The Third Party Option

Our Holy Ambassador to the Court of the Mainstream Media wrote a typically outstanding column this week on the possiblity of the third party to complete with the Republicrats. It brought to mind the following event.

A few months ago I got to play host to a group of House and Senate staffers who were visiting our organization to discover ways in which the new media could bring people together. They were sent by their bosses to find ways to calm down their constituents who were doing dreadful things like transcribing C-Span speeches, parsing them and emailing nasty letters to all and sundry because of the idiocy in the speeches. The politicians were upset because people were actually listening to what they said and now had a tool to compare analyses and spread the word. They came to us because we are leaders in the use and disseminate information.

They had been prepped for the trip by having an expert on the media come and speak to them. The expert they brought in to speak to them was Judy Woodruff. When they told me who they had met with, it took all my willpower to keep from asking, "What, was the stegosaurus busy?" The staffers were very concerned about blogs. I asked if they had booked a meeting with Glenn Reynolds. They said, "Who?"

None of them read any blogs at all.

In the conversation that followed our standard VIP presentation they got to discussing a bill that was being considered to increase federal funds for preschools because it was thought that there was a link between preschool and crime. The problem the staffers asked us about was how we helped people extract linkages between raw data and events. As I listened to them very seriously discuss how preschool prevented crime, I wanted to run out of the room and change my party affiliation from Republican to Libertarian. I had just recently posted these blog entries:

Race and Politics Don't Matter

Race and Politics Don't Matter II

The discussion about preschool and crime was a startling display of ignorance and incompetence. The piffle came equally from both parties, too.

It's like the French Revolution all over again. The MSM and the politicians have lost their hold on the distribution of information, but continue to behave like they haven't. They may not even realize it yet. If you put the political class in the role of the aristocracy, the MSM in the role of the Catholic Church and the new media in the role of the French middle class, I think the analogy can be taken a long ways before it falls apart.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the Italian or French governments begin to default on their debts. Fortunately for us, we're a decade or so behind them in the debt curve, so we will be able to watch them collapse first. I wonder if that will be a trigger for a third party or a wake up call for the Republicans.

I guess it speaks volumes that the possiblity of rational spending policy coming from the Democrats isn't even considered. I frequently find myself listening to the news with the patronizing attitude "Well, it's not like you could expect them to make financial sense. After all, they're Democrats."

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