Sour grapes from the left wing of the blogosphere

Christian Crumlish

I wonder if the libertarian-right pundit sector of the blogosphere is to this year's elections as the dittohead talk-radio shows were to those of 1994?

Meanwhile, the gloating and the whining are already running rampant. Tacitus bemoans the sour grapes from the left.

As a moderate-leftist who is usually disgusted by the behavior of both parties, I didn't have much to be happy about this time around, even within our little California bubble (but they say politics and culture sweep west to east in this country, so maybe you'll all be getting your own graydavisbots sometime soon).

It was interesting to see Trent Lott with his newish grayish wig being very conciliatory on one of the morning bloviation shows, and the guy (I'm forgetting his name without regret) at the special edition of the 700 Club fairly gloating and predicting a huge stock-market rally, no doubt a sign of God's favor.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Berkeley voted 70% to force local coffee houses to serve only "fair trade" coffee by the cup. You can still get your beans off the backs of the peasantry, though, so don't worry.

And here in Oakland we seem to have voted for a bunch of weird "temporary" tax increases to fight violence. The odd thing is they jacked up the downtown parking tax by half a percent and another tax by some similar tiny increment but the third hike is a 3% increase for single-room occupancy hotels. Which means that we are raising taxes on bums at six times the rate that we are commuters and business people!

Back nationally, I will be curious to see if the Democrats keep triming themselves into irrelevancy or decide that if they really are the opposition and they really are out of power that they should maybe consider presenting a coherent alternate agenda.

After the next two years we should either have a completely stabilized Republican hegemony in place or a massive repudiation of overweening hubris at the polls next time.