Previous Ramblings

Thursday, August 21, 2014

A sad story

The journalist Ezra Klein recently wrote an article on how "Obama's critics are suddenly sure Hillary Clinton is great." I went through and deleted every sentence regarding Hillary, Obama, and Syria, and this is how it reads:

In 1988, the BC show "Yes, Minister" outlined Politician's Logic. It goes like this:
1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. We must do this!

There is, however, a reverse of Politician's Logic, which might be called Pundit's Logic. It goes like this:
1. Something was done.
2. The problem isn't fixed.
3. We should have done the other thing!

Pundits have no choice but to consider counterfactuals; there's no other way to think about the world and the choices America makes within it. The problem is when the counterfactual is used less to evaluate reality than to lament it....The fact that something turned out badly often means that it's a hard, and sometimes impossible, problem to solve....Sometimes the problem really is that we should have done the other thing. But sometimes the problem is that we don't know how to solve the problem."

Doesn't it sound like he's talking directly about the current political reality of Kaua'i?

I wrote a lengthy post about our island's geographical polarization and the festering political inaction that it causes. But, after setting up the graph below, I realized that my commentary just takes away from the powerful story implied in those red and blue lines.  There's nothing that I can add to this sad story.


Click to embiggen.