Palin vs. Pawlenty

It occurs to me that, in the question of which Republican candidate should we back, we should back Pawlenty, and not Palin. Here's the problem: right now, the Republican party is a drunk. It's close to bottoming out. After thirty years of drinking down the business community's money such that most Republicans have forgotten that one of their responisbilities is to promote the general welfare, a task that applies for every American and not just the predatory class.

Here's the thing: if Pawlenty wins, well, things won't be so bad. If Palin wins, life will become a hellish landscape of Christianist predators.

On the other hand, if Palin loses, the Republican party will not have finally bottomed out. They might learn the lesson that backing the batshit nutters does not endear you to the majority of Americans, most of whom are not batshit nutters.

But if Pawlenty loses, the Republican party activists will go all in for sheer madness. They picked a reasonable candidate, and they lost. Since most of the activists live in a black-and-white world, the only lesson they'll learn is this: Palin could have won.

Yes, we'll have to live with that 29% of America that does not actually belong to the Reality-Based Community screaming and yelling and giving their money to FOX, and they'll be on the Internet forever, but untill that madness burns itself out, if that's at all possible, they'll never have power again.

My only concern is that we'll have to live with madness for a long time to come.

Waving, not Drowning

The other day, I went to the library to just drop off two books I'd picked up. While circling the bookshelves, I saw the librarian drop two books with the "not permanent acquisition" tags onto the "newly acquired" table. The tag indicates that the book is a paperback, and will be shredded when it gets too tatty to be reshelved.

The two books were Iain Banks's Surface Detail and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. Add that on top of my recent buying of the entire Jim Hines's Princesses series, three books from Haikasoru, and James Salter's A Sport and and Pasttime, and I suddenly feel overwhelmed. But there was no way I was leaving that library without the Shteyngart and Banks.

But I'm through the first two Princess books, as well as one Haikasoru, so I'll probably get through all this by the end of the month.

It's a good thing I don't want TV.