House of Eratosthenes

We’re fortunate to live in a country where popular opinion is so important. In fact, of all the news stories that clamor for our attention, probably none is so important as the reaction of the public-at-large to all those news stories…that’s probably the biggest one of them all.

This creates an interesting dilemma for us, living as we do in a nation where we have the absolute God-given right to form whatever opinion we so choose to form, independent of outside coercion. Do we? Do we, really?

Two things happened yesterday. One, the attempted Senate filibuster against Samuel Alito, was permanently consigned to the mists of history as it became clear Democrats lacked the 41 votes needed to sustain it. This raises the question: What was that all about? It was not about popular will, because if it was, a filibuster would not have been needed. It was not about “loyal dissent,” since the threshold for obstructing Senate action through that loyal dissent, surpassed what could be ginned up by a margin of thirteen votes. Nor was it about the principle of the thing, because for every principle believed to be “defended” by the filibuster, even by the most intellectually reckless, there were two or three more principles to be defended by getting Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court where he belongs. The Judiciary Committee had a whole week to show us how Alito would fail us on the Supreme Court, and all they managed to show was how much Alito had to teach them about American constitutional law.

The other thing that happened, with the filibuster episode safely relegated to the sands of time for all eternity, was that the opinion poll machinery came out of hibernation, brushed its fur, scratched its back against a tree, and started looking for fish and honey. Extra! Extra! Bush support down to 42 percent in poll!

The rating is the worst for a president entering his sixth year in office since the Watergate scandal downed Richard Nixon and reflects war fatigue, persistent discontent on the economy, ethics concerns and rising interest in Democratic alternatives in a midterm election year, ABC reported.

Funny, I didn’t see one single opinion poll about whether the Democrats were on the right track filibustering against Alito.

I would argue that a filibuster poll is more newsworthy than a Presidential approval-ratings poll. If the filibuster is protecting the right of the minority to dissent…don’t we deserve to know what kind of minority that is? Shouldn’t we know whether it’s an almost-majority minority, or a moonbat-minority? Or a flat-earth, “we never landed on the moon” minority? Or…a “handful of senators who are worried sick about raising funds for the midterms” minority? Would that not have been an important thing to know?

President Bush, meanwhile, appears to be doing exactly the same thing about the War on Terror, and about the economy, that any responsible President would be doing, Republican or Democrat. Oh, I’m sure there are millions of people who disagree with me about that…but they’ve had four-years-plus to get their 527 groups started and make the case to me exactly what a better President would have been doing, and all I’ve heard is a lot of “YEEEEEEAAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!” and “Bush LIED!!!” and rumors about Haliburton and Skull-n-Bones. So if my opinion stands that the whole War on Terror is just something any President would do…after one discards the downright irresponsible Presidents we could be having, and thank God we don’t have one of those right now…how does the opinion poll even matter? To say nothing of the fact that, according to the Constitution, President Bush can’t be re-elected again.

We are supposed to be thinking for ourselves in this country. We have the right to do so. All established institutions, private and public, are supposed to be supportive of us in exercising that right — regardless of who disagrees with whom.

And we are supposed to be jealously guarding that right, to form opinions of our own. In fact, if & when we find ourselves agreeing with a great multitude, that’s supposed to be a coincidence…or what happens naturally, when self-evident facts are impressed upon a large number of intelligent, preceptive, independently-thinking conciousnesses.

And yet, our print media tells us when Vox Populi matters. Without much justification. How long do you really have to wait before the next Presidential approval-ratings poll? You’ll see dozens of them, before Memorial Day, and everybody knows this. We expect it. Nobody questions it anymore.

And by omission, it also tells us when Vox Populi is entirely irrelevant. Had we had a Democrat President, and a Republican Senator uttered the syllables “fili” — you would have seen an opinion poll, a la Clinton Impeachment, 1998, before he got to the “buster.” This go-round, however, the press somehow just didn’t find the time to get one going. Too sleepy. In effect, our media decides for us, when we are supposed to be concerned about what everybody else is thinking, and when we are not.

We let them.

Why?

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Vox PopuliTuesday, January 31st, 2006

Vox Populi
Tuesday, January 31st, 2006