OK, I haven't completely given up on politics. Paige bought me a copy of Dick Morris's The New Prince for Christmas, and I enjoyed it. Morris was Clinton's Karl Rove. Morris has several interesting viewpoints, including the view that kicking the Democrats out of Congress actually made it easier for Clinton to get his laws passed.

The Democratic party is proud to be a "big tent of ideas," meaning that there are dozens of single-issue Democrats in Congress. Some Democrats want expanded abortion rights, others want gun control, others want the Equal Rights Amendment, others want affirmative action, and they all want it in every law. If Clinton wanted, say, government-managed health care, he had to make sure it somehow appealed to each of these groups before he knew he'd have enough votes to get it passed. It had to be health care that expanded abortion rights, required gun licensing, guaranteed equal, or more-than-equal access for women and minorities, and didn't break the budget.

In other words, each law had to be a Christmas tree to each faction of the party in order to pass.

President Bush's request that the Democrats let the Republicans get a say as the minority party rings hollow under the current political environment (although Bush did renominate all of Clinton's stalled judges when he took office because the Congress was closely divided and because he was barely elected in 2000; for the same reason, Bush reached out to Ted Kennedy when he developed No Child Left Behind). However, I'm starting to get suspicious that maybe the Republican party will become something of the largest faction in Congress. Pelosi and Reid may find it easier to pass bills that all Republicans support and that two or three Democratic factions support, than to pass bills that all Democrats support.

I've been pretty busy recently, which is why there haven't been any posts here for a while now. I've just about sworn off politics, given that it'll likely give me an ulcer long before I'm influential enough to change the world.

Which is why I was surprised to find out yesterday that Saddam's already been executed. The interesting part, to me, was that the newspapers that ran stories about how bad Chile's Augusto Pinochet was were the same ones that wrote Saddam wasn't all that bad or a terrible victim. And the ones that said Pinochet wasn't all that bad, well, they toed the party line as well.

Something's wrong when people choose which dictators to like because of political affiliation.