Sure, Everybody Wants To Party, But When It Comes Time To Help Clean Up They're Too Hungover.

I can't tell you how heartwarming it's been for a withered misanthrope to watch as millennial waves of fresh young Democrats adopted "old white woman" as a favored pejorative.

--Doghouse Riley

LEG pain: intermittent. Still bad at night, but mostly manageable with Alleve; kneeling in the garden possible, though I look like a crippled bug trying to get down there, and the pain upon attempting to rise again may be described as "blinding". I actually had this conversation with the orthopedist:

RILEY: The thing I can't do is kneel down.

DOC: Try not to do that.

There goes my conversion to Catholicism, especially under the current regime.

They switched me from Vicodin to Tramadol, which is the methadone of low-rent opioids. Listen, you fucks, I was abusing stuff ten times this strong when you were still cramming for your SATs! I tried to explain. And I got a script for Celebrex®, a medication which, to judge from the packaging of the samples I was given, can only be described as enthusiastic, as you would be too, if you were a Pfizer rep. Celebrex® restricts the user to Tylenol™ for other pain-relief needs, which is like telling me that in case of a splitting headache I can take two pieces of candy corn every four hours.

So Spring is here in extremis, and there are crows nesting in the big pine out back, and flickers and downy woodpeckers in front, and the garden looks as good as it ever will, especially considering that the gardener moves like The Human Torso in Freaks. And my Poor Wife is counting the two weeks to school's end, and her students are already gone, spiritually. There are many things to be said about the anti-unionist forces allied against the teaching profession, but among the most incisive is that anyone who bitches about how much vacation time teachers get has never taught the last two weeks of a school year.

And the carnival left town, which caused me to reflect on the fact that after a full month of unexpected (and somewhat undeserved) national campaigning Hoosiers seem to have come out the other side no more intelligent than before.

How much money do we spend on these things, again?

There was one, surprising exception--Governor Mitch "The Mighty Atom" Daniels, who ran unopposed, is still running campaign ads! And they're new, or else I would have suspected a) a scheduling glitch or b) typical power-structure collusion. And the goddam thing looks like a cross between a super-hero flick trailer and a sports aid drink campaign:

Lord, their internal polling must be even worse than what the Racist Star reported.

This may, or may not, have been why I got up this morning, but then catching up with yesterday's news has become something of a habit at this point, and I was shocked, shocked! to discover certain Obama supporters beginning to ask Democrats to move past Hillary, beginning, not surprisingly, with Hillary supporters, a concern which roughly doubled the usual number of comments to which "lying old bag" was appended, and which engendered my reply above. Soar high, Young Democrat! I think this idea of talking like a Republican, except about your own party, shows enormous potential in managing to lose a gimme national election in new and exciting ways.

That's not what I predict, and, Lord knows, however much I dislike both Democratic candidates, John McCain doesn't even register on the same scale. But the simple fact that this stuff can't be turned off owes, not to an anonymous rabble, but to a partisan campaign driven, Kos-like, by the desire to Just Win.

If that has a point I'll climb on board, but if it does someone has to explain it to me. Common sense and conventional wisdom both say it's a Democratic year; standard functional intelligence says you don't take anything for granted, especially once an election becomes binary. It's perhaps a shocking revelation, but middle-class or working-class Middle Americans don't really give a shit what bloggers think, and, as such, if the New Breed imagines it can win elections without them I say go for it. You can always blame your loss on their bigoted ignorance.

I used to discount this "divided Democrat" business, but I've been forced to give it another look. The sad thing to me is that none of it needed to happen; the Big Whoop of the campaign is that Obama did not receive his coronet in New Hampshire. The race ran absolutely true to form thereafter.  But his supporters--let's be fair, huh?--went apeshit.  Clinton slagging, in the long run, hurt the Obama campaign by drawing the line even more starkly. Before New Hampshire Senator Obama had a minor problem with genuine racists, one that it would have been hard for them to create much trouble about in an open forum. Afterwards he had a problem with his supporters calling all non-supporters racists. It's this fissure through which Jeremiah Wright pokes his head. In March, Senator Obama responds with a "masterful speech on race"; by late April he's being battered on the same issue by people like Brooks and Noonan who'd had no opening before. You may try if you wish to convince me that the portrayal of Clinton supporters as backwards, toothless, cousin-marryin' racists did not turn this into a major fault.

History walks backwards, like a crab; each generation learns that backwards, too. The practice of noticing things right after they fall on your head is time-honored, and none too smart.