Cuteness aside, yes, it's time.
I've left hints here before, but the day has come! Hunting The Muse is closing down.
And, something bigger and better is taking its place. I've felt strain here for a while because while I've gotten good response from my political writing, my other writing just hasn't seemed to quite fit. And as far as the political writing, I've wanted to take a next step.
I've got all that now. So, allow me to introduce my new home...
Politology.us: Politics and Technology in the United States.
I'm the captain over there, and there will also be occasional and regular guest contributors. This is a site specifically tailored not just for political weblogging, but for those that want to use online technology to engage politically. We'll be talking about technological issues, we'll be writing tutorials, we'll be collaborating on actual project development. In short, it will be a site attempting to bridge the gap between political SAYING and political DOING.
(That's "do-ing", not the sound effect.)
In addition? I have a few other personal projects in the mix. If you consider yourself to be a friend of mine (and odds are you aren't wrong), then you are invited to follow along on my new personal weblog, Thunder-Thumbs. It'll get pretty silly over there. Creative writing, miscellany, inside jokes. Come enjoy yourself. That's also where I will announce future ventures - so if you're interested in my programming or music activities, that's where you can find them.
As for museworld? Honestly, museworld was always intended as my music site. And music is finally started to pick up some momentum for me. Hopefully sometime in the next few months, we will see a bit of an overhaul here on good old museworld. You'll be able to hear about that progress on Thunder-Thumbs.
Old archived entries will stick around for the benefit of googlers everywhere.
If you've been a regular reader, thanks so much for hanging around and keeping tabs. The occasional comment and note has meant a lot to me. For most of my time here, I haven't really even risen to the level of a B-list blogger, but it hasn't really been about that - I've learned a lot about myself just from putting myself through the paces of writing regularly, and I've discovered some new passions. That was my goal all along, and it's been my honor to share that with you.
I hope you'll join me for the next steps.
In solidarity,
Curt
President Bush is pushing to "reform Social Security". He advocates something he calls "personal accounts", which historically has been called "privatization".
What is privatization? How does it differ from what Social Security is now, and how does it affect Social Security - and us - in the long run?
This article attempts to explain President Bush's likely strategy, and the likely effects of it should it be enacted.
Every wage earner pays into Social Security, and we are all supposed to receive benefits from Social Security when we become eligible. This benefit level is determined by a formula. The details of this formula can be found elsewhere, but suffice it to say that it takes the amount of money we pay into social security, applies a formula based on "wage indexing", and determines a monthly benefit amount that we will get when we are eligible.
This is how it looks for an average person.
(* Benefits can also be received for disability or other reasons.)
When examining the impact of a changed Social Security policy, we must consider the effect it will have on each person, but we must also consider the effect on the Social Security system as a whole.
In recent years, Social Security has run a surplus. This means that the payroll taxes we pay are more than enough to cover all the beneficiaries in the current year. The surplus gets applied to a Trust Fund in the form of U.S. Treasury Bonds.
In later years, the baby boomers will have all retired, and the payroll taxes won't cover the needs of the beneficiaries alone. The bonds from the Trust Fund would be redeemed to make up the difference.
The idea is for the surpluses and deficits to balance out over the long run. The payroll tax rates were set in 1983 by a group led by Alan Greenspan, to ensure that Social Security's funding would balance out, far into the future. The state of the system right now is that Social Security is effectively balanced, well into the 2050's.
President Bush, however, sees the system as having problems. His view of the problem is inherently dishonest, as shown by a related article, Social Security For Dummies. His basic approach is to pretend the Trust Fund doesn't exist, by borrowing the money from the Trust Fund and then insisting the government can't pay it back (more commonly referred to as "stealing"). And since it is taking from a tax revenue stream funded by the poorer, to subsidize a tax revenue stream funded by the richer, it is basically stealing from the poor to give to the rich - a reverse Robin Hood, if you will.
Granted, this is a problem, but you'd think he wouldn't want to draw attention to it. Nevertheless, Bush is launching a campaign to convince the American public that Social Security is in danger, even though it's from him. If Bush's desire to steal from the poor is seen as a serious enough threat, then he will take the opportunity to try and implement his solution.
Here's how it would work. Privatization is about allowing workers to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into private accounts (or "personal accounts"). Because this is effectively withdrawing money from the Social Security system to try and earn greater returns elsewhere, their guaranteed monthly benefit is then reduced by an analogous amount. This is commonly referred to as a "clawback".
Financially speaking, this can be considered a fair trade. Since the money would normally be expected to grow a minimum amount over that time period (the growth rate of U.S. Treasury Bonds), the private account investor would have to beat that growth rate in order to break even by the time they become eligible. This is considered relatively easy to do if one invests responsibly.
This has a certain degree of financial balance. But even if the plan were to stop here, there would be plenty of reasons to oppose it. Paramount among them is that Social Security is an insurance plan, not an investment strategy. While many people would be able to outperform the default growth rate, some would lose money, and that is a bad scenario when we're talking about a system that is supposed to give our elderly a bare minimum to survive on. The average monthly benefit for 65-year-olds retiring today is $1184. That's not very far above the poverty line.
But, it turns out the plan doesn't stop here. For the plan has one large side effect. A very large side effect. A multi-trillion-dollar side effect.
Remember that we are looking not just as the effect on a person, but on the system as a whole. If payroll taxes are going to privatized accounts, then what happens to the beneficiaries that were going to get that money?
If we put money into private accounts, then there's less money going to the beneficiaries. That money has to come from somewhere.
It could come from the trust fund. It would exhaust the trust fund a lot faster than the default plan would, but it's an option.
The problem that that, however, is that President Bush insists the Trust Fund doesn't exist (because he stole it).
So, we're back to that problem. The one that President Bush invented, but that he swears he has a solution for.
What's President Bush's solution? Rather than pay back the debt that was incurred to guarantee a certain benefit level, his solution is to default on that debt to the poorer citizens, and then cut the benefits they'd receive when they get older.
Basically, they rejigger the formula that determines the monthly benefit amount. There are plenty of ways to argue about the formula, but the big issue is that workers have been paying a certain tax rate with the expectation of a certain benefit level. Cutting the benefit level without refunding those extra taxes isn't exactly fair. The poorest 80% of the nation pays more in payroll taxes than they pay in federal income taxes, and then their promised benefits are taken away.
You can see the effect on the person. A well-performing personal account might have been enough to make up for the clawback, but it would be just about impossible for it to also make up for the benefit cut. Studies have shown that in order for the average returns to make up the difference, we would have to have a catastrophic crash in the stock market before privatization is implemented, and that wouldn't be good for anyone. And even if that happens, the average investor could hardly be expected to match average market returns. If Peter Lynch couldn't do it, how could the average investor? In short, the person loses.
The effect on the system?
You have both a raided trust fund, and a generation of workers that are conned out of their promised benefit levels.
These are President Bush's goals. To acknowledge the Trust Fund long enough to spend the money, and then insist it doesn't exist. To borrow money from the poor, redistribute it to the rich, and refuse to pay it back; a robbery. To cut our promised benefit levels, require us to make up the difference by engaging in risky investments that further line the pockets of the rich, and then tell us we should consider it a privilege. And to give us a future where more of our elderly and disabled are below the poverty line. All in the name of reform.
This is not reform. It is destruction.
There are no plans to cut the payroll tax rate, so benefits should not be cut either. If anyone wants to receive the benefit levels they have been promised over the last two decades, then there is only one position to take: oppose Bush's plans for personal accounts. Leave Social Security the way it is. If there ends up being a real problem with Social Security, we can deal with it later. For now, we must protect our elderly, our disabled, and ourselves from President Bush.
]]>The combinations get pretty heavy sometimes. I'm always coming up with ideas for political website tools. I've wanted to write some music for political ads that can be freely used. I just rarely have the time to follow up on my ideas. (Luckily, I haven't developed an interest in writing music that is algorithmically composed from the movements of the stock market.)
So, ideas. Over the past year in particular I've been judging against myself pretty heavily for what I've seen as, plain and simply, a lack of bandwidth. Some people just seem to get a lot more done in the same amount of time as I do.
I decided that I just needed to reject out-of-hand the possibility that some people are just naturally able to get more done, and that I'd be forever doomed to have a lot of ideas, with no chance of making serious progress on them.
So the objective became, how do I get more done in the same amount of time?
It brings up some painful thinking. For one thing, I hate discipline and I hate guilt. I've got my own values and ideals, and I'm going to stick by them. I do not want to assert myself under deadlines and schedules all the time, because I thought that if I missed the deadlines then I would just feel crappier and crappier about myself.
Of course, the way I then chose to respond to those values was to only have a very vague relationship to my goals. And that only led to the pressure building up in a different form - psychically; a general feeling of malaise, of life feeling stuck and life's pressures building up against me.
So that wasn't working. Now, discipline. What do I mean about hating discipline?
Well, long-time readers probably have a sense of the thread I'm describing here. I hate anything that involves replacing an emotion with a construct, and then doing away with the emotion.
A law that continues to exist even when the reason for that law no longer exists. A political policy that is in action only to "see it through" even when it serves no public good anymore. And, on a personal level, any ambition that we have when we've forgotten the reason for the ambition.
Basically, I want to avoid the practice of telling myself I want something, when I might underneath not want it anymore. So, I want to avoid an over-reliance of self-coaching, as I judge that it can too easily turn into a sort of consciousless, rote ambition. Better to always be in touch with what your true desires and needs are in the moment.
So you can see where I've been stuck. By not wanting to coach myself in a direction where I would get out of touch with my long-term goals, I ended up focusing too much on short-term "in the moment" types of goals.
And as happens way too often with all of us, I had come up with the answer to the wrong question. I had the right answer to, "How can I live so that I don't coach myself into a rote, consciousless ambition?". But I didn't have the right answer to, "How can I live so that I am continually moving towards my long-term goals while also staying in the moment enough that I can always know if my long-term goals are still right for me?"
Now, don't get me wrong. Feeling my way through by responding to short-term goals has actually worked pretty well for me. Particularly with my career. After I lost my last salaried job just before 9/11, I have basically been improvising since then, and it's turned into a (so far) successful freelance business that I've recently incorporated. I certainly didn't have a three-year goal to incorporate, and I frankly think that if I had had that goal, it wouldn't have worked out as well.
Um, I didn't just write that paragraph to knock it down. It's actually something that gives me pause.
The part I'm trying to reconcile with it, though, is that I don't see a long term horizon with this business. I mean, I'll keep at it, but I don't have a clear set of ambitions on how to grow it in the future. I don't exactly want to hire employees, and my time only scales so much. The only way I can truly scale it is with my hourly rate, but that can really only go so high without going through a complete overhaul.
And then there are just the general background stresses of aging, feeling more responsibility to your future, etc.
So, back to the objective. How do I get more done in the same amount of time, and how do I more efficiently work towards my long-term goals, and how do I stay checked into my internal sense of what it is I really care about and want to do, and how do I dual-use my actions so that they work towards my goals, but still are worthwhile if I decide against those goals later?
I think you start with the master goals. Keep them vague. Like, "Have a musical career." Always write a supporting document detailing exactly WHY you have that vague goal. Check in with that WHY document regularly to make sure your reasons are still valid. If you disagree with any of them, reassess that master goal.
Come up with actions or subprojects that help to enable that master goal. Make sure that you always have something scheduled for yourself that is in alignment with that master goal.
Practice time-blocking. We get overloaded with tasks. But always schedule yourself time for those master goals. I might schedule myself an hour a day for classical score study. Or it might be two hours to just sit down and play with your kids.
Or, you might need to just schedule yourself time for play. Important psychological trick - view this as NEGATIVE SPACE, so it doesn't become an obligation that you have scheduled for yourself. Instead it is just a "free" block of time that is unavailable to anything else.
You start with that. Remember the story of the rocks in the bottle. A professor brings in a bottle, puts a bunch of rocks in it, and asks the class, "Is the bottle full?" They answer, "Yes!" Then he puts a bunch of pebbles in, which skitter down between the gaps in the rocks. "Now is it full?" The class, catching on, "No!" He fills even more gaps with sand. And, still not full, because he's able to pour a large amount of water in it before it truly overflows.
You have to start with the rocks. Do your master goals first. This includes vacations and social plans! Schedule them in. Within reason, of course, you can't schedule yourself a ten-year vacation to Hawaii. Then fill in the rest. Appointments and tasks would be the pebbles and the sand.
So what's really left is the appointments and the tasks. That's a lot of stuff. I've felt overwhelmed by it. I've started reading "Getting Things Done by David Allen, and it's helping a lot.
I won't describe the process here as there are plenty of other sites that can describe it. But here's my general process so far. There are a lot of kinks, but I'm slowly working them out.
If I have a "nag" anywhere at any time, then if I have my cellphone, (a Treo 650 with mVoice installed), I press and hold the phone button, which gets through the keyguard and automatically records to my SD card. I record my reminder, press the phone button again to stop recording, and then my brain is nag-free again.
Every night I go through my reminders and process them. If it's a task, I add it to my iCal task list - either work, music, or personal. If it's multi-step I put it in my project list, which is a page in my VoodooPad wiki.
I review the wiki weekly - there's a page for each project. I determine action items, and add the ones I'm enabled to do to my iCal task list.
I sync my Treo to iCal, and they show up in Agendus Pro. I haven't worked out all my categories yet, but I schedule my tasks by day. If I don't get a task done in a day, I just bump it forward. I don't use priorities. I do enjoy the "Urgency/Importance" grid, and I use that... generally looking at "Importance" as being whether or not it is aligned with a long-term goal, and "Urgency" as whether I'm feeling time pressure from it.
Physically, I basically threw every damn thing in my office into an inbox. My inbox is basically a bunch of trays. I bought a new lateral filing cabinet. It has hanging folders, but I put manila folders into them. I bought a $30 label maker. My inbox is overwhelming right now, so I am adding an extra step, where I give it a once over and grab a chunk of my inbox and throw it into my tickler; my 43 folders. So I know I will look at and properly file the urgent stuff in the next few days.
Flaws?
Well, my task list is getting pretty large, and it is still easy to feel grumpy if I don't get my tasklist completed for the day. I would actually like to get away from scheduled tasks, I think, and only categorize them by project and category. I need to figure out better categories to do this well, though.
The other thing is that as I'm doing this, I am identifying more and more potential "Next Action Items". The list is getting pretty long. It is rather overwhelming to know that at any moment, there are thirty things I could do if I just sat down and took the fifteen minutes to do them. It is easy to feel paralysis from that. I haven't figured that one out yet.
Results?
Well, I do feel more organized so far. I look at my history over the past month, and I've completed an average of six or seven tasks a day - just completely random, ambiguous tasks that had no deadlines, but were taking up psychic space from me just knowing that I needed to get them done sometime soon. And, my brain generally feels emptier of obligations, because they are all externalized.
However, that emptiness hasn't yet transformed itself into more presence for my friends or for "living in the now". Instead it's been a bit of an unsettled feeling. I think I am just getting used to it. My brain still is in this mode I call "tracking mode", continually scanning around for what it is supposed to be obsessing about, just because it's so damn used to obsessing over the stuff that isn't there anymore. I'm hoping that will shift soon.
I'm also finding that it is a bit easier to find things. I had no idea how much energy that was taking from me. If you need to find something, you have to spend five minutes to find it, and sometimes that five minutes is too much, so you put off finding it and doing the task that requires it. If it takes fifteen seconds, then you do the task, and much faster than you would have otherwise. I know it sounds simple, but those are the things we can also overlook.
I tend to either be in front of the computer, or out and about with my cellphone, so my "collection" approach is working well. If I'm going to carry something, then it's easier to carry my Treo than a Moleskine. Really all I want on the computer is a Quicksilver Plugin to append to a Voodoopad Page without having to open Voodoopad.
My main challenge now is to expand the GTD habits to the rest of my house. I just have clutter that don't have right places. I probably need to buy a couple of armoirs.
So, that's about the state of my "life organizing" habits. Feel free to weigh in how you do things, or if you have suggestions on how to enhance this approach.
]]>This is not a process that works. You can't have somebody half finish a script, then start filming, then tell them you want something else and have them rewrite it, then when it's finished try to cut it into something else you thought of later. How many times can you make that mistake and not figure out what's what? I'm telling you guys, you just can't make a good movie the way you are trying to make movies. You can't even make a good sandwich that way. You'd end up with peanut butter and dijon mustard, with lightning bolt shaped bread that has jalapeno cheese sauce in the crust, and a little screen made out of white chocolate that you can use to look up football scores and download the new song by Ludacris. These people cannot be trusted to make decisions about art or entertainment. They should not be allowed out of their houses.There's some pretty funny writing at that site. ]]>
The right believes that a strong and powerful set of ideals must be protected at all costs, even if it occasionally means that their actions don't align with their ideals.
The left believes that they must reconcile their actions and ideals at all costs, even if it occasionally means that they have to relax their ideals to do so.
Obviously, neither is an absolute truth, but they're two archetypes that are interesting to think about.
Did you hear about the flying shoe?
Maybe I should back up. Tonight there was a debate between Howard Dean and Richard Perle in Portland, OR. You all know who Dean is. Perle is one of the architects of PNAC, the group that planned the invasion of Iraq long before 9/11. He's a neocon's neocon, one who will unapologetically defend their aims without bothering to disguise it in froofy talk like Bush does.
The debate started with each person giving a fifteen-minute opening statement. Perle's was highly disciplined but relatively simplistic. 9/11 changed everything, we didn't take terrorists seriously beforehand, they saw us as weak, they attacked us, and it was up to us to preemptively attack the states that harbored them to protect ourselves.
Somewhere in there he made reference to the military loss of life, and how he's recently become aware that Oregon has suffered disproportionately in that regard. He then proceeded to express how he felt for us in return.
I imagine that Perle is a pretty smart guy. Maybe he isn't, but in this case I have to believe that he knew that the audience would see that comment as crass. I think Perle's got a bit of a nasty streak in him.
You'd expect it would make someone want to go ballistic.
Enter Bruce. :-) A 52-year old man comes running down the right aisle, screaming "MOTHERFUCKING LIAR! LIAR!". He ran up to the stage, and... and threw his shoe at him. He missed. The funny part was that the shoe bounced off the back of the stage, and went right back to him. He stopped, momentarily confused, and then picked up the shoe and threw it at him again.
He got tackled on the ground in the audience. Perle continued to try to talk. ("He's passionate, but luckily he's inaccurate.") "Bruce" continued to scream, "LET ME UP, MOTHERFUCKERS!" and then as they finally carried him out of the hall, he was screaming, "WHORE! WHORE! HE'S A WHORE!" (Perle: "It's all right, there's a certain repetition to his theme.")
Honestly, it was pretty entertaining. I'm normally made very uncomfortable by things like that, but from where I was sitting, I think people generally enjoyed the whole display.
That said, people clapped in support of Perle after that, and when the moderator stuck up for him, so it might not have been the best tactics. On the other hand, the applause felt a bit perfunctory, as perfunctory as applause can feel.
Now, as for the actual debate.
I had never seen Dean in person before. Actually, I don't believe I had ever seen someone in person before who I had seen so often on television. My main odd impression was that he looked a lot more like what I thought he would look like than I thought he would. :-) I guess that television thing is pretty accurate.
I have to say, Perle is pretty politically stupid. He's also among the more honest neocons. What I mean by that is, he will often actually say one of the neocon's true goals, while they usually try to hide their goals. I imagine the GOP winces at him occasionally.
To me there were two real jaw-droppers. One was about the failure to find WMD. Perle said that using that as a reason to oppose invading Iraq is a bit like realizing at the end of the year, your house didn't burn down, so therefore you shouldn't have bought your fire insurance policy a year earlier.
I actually booed involuntarily on that one (as did the entire rest of the audience). I couldn't help it. It was just so amazingly outrageous. Plus, I think that Perle was being sincere there, I don't think it was some artful crafted talking point. He actually sees them as analogous. Never mind all the lost life. Never mind the thing about the fire insurance policy actually making your house more flammable.
The other moment was that Dean asked Perle to just speak freely about how he would solve the North Korea problem. Perle basically said that we should blackmail China by telling them that if they didn't solve North Korea for us peacefully, that we would be forced to solve it by force. There was no booing there. Just a whole lot of silence and a couple of gasps.
In hindsight, I almost wonder if Dean had done that deliberately by knowing ahead of time that Perle would say something like that. Giving him rope to hang himself, etc.
Finally, there was a good exchange at the end where Dean beat Perle pretty strongly. Perle made the point that foreign policy should be more nonpartisan than other areas of policy, and asked Dean what he would do to help depoliticize it. Dean didn't take the bait and said that Bush was very partisan, and wasn't open to Democratic input about foreign policy. It was ballsy because Perle had struck a very conciliatory tone in his question. Perle responded with the caustic comment that he was sure that any Democratic input would have been mentioned to the president by his Secretary of State. That got a lot of mocking from the audience. He also opened himself right up to Dean's response: "And he was treated like a Democrat."
It was another example of Perle being politically stupid; using Powell as an example of bipartisanship when Powell isn't even there anymore.
Overall, there was one pretty important undercurrent to the whole discussion. Perle's policies really are internally consistent if you adopt his world view. The problem isn't that he's making errors within his own defined parameters. The problem is the parameters themselves. The problem is that he declares irrelevant some very damaging effects of the policies he defends. On Dean's end, he pounded home the point over and over again that being strong on defense and looking out for our long-term future are not mutually exclusive. There was one key point in the debate where that point really came through. Perle had been deriding the concept of "soft power" by saying that it was a poor alternative to using necessary force. Dean took him to task for restating the question and said that no Democrat had ever defended abdicating force; that instead, the Democrats believe we need both.
Other reflections - I was sitting near the front. It seemed like the first fifty rows were all Republicans, and all of the mezzanine and balcony levels were Democrats. You could actually hear the applause coming from different parts of the hall that way. Typical...
I think that's also the first time I've been around so many Republicans. So many suits and ties. I found myself staring at them, wondering what makes them tick. Surely they can't all be in it just for power's sake...?
I do have to say that I was very struck by the vocal response of the Portland audience. Passionate, extremely participatory, and without it being a college crowd - these were like your next door neighbors, parents and professionals, caring deeply and standing up to Perle's bullshit a lot more than most Democratic politicians do. Portland rocks. I so love living here.
And one more note. The entire debate was about foreign policy, dominated by Iraq and the middle east. The number of times the word "oil" was uttered? Zero. I am torn whether that was a glaring omission, or if it really is impossible to bring it up in a responsible way. Anyway, it's unsettling.
]]>Its not the Daddy party vs. the Mother party. It's the cokehead party vs. the pothead party. It is no coincidence that I can't stand people on coke and I can't stand Republicans. Potheads? Some of the best people I have met are potheads. One party is all about belligerence, overconfidence, and it hates nuance. The other is about reflection, introspection, and making sure there is enough food.]]>
This should be really interesting. I don't really care so much about the actual content of the debate because I highly doubt they will say anything I haven't heard before, but the debate techniques will make this interesting.
Perle is an odd duck because he's the rare neocon who will actually argue in favor of what the neocons are actually trying to do. Like, in the past he's actually talked about the domino theory of how democracy in Iraq will make all the rest of the middle east countries follow suit. He doesn't seem to try to disguise his actual objectives like the rest of the neocons do.
But he's also a big bully that is very good at saying outrageous things in a rational tone of voice. Kind of like Cheney, except crazier.
I've always thought Dean to be really good at cutting through that kind of bull, but I also find him a bit spotty. As he puts it, he speaks elliptically. So I'm not at all sure he'll wipe the floor with Perle.
I'll blog the results when I get back. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep notes on the event at all, but we'll see.
I know that most people on the left agree that if not for the hypocrisy, focusing on Gannon's backstory would just be a witch hunt. The defense for publicizing it so loudly is the illustration of the GOP's hypocrisy. The story is, the GOP is about immorality of sex, prostitution, and homosexuality, and then here they have this reporter that contradicts all of that.
But that's where the problem is. Crowing about the GOP's hypocrisy doesn't really hurt the GOP. And the left already knows the GOP is fueled by hypocrisy. So this really serves no purpose - it's just a form of political self-pleasure for the left.
Why doesn't it hurt the GOP, really? Well, there are a few reasons. The big reason is the "We're All Sinners" phenomenon. If someone sins, it is their nature. They use their religion to absolve them of their sins. Rinse, repeat.
What this means is that for many folks on the right, especially the religious right, there's a common separation between action and ideal.
We on the left call that separation "hypocrisy". But that concept just doesn't apply to them. Their value system is completely compatible with their actions not following their ideals.
Why the double standard? From the right's perspective, when we sin, since we are not with God, we don't get absolved of the sin. So they decry us. And from their perspective, it isn't inconsistent at all. The reason it is inconsistent from the left's perspective is that so many of us reject out-of-hand the notion of a basically corrupt nature that we can only rise above with the help of God. They, on the other hand, have a relationship with Jesus Christ to help absolve their sins. They have their faith to see them through their trials.
This pattern isn't just restricted to religious thought, either. The same dynamics can be transferred to the "Good Old Boy" network of Republican politics. They fight for their ideals, but if their actions don't line up, then well, that's just life. What's important is the ideal, because they believe that it is their ideals, and not their actions, that fuel their power.
So let's break it down. The GOP shouts out ideals that liberals find repugnant. The GOP then acts in a way inconsistent with those ideals. The left exposes the action, and screams hypocrisy. The right just shrugs about the hypocrisy, because the concept just simply doesn't apply to them. It's just an action, their ideals are still pure. But they find the publicity unseemly, much in the same way we would in reverse. The cries of hypocrisy do nothing to convert people on the right. It's not even cognitive dissonance - their value system is quite comfortable reconciling a split between ideal and action.
And for the swing voter, they are caught (as usual) between two models. On the one hand, they are vaguely uncomfortable with hypocrisy. On the other hand, they don't like the witch hunt. So they're reduced to just feeling cynical about the whole thing.
Focusing on the personal life - even to expose hypocrisy - is not worth the effort, in my opinion. Yes, it revs up the more indignant among us on the left. But it also more deeply entrenches negative stereotypes the right has of us. To me, the tiebreaker is that talking about the personal life is just time and words not spent on talking about Bush's propaganda efforts.
Very. very weird.
(So, I went and read what I wrote and it didn't even answer my question. Sigh.)