Today's Angry Post I

1. Politics is not a computer-game. It's not baseball. It's not football. To win at any cost in politics usually means that you lost something much more important than the game. Politics. Has. Real. Consequences.

And to turn all that into some play about greed and power and the pure glee of making someone else suffer is disgusting.

2. Politics is not something you buy at the mall, preferably in your size and in pink. No, you can't return the Congress to the store if you don't like what they do. No, you can't whine when things go bad, because you didn't vote for those causing teh badness. It's not consumerism. You get some group in power whether you want or not.

3. Politics is not entertainment for you. It's not smart to write about it all as if it was a horse-race, to rank the players as if they were Reality Show contestants, America's talent, to be giggled at and pointed at because they have screechy voices or unbecoming suits.

Nobody is required to make politics fun for you, to make difficult concepts easy or to take care that you are not misinformed. But those who write on politics should at least get the barest facts right. You know, boring facts, the ones which don't play baseball, don't go to the mall, don't crack jokes. It is those facts which will ultimately have the power to hurt or help real people.

4. It's easy to see why so many don't want to participate in politics. Same-old-same-old, and the poor get poorer while the rich get a second chance to ruin the market. But not participating IS participating: Just as you can't buy a political option and then not-buy it if you don't like it, we always get politics rain upon us, whether we vote or not. Always. The non-participants participate by handing their keys to someone else.

5. Indeed, what politics IS, at its basest level is self-defense.