the man or the system?

Dang, you are right, as usual, Beagles.  All those names seem alike to me, Madison Monroe, Hamilton, and then I thought, isn't he on the ten dollar bill, but now I realize that so is Franklin.

Well I admit it, the founding fathers are my weak point in historical scholarship.  This should be an exciting time, they were mapping out a completely new kind of country, there were big ideas, big personalities, big fights, and yet I can't suppress a yawn.  I've forced myself to read books about them, but I can barely keep my eyes open.

I blame it on grade school, it seems like, in an effort to make us patriotic, they kept shoving the founding fathers down our throats.  It seems like half our movies were of guys with wigs.  Maybe if we had a Jablonski, and an O'Hara, and a Giamatti, back then it would have been more interesting, easier to tell the players apart.

In these days when you can go to the nearest fruteria and find a guy who will give you a whole new set of ids for under a hundred bucks, I don't see how asking some guy for a piece of paper is going to mean anything.  I suppose you could go to where he says he is born and check the records there, but why not just drop the stupid requirement? 

You say you have nothing against Hispanics (and blacks and gays et al) it's just that there are so many of them, but then there are so many whites too, but then you say you are against everybody, but it's always the Hispanics et al that you complain about, and not so much white people who look and talk like you, so I would say you have something against them.

Cubans are not like other Hispanics.  The main difference is that they have no immigration problem, they are legal the second they step on US soil, and they come from an oppressive commie country so they tend to be right wingers.  When I am speaking of Hispanics and the republicans I am talking about voting patterns, and the reason they vote mostly for democrats are that the republicans, especially in election times, are always bad mouthing them.

Take gun nuts (please, drum roll).  They aren't inherently democratic or republican, but the democrats have bad mouthed them in the past, we don't much anymore, but you guys have long memories, so you tend to vote republican. 

Historically catholics were more likely to vote democratic because they tended to be poorer, but I don't know how true that is anymore.

That whole thing about generalizations, it's an inherent fallacy.  You know we have to fit things into categories in order to be able to talk about them, but things never fit that well into one category or another so there is always some error there. 

Back in my youth it seemed messy to me, the way you had liberals and conservatives in both parties.  It seemed to me that it should be more ordered, like in Europe where they had like liberal and conservative parties, but now that we are more ordered it is not so hot.  It's a zero sum game anymore where a victory for the dems is a loss for the reps and vice versa.  Used to be a group of reps and dems could get together and hammer out something and get credit for it.  Anymore if they did that the rest of their parties would be calling them traitors for colluding with their opponents.

That thing where you are not as interested in who makes the supreme court decision as you are in what the decision is highlights what I think is one of the (many) big differences between us.  I think you tend to believe that what is important is the system: if we have the right system then it doesn't make much difference who runs it.  I tend to believe that the system is not as important as the people who run it: no matter what the system is, they will find a way to get out of it what they want.

Of course that is a simplification (because we can only speak in categories which we know are imperfect), but what do you think of that differentiation between the two of us?

I predict that Obama will nominate some moderate guy or woman, very likely a minority, but not necessarily.  The republicans will then decide probably not to hold hearings, but maybe they will because they won't want to look obstructionist, but if they do they will find all these terrible things in his/her record and vote them down, and both sides will use it as an issue in the upcoming election.

I'm sorry if I have been so political, but it obsesses me in an election year.