Gary and Isa are here from Britain!  Grasshopper is home from orchestra camp!  Jay-the-dog is about to turn himself inside out.  Today, we are taking Gary and Isa to a good old-fashioned pancake breakfast and an airshow.

Last night we went to a party thrown by a friend/neighbor.  We left, but not until after I got into a “fight” with a republican.

No, not really.  It was fun for both of us.  It all started when I left our table in the pleasant back garden to find somewhere else to be.

We were having a great conversation when a guy standing right behind me launched into a diatribe about how the press was burying the “Johhny” Edwards story, and this was proof of a liberal bias in the press. 

What?  First of all, it was all over the place, and if they didn’t have Olympic coverage to run, they’d still be riding that horse until we ALL wanted to scream.  Secondly, if the press DID cover it to their satisfaction, they’d make it into a complaint about how he’s such a pretty-boy media whore he’ll even use an affair to get attention.  Seriously, John Edwards was so far out of the news until this erupted that they were practically on different planets.

So here’s a general drift of the conversation.  I don’t remember it exactly, but its my best recollection”

Rep. man #1 “What do you think of this Johnny Edwards situation?”

Rep. man #2 “What a slime-ball he fathered that baby AFTER she was sick again with cancer.”

Rep. woman:  “What is his WIFE still doing with him?  Doesn’t she have any self-respect?”

Rep. man” 1:  “She doesn’t have any choice, she’s not going to live much longer.  She’s stuck.”

(Just an aside here, does anyone actually believe that Elizabeth Edwards could be forced , by circumstances or anything else, to do something that she did not want to do?  I mean, wasn’t the Republican line on her that she was a brazen hussy who wore the pants in the family, feminized her husband, and didn’t know her place, or when to keep her mouth shut?  Like, wasn’t that just a few weeks ago?  And I would also like to point out that when Democrat women stand by their philandering men, they have no self-respect, but when Republican women stand behind their philandering men, they have family values.)

Rep. woman:  “They won’t let him speak at the convention now”

Rep.  Man#1:  “Oh, they MigHT.  How do you know they won’t?  You never know what they’ll do.”

Rep. woman:” Ugh.  He’s such a slime-ball.”

Rep. man #1:  “And they’re not covering it at all!  If it were a Republican, you know they’d find out everything and we’d hear about it, believe me.”

I DIDN’T get up and point out that the reason Republican affairs have gotten more coverage recently  is:

1)      Larry Craig was an out spoken homophobe (in other words, someone expressing unreasonable fear of homosexuality) who worked tirelessly to link homosexuality with pedophilia, libeled homosexuals as a group relentlessly, and pretty much made “traditional values” his calling card.  That made him a story.

2)      He broke a law in trying to solicit sex.  There was an arrest, and he pleaded guilty hoping to keep it quiet and avoid public consequences, then regretted and retracted his plea when there were public consequences.

3)      He was the latest in a long string of prominent homophobes caught in the act of engaging in the behaviors that they attribute to the homosexual community at large. (public sex, prostitution, drugs (Haggard), pedophilia  (that one senator in the page scandal), etc.

4)      Craig was arrested, and there was an arrest report, so the media could jump all over it.  The Edwards story was broken by the National Enquirer.  Running a false lead from the National Inquirer is probably a lot like getting duped into publishing false papers involving the President…a career killer.

5)      Craig was arrested on a slow news week, the Edwards thing blew up in the advance of the Olympics coverage.

I’ll cut out a few minutes of topic jumping and complaining about how rich Edwards is (I thought Republicans admired rich people),taxes and how the Dems just want to spend willy-nilly on all of these “entitlements” and things that don’t do us any good…the one that made me have to get up and leave was this:

Rep. Man #1: ”Just think about typhoid and diseases like that.  I just saw a show on it, and can you believe how many people they used to kill?  I mean, wow.”

Rep. woman: (awe in her voice) “Yeah.  Wow.”

And then they lapsed into profound silence.

*groan*  Yeah…”wow”.

But I guess the Fox News commentators that write all of their lines hadn’t put any words into their brains to describe things like robust public health infrastructure,  reality-based policy decisions, evolution-based genetics research that allows for analysis of mutations in diseases to create new vaccines to keep up with the rapid evolution of viruses.

I got up and left, ‘cause I was having trouble not saying anything, and these were not people you could talk to.  They were possessed by John Gibson.  Total Fox-bots.

And our host immediately introduced me to his “Republican friend” and left.

And one of the first things the “Republican friend” said was that the Dem’s didn’t provide funding for the 35W bridge, but were trying to blame the collapse of the bridge on Pawlenty.

Me: “Actually, there was funding specifically to brace those girders in the budget, and Pawlenty specifically vetoed the roads and bridges line item in the budget that would have provided the funds to fix the bridge, until it could be rebuilt”.

There ensued a lively and intelligent conversation where the guy didn’t dismiss my facts out of hand, while still challenging me to support them, and it was fun ‘cause he wasn’t a Fox-box idiot.

Thank God for the occasional Republican who is not a Fox-bot idiot.  Cause talking to people who only agree with you can get boring, but talking to idiots is self abuse…and not the fun kind.

One of his points was that it was possible that bracing the girders would not have prevented the tragedy.  Which is true enough…but IF everything that could reasonably have been done, HAD been done…and if Pawlenty hadn’t stood in the way of reasonable preventive action, I would merely disagree with some of his other policy decisions…but as it is, he DID stand in the way of reasonable action to prevent the tragedy, and a tragedy DID occur, and he is trying to somehow make it the fault of the congress.