attributes

Nights like tonight, hanging out with old friends and new, I realize more concretely that until you know someone, you can't judge him. What I mean is--you can hear something about someone; his political beliefs, religious beliefs, jobs, alma mater, home state, etc. and think, "Oh, he's THAT kind of guy" because of any one of those, but you'd probably be wrong. I was hanging out with an atheist, a catholic, an agnostic, two gays, two lesbians, an ex-Infantry officer, three people who voted for Bush a total of five times, four Obama supporters, a political agnostic, a physical therapist and three dogs...

There were only five of us there, but it was great! I kept thinking to myself that if you drew any single descriptor of any one of us out of a hat, you'd probably guess wrong about every other aspect of any one of us. And, if you judge someone...anyone...based upon one single attribute, you'd probably be wrong as well.

Political amnesia

I am on an iPad, so writing this sucks. I asked my sister tonight why it seems as though the entire country has collective amnesia about JUST how bad the Bush years were. I asked her this because she made a joke about how dumb Dubya used to sound, and yet I feel her leaning toward camp Romney. She replied, "I don't think anyone's forgotten, but why dwell on the past?" I left the conversation at that, but didn't forget the question--we were enjoying a card game and I didn't want to ruin it with politics. The answer, however, is that it is not "dwelling" to remember how bad the Bush administration was on very many levels. On foreign policy, Romney would be another Bush term. More than half of his foreign policy advisors are ex-Bush advisors. Want another Iraq or Afghanistan? Romney is your guy. Aside from naming Russia our "greatest threat" the very people who were architects of the near-east fiasco are now advising him. When it comes to domestic policy, much is the same as well. Want further tax cuts for the wealthy, increased military spending and decreased government spending (other than unfunded entitlements and a probable extension of all the sugar-coating butnoneofthe medicine of the affordable healthcare act) then Romney's your guy. When people say Obama blames Bush too much for the current crisis, they forget that by choosing political amnesia,they risk electing a man whose exact prescription for the future is to repeat the mistakes of the past. Apparently I'm not the first to have thought of this. Here is Newsweek, however flawed a publication, discussing the same.