May 10, 2006

  • Lefty Drunkards

    First there was DrinkingLiberally, and now there's GreenDrinks.

    I remember a while back reading an issue of some progressive magazine with a cover story about how beer could save the country from George W. Bush in 2000. They suggested getting all your progressive neighbors over for a BBQ or something, and then go en-masse to the polls. They suggested that brewpubs could offer free beer if the customer could show proof of having voted.

    I'm not sure how much a difference this suggestion made (mostly because that election was stolen), but the idea lives on. Meetups for adults with a relatively narrow set of common desires for social change. Right-wingers have church, progressives have the pub.

Comments (11)

  • hmmm. the concept of "get drunk and vote" sounds like it could backfire.

  • Something has to be done to get the silent majority out there and voting. I thought we'd done it, but the right beat us out again!

  • i heard the bush popularity is down to ~30%

  • i like antiflag.. theyre antibush

    http://www.anti-flag.com/main.php

  • I know people never listen to me when I suggest this, but the trick is actually to stop nominating bad candidates for the presidency. True, Bush is a horrible president, but Kerry looked pretty horrible too, and people tend to go with the evil they know. Gore wasn't much better (and Bush didn't have a record of proven incompetence in 2000), though I admit he would have won sans the SCOTUS intervention. I think it wasn't a "silent majority" so much as an "ambivalent majority." Don't worry about raising awareness of candidates or issues. Just find somebody with more charisma than a used tissue.

  • Ramen: The America I want to live in is about candidates and issues, and not whether the nominee looks good in a cowboy hat.

  • I'm not talking about looking good in a cowboy hat. I'm talking about not coming across as a soulless tool like Gore did, or a total pandering whore like Kerry. Watching the debates, I had a hard time believing Kerry actually believed all that strongly in any of the principles he espoused. He sounded like he'd carefully formulated them to be palatable to a calculated number of people, and didn't especially care about them on their own merits. Speaking for myself, I want more than positions on issues, I want insight into the thought process that came to those conclusions, and I just couldn't find one with Kerry. Just a tired old politician, and not even a very good one at that.

    A candidate has to come across as a human being. Bush did. He came across as a stupid, childish, petulant human being unfit to rule anything, but a human being nonetheless.

  • very true...

  • Ramen: This thread is about getting together to talk about issues, and how the left-center spectrum has taken that and put it in a pub or a bar or whatever. Kerry lost (by two percentage points) because the Republicans got out the vote by running anti-gay-marriage initiatives in predominantly-Republican states and having a candidate who was a buffoon that people could identify with, as you describe. Minus the anti-gay bigotry, the Republicans would have lost, and resoundingly so.

    As I say, I'd much prefer politics be about policy, rather than personality. If you'd prefer to vote for some dumbass simply because he's a dumbass (and thus not 'slick' or whatever), then you get what you deserve. The problem is that no one else deserves it.

    So liberals will be meeting up in pubs and talking over issues (rather than simply listening to talk radio), coming up with new and wonderful ideas, which will eventually be public policy. Assuming the republic lasts through the Bush administration.

  • Methinks you're not getting my point. A human being can govern a country, however badly. A cluster of mismatched opinions selected with no apparent rhyme or reason is completely untrustworthy. I need to have some understanding of how the human thinks, rather than which blurbs s/he's spouting this month. When you know the candidate, you have some feel not only for his/her position on existing issues, but for how s/he might react to new challenges. Knowing the platform, you've just got a bunch of idle promises nobody's ever kept anyway.

    In voting for Kerry, I was basically trading in my whole hand for random cards, just because the existing hand sucked (the Bush philosophy: attack head-on/hide under a rock, depending on the weather). We all were, outside of the Democratic party faithful. Kerry was essentially running against an emotionally imbalanced chimp, and it takes a notable lack of character to lose to one of those.

  • Ramen, you're missing *my* point. You seem to want to argue about why Kerry lost the last election, when in fact the point of this 'blog entry is to show how lefty-center folks seem to enjoy politically-oriented social drinking.

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