On blogging in 2007

Things have been slow around my little corner of the blogosphere this year. I'm certainly not blogging with the zeal that had me at 6 to 10 posts a day a couple of years ago. Some of this is because life intervened and I found my attentions drawn elsewhere, but that isn't the whole of it. I've really been struggling to figure out why I've slowed down in posting. Tonight, things started to come together, and I think I know why my volume of posts has dropped off: 2007 has been a very vapid news year.

Politics in Washington have been somewhat inconsequential. President Bush squandered any political capital he had after his re-election, and there are no more pet conservative projects in the pipeline because of it. Now in 2006, that provided plenty of fodder for blogging because the Bush Administration's failures in pushing so many conservative programs is, in my opinion, what lost Republicans control of Congress that year. This year has been devoid of much of what would normally get a conservative fired up, and both parties have resorted to little more than political jostling for 2008.

Meanwhile, the great conversations of war and peace have been played out, and here we are with two wars on our hands. An ambivalence has set in amongst the American public, and any increases in support of the Iraq war can probably be attributed to the fact that some Americans have resigned themselves to the fact that the easiest way out of Iraq will be to actually finish the job. North Korea has fallen off the map as Iran has loomed larger, but even with Iran there has no sense of urgency. China and Russia have been major players in the news, yet both still seem like tomorrow's problem. In our own backyard, we've failed to give enough attention to pressing issues like how a post-Fidel Cuba will affect us, or what will be the consequences of growing socialism/communism in Latin America.

Rather than attention focusing on the vital issues above, we've numbed ourselves by injecting heavy doses of Britney, Paris, Teen Pagent Queens, OJ, and other brain dead celebrities directly into our national veins. What disturbs me is the nation did something similar toward the end of the Clinton administration, and our desire to ignore real issues allowed our leaders to avoid the tough topics like the growing threat of terror. That threat still exists, and many others have been brewing on the horizon. I hope that we (myself included) snap out of our haze, and soon.