It’s been a rough year for allergies—in a part of the world which is notorious for allergies—around here, so after getting my water pump replaced, I was feeling a need to remind my respiratory system that air need not be the enemy. I drove out to Mendocino in time to get a vegan pizza at Frankie’s and then headed south on Highway One, the theoretically slower, but coastal route towards home, hoping to breathe some ocean air.
My thoughts turned towards a sense some people—notably including my old favorite professor at CSU East Bay—express of being able to breathe more easily when a Democrat is in power. I wondered if that professor—I hear he is now headed for retirement under a rather favorable plan the university has for fully-tenured professors of retirement age—still feels that way. After all, Barack Obama’s function, for all intents and purposes, seems to have been to legitimate the neoconservative and neoliberal policies of the George W. Bush administration, and indeed, to push them to heights, or depths, that would have embarrassed all but former Vice President Dick Cheney and his acolytes.
I have, for quite some time now, recognized, along with Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal,[] that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is not in policy but rather in a willingness on the part of Republicans to instigate violence against a Democratic president.[] But it seems particularly appalling this year as U.S. voters this year face a choice between a president who does not deserve re-election and a former governor who does not deserve to be elected in the first place.
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