Thanksgiving Politics

~ Laura

It’s Thanksgiving! Time for us to count our blessings and tuck into some dry turkey smeared with cranberry sauce to make it taste better!

It’s also the time to have uncomfortable conversations about politics with Uncle Pete and Cousin Sally. My peeps on social media are bracing themselves for the inevitable pronouncements about politics and the economy from relatives. How do  you respond when they say something so completely stupid? Snark? Eye roll? Whip out a PowerPoint presentation on your iPad?

I usually go for the gritted teeth approach and some passive aggressive mumbled response that nobody hears because I have a mouth full of turkey.

Dan Drezner provides some retorts for foreign policy matters.

I like to pull out Pope Francis right now as a response to all social matters right now. My uber-Catholic family doesn’t like to fight with a Pope, so I use the Pope card whenever I can.

Published by Laura

13 thoughts on “Thanksgiving Politics”

  1. We are having a blessed Thanksgiving ALONE this year. I couldn’t be happier. I have had to drive anywhere from 1 to 11 hours every single year for the past 29 years to have Thanksgiving with family (except for one year I hosted my SIL and her husband). This year, the teenager is in HS marching band, and the annual football game with our traditional rivals is held every Thanksgiving morning at 10 am. My husband and I will get up at 8 to help out with feeding the band members a pancake breakfast. And then it’s back home to do precisely nothing all day.

    I don’t eat turkey because both my kids were due in early July. What does that mean? It means morning sickness hit hard both times right at Thanksgiving. I can’t think about turkey without wanting to throw up, much less cook it. The teenager is a vegetarian, so that means my husband and son are ordering a pre-made turkey dinner from Whole Foods for 2. Good on them. S and I will eat some popcorn and toast in the Charlie Brown tradition.

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    1. “And then it’s back home to do precisely nothing all day.”

      Fantastic.

      I did my last-minute shopping this afternoon and it was total madness, even though it was at a massive new grocery store, the biggest in our area. I discovered, to my great delight, that HEB sells about 2 pounds of ready-cooked turkey breast in a box for about $10. Yay!

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  2. News that the administration is closing the US embassy at the Vatican might complicate your fallback position.

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  3. That’s funny. Do you have stupid relatives? My conservative relatives sound like Greg Mankiw and Eugene Volokh, and my liberal relatives sound like John Quiggin and Jack Balkin.

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    1. I’ve never met any of those people. How do they sound after two whiskey and sodas, a bottle of wine, and who knows how much Baileys?

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      2. All the relatives become much, much more tolerable after I’ve had two scotches and a bottle of Chardonnay, that’s for sure.

        Glenn Reynolds said the other day that sex was created as a device to enable unrelated adults to live together. I would add that alcohol is evidently as a device to enable related adults to spend holidays together.

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    2. My conservative relatives sound like Eugene Volokh, and my liberal relatives sound like John Quiggin

      They have Russian and Australian accents, respectively? (I suspect that Volokh came to the US young enough that he doesn’t have much, if any, of an accent, but I’m not sure.)

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  4. I keep discovering new ways to cut corners for Thanksgiving, as we always stay home and have Thanksgiving dinner for just our immediate family. Aside from the aforementioned ready-cooked turkey, I’m also enjoying my discovery that instead of painstakingly peeling and cutting up sweet potatoes, I can just microwave them in their jackets and serve. (They were just 19 cents a pound today, which is amazing.)

    The fresh cranberries were also just under a dollar for the bag, which is also fantastic.

    The cafeterias, where we normally eat dinner, are closed until Monday, so this is the time of year that we have to reacquaint ourselves with that shiny black thing with knobs in the kitchen . There are probably about 7 or 8 weeks of the year that we go through this, and it’s always a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit when we come out alive on the other end.

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  5. The Google search “talk to the relatives about obamacare thanksgiving” has 293000 results, and the first coupla pages have some gems. There are two main genres: (1) How To Respond To Your Rube Rustbelt Relatives When They Don’t Show Proper Gratitude For The Affordable Care Act (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/25/a-guide-to-surviving-obamacare-debates-at-thanksgiving/) and (2) How To Put Your Idiot Lefty Uncle In His Place When He Backs Obamacare (see http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/11/ofa_urges_obamabots_to_talk_about_obamacare_at_thanksgiving.html).

    From the amount of effort being exerted on all sides to insert this issue into Thanksgiving dinner, it looks like everyone thinks it can be important. I think they are right: this is when you see your nephew with the chronic condition whose life has been made enormously better by must-issue, and also when you see your cousin who has been sent a cancellation notice for her individual plan with which she was happy and offered something much more expensive which meets the current standards. A lot of people will come home with political indigestion to match the overeating indigestion. It will be very interesting to see if it moves the meter, and if so which way.

    Our family is NOT crossing the continent to California for Thanksgiving, so any conversations like this for us will happen in December. I guess I could be surprised, but I don’t think I need any talking points this afternoon. We are expecting smooth sailing, with our little group.

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    1. I don’t have the time to pull this into more coherent form, but it looks like there may be some interesting stuff coming up involving the interactions between the ACA, state law and alternative medicine (which is a big deal on the West Coast).

      http://www.medicaldaily.com/affordable-care-act-raises-status-alternative-medicine-insurance-companies-shall-not-discriminate

      Scariest sentence from the following link: “The chiropractors claim, right off the bat, that they are primary care physicians.” That is unfortunately quite true–a lot of chiropractors will treat you for ANYTHING.

      http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cam-practitioners-as-pcps-under-the-aca-part-2/

      “On Sept. 30, 2012 Gov. Jerry Brown signed measures SB 951 and AB 1453, which included acupuncture to be covered under the federal health reform also known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) that was signed into law on March 23, 2010.”

      http://feel-better-acupuncture.com/acupuncture-essential-health-benefit-obamacare/

      It would be a heck of a thing to have your health insurance policy cancelled because it didn’t cover acupuncture.

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  6. So, the Greater Levendee Co-Prosperity Sphere is trickling back home after gorging with the relatives. I grew up in Calif, where the Best Foods mayo says ‘known as Hellman’s east of the Rockies’. Now I live in Va, and the Hellman’s says ‘known as Best Foods west of the Rockies’. So: about ObamaCare ‘Known as the Affordable Care Act left of the center’ (alternatively, the ACA ‘Known as Obamacare on the right and the center’) – did it come up? Anybody sing its praises? Get up from the table and stalk away? Any moms say ‘Hush, let’s not let politics intrude here’? Complaints? Shaking of heads about the promises?

    And while we are at it, the now-apparently-forgotten government shutdown.. praise? complaint? shushing moms?

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