politics

There is a newspaper in Rhode Island, The Providence Journal, that has on-line links to garden blogs. The link to this blog contains the description that Plants and politics entwine in this Indianapolis blog.

I think the reviewer came across the blog during the period when President Bush was supporting the amendment to the constitution to prevent equal marriage rights for gay families. I was very upset at Bush and I did the equivalent of what humorist Donald Kaul once wrote was an act of passion for White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants, writing a letter to the editor.

Instead of writing the newspaper, I blogged my anger here. I sometimes wonder in the niche of politically excitable gardeners, if there is disappointment when such folk click to this site and don't find much politics. I know it must be here somewhere. Larkspur seedlings? Again? Sheesh

I think personal blogs like this can be all over the map, so to speak, in terms of subject matter. As much as I think about gardening, I live within this world. I am free to write about anything that interests me.

And sometimes that is political and often it is about gardening.

addition: We are in a situation where we have lost our goodwill among other countries, we're mocking our own values of a democratic and just society, and we have no strategy to move towards a solution. The Wilsonian impulse to change the world is sometimes an attractive one, but it relies on magical powers. It is one thing to fight an enemy who has attacked you. It is irrational to overthrow another government, discover that the reasons you did it don't exist, and then become caretaker of a place where we do not understand the language and culture, and we are a sitting target for multiple groups who wish to manipulate anger against us for their own end. God forbid when we face another situation soon where there exists madmen with real WMDs.

And if we leave Iraq, what happens after we go? Americans have blood on hands from the Kurds who believed us and were gassed after the first Gulf War. We stopped Hussein and his sons from torturing his people. Are we setting Iraqis up for further oppression? It's an impossible situation, made more so by this president and his divisive and dismissive attitude to his fellow countrymen who don't ascribe to his ideological worldview. The administration needs cooperation from other countries and cooperation from its fellow citizens. They have isolated themselves into a small corner of true believers, not in God but in a litany of ideology (tax cuts are always right, liberals are always immoral, blah, blah, blah).

Some people grow in the presidency, some unexpectedly meet the challenges. He has a cracker jack, surgical like precision in identifying his political base. He has a deaf ear to the rest of the world or how to lead this country at a critical period.