New Liberalism

Okay. So this is the inaugural post, and you should probably know a bit about what you’re going to read. It might not even be that much, by the way. I’m not an unusually busy person, but most people don’t have the good fortune of being able to devote hours upon hours to blogging without worrying about losing their day jobs. And I have a day job.

I had a blog a while back, which is now defunct (I’m not going to link to it, though), that I started around the third anniversary of 9/11, and I guess the same reasons for my wanting to write then apply now- in the wake of Katrina, and with the ongoing developments in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere: a belief that a serious political discourse, essential in these difficult and meaningful times, has been compromised and corrupted by partisan jerk-offs on both sides of the aisle. The lull that the United States was in before 11 September 2001, I believe, had set back in… to the point where we all believed again that the world was as it was presented on Crossfire-esque pundit shows that profit from base and meaningless politicization of apolitical events. “War,” for example, is now openly traded political currency. So I wanted to do, as I wanted to do then, my small part in trying to bring a little level-headedness to news analysis.

I don’t know what I can offer in terms of expertise that others can’t, but I’ll just ask you – my plentiful readers- to judge my musings on their merits. One thing you won’t get here is spin: I’m not going to say anything I can’t back up in an argument. You might not agree, but disagreement used to be something looked upon as a positive in the United States. You won’t, however, be able to impeach my intellectual credibility, and I likewise hope not to be able to impeach yours. I want high-brow stuff here, and nothing but. So that’s what I’ll be doing.

But since bloggers all have open political persuasions (and are all, to that extent more honest than the major broadsheet newspapers in this country), I’ll get it all over with and do a full disclosure right now: I’m a socially liberal, fiscally moderate “Democrat.” I supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq- my support for the latter was and is based on the belief in spreading liberalism throughout the Middle East, and to that extent was and is unrelated to anything to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction. I’ve never been enthusiastic about the current administration, though, and I was happy enough to vote for Senator Kerry last November.

So those are the basic planks of my political platform… no doubt you’ll become more familiar with them.

Thanks for reading.

# posted by Mayflower @ 5:39 PM