The Radical Moderate

In local news, yesterday, the Palestinian soccer team held its first home game, a friendly match against Jordan. Until now, home games have been played in Jordan or elsewhere, but now they have a stadium in Ramallah.

FIFA, the international football association, was represented at the game by its head, Seth Blatter. If I could meet him, I'd have to ask him where are the teams from Basque, Kurdistan, Tibet, Chechnya and a few other places. After all, the Palestinian team is the only non-national team recognized by the organization. No other people wanting a State (ignoring, of course, the Pals already have one in Jordan) have been granted that favor.

Why? Gosh, it couldn't be that the Pals are the only Stateless people who openly say their goal is the destruction of the single Jewish State, could it? After all, those Europeans have never been known for antisemitism, have they? Oh, yeah, right. Never mind...

Republicans running for Congress are at high risk for going down with the McCain ship. So the party and other Republican "strategists" have opened with a new campaign tactic: Warning voters about the "danger" of having one party control both houses. However, there seems to be two obvious problems with that.

First, folks, have you really thought about which party last controlled both Administrative and Legislative branches of the government? Well, that would be 2000-6, when the Republican third branch crowned their personal choice of President. If the Republicans are going to prove one party rule is dangerous, they must do it by showing how bad Republicans messed up the country. Ooops.

Then there's the other side. I used to believe the same as the message. I was very involved in politics as a kid. The first Presidential election I could vote in was 1980. Carter and a Democratic Congress had messed things up. Though I thought Reagan wasn't too bright and wouldn't be that good, I figured he'd have one benefit. I figured he'd chop left wing pork while the Democratic Congress would cut Reagan's pork, and the budget and debt would both look better. Ooops.

It ended up that Congress and Reagan winked at each other, then voted for each others' pork, exploding the budget and debt, at rates not seen before and only surpassed by Bush and Shrub. Clinton, with an opposing Congress, did manage to slow the growth of government and ended up with a budget surplus, but that's when there were still a few old-style conservatives in the Congress and the middle of both parties did work together.

The Republican Party has hopefully run its course in its current incarnation. Democrats in control of both branches aren't the folks from the 60s and 70s, and neither is our economy. Working together is needed to solve the problems. Obama and a Democratic Congress have the best chance of that.

Maybe, if the Republicans are forced to lick their wounds in the minority for some years, they can remember what the party used to be about. That could only help the country.