Friday, October 22, 2004

More Unmentioned Words

Also on my list of words I expected to be discussed this campaign - but gone AWOL - are conservative vows to end reviled policies, like the "don't-ask-don't-tell" doctrine toward gays in the military. (Wasn't it a GOP priority to reverse that?)

And while skyrocketing "pork barrel" spending has attracted some editorials, neither side is really discussing how it has burgeoned under this Congress. And why no followup on the once-topical "Contract With America"? Newt Gingrich asked us to track, a decade later, whether this core set of reform promises were kept by a GOP-controlled Congress. (There's more corruption and the minority in Congress is more excluded from discussion than when the Dems controlled things. Will the Dems keep their new promise to "forever reduce partisanship"? Maybe not. But it's their turn to try. They can't do worse.)

Other phrases may have drowned in irony. Take nation building, scorned as utopian by the team surrounding George W. Bush - till they began spending far more on that pastime than Clinton did in the Balkans. Now, "nation building" goes un-uttered. (See me comparison of the Balkans to the Iraq quagmire at: http://www.davidbrin.com/neocons.html )

Ah, the convenience of memory....

Oh, worth a look: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp

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