Spaghetti Thoughts

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I spent the day tidying up my office. I organized the piles into folders, coiled some of the cords running between the various peripherals on my desktop, and recycled anything I could. I wish I could do as much for the swirling thoughts in my head. But my mental spaghetti cannot be untangled so easily.

I worry that I will give in to the despair that follows a senseless act of extremism, the sense that no matter how hard my cohorts and I struggle against adversity, there’s always a nut out there poised to do more than shoot down our arguments. The longer I am involved in politics, the more it seems that issues are never put to rest. We wrangle endlessly over the same ideas with merely incremental results.

The current campaign against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is a case in point. As the Senators dance the minuet of the confirmation process, the usual suspects are taking the usual positions and making the usual comments. All that has changed is the methods used as the Republicans back away from their “up or down vote” position and find nice words to say about the filibusters they decried during the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.

The hypocrisy has been breathtaking. That Rush Limbaugh would have the nerve to call anyone else a racist leaves me gasping. My husband likes to say that Republicans engage in political projection, accusing Democrats of bad intentions because that is how the Republicans would act if they were in the Democrats’ position.

I think they just engage in selective memory. Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that George Tenet is to blame for the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were allies is a good example of this. George Tenet did not cherry-pick intelligence to back up a belief he couldn’t bear to give up. Nor did he go on news show after news show to state categorically that there was such a connection.

Someone once asked me why I am a Democrat. I thought for a moment, and then replied, “Because Democrats care.” I wasn’t just thinking about Social Security, affirmative action, and welfare. I was thinking that the Democrats I have known have been concerned that what they say is both true and accurate. We not only know that life is full of nuances; we are determined to help others understand those nuances.

It is very difficult for the Democrats I know to limit themselves to sound bites and daily messages. They want what they say to make sense. They are not cynical about skirting the real story in order to tell the story they think will get them quoted in the newspapers and on TV. (This is one reason we sometimes have so much trouble winning elections.)

We don’t want to put out twisted statements that, like spaghetti, arrive tangled on the table.
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