Keeping The Faith

I was reading over my old blog entries. What really ignited my interest in politics was the 2000 G. W. Bush election. I was a fan of Bill Bradley the man without really understanding his policies; I was not as enthusiastic about Al Gore. I listened to Don Imus of “Imus In The Morning” at the time, and he hammered on Gore pretty heavily. Not to condone Imus’s own politics, but still the repetition had some effect.

Those old posts of mine were pretty sour on Bush The Younger. My first presidential vote was for Reagan, and then for GHW Bush. Again, not policy-driven, more like what I think the average voter, “normies” as we the politically-obsessed now call them, would base their vote on: vague concepts and feelings. As I recall, when I was in third grade in 1972 I was for Nixon. As I matured, I moved to the left. I had subscribed to a weekly news magazine so I could get a summary of the news, not being able to keep up with a daily paper. I chose US News & World Report, but as time went by I found myself disagreeing with the columnists and the general tone of the reporting. I was on Compuserve and joined the Canopus forum founded by Will Zachmann (and hey! while looking that up discovered it’s still around, on Facebook!). That broadened my horizons considerably.

Now I am hard liberal, or progressive; I voted for Gore, and Kerry (and was gobsmacked when GWB was RE-elected!). Obama, Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Harris, of course. Growing up in the NYC-metro area (in North Jersey, line-of-sight with the Empire State Building with its TV antenna) I was exposed to Donald Trump at a tender age, and ignored the attention-seeking blowhard, along with the other detritus of the Daily News society pages.

And here we are. Gobsmacked is inadequate to describe how I feel about Trump being re-elected. If GWB was bad, DJT is catastrophic. I really only wanted to read about a second Trump term in alternate-history speculative fiction.

This blog will channel my political self, so I can be a bit more social and temperate over on “Slit Eyes Look At Life”. Not that anyone will be reading either, but at least I have a space to vent. So it goes.