Wonder Land and American Politics: Left versus Less Leftist

The WSJ's Dan Henninger has a thoughtful piece based on Freud's famous conundrum "What do women want?" And then extrapolates it to the American voter.

Of course, the real answer to Freud's original question is: "They don't know, or rather, they know and then change their minds about what they want."

The American voter is less fickle and changeable, but not by much [being comprised of 50% females]. Henninger's answer as to the US voter:

The nasty paradox of the modern, data-dumped media age is this: The more we know, the less we know. Weirdly, in a world of total data, people barely know what they want from politics--for themselves, for the country or the presidency.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair on his way out of office identified a truism for our times: With the rise of the Web, judgment has fallen because less time is available to think. So one was struck during Sen. John McCain's visit to the Journal editorial page a few weeks ago, when he remarked that campaigns aren't adjusted day to day now, but "hour to hour."

It may be that a Web-stoked media has demoted the office of the presidency itself as an animating idea and elevated the mechanics, the sport, of elections. The unpopularity of the Bush presidency aside, note how a presidential election, now entering its second year, has become a national obsession, which like most obsessions tends to induce disappointment.

The entire nominating process has turned into a two-year horse race, with handicapping on a daily basis depending on polls, many of which, like the CNN You Tube "Debates," heavily skewed by manipulative questioning to obtain the desired result. Since the mainstream media is almost entirely left-tilted, the polls invariably tilt left in their "answers," which are the GIGO product of a dishonest press/media. But Henninger makes another observation:

We are passing through a largely ideological age, exacerbated by the Web on the left and right. The left doesn't want to do politics with the other side but merely wants to eliminate it, and then run the country. The religious right, by and large, mainly wants someone to pay attention to them and acknowledge their legitimacy. None of this has much to do with finding a candidate who will make more right than wrong calls during four years in the Oval Office.

The ultra-left blogosphere and Dem politicians are starting to veer back to the Bolshevik template that socialist governing entities often adopt when their "policies" and "programs" are revealed to be the same as those which have not worked in the past in our country, any other country [except perhaps a couple of Scandanavian mini-states with miniscule populations], and have usually devolved into authoritarian templates: Kim Jung-Il, Mugabe, Saddam's & Assad's Ba'ath, Castro, and of course the failed totalitarian monster entities of Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, & Stalin [all of which caused the death of significant percentages of the country undergoing "the transition from socialism to communism. Pol Pot holds the % record with about 40% of his countrymen slaughtered in a few short years]. So remember well DHenninger's sentence:

"The left doesn't want to do politics with the other side but merely wants to eliminate it, and then run the country."

We're not talking about centrists like Hillary & Obama, we're talking about mindless hypocrites like Edwards and Kucinich & the Kossack/C&L/Olberman choir of spew machines infecting political discourse with dishonest deceitful lists of lies & pseudo-events like Plamegate. Henninger finishes with a sad conclusion:

It may well be that, as so often before, voters starting in Iowa next week will in the aggregate find the right reasons to choose the winner in November. Little wonder, though, that their mood is sour. More than ever, the electorate is being ill-served, and knows it.......terrorism's many addresses, the shameful images of Darfur, the dollar in decline, a Congress in which there is next-to-no confidence. Amid this comes a campaign running 24/7 unto eternity, even as people madden themselves trying to penetrate deeply enough to get a fix on the candidates and make the right call on the presidency. Freud also said, "Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." In American politics, ambiguity is all you get. Our voters are not neurotic. They are just deeply annoyed.

The outright lies of the left, the dissembling of the centrists, and the timid fear of real conservatives to grasp the nettle of difficult issues like illegal immigration and defense of the country against terrorism all annoys and dismays the electorate, as dishonesty, doubletalk, and gutlessness all compete for the ennui trophy in 2008.

Go see Charlie Wilson's War. [Spoiler alert: Aaron Sorkin's screenplay is a bit "West-Wing Whackjob in its bias.] For all his numerous imperfections, Charlie was a guy who had the balls to stand for something and worked single-mindedly to achieve it.