Greetings!

It appears my post on why I’m not about to vote for a Republican anytime soon is making the rounds again, if Blogger’s hit-count tracker is to be trusted.  While that post has been a reliable backlist hit machine since I wrote it back in 2012, logging on average about a hundred hits a month, nearly a thousand people have landed there in the last five days – mostly from Facebook, though some from Twitter.

For those of you who have found your way here because of that, welcome.  Feel free to look around the place.  I hope you like it.

I just hope you won’t be too disappointed in the fact that I don’t do much political blogging anymore.  It got old.

Once in a while I do, though, and I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should revisit that post for the 2016 election cycle.  Maybe when the election is closer.  Maybe not at all.  We’ll see.  But mostly the political stuff I’ve been writing of late has been more analytical, more historical, and less focused on the day-to-day travesties that appear like clockwork in the news. 

This is a change.

There was a time when it seemed like every other post I wrote was a description of some outrage perpetrated by the right-wing fanatics who took over the once-proud GOP and transformed it from a responsible purveyor of conservative opinions and policies into a demented howling wasteland of Gilded Age Social Darwinism and Dominionist blasphemy.  I live in the blinking warning light that is Scott Walker’s Wisconsin – it’s been fascinating watching this process up close, in a Pyrrhic sort of way, and for a while it seemed worthwhile to argue against it.

But after a while even the choir can’t stand the preaching.  Those who could see the blisteringly obvious didn’t need me to point it out.

Also, it became clear that – far from being horrified at what the party claiming to represent their interests had degenerated into – the Republican base saw that transformation as merely a down payment on the level of batshit insanity that they required.  And as every assault on American morality and values perpetrated by the leadership of that party was greeted with strident calls for further assaults and condemnations that those assaults hadn’t gone far enough, it stopped being either entertaining or educational to point out how far down the rabbit hole that party had gone.

I think they’ve figured it out, though.  The sane ones, anyway.  The reality-based conservatives.  The ones who understand the actual history of this country and who draw conclusions from that history that are simply different than most of the ones I draw.  There are a few of them left out there, I know.  I’m friends with some.  I read others.


I feel bad for them.  There’s nobody out there advocating for their interests.  There is nobody out there representing their views.  They have been abandoned by their own party.  Only recently have they finally figured out that their party has been consumed from the inside by the cancerous rot of the Teabaggers and their fetid ideology.

I think it was the current crop of GOP presidential nominees that finally brought that home.

Seriously – Ben Carson?  He’s your front-runner?  A man whose defense against charges of fabricating his own life story is to double down on claims that he actually did stab someone?  That’s the guy you want with his finger on the nuclear button?

The fact that the guy he bumped down to the number 2 slot was notorious blowhard and serial bankrupt Donald Trump only makes that more ridiculous.

But really, how often can you write about that without depressing yourself into a coma?

So while the politics appears now and then, mostly I write about other things these days.  If you like what you see, you are welcome to stick around.  If you don’t, well, the internet is a big place and I won’t be offended if my corner of it is not to your tastes.  I’m not for everyone, even if you agree with my politics.  Move on to other, more congenial places, with my blessings.

For those who choose to stay, welcome aboard.