I just noticed the “Good News” category and felt drawn to post something in it.
Let’s see: the economy is liable to fall off a cliff if we don’t enact desperate, expensive measures - that may actually aggravate the situation.
Our foreign policy is unraveling from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, and North Korea is back in the nuclear bomb business.
Both candidates of one of our two political parties, each in his and her own way, have passed from error-prone to ignorant to unprincipled to scary to something unprecedented in my lifetime: general objects of widespread - and deserved, God help us - ridicule. Not the occasional targets of good-humored jokes and a daily poke from Tom Toles: objects of widespread ridicule, and for their essential qualities, not an occasional pratfall. It’s no laughing matter, and no victory. Democrats can’t be good Democrats without good Republicans, and a one-party system is bad news no matter which party it is.
The government is rudderless and the executive branch is running along behind events, irrelevant and ignored, figuring out how to win the Congressional elections of 2006. No grownups are available before late January to step in before things get really out of hand. Of course it’s unthinkable that the US could “turn to David Petraeus in a time of national emergency”, and yet for an instant there, I thought it.
Events daily upstage the Onion.
Oh yeah, the good news I’m setting you up for: You can ease off worrying about all of the above: it’s all a lot less important in the grand scheme of things than you thought it was last week.
