Politics

I was just over at the Meetup site, which I learned about the other day. I'm not much of a joiner, but I've heard enough about people getting a goodly amount of satisfaction from meeting other people with similar likes and dislikes that I thought to give it a try. Granted, the possibility of finding anyone else who likes to know how anatomy works, enjoys reading about business theory, artificial intelligence, microeconomics, and occasionally sociology, architecture, or science fiction -- well, that seems pretty unlikely, sometimes. And almost no one likes to think about all of that stuff. Most people, I gather, focus on a couple of areas and go deep. I look at a bunch of areas, and stay at the shallow end. I don't know details about many things, but I know pieces of lot of things, and I like that.

When I got to Meetup, I poked through a couple of interest areas, and found one that sounds possible: a group of people who got together as a pro-Kerry group and stayed together as an anti-Santorum group, specifically, and a Democratic party organization, generally. Nothing wrong with any of that, and a great deal that's right. But it brought me to thinking a bit about politics, and about the current debate regarding the offering for Supreme Court justice. I think that if I didn't know that this guy was picked by Bush, I'd be in favor of him. He's got a lot of good qualities, and even the ones that I don't like -- most notably, he's for strict interpretation of the Constitution, which I don't like because I think its a code word for 'roll back all you can from the liberal years' -- well, even those aren't terrible. The court should reflect general political feeling, and right now, whether I like it or not, that's more conservative than liberal. He's a capable person and so far as I can judge, he'd be a good choice.

And when I find myself thinking that, given my own choice in the dichotomy of Democratic or Republican, I wonder if it makes Karl Rove chuckle. But then: do I really care what Karl Rove thinks?