Hey y’all!

Welcome to my blog! Who am I? Joan Opyr: writer, editor, parent, Democrat, ex-patriate Southerner, baseball lover, softball player, alumna of North Carolina State University, and an Old English scholar with half a PhD. I haven’t gotten around to writing that dissertation just yet. It’s been 15 years since I finished my coursework, but who’s counting? Besides, plotting murder mysteries is so much more fun, as you’ll discover if you check out my books, Idaho Code and From Hell to Breakfast.  I am also a humor columnist for Stonewall News Northwest and an occasional op-ed writer for New West Magazine. I’m a busy woman. Too bad I’m not a rich one, but you can’t have everything. As my mother always says, you’ll never see a Brinks truck following a hearse. What’s on my mind these days? The Democratic primary. I find myself wondering why the poobahs and pundits in the media are so eager for the whole thing to be over. Are they really afraid that John McCain will prevail? Have they listened to him talk? He’s a babbling brook of ill-informed, ill-tempered, and ill-timed remarks. Singing bomb, bomb, bomb — bomb, bomb Iran. Calling his wife Cindy the C-word. Hugging the homophobic Rod Parsley and the anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic John Hagee. As soon as the press gets up off its lazy ass, he’ll pop like a mylar balloon. Too old, too crabby, too bad. Goodbye. Far from being worried about the length of the Democratic primary, I think we should be glad. Yeah, you read that right. I’ve been talking with friends and family in North Carolina, some of whom voted for Senator Obama, others who voted for Senator Clinton. Do they think this past Tuesday’s mixed results — Obama winning the Tarheel State and Clinton winning Indiana — are a bad thing? No. Will they vote for John McCain if their favorite doesn’t win the nomination? Not on your Nelly. What the media fail to see is that this is the first real 50-state primary we’ve had in living memory. The Democratic candidates have fought over forgotten states like Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. For heaven’s sake, they’ve fought over Guam. And now the fight moves on to West Virginia. When was the last time a Democrat (or any Presidential candidate) gave a damn about West Virginia? The idea that drawing this contest out until the convention will harm the eventual Democratic nominee is founded on the flawed premise that we all want to know right this minute who that nominee will be; that we’re all ready to anoint the winner. I’m calling bullshit.  Let the process play out, and maybe the voters in those forgotten states will once again feel that they matter. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?