For a good part of the morning and the beginning of my afternoon, I listened to the hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. As the questioning wore on, I heard lots of talking around the issue and outright lies, and after awhile it simply wore me down and I had to tune it out and put on some music.<\/p>\n
It’s only early in the year, but I’m starting to feel the same sort of post-2004 election burnout that I had after Bush was re-elected. In the months following, I tried to stay engaged by reading a slew of political books (from which I actually learned a great deal), but finally reached a breaking point at some undetermined time and had to escape to other pursuits almost completely.<\/p>\n
I think I’m back to that level of disgust again now, and in order to stay sane I’m going to have to voluntarily attempt to sever some ties with my usual daily intake. Some have already coined the phrase “outrage fatigue,” and I would say that’s a definition that fits my situation pretty well. Granted, I’m not going to be able to simply stop and go cold turkey (you can pry my thinkprogress.org<\/a> from my cold, dead hands), but I am going to have to chill out a bit in the next couple months if I don’t want to have a meltdown before the elections this November.<\/p>\n In the meantime, I’m going to focus a bit on other things and try not to let myself get so wrapped up in all the sordid details and specifics of every single committee and investigation. I just end up getting my hopes up and nothing seems to every change or come to fruition anyway. I haven’t given up the fight, I’m just going to stop being such an absorber of micro-details. If something big happens, I’m still going to hear about it, but a little buffer isn’t going to hurt at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a good part of the morning and the beginning of my afternoon, I listened to the hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. As the questioning wore on, I heard lots of talking around the issue and outright lies, and after awhile it simply wore me down and I had to tune it out and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}