Heh.
Yesterday we had originally planned on going to the zoo. She'd taken a vacation day and everything. Sadly, her fibromyalgia flared up bad Sunday night, and she didn't get to sleep until after 5 AM; when I woke her at 9:30 she told me the trip was off, apologized, and went right back to sleep. She slept for almost twelve hours--I have no idea what component of that was due to painkillers and what was due to fatigue, but I kept very quiet and let her sleep rather than wake her needlessly.
We did, however, find other things to occupy us once she was awake.
* * *
My appetite for political commentary has waned.
It seems as if I'm just tired of it all. I read the stories in the news and end up shaking my head in resignation; I just can't summon the ire I once did for all the bullshit.
I suppose if I had a real alternative that I could vote for, my opinion would be different. Problem is, I have a choice between Democrat and Democrat Lite; neither party stands for what I believe in and there is no viable third party.
...and in the process of writing that, I realized that the Green Party is the left's Libertarian party; the only real difference is that the press covers the Green party's activities to some small extent. They utterly ignore the Libertarians. This is so because the press agrees with the Green party's politics, but they can't give the Greens too much press lest they interfere with the Democrat party's chances for success. Ross Perot splitting the Republican vote good, Ralph Nader splitting the Democrat vote bad. Got it?
Just take, for example, the illegal immigrant amnesty bill before Congress right now. There is a plethora of law already on the books which codifies how immigration and naturalization are to be handled. If we are having a problem with the immigration situation it is because the laws on the books are not being enforced; this is not a situation where we need a new law to handle an unprecedented condition.
The law under debate now has nothing to do with enforcement; like a budget bill which promises budget cuts in exchange for tax increases, this bill will legalize current illegals without doing anything to enforce the borders.
The only difference is, both Democrats and Republicans are telling us No For Real You Guys This Time We Really Mean It.
...and they won't do squat. They won't, and we have the previous two amnesty bills to demonstrate the fact. Millions of illegal aliens will be granted legal status soley because they've managed to get here and stay here; the rest of the bill--the enforcement part--will be quietly forgotten, exactly as has happened the last two times.
Democrats want amnesty because it guarantees them a constituency. Republicans want amnesty because they think it'll make people like them. Both parties want it because illegal aliens keep the price of labor in the country artificially low, and big corporations donate big money to both parties.
It's enough that I've concluded that the GOP has been lying to us. I'm starting to think that they've carefully crafted an image of being spineless, craven cowards, so they can compete with the Democrats for which party will be in charge of everything. It's about control, about rooking the rubes into voting them into power, and not about what's good for the nation, which is why we consistently see the GOP caving on all kinds of things: they get all kinds of federal control over everything without having to own up to having voted for that control. "Look, we just don't have the votes to repeal Obamacare," they say in public, and then snicker behind their hands about how cool it is to have so much power.
If I saw the GOP actually trying to do things which were good for the nation, instead of being merely good for the politicians who run the show, I might have a different opinion--but I don't see that, and I haven't seen it for more than a decade.