Well, hi there DU! How’re y’all doin’? Whatcha been up to? [View all]

[DFW]

I took a little sabbatical about 6 months ago with one minor interruption. It got a little too evil in here, and that just wasn’t my style, so I just dropped out of sight for a while. I didn’t think it was worth a big proclamation with a marching band and fireworks, so I skipped that part.

A quick look around shows a bunch of new faces, and some welcome old ones. I was told some embittered former ones have left altogether, off to a board where they can commiserate among themselves. I looked, and they seem content to be there, if not exactly content per se. Some of the obvious minions sent out by Rove and Friends have returned to those dark places from whence they must have crawled, and the steady stream of “I-Hate-Hillary” invective on DU seems to have slowed to an insignificant trickle. That is a welcome change, as there is certainly enough of it elsewhere.

HRC has made her choice for VP, and while Tim Kaine might not have been my first choice, he seems to have a lot more to offer us than might have met the eye prior to scrutiny now underway. A friend of mine, Jim Hamilton, was in charge of vetting Hillary’s possibles, and Jim is nothing if not thorough. It’s not for nothing that over 40 years ago, another man from North Carolina (Sen. Sam Ervin) got young Jim involved in the Watergate investigation that eventually brought Nixon down. If Kaine made it through Jim’s wringer, he’s got some chops.

Another friend of mine, a former Governor of Vermont whose name is still remembered by some, told me years ago that there was a lot more substance to Tim Kaine than most people knew. I was skeptical, but I have never met Kaine, and I had no real basis for judgment. From a few posts I have seen here, Howard knew a lot more than I did. I have seen plenty of “Howard has sold out” posts around the internet, but Howard told me in 2009 that if he didn’t get a cabinet post, he’d lend his name to some law firm for name recognition (for them) and some steady income (for him), and spend most of his time “raising hell for causes I care about.” And not just in the USA. A couple of years back, he organized a walk from Bangkok to the Burmese border to call attention to human trafficking. I wonder how many of his internet haters participated in that or anything like it?

I could have met Kaine (and Howard) this coming week in Philadelphia, but I passed on the invitation. It was not a decision I made lightly. In the offer were VIP hotel and passes to all events, etc. and no one asked me for a cent. Coffee one-on-one with Cecile Richards (also a friend), and all sorts of cool stuff, what’s not to like? It was flattering to get such an invitation, but I was in a different country EVERY DAY for work for most of May and ALL of June, and I need the down time more than I need the glad-handing, the strategy sessions and the photo ops. I’m not 30 anymore. I doubt I would have enjoyed the convention much if I had had to spend half of it at the ICU unit of the cardiac ward of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. I somehow think the Party will manage just fine without me this time.

My wife and I are currently with our neighbors from Germany who are visiting with us here in Nowheresville, Cape Cod. The road to this place isn’t even paved. Just what we were looking for.

This seems as good a time as any to try a return to DU. After all, I was here for something like ten years prior to my absence. There seem to be a few self-righteous types around, still, but what else is new? Someone’s always looking for a fight. Where WON’T you find them? What matters to me is that the level of discussion has been brought back up from sulfuric acid to something much more resembling a neutral pH level, and that’s good enough for me. Things ARE sounding a little (OK, a LOT) more upbeat than they were when I left.

So, OK, DU, what HAVE y’all been up to?