What I find fun is the idea of trying to make things testable, and therefore open to validation.
But there are times when I am not too sure that it takes us where we need to go.
The whole crisis of faith that is the BirtherKult has me looking at the problem of testability. In my gut, I feel that these are not strictly irrational people - merely folks who are knee jerking to unstated problems that they do not have another way to address.
My core thesis remains that too many americans drank the kool-aid about the unitary executive principle, and the rise of the EternalSunShineOfTheRepublicanizedAuthor
So enter the 'war president' meme - with all of the emotional baggage of Support the president to support the troops and the amusements about who is being more treasonous in these times. Which of course gets all messed up with when and how exactly one can talk about the nation being 'at war', and is there really any need to know how to tell those times from other times. All of which are issues that one can skip over with blind faith in the greatness of great leader.
Then there were all of those ugly moments about how some form of LawFare was depriving the great leader of the required freedom of action, that a war president clearly should have in a time, of, uh, well, when the warLeader wants to do things the warLeader's way.
How should those who have sold their soul to back the warLeader deal with the warLeader just walking away from it all? That was the central messy part of the 2008 election - since unlike when Reagan stood down, the Veep was not the logical choice to take up the mantel of the warLeader, and follow in the ways of Truman and lead the troops to total victory over the civilian forces of a free election!
Oh sorry, did I mash more than one issue into place there?
I mean how else do we get to the blind leap of faith that was sarah?
So here you have all of these folks, who by their own judgementalism, and authoritarian authority, should have hammered Dubya for abandoning our troops in the field, are not able or willing to follow their rhetorical posturing into the Danger Zone. Since to go there would mean questioning their own sense of sanity! Since they would be openly doubting the greatness of the warLeader! While also worrying that the only reasonable defense would be that the warLeader really had to accept the limitations of constitutional law! And you know where that would lead! War Crimes Trials for those who violated american law. And that way is messy!
Unfortunately the leap of faith is that some how the evil obama used his witch doctor voodoo and stole the election. Not merely that he had stolen the election from theSarah, but that he had actually rigged it all to force the warLeader out of the race. In that safer place it is simpler, kinder, gentler, since one need not take up the hard work of resolving how Dubya walked away from the war and just left the troops in the field.
These are issues that will ultimately need to be addressed.
The nation was somehow suppose to have resolved it's Vietnam Syndrome by allowing the greatness of great leader to dogTheWag and send the troops into IranqiStania, to restore the wetlands. But clearly as a nation we are no closer to solving the problems of Nixon, the peace candidate, and what a peace candidate can do while downsizing the troop levels. Nor have folks worked out what they want to do with Obama As Nixon in the scary reworking of all of our Hunter S. Thompson nightmares of looking out and seeing where the wave crested.
Maybe as a nation we should take that time.
Maybe as a part of getting a national health defense force in place, we can take the time to work on these deeper issues, issues that may be little more than the irrational emotional excesses of folks working out which Guilt they can and and can not cope with.
Maybe then we will be able to look out on that new day in america and cope with the little irrational bits that make being an american, well, American.
We may not be able to do that with the correct numerical polling data yet, but we can hope that along the way we can find that safer place. That place where we all, as a nation, push the wave back up over the hill...