RIP

So old Hunter S. Thompson has taken the Hemingway cure. Poor bastard couldn't bear up under any more W., I'm sure--last time I saw him on TV was Charlie Rose maybe a year ago and he was as fumbly, mumbly, and rambling as ever. I've only read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so I don't feel this as a major loss, but I enjoyed that book, so Godspeed Hunter.

I watched TV today briefly before work and between MSNBC, FOX, and our local CBS affiliate I saw no less than 6 different talking heads tell me how "liberal" the media are or how "liberal" professors are or how "liberal" historians are or how "liberal" Hollywood is. I'm sick of being told how "liberal" everybody is by the "liberal" media. PBS is censoring cartoons and can't show Frontline episodes where soldiers who face death daily use naughty language--because they're so "liberal." They've got Now! after all--that proves it! Never mind Wall Street Week, Paul Gigot, Tucker Carlson and all those other rabid lefties polluting the public airwaves with their government-subsidized Marxist agendas.

Much of this liberal/conservative stuff is bullshit. Ask 90% of Americans to explain what conservatism or liberalism actually mean and you'll get embarrassingly foolish answers. Typically in my experience people have aligned themselves with a personality they like--Limbaugh, Moore, Coulter, Franken--adopted that person's views as their own, and accepted them uncritically as gospel.

Yes, I'm left on most issues--but there are conservatives I admire, and on certain issues I lean right/libertarian more than I lean left. What I'm losing patience with are the labels--George W. Bush is not a traditional conservative by any stretch of the imagination, any more than Bill Clinton was a liberal; he's increased the size of the federal government dramatically, he's lavished pork on the red states at a rate that would make FDR ashamed, he's blown the budget all out of whack, and he's got several foreign policy interventions/nation-building exercises going at once. Without the tax cuts and the continuous mention of God's Will and the environmental stuff he's hard to portray as William F. Buckley's wet dream.

Can we stop using these terms so loosely? Can we take the focus of our partisan ire off of ideological alignment and put it back where it belongs--onto characteristics like accountability, competence, and honesty? Argh.