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The year that was 2010, well, we knew going in that it was going to be interesting. It would be a slow roll to the United States midterm elections, which meant more politics than one could potentially digest (or want to), both inside and outside the country. We saw the nominally populist, small-government movement field candidates of the bizzarre, who may have turned out to be sheep in wolven clothing, strange assertions, and perhaps more abuse of dead politicians and Founding Fathers than a normal election year. There were also lots and lots of opinions and statements made against he current social safety net, tatterd and holey that it is, and many promises that it would be changed, dismantled, or otherwise removed.
Conservatives would continue to accuse the administration and the President of being socialists intent on destroying the free market, unable to run the government because they have no experience in running businesses and thus do not have the wisdom of the free market and it's obvious solutions to debt and deficit problems, and ideologues unwilling to compromise or accept suggestions from their opposition on anything. That opposition would set a record for number of filibusters in a Senate session, embrace the idea of the Party of NO, even to ideas that were their own suggestions, and continually insist that the private sector had all the solutions to the problems and deserved every dollar of the debt the federal government incurred to bail them out of the economic collapse they engineered.
The name Matt Taibi would become almost household, and Rolling Stone would suddenly be known as a magazine that did in-depth and smart political writing instead of pieces on, y'know, music. In some ways, it followed in the footsteps of Playboy, which also routinely had articled unrelated to sex inside.
And Muslims would continue to be demonized wherever conservative columnists could try - tying them to terrorists, accusing them of attempting to take over the country, accusing the President of being secretly one and exhorting their fellows to be as irreverent to Islam as they perceived the culture was to Christianity.
That was just one examples of the insane things that a lot of people would believe about the President, about his administration, their policies, or liberals and liberalism in general. A lot of discredited conspiracies continued to live in 2010 despite having been disproven early in 2009.
It wasn't all about politics, of course - part of the problem of getting older is that you have less people alive at the end of the year than when you started. I can only hope that they determine how to prolong life indefinitely before biology forces me to the end of mine.
And it wasn't all bad, despite the fact that I'm sure my news tends to the negative more than the positive. The year had a lot of talk about why we haven't decided that QUILTBAG people are people and accord them all the proper rights and privileges of such, and a lot of action on the same, for example. But there were also more than a few places that did accord QUILTBAG people the status of being people who can engage in all sorts of activities. The Century of the Fruitbat marched forward in many places, and backwards in a few.
And there were all sorts of literary terrorists around, doing their best to remove books they considered inappropriate from schools and libraries, making large loud complaints about the presence fo information in the library or the school, and continuing to make their case as to why they should be entirely ignored, based on their ignorance of the thing they were challenging, or their hubris in believing they knew best for everyone.
( 2010 in review, long-form edition )
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Conservatives would continue to accuse the administration and the President of being socialists intent on destroying the free market, unable to run the government because they have no experience in running businesses and thus do not have the wisdom of the free market and it's obvious solutions to debt and deficit problems, and ideologues unwilling to compromise or accept suggestions from their opposition on anything. That opposition would set a record for number of filibusters in a Senate session, embrace the idea of the Party of NO, even to ideas that were their own suggestions, and continually insist that the private sector had all the solutions to the problems and deserved every dollar of the debt the federal government incurred to bail them out of the economic collapse they engineered.
The name Matt Taibi would become almost household, and Rolling Stone would suddenly be known as a magazine that did in-depth and smart political writing instead of pieces on, y'know, music. In some ways, it followed in the footsteps of Playboy, which also routinely had articled unrelated to sex inside.
And Muslims would continue to be demonized wherever conservative columnists could try - tying them to terrorists, accusing them of attempting to take over the country, accusing the President of being secretly one and exhorting their fellows to be as irreverent to Islam as they perceived the culture was to Christianity.
That was just one examples of the insane things that a lot of people would believe about the President, about his administration, their policies, or liberals and liberalism in general. A lot of discredited conspiracies continued to live in 2010 despite having been disproven early in 2009.
It wasn't all about politics, of course - part of the problem of getting older is that you have less people alive at the end of the year than when you started. I can only hope that they determine how to prolong life indefinitely before biology forces me to the end of mine.
And it wasn't all bad, despite the fact that I'm sure my news tends to the negative more than the positive. The year had a lot of talk about why we haven't decided that QUILTBAG people are people and accord them all the proper rights and privileges of such, and a lot of action on the same, for example. But there were also more than a few places that did accord QUILTBAG people the status of being people who can engage in all sorts of activities. The Century of the Fruitbat marched forward in many places, and backwards in a few.
And there were all sorts of literary terrorists around, doing their best to remove books they considered inappropriate from schools and libraries, making large loud complaints about the presence fo information in the library or the school, and continuing to make their case as to why they should be entirely ignored, based on their ignorance of the thing they were challenging, or their hubris in believing they knew best for everyone.
( 2010 in review, long-form edition )
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