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Volume 9, Number 25
March 23, 2008

The Paxton Pundit

SUNDAYS - SINCE 1999



A Discouraging Word
"These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."
Barack Obama A More Perfect Union"


Here's what's wrong with the polls, at least in the way they're used in the popular infotainment media. They don't take into account the technological workarounds to which people will go to avoid this nuisance.

Our phone rang a few weeks ago, right when I was expecting a call, and I didn't have my magnifying glass handy to read the caller ID (I know, I'm getting his eyebrows, too), and when I picked up, a mechanical voice asked me to stay on the line for some such research outfit.

Click. It was a brief call.

Then I entered (505) 514-0673* into my address book (30 minutes and an even bigger magnifying glass later) under the name SPAM and assigned it a ring tone reserved for DO NOT PICK UP!

Just now, as I'm settling into my writing space, mood, etc., these pollsters called again. Only two rings. They don't seem to want to factor in answering machines as a statement of call screening for overbearing nuisances.

The first time, I registered as having picked up and then hanging up on the pollsters. (I know: the nerve.) From now on I will never even make it close to that statistic.

Answering that you don't wish to participate needs to be tracked. What is the average age of the non-respondents? Annual income? Level of education completed and degrees earned? (They could just ask somebody at the passport office to cough up the vitals.)

I personally don't know anybody who wishes to participate in this babel. Of course, we live the rural life and have very few friends, but kindly take my point.


NPR's playing lightly in the background.  Evidently the Capitol Steps have decided to send up a cowboy classic.

Oh give them our flag
Through the mud they will drag
In the error of unprovoked war
Though the slog is absurd
The discouraging word
Is met with a "so?" and no more

War, war on the plate
That's what Cheney and Dubbya live for
Though the slog is absurd
The discouraging word
Is met with a "so?" and no more
But, as Don Imus says often, that's not why you called.

I was just flabbergasted at the final product of the right wing's position on Obama's exalting speech, A More Perfect Union.

The Senator had said "But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality."

To which the conservative air slicers responded "not good enough - he needed to repudiate the man along with the ideas. He'll be mince meat in the general election." (It reminds me of our local rancher who told me our trespass brown cows might belong to a rancher who runs only black anguses, and thirty-five miles away.)

I'm thinking they'd much rather beat on Hillary for however many months.

Theirs is a brave new America, where we grant habeas corpus to the vilest domestic criminals but never to the captiously named 'foreign terrorists' and find freedom of speech in the obscene fundraising it takes to run for office but not within the walls of a predominantly black meeting house of a mainstream church.

I'm suggesting that the overwhelming right wing response has been precisely, in Obama's hardly prophetic terms, "to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative." (He could have added "rinse, repeat, and you can kiss my black ass," but he's a dignified man, running for president, not some no-talent impressionist, doing the four set prom night special at "Whiskey for my Horses, Comedy for my Peeps.")

He needn't take notice of some hatchet job, has-been from a thankfully bygone era in American politics trying to sneak "he didn't go far enough" into the heaviest rotations on those supposed places for politics.


This week, the buzz is that Clinton can only venture into territory which will readily be characterized as larceny, and some have gone further to suggest a graceful bowing out.

If Obama can be faulted for anything, it would be the product of a marketing firm. Tuesday's speech was a further maturation of Obama, the candidate. He didn't beseech us to go shopping. He challenged us, in the context of the Preamble, to seek common goals, plans and actions, with continual improvement, for therein lies the path to that more perfect union.

I'm ready.

So, evidently, are the Capitol Steps. This was a wordy one. Verse 14, if I can write and count accurately.
Oh the deal in Anbar and with Moqtada Sadr
Make it seem like the civil war's o'er
If conflict were done then the boys would come home
Reasons "no" are both goofy and dour

War, war on the plate
That's what Cheney and Dubbya live for
Though the slog is absurd
The discouraging word
Is met with a "so?" and no more

Next week: Skulking Along

RETURN

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* Update 4-3-08:
Turns out, according to on-line chats about these kinds of things, the number was being used by a Fraternal Order of Police fundraiser who may or may not be authentic. Perhaps this clown with no caller ID also pretends to do polling. Or I might have misheard in my rush to hang up.