Good afternoon, Blue Dog!
I received your comment earlier this
afternoon, and I thank you for your kind words. I checked out your blog, and
can honestly say you've got a much keener skill for opening folks' eyes than I
could hope for. Preach on, sir!
Not out of egotism (well, I
certainly hope not!), I'm putting your brief blurb up as part of my latest
posting – but I'm not identifying you beyond your "handle", and the
fact that you're a USAF veteran. (Salute!) Would you allow me also to put up a
link to your blog in my next posting? I'd like to also pull a few
(attributed!!) quotes from it to introduce my two or three readers to your line
of thinking; would this be okay with you?
He took the
time afterward to look over yesterday's blog here, and added a comment:
Link
away. And again, thank you for that response. I'll be thinking and I may take a
crack at it myself. I'll link back to your piece (saves me having to cover the
same ground).
Blue
Dog (look up Blue Dog Democrats for the inspiration to my handle, though, I am
now Independent for the last eight or so years, after sixteen as a registered
Democrat).
He even
kindly sent me a note back (and included a gentle correction to something I'd
misread on his profile at his blog):
Thank
you! We all like praise. Please feel free to link me as you want. I plan to
take a crack at the article myself as it is appearing in Myspace. My handle
"Blue Dog" refers to my fiscally conservative Democratic roots. I
became a Democrat in the Reagan years and am now Independent. I can't say I
follow a particular philosophy, though, I am for the most part what they call
"socially liberal" and for the most part, I take a hard look at
government expenditures to make sure we get what we think we are paying for.
It was
delightful to hear from you!. Oh yes one other point, I am not retired Air
Force. I spent six years in the Air Force.
My next
few blogs are going to look at some difficult free speech issues, the Spanish
letter, and I think I have something else on the back burner. I tend to throw
stuff into a file when I'm at work (I'm the boss so I get to play a bit) and
then massage it at home at night after my kids go to bed.
Again,
it was lovely to get your email.
I'm going
to keep my eye on his blog, and strongly advise both my readers to do the same.
You can find it here:
Do check
out his various blog-entries and categories – he got rolling just last month,
but there's plenty of material there already. I must say the fellow's got a
good, sharp mind, and argues very rationally and precisely. Again – much like
our regular guest-contributor here, Spartacus, Blue Dog has no loyalties to
either major American political party, and thus is well able to slam anyone who
needs it.
I'm most
curious to see his own take on that "Spanish" editorial. He also
mentioned in his email to me about some particular professional expertise in
Arabic he has – so I assume that includes a grounding in the cultures of most
Arabic-speaking countries, which should give him some good, solid ground from
which to address the editorialist's anti-Muslim tarbrush.
Blue Dog's
blog is more politically focused than mine is, of course. I haven't the time –
or anything close to his expertise – to really sniff out and maul the bad guys
like he does… so I'll read him when I can, and chime in and share, too. Here's
some of his bark and bite:
A different view about Iraq -- Comments on Three
Inconvenient Truths About Iraq Right Now
It comes from the American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Rightly or
wrongly, I view this conservative think tank as a window into the current
administration's thoughts. It's well connected with its alumni having occupied
administration posts, commissions, panels. People tend to associate it with the
neoconservative moment (Irving Kristol is a senior fellow at AEI). Michael
Novak and Richard Perle were also previously associated with AEI.
…I post this article partly to
draw our attention to a resource that we have in our quest to evaluate our
government and it's policies. These think tanks constantly publish position
papers on issues, papers that end up on the desk of our congress men and women.
These entities are extremely infuential and if you read their statements, you
often access the facts and documents on which our representatives base their
decisions. If we read these position papers from both conservative and liberal
think tanks, we will be prepared to understand and debate the issues that much
better.
The Brookings Institution
is a relatively liberal think tank (it made the Nixon enemies
list; check out what they are saying about universal health care). The Heritage Foundation
is another conservative think tank. And finally, I can almost hear the boos and
the hisses, the ACLU.
Not just politics; how about judicial-system
travesties? E.g.:
Thoughts on Letting a Potential Rapist and
Pedophile Go Free Based on No Interpreter
When I went to elementary
school—thirty-four years or so ago—we spoke of America as a melting pot, a land
where cultures clash to reform into something new and unique. The term came
from a 1908 play by English writer Israel Zangwill, which transposed the plot
of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to New York City, with the star-crossed
lovers now from Russian Jewish and Russian Cossack backgrounds.
…Flash forward, and we no longer
talk of melting pots, but rather we favor cultural pluralism and analogize to
salad bowls.
Whether we speak of pots or
bowls, the American recipe works only if our criminal justice system can do
justice in an environment of clashing cultures and languages. If our
Constitution's "speedy trial" provision mandates that a potential rapist and pedophile goes free,
because the Court cannot locate an interpreter, we have a nightmare, not a
system of justice.
And back to politics, of course:
Thoughts on Why I am Not a Liberal/Conservative
If forced to drape myself in the
robes of a political philosophy, to abandon a simple independent stance, I
would don the sometimes mocked garb of an American centrist. According to the
American Heritage Dictionary, centrism is the "political philosophy of
avoiding the extremes of right and left by taking a moderate position."
To me, it is not so much a rigid
political philosophy where you define what it means to be a centrist for all
time, but rather it is a conscious decision to reject the extremes of both the
far right and the far left. As John
Avlon said, "At a time when political debate is too
often dominated by the far left and the far right, Centrists cut an independent
path between the extremes—putting patriotism before partisanship and the
national interests before special interests."
Perhaps John F. Kennedy put it
better when he stated, "extreme opposites resemble the other. Each
believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or
surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead." Speech, November 16, 1961. With his
words in mind, I try to maintain an open mind about the issues that face our
country, to search for solutions without reliance solely on the ideology of any
one party, and to adopt the correct position whether it is to the right, the
left, or something a bit closer to the center.
Of course, this irritates my
coffeehouse friends…
Well, to me Blue Dog isn't reading all that
centrist. Much of what he's written thus far jibes with my own feel on those
issues, and I would characterize myself as more left of center. But let me
state that I haven't given the concept of position the degree of thought that
Blue Dog has, either.
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