Party on Voting Day

Barry got to pick the last song of the night at the Big Social Event. He had 2 choices. So he picked “Honey”, by Bobby Goldsboro. The other choice was “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton. Most people would have picked “Tears in Heaven” because they think, and quite rightly, that it is a better song than “Honey”—which has topped more than one poll as The Worst Song of All Time—making the other choice irrelevant, really, to a normal person. In fact, even Barry thinks that. So why did he pick “Honey” and make everyone ill and depressed? Because Barry doesn’t pick songs, he picks notes. Those little pieces that go together to make songs, but mean little to nothing by themselves. See, Barry likes the note D. And “Honey” has lots of D’s in it. “Tears in Heaven”, though a better song say all, has hardly any. Barry doesn’t follow the gullible crowd of melody-obsessed songophiles. He’s too sophisticated and sees right through that. Good melodies often cover-up terrible single notes, like A-flats and B’s. Before you jump to the obvious and correct conclusion that Barry is a self-congratulating cretin whose lack of reasoning ability can cause you no more than about 3 minutes of aural agony consider this: He votes the same way. Barry votes for the person, not the party.

Like a note doesn’t a song make, a legislator doesn’t make laws and policies. Legislatures do. And legislatures are run by parties. The difference between being the majority party and the minority party in Congress is— to take Lyndon Johnson out of context—the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit. The majority controls the rules and the agenda in legislative chambers. And anyone who knows the politics equivalent of 4 Is More Than 3 knows that he who controls the agenda controls policy. So, if you voted for a “conservative Democrat” because your local Republican was somehow not up to snuff, for instance, you voted for Nancy and her flying monkeys to decide what qualifies as an issue and what gets to be voted on for the next 2-will-seem-like-20 years. Good ideas won’t be defeated; they will just never come up. Bad ideas will be simply inevitable as policy, unless vetoed. And W ain’t the best border fence against bad ideas nowadays.

Now don’t beat up on the smugly ignorant “character” voters too quickly. The party strategerists make this mistake themselves when they think a Joe Lieberman is somehow a tradeoff for a Lincoln Chafee. Sure, you couldn’t count on Link to vote on the right side of Should We Come In From The Rain? But at least there was a vote, and everyone had a good chance of using the sense God gave a goose under GOP agenda-setting. Joe would probably vote for dryness but he won’t get the chance to now. No one will. There will be no vote on coming in from the downpour because the new majority will insist that such a vote would amount to mob rule that would stomp on the rights of rain-drops to due process, or some such nonsense. And Joe gets everyone no closer at all to shelter and central heating. So the next time someone tells you with pride that they vote the person, not the party, tell them you’re going to glue the headphones from Barry’s I-pod onto their ears. If they don’t like that, tell them you set the agenda and that it’s already been decided. They can object again in 2 years.