Also, re: the SLA. Did they ever manage to liberate Symbia?

[plug] LISTEN TO MY PODCAST [/plug]

You should know better by now, Tim. Boomer Generational Trauma is never going away. Boomers are the Most Important Generation in the History of Humankind and every last collective fart of theirs is going to keep stinking up the air long after the last Boomer is dead and buried/cremated/cryogenically frozen.

But seriously, wasn’t Barack Obama in third grade when the Weather Underground were active? I watched the Patti Hearst saga on TV at age 10 and an acquaintance of mine once belonged to a church whose pastor was the father of an SLA member. I guess that means I can never be President.

I think the reason for this behavior is that politicians worship the God of Election/Reelection. Fridaykr’s rules are designed to prevent missteps, not to enlighten the electorate or even to learn from them. This is an old characteristic of the two-party system and it became even worse during the 1972 campaign as television began to play a larger, more effective role. Now the interplay between the voters and the candidates is highly ritualized taking the form of visits to diners, bbq’s etc.

And our election system is getting more burdensome and less trustworthy. The day is not far off when pollsters will add a new parameter to their present factors of sample size, date taken, margin of error, and level of confidence: they will make their projections but qualify them with an estimate of the number of votes cast that will not be counted.

Obama should know by now that the rules of American political discourse are fairly straightforward, if limiting: don’t be too direct in expressing uncomfortable truths, don’t ask for personal sacrifice, turn any infelicitous turn of phrase into a metonym for broad policy decisions, substitute personal attributes for competency in governance, and above all, don’t raise taxes.