1 Boring Old Man

I’ve gotten a lot of email and some comments about my plan to fade out as a daily blogger, and I appreciate them. It’s not that I’m tired of doing it. Maybe that’s the way it sounded, but it’s more something else that I can’t say easily. I started blogging almost because I couldn’t not start. After the 2004 election, it slowly dawned on me that what I read in the papers wasn’t what was happening. And when I dug, it didn’t have a bottom. Bush really did distort the prewar intelligence. Al Qaeda really wasn’t allied with Iraq. Our government really did know that the Niger Uranium stories were forgeries. Our government really was corrupt.

It was driven by a passion to say the not totally apparent truth over and over again in the hopes it would have an impact. And I found lots of other people who apparently had caught the same passion. Would Patrick Fitzgerald be able to prosecute Cheney? Would Douglas Feith be exposed? Was Alberto Gonzales going to get away with putting Rove’s voter fraud scam into play in the DoJ? Turning it into a mystery novel somehow kept the awful truth of our government alive for me. When I got very far from it, like on a trip, it felt as though I was betraying something, colluding with the silence of the Press that had become part of the problem.

The Democratic Presidential Primary brought a new anxiety. I really liked Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. My initial preference for the latter was because he voted against the Iraq War, but I came to prefer him also because of the way he handled the various crises that came up along the way. But with Clinton and Obama, there were new worries – the gradient of race and gender. Now, I think that either one would’ve beaten McCain and Palin, but that’s hindsight. Before the election was called, I cared way too much to have any objectivity at all.

But the blogging was driven by a passion to see us back on the path of American history instead of experimenting with something that honestly felt like fascism to me – rule of the powerful. In local government, a group of us formed Citizens for Open Government, C.O.G. I named it, but I knew it was an acronym for what I felt about national politics.

I really like Obama. I think once he gets his stride, he can be a great President, if America will let him – and I believe we will. Lord knows we need one about now. And I don’t think our government will be run in secret anymore. There are lots of bloggers who have a passion for policy and the details of where we’re headed. I’m not one of them. My passion was and is for open government and truth, as naive as that sounds. It’s already obvious to me that I don’t run to the computer to see what he’s said today, or who he might appoint – even though the election is barely over. It’s in his hands now.

Today, I have a really great feeling about being an American. Whether it was the financial crisis, or the wars, or a gradual awareness of the misdirection of the Bush Administration, America woke up. And those places where race really was a factor in the election didn’t matter. They were in already Republican strongholds [like where I live]. There’s still an Obama sticker on my car and an Obama sign at the foot of my driveway, and I expect they’ll be there for a long time. It may be a bad time for America in many ways. But in the ways that matter to me, it’s the best of times.