From Pottersville, one of my favorite blogs: http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2008/05/4000-funerals-and-wedding.html4,000 Funerals and a Weddinghttp://bp0.blogger.com/_v63oTveUEGI/SCcPC4GktJI/AAAAAAAAEUA/8eOEVxS5QEI/s320/jenna+and+hager+snuggling.jpgNo one ever said that Jenna Bush didn't have the right to get married yesterday. No one ever said that the First Family hasn't the right to continue their personal lives while there's a war raging in Iraq.
Even so, about 9000 American parents and several thousands of spouses who have lost children, wives and husbands in both Iraq and Afghanistan have a perfect right to ask why the Bushes felt they were entitled to hold a private wedding while they had to hastily plan 4500 funerals.
A piercing indication of how infiltrated the Bush family has become is news that the Methodist minister, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who'd married Jenna Bush and Henry Hager, is
openly a Barack Obama supporter. This is a curious turnaround for a Republican family so clannish and partisan that one half expected the top of the wedding cake to feature a miniature bride, groom and Karl Rove. Such an infiltration would've been unthinkable four, perhaps even two years ago.
As
Frank Rich tells us this morning in his byline, this isn't 1968. In fact, with the way the world has changed just since the last general election, it's hard to believe that it's even 2008. Nothing is as it seems or ought to be. As Rich reminds us, we're about as far from 1968 as can be imagined, the year Dan Rather got knocked on his ass at the Democratic National Convention and of the Chicago Seven.
Fast forward to 2008 and the so-called protest in New York City resulting in over 100 arrests, including that of the Rev. Al Sharpton, in the wake of the acquittal of the three NYC police officers who'd pumped Sean Bell with 50 bullets on his wedding day. There was no violence; virtually all of the arrests were for disturbing the peace. Rodney King may still be alive despite the LAPD's best efforts but his legacy is as dead as the Martin Luther King whose death set America's cities in flames.
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In a way, the change in attitude among young people is a good thing. Rich reminds us that voter registration in Ohio is up across the board. Young voters 30 and under actually outnumbered the 65 and over demographic during Ohio's Democratic primary, which is quite a feat.
But what is frequently being ignored is that after having dissent squashed and softened for last seven years under seven and a half years of the Bush junta, we're seeing an astoundingly passionless young demographic getting more and more passive and tenderized while cases of police brutality and home invasions are alarmingly on the rise, as the Cato Institute tells us
(large .pdf file).
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Meanwhile, we blog as if it's an end and not merely a means. Republican elites get married and poor, politically unconnected Democrats of color get killed 6000 miles away and even the Devil has to shake his horned head and marvel at his own ingenuity.
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