Why blog when everything's wonderful?

Michael Westmoreland White is fasting from political commentary because of his extreme frustration with the political process. Meanwhile Hilzoy is hanging up her blogging cleats for the exact opposite reason: "It seems to me that the madness is over."

I'm definitely in the latter camp. Politically, everything's coming up roses. Brick by brick, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are laying the foundation for a progressive future.

But if you read liberal blogs you wouldn't know it. A lot of text there gets devoted to

• righteous indignation at Ben Nelson not being fully on board with health care reform, or

• jaw-dropping amazement at the cynicism or stupidity of GOP Senators who say things like, "Since there's CO2 in Coca-Cola, CO2 in the atmosphere can't be bad for you,"

but you know what? A health care reform bill, which contains a public option, and pays for it by taxing the rich, passed a committee vote this week! And did you know that the House also passed a bill to begin to deal with global warming, an issue that, let's face it, nobody but liberal eggheads like me cares about? 

Remember the stimulus? Every liberal blogger out there couldn't devote enough bandwidth to obstructionist Republicans and craven Democratic centrists dooming the stimulus, but it passed! And so will health care reform. This has been a Democratic priority for half-a-century. With a popular President and 60 votes in the Senate, this time, we will not be denied. It will not be a perfect bill, and Ben Nelson will vote against it. But all we need is 51 votes to pass it, and we have 60 Senators. It's unthinkable that a Democratic senator would filibuster his own President's signature piece of legislation. Cap and Trade's prospects are dicier, but it's doable.

It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen without compromise. It doesn't happen without much sound and fury (signifying nothing) from the other side. True believers will always find the amount of compromise distasteful at best, an abomination at worst. But our political system is designed to foil the revolutionary and embolden the incrementalist. Despite the institutional booby-traps, we're poised to get good things done.

I don't envy the famed GOP discipline one bit. Yes, leading the Democratic Party must be like herding cats, but at least you've got a herd to lead. Republicans these days have disciplined themselves down to the irrelevant and laughable level of the People's Front of Judea:

So why blog? The last time I quit blogging I wrote,

But there's more to it than that. Blogging has encouraged in me a rather superficial reading and writing style. I've become too focused on the daily news cycle. My writing tends to be too reactive. And in the end, unsatisfying. There's three and one-half years left for the Bush administration to find news ways to amaze and confound me with their mendacity, incompetence and cronyism, but there's only a limited number of ways to point this out in writing. I'm tired of pointing it out. Tired of reacting to them.

I was then where Michael is now. But I can't be where Michael is now because now, really, things are a whole lot better.

I'm not quitting blogging again, but when I have to pay TypePad another $50 this fall I will have to think about it. The things I read about at school don't lend themselves to blogging much, and after I've read at school all day I don't much want to read and write more at home. Blogging can be a way to think out loud, or carry on a conversation about academic work which is sadly an all-too-solitary affair, but medieval history and me don't seem to lend themselves to it.

Even if I did, there's the Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before where I wait tables, which takes a lot of time. Plenty of blogging material there, but I'd have to change a lot of identities to protect the innocent and guilty.

I'm glad that Lee still turns out short, thoughtful posts about theology and public policy that's free of the frankly pathetic intellectual snobbery on display at so many theological blogs. May his tribe increase.