Here are my best guesses on what people of various political persuasions are thinking. YES, these are generalizations, but then so are the political parties.

Liberal

Human beings are rational and born good or, at worst, as blank slates. Their roles and behaviors have been and are imposed upon them by family, church, economic standing, and state. As such, they can and must be taught to behave properly toward their fellow men, women, life forms, and the environment. Bad behaviors are the result of a bad environment and social inequities. If bad environments are cleared up and social inequalities eliminated, then human beings will behave better simply because they’ll have less to fight over. People of different genders, colors, ethnicities, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds,  given equal footing through laws and customs, can be made to get along with each other. Conflicts can be brought to an end if inequalities are eliminated, good-faith efforts are made to understand one another, and individuals can be taught how to behave properly. If individuals (parents) cannot train their children right, then it falls to the “village”–the local community, the state, or the nation–to do it for them. It is the right and duty of the state to ensure quality education, social stability, and social and economic equality. Taxes should be raised on those most able to afford it to ensure all of these social goods, and the good of the many should be decided by those experts best equipped to ensure worthy social goals. True freedom will exist for everyone when there is no inequality and everyone is allowed to do what they want as long as they don’t harm anyone and as long as they do their fair share for the betterment of society.

Moderate

I don’t know much about human nature, I can only speak for myself. I don’t want any trouble from anyone. I just wish people would stop fighting all the time. As Rodney King put it, “Can’t we all just get along?” When there is a hotly contested election, I tend to listen to those closest to me to see what their advice is. If I can’t make up my own mind, then I vote for the person who I think will cause the least harm. I don’t give a lot of thought to politics, I just want to do my job and be left alone. There are good ideas on both sides, so I don’t see what there is the fight about. I don’t really know what the government should do, but I do think we should do our best to stay out of trouble and to make sure people in this country don’t commit crimes or anything like that. Is that okay? We will bear any price to ensure the success of goodness and rationality in suffering parts of the world.

Conservative

Mankind was born “fallen,” meaning we were created by God with free will, but are “fallen” through Original Sin. As such, our legal customs and religions exist to keep our passions in line. When those fail, we have government, which is necessarily limited because it is run by people as sinful, power-hungry, and corrupt as the rest of us. Education should be kept as decentralized and as local as possible, and it should aim to make the next generation like its parents, only a little better. Freedom resides with individual opportunity and the right of the individual to make of him or herself whatever they can. This freedom can result in economic or social inequalities or differences due to different abilities or cultural standards. In a system of equality under the law, the state does not sanction social ascendancy through official birthright or group rights; individuals rise and fall through their own efforts and through whatever means bequeathed to them by their parents. Right and wrong exist, as do good and evil, and individuals and groups must be judged by the acts according to unified standards agreed to by the majority.  The government exists to enforce the laws, defend the nation, maintain the aforementioned system of justice, and to ensure that the laws reflect an enlightened standard of human behavior, in accordance with custom and religiously guided principles. There are some public goods that government might perform, such as maintaining roads, waterways, air traffic, electricity, and other public works, but government should be limited in its ambitions at home and abroad. We are friends of liberty everywhere, but guardians only of our own.

Libertarian

Human beings were born bad, whether by God or some other natural process. What you believe is your own business, and the state should exist only to protect your property, your right to say and do what you want, and to keep out any foreigners who say otherwise. The marketplace is and should remain the final arbiter for success and failure, right or wrong. Government should be severely restricted, with as many functions privatized as possible. Government should not impinge on personal or economic behavior except in obvious instances of theft, fraud, or death. In addition to the marketplace, interactions between individuals should be governed by a civil society of independent, armed individuals. An armed society is a polite society, and no individual should be forced to sacrifice freedoms for the sake of another.

Green

Humanity is inherently good, but capitalism is evil. It has twisted morals, resource use, and relations between individuals to be subservient to the wage slavery of the dollar. Capitalism has spread across the world like a cancer, destroying habitats, animals, plants, and other natural wonders. Because of this, government should be run by scientists and other experts capable of restraining capitalism through taxes and regulations to enforce Earth-friendly policies for the good of society. In addition, the rich capitalist nations should be taxed to help poorer nations improve conditions in those regions, regardless of culture or merit. The reasons so many nations in the world hate the United States are because it is rich, arrogant, and imperialistic. The world should be governed according to the principle, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” until the whole world is healed and living under one government dedicated to the good of all. If this means that individuals lose some of their free speech rights or their right to bear arms, that might be regrettable on an individual level, but a necessary price to ensure the price of peace is paid everywhere.

Here’s where the “Jeremiad” portion of the post comes up. Here are just some of the weird things loose in the world:

• The Russians have stated that a military response is required due to the Czech Republic accepting U.S. missile defense batteries on their territory.
• The Iraqis want us out on a specific timeline just as Israel and Iran are conducting war games.
• Oil continues over $130 a barrel while gasoline in the U.S. hovers at or above $4 a gallon.
• The political process in the U.S. continues to remain hostile and rancorous.
• The Chi-Coms are warning French President Nicholas Sarkozy not to visit with the Dalai Lama.
• Ahmadenijad threatening to hit the U.S. and Israel if it’s attacked after recent speculation that a military strike is possible before Bush leaves office.
• The Beijing Olympics are a month away.
• Neither U.S. presidential candidate is interested in increasing the domestic supply of oil to decrease prices.

Too much thinking. Might as well have a beer.

Let’s be careful out there.

Follow-up:

Okay, I was mistaken. The Russkis are p.o.ed about the installation of a radar station, not an anti-missile battery. The responses to this situation on some web sites are self-righteous, deluded, and faintly ridiculous. The standard rejoinder–using “blame America first” as its mantra–has been, “Ask the U.S. if they’d feel better if the Russians placed a radar station in Cuba to protect the socialist countries in Latin America.”

Well, the only way that’d happen, realistically, is if they installed a radar in Cuba to protect them, say, from ballistic missiles from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. However, Chavez doesn’t have ballistic/nuclear missiles–at least not yet–and if he was to fire them at anybody, he’d be firing them at US, and Putin knows it.

The U.S. defenses are there to protect Europe from Iran. If the Russians would let us, we’d probably try to station anti-missile batteries in their country! Iran is the big threat because they’re crazy and stupid enough to push the button. They’ve threatened as much. The Russians a) don’t believe us and b) don’t like the idea of the U.S. encroaching on their perceived sphere of influence, which they see as the Slavic portions of Eastern Europe.

Nevertheless, this bears watching.

This report deserves to be quoted in full:

U.S. Delivers Iraqi Uranium to Canadian Firm

The U.S. military has finished delivering 550 tons of yellowcake uranium — left over from the late Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons-making era — from Iraq to a uranium trading company in Canada, Pentagon officials confirmed to FOX News on Monday.

Cameco, which sells the natural uranium, also called “yellowcake,” to electricity-producing utilities around the world, bought the uranium for an undisclosed price several weeks ago.

To assist in the sale, the U.S. military transported the uranium over the weekend to “ensure its safe transit,” senior Pentagon officials said.

“The Department of Defense was responsible for the safe and secure transfer of materials from Iraq to the country of purchase,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. “The cargo was transported by convoy from Tuwaitha nuclear research facility in Baghdad to a secure location in the Green Zone” and then loaded onto a C-17 and flown to an intermediate location via 37 sorties, he said.

Once at that intermediate location, which Whitman declined to reveal, the cargo was shipped to a third country where it was loaded onto a U.S.-flagged cargo ship. It was transported from there to Canada.

Tuwaitha is the facility that was bombed by Israel in 1981 and again by the U.S. during the 1991 Gulf War. It was a centerpiece of Hussein’s nuclear weapons effort, and was looted shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

According to senior Pentagon officials, the U.S. spent an estimated $70 million to ship the yellowcake. Iraq has promised to reimburse the U.S. for the money spent flying the nuclear component.

Yellowcake, depending on market conditions, can be worth anywhere from $60 to $85 per pound.

Officials told The New York Times that while the material could not be used in its current form for a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb, the unstable environment in Iraq, along with the health dangers that can be caused from it sitting around in concentrated forms, encouraged officials to make sure it was put in secure hands.

The Times noted that the yellowcake removed from Iraq is not the same yellowcake that President Bush claimed in his 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein tried to buy from Niger.

FOX News’ Catherine Herridge and Justin Fishel contributed to this report

Now okay, my liberal friends will no doubt pounce on the last sentence of this report as the “Aha!” moment of the article. However, it leaves open the obvious questions:

• Iraq has no natural sources of uranium. The stuff was obviously imported.
• Where did this particular cache of yellowcake uranium come from?
• 550 tons of yellowcake is not a small amount. Assuming that only 3 to 5% of uranium found is suitable for nuclear weapons, that still left, potentially, somewhere around 16.5 to 27.5 tons of weapons-grade material that the U.S. establishment press stated was not there.
• Saddam expressed little interest in developing “peaceful nuclear power” as a fig leaf for making bombs as Iran is now claiming. He wanted nuclear weapons.

Will we hear an apology from the media to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the Bush Administration? Of course not.

But one must pose the obvious question: Certain political opponents of President Bush threatened the President and VP Cheney with impeachment for “lying” about Iraq–under the auspices of “high crimes and misdemeanors”–because no weapons of mass destruction were found there. If the means for making WMDs (quite a lot of them, actually) have now, in truth, been found, what can the people falsely accusing the President be charged with? Libel? At least.

According to my lib friends, “everyone knew” Saddam had no WMDs, which is odd, considering how hard Saddam bluffed the U.S. into thinking that he did. Hell, he even had parts of the CIA and Colin Powell convinced. Powell and Richard Armitage never got over the “missing WMDs” and the damage done to their reputations. That’s partly why, even though Armitage was the one who leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the press, he did not come forward when Scooter Libby was charged with “outing” her as a CIA agent. Will Powell and Armitage now apologize to President Bush? They ought to, but most likely won’t. Will Bush give a full pardon to Scooter Libby? It would seem he would be justified in doing so, but he probably won’t until he’s on his way out of office.

“Bush lied, people died.” That’s been the mantra of the Left for five years now. Enough already. Iraq was a preemptive strike to stop Saddam from developing nuclear weapons. Five hundred and fifty tons of reasons have just been delivered to the Canadians. Was the war justified? You can still consider that a judgment call. However, the “Bush lied” charge should now be laid to rest. Or better, outed, shouted from the rooftops by Republicans, and thrown in the face of Democrats who voted for the war before they voted against it. Time to go on the offensive. Will McCain, et al., have the stones to do it?

But ya know, I’m cool with that. I’ve said quite enough this week.

Dammit!

A feminist coworker posted the following article on her web site: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10518131

It talks about women being raped, abused, and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on or after the battlefield in Iraq. The solution to these problems, of course, is obvious and will therefore not be followed. We could, simply, get women out of the military, out of the combat zones.

Now before some folks reach out and try to remove the electronic version of my testicles, let me offer an alternative position: we could divide our military forces into combat forces (”Leviathan Force”) and occupation and peacekeeping forces (”System Administration Force”). The Leviathan Forces, as articulated by its author, would consist of young men, about 19 years, old, and slightly pissed off. The Sys Admin Forces would be more integrated (from a male-female perspective), older, and more deliberate in its actions. The goal of the Sys Admin group is to provide stability and civilization to an area where the Leviathan Force has previously killed people and broken things. The presence of women would be a reminder to the local populace and the male soldiers on the ground what the purpose of the mission was.

But no, we won’t do that. Instead, we’ll continue to put women into an environment filled with young men stressed out and hyped up by combat. Speaking as a male (not as a male who has been in the armed force), I can tell you that one cannot switch from a paranoid watchfulness–as when one perceives one’s life has been threatened–and the civilized behavior expected between men and women back at home in peacetime. And I’m not a particularly emotional or violent man. But putting women into that environment was not a particularly great idea, and the armed forces are still paying for it.

And as bad as the story described in the NZ Herald is, imagine how much worse a female soldier’s PTSD would be if she were captured by Al-Qaeda. Ask Jessica Lynch what kind of nightmares she’s had since returning from capture in Iraq. And she was lucky–she was rescued. What the hell are we going to do when we have American women in our armed forces captured, raped, tortured, beheaded, and all those other wonderful things our enemies have been proven to do? What’s also interesting to me is how much more outrage and invective there is toward our own boys than toward the terrorists who actually tortured Ms. Lynch. Again, there’s this irrational expectation that American males can be utterly vicious toward our enemies, then come back to their base camp, act completely composed, and treat their female comrades in a rational, polite, politically correct fashion.

There was a time when men came home after “the wars” and would not share their experiences with their wives or children in great detail, out of decency, taste, and chivalry. Now we have women over there, seeing the experiences that used to be kept “over there,” and we WONDER why the men used to keep the brutality to themselves??? Bizarre.

Early in my post-college working life, my father told me, “Save up your attaboys because ten attaboys equals one awshit.”

An attaboy (or attagirl), for those of you new to the business world, are moments of recognition by your bosses–compliments, awards, bonuses, etc.–anything that results in a warm, fuzzy feeling on a professional level.

An awshit is also pretty self-explanatory: it’s a situation where you screw up, usually publicly, and the boss becomes aware of it.

The ratio of attaboys to awshits might vary from office to office and from offense to offense. Depending on the nature of the awshit, all of the goodwill you’ve built up over a tenure filled of attaboys can be undone, such as costing the organization a ton of money, stealing, or committing some other ethical crime. Some awshits, like accusations of sexism, racism, or sexual harassment, even if proven false, can permanently damage a career–these offenses are particularly lethal to white males.

More realistically, awshits are of lesser severity, such as losing the office keys (or, in my case, a hotel master key), angering a customer, turning in an assignment late, or going over the boss’s head. You don’t lose your job over such things (usually), but you can be embarrassed and hopefully you learn from these experiences.

Now my “problem child” peer has built up a lot of awshits with me (missed deadlines, forgotten directions) without any corresponding attaboys. Eventually, even enough low-level awshits can end your current job. So, again: maximize and save up (document/save) your attaboys/attagirls, and minimize or learn from your awshits. You’ll find your professional life goes a lot smoother.

The problem child, in conjunction with the SME, came up with a nearly entirely new draft. The good news is, it’s shorter to read and (surprisingly) in good shape stylistically. The bad news is, I still had to go back and fix some things that I’ve now corrected three and four times on previous drafts. She’s making the changes, but the lessons just aren’t sinking in. Again, if you have problems remembering what people tell you, perhaps a high-pressure, high-accuracy environment like the space program isn’t for you.

Friday was spent babysitting my problem child to make sure said person would get the work done on time. Well, in-between missing my markups, ignoring my markups, and questioning my markups, I’m surprised the doc got edited at all. We handed off the clean draft to the subject matter expert (”author”), and let him at it.

Today–Sunday, mind you, a weekend day about five days past when this thing was due–I got an email stating that Problem Child did not, in fact, hand off our cleaned-up draft to the SME, but a different draft. Apparently they got flustered by the fact that there was suddenly a deadline on, and they handed off an earlier draft with NONE of my markups. The USB drive with the document? Could be anywhere. Was a resend of the CORRECT document considered? Apparently not. So now, come tonight or tomorrow, I will be re-editing what took me about five hours of repeated markups to fix.

To make this worse, I’m short on cash at the moment, so adult beverages are out of the question. I’m not going to sleep well tonight, am I?

I am doing my level best not to fire somebody. However, at some point, this person needs to get a little on the ball and think. If you have trouble learning things quickly, remembering what people tell you, or communicating clearly, perhaps the communications business is not for you. Gosh sakes…

Now, with previous employees, “throw ‘em in and see if they swim” was a perfectly reasonable training method. Plus, and it’s not being too picky to point this out here: you can’t write for another writer. You give them the material, hand them a template, ask them to turn around a document, and then see what happens. A writer who wants to be micromanaged is almost a contradiction in terms, isn’t it? We get into this line of work because, theoretically, we learned to put words together better than our fellows. That is not a group activity. It requires individual initiative and a willingness to do the work or–nay, dare one say it?–a love for the work! You either have the mind for it, or you don’t. GAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Okay, maybe I work faster than others. I have to make allowances. Fine. It’s been six months. When the employee says, “I’m not getting it,” at what point do you say, “Well, then maybe I’ll hire somebody who can.”

Maybe I didn’t hold their hand enough. “See the form? Isn’t it pretty? See the boxes? Words go in there. There are some words there already. What does that one say? ‘Name?’ Good! Now what do you think you should put there?”

Maybe I didn’t train this person enough. “Did you do X?” “You never told me that.” “Actually, I did. Here’s the email.” Three months later: “How do I do X? You never told me that.” “Remember that email we talked about three months ago?”

Maybe I didn’t stress the importance of deadlines strongly enough. “Have you finished the doc yet?” “I’m still waiting on someone to provide me inputs.” “I tried.” “How?” “I called them and left a message. Now I’m waiting.” “Did you call their boss?” “They’re not in.” “Did you call THEIR boss? We need this today. Did you email them? Did you use the alternate contact?” “No.” <sounds of teeth grinding>

But by all means, I’ll give this person another chance. I’ll try an all-day hand-holding session. Everything will be (re-)explained, calmly and patiently, then repeated. Twice. The work will be finished, even if it’s late (which it is). This person and I will sit in a cubicle until the g-damned work is done. Not “almost.” Not “close.” Not “we’ll finish it on Monday.” Finished.

Some part of me wants to make this person cry, but only if that emotional distress is a sign that they’re finally getting the hint that this is a real damned job, with real damned responsibilities, and if those responsibilites are not lived up to, YOU WILL BE FIRED!

I gave up therapy for writing. And why not? This is much, much cheaper. Thanks for reading. Or not. Doesn’t really matter, though: I feel much better.