Seriously guys? Armed rebellion? Are you kidding me?

Eight years of George W. Bush, and American liberals threatened to move to Canada or Scandinavia. We actually have friend who moved to Latin America — that’s really taking your position seriously, IMHO.

But here’s the deal folks: Bush won the election in 2004 (and sort of in 2000). Obama and the Democrats won in 2008. Fucking deal with it.

You can’t claim to be for democracy if you don’t accept that sometimes your side loses. That’s part of the bargain. My side lost consistently from about 1994 – 2008. That’s a lot of losing, but you know what — I lived through it. I played video games, watched TV, hung out with friends and family, ate dinner, that sort of thing. I lived through it and so can you.

And let’s say for the sake of argument that rather than pulling a Timothy McVey or Eric Rudolph and attacking “the enemy” in their own red states, that the new militia movement gets organized enough to send a group of fat middle-aged dads armed with hunting rifles and semi-automatic assault rifles down to DC, what do you guys think will happen when you get to town? The night Obama won, I saw something like 200,000 people on the streets of D.C. march down to Lafayette Park to tell Bush not to let the door hit him in the ass on the way out.

Do these people honestly think they can just invade a city where President Obama has something like a 100% approval rating? Are they insane?

Seriously, they should go back to playing Call of Duty: World at War online, and then when they’re done feeling like they actually lived through World War II, they should work on getting their guys elected. Be adults instead of whiny, pathetic little babies who can’t deal with the fact that five million more people supported our guy than supported theirs.

Because these dreams of rebellion just aren’t very realistic. And secession– without the blue state federal gravy train, how would the south pay the bills? Get real.

By now, you’ve probably heard (or heard of) Rick Santelli’s rant about the people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford. And he is correct in the sense that they were part of the problem we’re now all suffering through, but they weren’t the source of the problem. Need we forget the heady years of the housing bubble, the insistence of the media, the banks, the predatory lenders, our friends and family, a big swell of peer pressure to buy a house? President Bush called in the ownership society. People made a lot of bad decisions during the housing bubble, but it wasn’t like the entire world wasn’t cheering them on.

Everyone was making bad decisions.

Tina and I almost made one of our own — a real estate agent and her friend at the bank kept telling us that every crummy overpriced house we looked at was a great deal. “If you don’t get into the market now, you’ll never get in!” she warned.

We opted not to buy and stay renters. Not bad, considering the quickly depreciating values of the homes we looked at not two years ago. I bring this up not to say that we’re somehow better than the people who did opt to buy, but that we were pressured to get a bad interest-only loan predicated on the notion that someday we would cash out the equity in our house and refinance. Tina and I are educated and, in regards to big expenditures, fairly cautious. Other people aren’t and they paid the price — and now we’re all paying for them. But it wasn’t like they were solely responsible for their mistakes. The financial and real estate industries are just as responsible as they are for offering them risky loans and promoting properties that people obviously couldn’t afford.

Santelli’s error is that everyone who participated in the bubble is at fault — not just the people who joined the “Ownership Society” when they couldn’t really afford to. Blaming the “losers” alone means shifting blame completely from the creators of the shell game.

I’ve always been skeptical that markets regulate themselves — I think it’s pretty clear that without regulation and a referee, markets work the way they were meant to: to get the people who run them stinking rich through any possible means. Greed often overrides common sense, and it certainly doesn’t regulate itself. Greed by its nature is selfish and reckless.

And it seems to me that the gatekeepers of the economy like Santelli still haven’t learned their lesson.

Back in 1991, I had my greatest high school-era experience — I attended the Duke Young Writers Camp at Duke University. It was the summer before my Senior year, and my first glimpse of what college would be like. To say that I changed my outlook on life in the two week session, would be an understatement.

There was this kid there from Falls Church, VA named Mark. Mark was a real dick to me, knowing that I was from Hagerstown, and was quick to discount my claim that I lived near D.C. He was also one of those guys, who seems untouchable, morally superior and right about everything. He was always quick to condemn me and my friends (who, in retrospect, weren’t probably the best people for me to have aligned myself with, but I was only 16), and made himself out to be this great paragon of honesty and virtue.

Yet, for some reason I remember seeing Mark running through the quad with his girlfriend’s bra on, and how she cried because of the embarassment and humiliation. She was slightly overweight and her bra was enormous. It was classically juvenile and cruel, and did completely broke the illusion of Mark as the “good guy.” My friends were dicks, but they didn’t do things like that.

The lesson, of course, is that everyone — even the most morally upstanding like Mark — has the capacity to be a great douche bag.

I don’t know why I thought of this, but it flashed in my head while on the way to work this morning. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story that was on NPR, which was about Charles Darwin.

The hardest thing I’m going through right now is this constant state of uncertainty. I’ve been sick with a cold for about five or six days now. The problem is that cold symptoms are very very similar to heart failure symptoms. I’ve called the Heart Clinc twice now about it, and they assure me that if my family is sick (they are), then it’s probably all that’s wrong with me, too. I’m not gaining weight — I’m not swelling in my hands or feet. But I’m still unsure. Maybe this is heart failure again, maybe my heart is giving out despite the medicine?

Being chronically ill is like being placed in a state of constant limbo and panic. Every bout of sickness takes on greater weight. And with no contact with doctors for weeks on end, it’s hard to know where you stand, what your future may be. You can only hypothesize and worry, and I am a terrible worrier. In the end you guess that you don’t have a future.

I don’t know what I would do without Tina’s constant support and optimism. She makes me feel that I’m not alone, even though some pretty bad things have descended on me, and she can skillfully talk me off a cliff when panic sets in. Without her, I would have already lost this.