NP: Mike Keneally & Beer For Dolphins, Dancing (CD)

For all my distaste for the media's gross exaggerations of the near-coronation of Howard Dean, it's entirely possible that they actually prodded people into paying attention, which has allowed Gephardt to close in Iowa and Clark to gain in New Hampshire. My local Fox affiliate said Clark was in a statistical dead heat with Dean, but I think they meant Kerry for the second-place slot.

Meanwhile, in a Washington Post article today on the notion of tax reform becoming an issue in the 2004 election, following it's spot in the sun as part of the Democratic primary, Grover Norquist of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform was quoted as saying "We'll just stand up and say, 'It's a tax increase,' and people are willing to believe us because they've seen it before."

Read that quote more closely. They'll "just" say something, and the people will be "willing to believe" it. To my mind, that's the inherent problem with the overarching GOP strategy these days. They seem to take full advantage of a public too gullible to realize they're just making shit up. This is what bugs me more than almost anything else, even though my own broad generalization about people isn't that they're good or bad, but dumb. To ruthlessly take advantage of that dumbness for political advantage just doesn't seem to be in the best interests of the country as a whole. Iraq-al Queda connection, anyone?

But what can you expect when so much energy is funnelled into holding onto power, rather than actually serving your constituency? The situation is further clouded if you take that second part and figure that any given politician's real constituency consists of the power brokers that got him or her there, and not the actual voters. Not unlike how the major record labels' real customers are their distributors, and not the actual music listener.

Man, I'm all about drawing the parallels between politics and music this week.