You may remember me mentioning a regular at work who, after I wrote the letter to The Day about commentator Lee Elci—whether through here or on Twitter.
A couple of weeks ago, he lent me the audiobook version of Where the Right Went Wrong by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was a commentator I was unfamiliar with until the regular mentioned him to me during one of our conversations—we usually end up talking about what happened on Bill Maher when he's on air.
In sum: The audiobook details the Republican argument against the Iraq War, noting the influence and role of Neoconservative figures in driving the Bush Administration towards that decision. Personally, this is a new take on the discourse surrounding the War in Iraq, mostly because it comes from a pre-Trump conservative point of view. There are some parallels in both left and right wing points of view regarding the war—a big one being the idea of the US as the "world police", trying to force democracy on a nation through militaristic means. However, that's where the similarities end. Buchanan still retains the past Republican prejudice against gay marriage and the concern that secularism and immigration will lead the country to ruin and so on.
There are some interesting bits—he apparently thinks that the idea of the free market is a threat and that he has concerns for the Republican party in future. As to whether or not said concerns lead straight to Donald Trump, I can't tell. This is an audiobook that I don't think I'll re-listen to again—I mostly had it on 1.5x speed and I never do that for other audiobooks.
On the other hand, after three years, I'm almost finished with Rachel Maddow's Blowout and it's been a a good run. I think I'll save the lengthy review of that for Goodreads though. My Mother and I had a sort-of competition to see who could finish the book first. I lost, of course.
In some sense, it feels like I've taken a political sabbatical this year, at least online anyway. I do check The Day's website for news along with Twitter when I login. There's also John Oliver and Bill Maher who I watch with my parents when they're on, but nothing much outside of that. I've thought about re-subscribing to the Two for Tea podcast—as in funding them through Patreon again. I feel that, outside of the Heterodox Academy, Iona Italia does a spot-on job at holding lengthy academic and political discussions with various figures.
The biggest distraction for me this week was surprisingly, writing. There are two works-in-progress that I started this year—one in late April and the other earlier this week. I'm sunsetting the other one, which I've blogged about before as I feel like it's had its due. I personally think, in hindsight that it was never meant to be more than a "slice of life" fiction piece for a class and I've briefly talked about the time surrounding it too.
I feel more comfortable being myself now than I ever was when I wrote that short story and I'm thankful for the friends I have today (both online and offline) because of this. In a sense, these new stories are a celebration of that fact—ironically, the one I started this week is meant to be a short story. We'll see about that one though...
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