Local Republican Candidate, John Colbert, proves he's no threat to Schiff

So, I've never read the Glendale News-Press, but they published an article on John Colbert, the Republican Congressional Candidate for California's 29th District (currently occupied by Rep. Adam Schiff). The article is here. I'm loathe to link to it because the article isn't very enlightening, and comes across as biased. On the other hand, read for yourself and decide what you think of Colbert. I suppose I'll look into Colbert's platform a bit more, but as it stands he just sounds like a poster-child for the Party of No, and dangerously, one who doesn't seem to have a very good grasp of how legislation gets done in Washington DC.

Oh, if you do read the article, don't skip the two comments. They're classic ideological nonsense.

I tried to post the following comment in the paper's forum but couldn't seem to get it to work:

Sorry, but the statements made by Colbert don't give me confidence he'd do a good job as our representative. Hackneyed statements about Rep. Schiff being from the "far left" are either just colorful rhetoric or indicate a candidate who truly has no idea how the lawmaking process actually works. Sure, if you don't provide (or understand?) the context, it's easy to make it sounds like a Congressperson is voting for a fish over farmers! Healthcare reform: what, specifically, are you opposed to, Mr. Colbert?

And sorry the reporter, Bill Kisliuk, introduced his article in a way that seems to agree with the candidate he's supposedly objectively reporting about rather than, well, objectively reporting. What proof do you provide that "Congress is killing jobs" other than Colbert's assertion that it is? This is just an ideologically loaded statement.

Well, from the two posts so far it looks like Mr. Colbert will get at least two votes.

Stay the Course?

I was listening to President Bush's press conference today. As an informed citizen, I've always thought it critically important to keep myself up to date on current events, administration policy, etc. In the past few years I've generally avoided listening to him whenever possible, mostly because I end up yelling at the radio. Also, since the administration has been something of a broken record for several years now, I guess I haven't felt it necessary to listen to Bush's misguided, unreflective pronouncements. The president's use of language (dripping, as it is with ideologically-charged words designed to key into emotions but otherwise utterly lacking in substance) seems to me the ultimate catachrestic endeavor. Of course, his choice of words is made to elicit fear amongst voters: fear of change, fear of taking responsibility for our past choices, fear of attack from vague, ill-defined threats.

His urgings to "stay the course" over the past several years have started to fall out of favor in the public. It's about time. The phrase has never made much sense to me, since it implies that self-reflection about the Bush Administration's Iraq policy is off-limits, anti-patriotic, and somehow a bad thing. "Staying the course" also carries with it a host of problems, since it also implies that we Americans supposedly accept the assumptions that Bush does: that it was correct to attack Iraq, that finding/destroying alleged weapons of mass-destruction was the reason to attack Iraq, that it is sound policy to plunge a country into civil war in the name of "taking the fight to the terrorists" (i.e. the terrorists that didn't exist in Iraq before we invaded their country).

It is comforting to see Americans beginning to wake up from their long slumber and recognize that the Bush Administration's "stay the course" policy--along with most of its undergirding assumptions--is a dangerous one. They have an opportunity on November 7th to send a message to the Bush Administration that it has clearly failed the course.