ideology may be missing, but the intimidation hews to the familiar Soviet style.




• I spent some time thinking about all of that tonight and pondering the next few years. Given Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, etc ... I asked myself if there was really anyone I trusted to lead the US over the next few years. Only one name came to mind: Thomas Sowell. You may be aware that my opinion of Thomas Sowell is damn near worshipful.
  
  So I reminded myself to google the phrase "draft Thomas Sowell" when I got home and see if there were many other like minded people out there. I was a little surprised to see that there isn't that much of a "draft Sowell" movement on the net. I did discover one like-minded blogger (I see another addition to the blogroll coming up) and I found some "draft Sowell" comments here and there, but there really isn't much noise being made about the idea of a Sowell presidency. Pity. The guy is a genius. And he's not a politician.
  
  Of course he'd never run, but it would be cool if there were a draft Sowell source out there for his fans to use for social networking. Or whatever.



• Oh, yeah, speaking of Russia and Georgia, this bit from an item in the National Review put a smile on my face:

  Vesti FM, an outlet of Russian state radio, has been broadcasting that Vice President Cheney set these events (in Georgia) in motion in order to prevent the election of Senator Obama.

  I had to chuckle. Pity the poor neocons, I thought. They're so crippled by democracy that they have to arrange an international crisis in order to influence an election. It's bound to be simpler to do it the Putin way and simply rig the thing from the get-go.



• A great many of the blogs I read are upset about Obama's pig in lipstick remark. My take: we're wasting our time with this. If anyone ever asks Obama about it he'll simply say that he was being colloquial and that he'd never stoop to calling Governor Palin a pig. It's beneath him, he'll assert, and the right-wing blogs who called him on it are just being paranoid. He'll come out smelling like a rose and make the right-wingers look childish.
  
  He didn't make the phrase up, after all. Google it.
  
  We've got to pick our fights better than this, people. You can't win a bullshit contest against the world's champion bullshitter.
  
  Besides, he probably really didn't intend it as a veiled reference to Governor Palin. Could this the kind of hysterical over-reaction that we've come to expect from the left-wingers? We're better than that. Right?



• I tried to leave a comment to that effect at Newsbusters, a conservative blog dedicated to following the leftist media. But first I had to register and then I had to log in and change my password, and the log-in page wouldn't load and yadda yadda yadda.
  
  It reminds me of Little Green Footballs, a conservative blog that I absolutely love ... but that requires a vetting process for potential commenters that's probably tougher than the screening process to join The Avengers. It just ain't worth it.
  
  Come on, people! It's just the internet! When did we start taking ourselves so damn seriously? 90% of the people using this particular medium are just looking for porn and MP3s. None of us are crafting Plato's Republic, here.



• One of the reasons I love LGF, by the way, is that Charles occasionally turns up tidbits I might have missed from some of my favorite writers. Like this one from P.J. O'Rourke:

  Ann Coulter to me is someone who says things that I say all the time, but I say them at three in the morning when I’m drunk as a monkey. She says them at three in the afternoon stone sober in bright daylight.

  That's just awesome. P.J. Rules.
  
  By the way, Fox News doesn't do itself any favors by allowing Coulter on in prime time. That woman is the right-wing version of Keith Olbermann. Can't we all do a little better than that?

Labels: Blogs, Media, News, Obama Watch, Politics