What are we to make of former senator Gary Hart's observation, which I heard yesterday on a cable news show, in response to a question about the U.S. Senate's frequent dysfunction?: "The caliber and quality of people serving," said Hart, "has gone down."
In those words there inheres a certain ambivalence, I think: an urge to frankly declare the modern GOP a reprehensible herd of anti-intellectual misfits and opportunistic nincompoops -- a partial roster, Jim Bunning, Jim DeMint, David Vitter, John Ensign, Jeff Sessions, Saxby Chambliss, Jim Inhofe, even Kit Bond (who I once witnessed, in person, meticulously combing his hair in preparation for a radio interview) -- restrained by a sophisticated desire to play ever so nicely, lest the opposition's visceral infantilism rub off on Hart and fester like the foul character flaw it is.
I know how he feels; his ambivalence snakes through me each time I sit down to write a thought or two about our political state of affairs, which wouldn't be what they are, absent said nincompoops. In the face of so much callous resistance to the kind of vigorous, far-sighted innovations this great nation so desperately needs these days, a great deal of restraint is required to internally enforce civility.
One wants, as they say, to simply scream.
And in these ambivalent words of my own, the discerning reader will detect, I trust, a sincere apology -- for any screaming here committed.