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 I know I promised you another installment in the intriguing adventure saga of that merry band of misfits known as The Boomers: Doc, Angeline, Gummy Bear, Vanzetti, the charming political maverick Gov. Frankie, the long-lost Lisa and other exciting characters still under construction. The truth is, I've been a bit preoccupied following the election in Ohio's 2nd Congressional district. And I've also been sidetracked a bit by that thing called reality. Up here in Northern Michigan we've been pleasantly preoccupied by the yearly invasion of summer visitors from your Midwestern cities. I use the word “pleasantly” in reference to the considerable amounts of cash the city folks pump into our local economy. Notwithstanding the infusion of cash, I will realize a sense of bittersweet when I watch them pack up the kids and suitcases into their SUV's and leave with their credit cards for the trip home. Sometime around the end of August things get back to normal, if there is such a thing up here.
In our little house on the lake, newly connected with high speed broadband, I've been following the Congressional election that has been taking place in the bucolic pastureland of Southern Ohio and the mean streets of Cincinnati. Before going on, I must make this disclosure: each summer entire villages in our county are overrun by the well-to-do from Cincinnati's affluent neighborhoods. This has been going on for quite some time. It seems years ago, before air conditioning, the idle rich of Cincinnati would head up to our pristine lakes and shore towns along Lake Michigan, leaving their business affairs in the hands of their trusted minions. They built humble cottages and grand lake homes and took over entire towns. They had their own social circuit, consumed large amounts of cold beer and spent many evenings plastered on their lake home porches listening to their beloved Red Legs on transistor radios. As kids growing up in these parts, we looked forward to the yearly invasion. Beer and alcohol sales would skyrocket, and there was always work to be found in the bait shops and marinas on the lakes, supplying the vacationing boaters in tennis sweaters and pastel sun hats. And of course, the girls from Cincinnati were quite attractive and engaging, unlike their bulbous-nosed fathers.
What was I talking about? Oh yes, Hackett and the blogosphere, sorry I was drifting. This was a truly interesting election in that Hackett's candidacy was driven primarily by the blogosphere, and a dedicated group of local patriots, including some fine folks from the local NTEU in Cincinnati. For those of you wondering what the blogosphere is, well, it's what the bloggers call themselves. One of my favorite blogs is DailyKos.com. I recommend it to anyone who thinks that Fox News is a real news channel. You can follow links from that blog to articles written by truly interesting and intellectually honest people. You know, the kind of people you wouldn't ordinarily encounter in your local newspaper or on cable news channels. Ending up in the blogosphere is a final sort of acknowledgement to oneself that the your former sources of news, the mainstream media and cable news channels, are basically serving up a heaping helping of political propaganda. Unfortunately, large numbers of our citizens are consuming that crap, and going back for seconds. That's basically why you hear such bizarre comments like, “if we don't fight the terrorists over there, they'll get us over here,” or “if we increase the social security tax on people making over ninety thousand dollars a year, we will drive many doctors out of business.” I borrowed those two comments from Jean Schmidt, the winning candidate in the Congressional election just completed in Southern Ohio. To the people of Southern Ohio, I offer you my deepest condolences.
The good news is this: Maj. Paul Hackett came within a couple thousand votes of winning this election, and it was the blogosphere that got behind him with their tremendous word-of-mouth communication, and raised a half a million bucks from the blogs and their readers. The Democratic Party in Washington didn't do jack shit for Hackett. Hackett, an everyman sort of character was adopted by the bloggers because they liked what he had to say and he spoke honestly, unlike his opponent who seemed to be some sort of walking, talking half-human parrot. In past Congressional elections in this district, the Democrats had to search high and low to find someone they could push out into the 2nd district as their candidate. It was sort of like trying to find a volunteer to do the cooking at the company picnic when the temperature is ninety-five degrees, and the entire city is under a severe pollution warning because the local electric company is pumping so much crap into the air that you can hardly breath, which was the case in Cincinnati on Aug. 2nd. It seems that the chairman of the local electric company is also a George Bush Pioneer, and after raising a few hundred thousand dollars for the Republican Party, the EPA dropped their one hundred million dollar lawsuit against Cincinnati's electric company, the largest fine ever imposed by the EPA.
That's why this story seems important to me. I understand Hackett called George Bush a “chickenhawk”, which is entirely appropriate, because it is a fairly well-known fact. Hackett was not being controlled by handlers and consultants from Washington, he was just telling it like it is, and that's what the bloggers really get fired up about. So, ladies and gentlemen, Maj. Hackett and the blogosphere, and some courageous patriots on the ground showed us how to conduct a political campaign. Anywhere else on earth, Hackett would have won. The 2nd district of Ohio is so conservative it makes the Vatican look like Funkytown.
Of course the Republican domination machine is scared shitless about this one. They figured that by the time they had big media in their pocket, the case was closed. Well, just remember this: The internet was originally designed to be redundant, to withstand nuclear Armageddon. So say if a nuclear bomb was dropped on West Virginia, the survivors could still find an active internet spoke and get on their computers and communicate over the internet. Ok, bad example, people in West Virginia don't have computers, but you get the point. So the very design of the internet is like a giant spider web with many redundant connections, so I figure the Republican domination machine may have a hard time disabling it. Let's say that some agents from the Karl Rove Security Force kick down the doors at the leading progressive blog, DailyKos.com, and they seize all of their servers under a new provision of the Patriot Act. Well, I figure Kos will probably have a backup server all ready to go online over at his grandma's house, and they'd never find it. Who would suspect a little old lady would be hosting a progressive blog out of her spare bedroom, helping Maj. Paul Hackett get elected to the U.S. Senate or the Governorship of Ohio next year.
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