I haven’t written much here about politics lately. I’m just demoralized and fed up with all of it. Democrats won the presidency and the largest Senate majority of any party in 30 years, and yet we can’t get anything done. Harry Reid lets the Republicans threaten to filibuster anything they want, to the extent that the country and the media now think it is normal for all legislation to require 60 votes to pass the Senate, as if it has always been that way. You can bet that when the Republicans take control of the Senate again, they won’t care about winning a single Democrat over for anything, and they’ll throw a temper tantrum if Democrats even think of threatening a filibuster. And they’ll get the media to go along with them. They’re just better at manipulating the media, because they know the media loves conflict and simplistic stories, and that’s what the Republican Party today is good at. Conflict and simplistic stories. What liberal media are the conservatives talking about? Fox is one of the most influential media voices today. Fox is the media. It’s not liberal. If anything, the rest of the media is corporate media, not liberal media. Please.

And now the Senate thinks it’s a good idea for people to bring guns on Amtrak. Once again, the conservatives have changed the terms of the debate. What does a “well regulated Militia” have to do with bringing guns on a train, or to national parks, or to churches? What does defending yourself from some imaginary government takeover have to do with bringing your gun to a national park? So now a big chunk of Congress thinks it’s okay for criminals to have guns, don’t worry about background checks, hooray, guns for everyone.

There are many good things about this country. But one of the worst is that so many Americans think the world stops at the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Maybe it’s not just an American thing — maybe most people in the world think their country is the greatest and that there’s nothing that any other nation can teach them. Maybe it’s just a natural human impulse to resist change.

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.”

In other words, better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know.

And yet — what Bush and the Republicans did for eight years was anything but conservative. Invade another country on false pretenses? Lock people up without charging them with anything or letting them see evidence? Those things might be conservative in a macro sense — i.e. compared to most of human history, those things might be typical — but compared to the way our country had acted for the previous 200 years, it was radical change. And they were able to get their way. Why? Because they knew how to use fear to manipulate the public. So maybe it’s not always that those who resist change have an automatic advantage. Maybe, as I said at the beginning, the side that is better at manipulating people with simplistic answers has the advantage.

I don’t feel like analyzing this anymore right now. All I know is that we’re in a situation where the Senate is more lopsided toward the Democrats than at any time since 1979 and for some reason the Democrats are worried about winning over the vote of Olympia Snowe. Let alone some members of their own caucus. It annoys the hell out of me.

End of rant.