I Never Did Understand How to Play Politics (But I'm Not Alone)

Oy, it's a confusing day over at the Google Reader.  I down my first espresso with Tom Carlson's "Snobs Like Us," where he reminds all of us* bicoastal flyovers that we do a piss-poor job of showing any respect for the great  unwashed.   It's hard, I know; some people aren't even tryin', but it's just not easy to say "cling to their guns" without sounding disdainful.  On the other hand, I think Carlson misreads the quip from Adlai Stevenson to the woman who said that "every thinking person will be voting for you--"“Madam, that’s not enough," he is said to have quipped in response and I don't read that as hauteur quite so much as the words of a man who really didn't want to be President all that much anyway (and would indeed have come across in the job as mediocre at best, IMHO).

Hard not to sound disdainful when you just want to help.  Which is precisely why the forces of darkness find it so easy to pound the stuffing out of the chatterers with stuff like the phoney, tarted-up, made-for-cable "war against Christmas."  And so I resonate with Tod Kelly in his asperity as he declares that "no, we are not making War on Christmas, or anything else for that matter, not even Justin Beiber (well: exception for Justin Beiber)."   But as Kelly must realize (or he wouldn't get so irritaed), apopleptic rage won't get you anywhere, except insofar as it gives your transient readers (me) a momentary feelgood.  You know the ones that are hurling all that fecal matter are precisely the guys who are causing the problem, but you don't seem to be able to do anything about it.

Which makes you ready to go completely around the bend when you read Bob Moser's splendid narrative of the Texas-style Caesaropapism on offer through Rick Perry.  Perry's adversaries are having a field day ending every sentence with "and, um, I forget the third thing."  But the laughter is giddy because in the back of their minds they know that zombies rise to walk among us all the time.

Hey, bub, who you callin' a zombie? Oh, no, no, that's not what I meant, just listen to me, please understand...
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*I keep trying to insist that I am not, dammit, a snobby bicoastal flyover but if you read my resume I guess the charge is going to stick.