Nonpartisan

[mmcirvin]

I take back most of my disagreement with Reid Stott. Judging from the first part of his essay, when he says "nonpartisan" he still means it literally, instead of the usual modern meaning of "stop criticizing politician X", which has so corrupted the term that I have a hard time taking it at face value. I also have doubts about Ray Nagin's sainthood, and it's only if you see the whole thing as a zero-sum Republicans vs. Democrats game that picking on Nagin really exonerates Bush (it seems pretty negative-sum to me).

But it's really, really hard to be nonpartisan when criticizing the federal government if one party controls everything. You have to go looking for some Democrats to criticize somewhere else to get that nonpartisan glow. Maybe I can rent myself out as a token Democrat to criticize when you want to be nonpartisan and are absolutely at wit's end. If we lose a few more thousand people because of federal incompetence, I can go out and say something offensive on the teevee for a reasonable fee while waving around my motor-voter form from the RMV with the party check box on it.

Comments

Ignoring Katrina for the moment

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Stott says that going into things half-supported because we really don't want to commit the needed forces is natural and nonpartisan. I'm not sure I agree it's not politically conditioned, but even so, there's still the choice of which things we go into with delayed support and which we don't go into at all. Do we choose to go undermanned into Bosnia and Kosovo, or into Afghanistan and Iraq, or into Rwanda and Sudan?

My name is sunburn and I'm a bozo.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Eh, you're always more fair than *I*, at least, gave you credit for. I apologize for my behavior in your LJ lately. While I'm not outraged directly at Bush, I'm outraged, and a little more overcome than I expected.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

My feeling on the matter (having been through several ridiculous Fark comments threads on the subject) is that there's a fair amount of blame to go around at all levels of government in and above New Orleans, and that it's mostly partisan leanings that are making people focus either solely on the federal government (if you want to bash Republicans) or solely on the state and local levels in Louisiana and New Orleans (if you want to bash Democrats). There probably are people who have non-partisan reasons for focusing on one level of government to the exclusion of others, but my gut instinct is that most people who do so are doing so for partisan reasons.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I would also like to add that, unlike Stott, I'm actually quite proud of much of the blogosphere response. If you dig deeper into those super-partisan or super-ideological rants, you'll actually find that many people involved pretty much agree with him on the substantive issues if not the meta ones; for instance, see the Nielsen Haydens' blog (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/), which normally is about as passionately Dem-partisan as they come. (The reason China Miéville found it easy to be nonpartisan is that he's an English Marxist; everyone in America is a ridiculous far-right stooge as far as he's concerned.)

I have, so far, only seen one (1) non-ironic mention of secret weather control machines. Maybe because I'm not looking in the right places. (However, I have seen a fair amount of outrageously racist barf about cannibals and such.)

The Sept. 11th attacks didn't unite America because we were better people then. They united America because

(1) it was a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy;
(2) it scared all of us half to death (I think a lot of that was actually thanks to the mysterious Mr. Anthrax in the subsequent days; wonder where he is now?)
(3) the victims did not run vastly poorer or blacker than the American mean—I speak not so much of conscious racism/classism here as of the general sense of social estrangement from people who seem different and aren't perceived as living the same way;
(4) Bush was still a new president and there was a desire to cut him some slack on those grounds.

And I suspect we'll soon be able to add that (5) there was no Refugee Problem to speak of.

[davetheinverted]

That essay may be the single most sensible thing I've seen anyone write on the subject.

Dav2.718

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Matt, I think you were right in the first place, and I don't see blaming the federal government as partisan, but I have a question, I haven't been reading that much blog stuff, and I'm wondering if when they try and be 'non-partisan' and blame the city, parish and state levels of government do they take into account that Louisiana is either the poorest or the second poorest state in the union?

Miscellany

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

This scapegoat-for-hire scheme of yours reminds me of Mike Zeares, Total Bastard. Only time will tell if, like that bastard, you fail to convert this into any serious cash.

Also, I had to look up to see what the R in RMV stands for. Out here we have to DOL, Dept. of Licensing, which handles everything from pet licenses up to business licenses, with drivers' licensing in between.

Since Washingtonians speak a radically different language from Massachusetts residents, you may feel free to draw wide generalizations based on small differences in transliteration of our language.