People who can't separate ideology from reality

I bet we all know people like this, people who seem to be very normal, competent people who live unremarkable lives, who say crazy things from time to time. There's my friend Matt, who once told me that he doesn't believe in progressive taxation. This is right up there with all the people who think the Fair Tax is a great idea. I guess in their minds, poor people either don't exist, or they are poor on purpose (and if only they had to start paying a lot more in taxes, they'd straighten up right away), or they deserve any problems they have that are related to being poor. I don't know.

Then there's my friend Michael. He's a friend on Facebook, and he is always answering the political debate questions. The other day, the question was which one of the Democratic candidates do you not want to win. He said John Edwards, because he is very up front about his socialist policies. I think he's referring to things like universal health care and better college payment programs for working and middle class students. Alright.. but these aren't really socialist. The people (like myself) who are in favor of things like this aren't opposed to insurance companies or loan companies making money, we're just opposed to them gouging their customers, and making money too much at the expense of the people they are supposed to be helping.

When I was much younger, I thought libertarianism had some merit. Then I became more involved in the real world, and I realized that it just can't work that way. Places where there is less government interference in people's lives aren't paradises, they are places like Somalia and Afghanistan, where he who has the most and the biggest guns wins, and gets to tell everyone else what to do. There's no such thing as the rational actor. I think people who are opposed to government involvement on the basis that government screws everything up are wrong (or cherry-picking their examples so they ignore all the cases where government does a good job), but at least they can give some reasons for what they think. People who are too much in favor of regressive taxation and anti-socialism just don't match the real world with the world they think would exist if they got their way.

Hillary Clinton Hate

I don't get why so many people hate Hillary Clinton, but my best guess is that it comes down to sexism. They hate her for being frigid, but when she has an emotional moment, they hate her for being either too calculating _or_ too emotional. Some idiot in the press corps said, "Is this how she'll deal with Kim Jong Il?" Yeah, of course, just like George W. Bush read "My Pet Goat" to him. The moron on the morning talk show here can't resist referring to her as a bitch, and he said when women wear a pants suit to a wedding, they look like Hillary Clinton. WTF? Is this all just about powerful women making men feel uncomfortable? I saw the theory somewhere that aside from the most odious racists, it doesn't bother your garden variety racist if a few non-whites manage to make good, and most people in the mainstream are more put off than not by racist statements against Barack Obama. However, sexism by its nature has to be more insidious. Men and women live and work together, and if one powerful woman who actually has a shot at the presidency makes men nervous, how must they feel about women who are their bosses, or their coworkers who do the same work they do?

I don't get any of this. The stuff I'm describing is foreign to me. I'm an Obama supporter, but I do understand women voting for Clinton just to see this finally happen. Mostly, I think the idea of having a woman and a minority be serious contenders in the race, and still a middle-aged or old white man winning is very depressing.