“In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates. Conservatives trounced the moderates and have driven them from the party. These days the fight is between the protesters and the professionals. The grass-roots protesters in the Tea Party and elsewhere have certain policy ideas, but they are not that different from the Republicans in the “establishment.”
“The big difference is that the protesters don’t believe in governance. They have zero tolerance for the compromises needed to get legislation passed. They don’t believe in trimming and coalition building. For them, politics is more about earning respect and making a statement than it is about enacting legislation. It’s grievance politics, identity politics.
“Of course, the professional politicians don’t want to get in the way of this torrent of passion and resentment. In private, they bemoan where the party is headed; in public they do nothing.”
“In public they do nothing,” Dave? Look at your own damn self in the mirror. You have not done nothing in public. Rather, throughout the Clinton and Bush years, you ran with the neo-con gang, doing everything you could to advance the cause of “passion and resentment,” urging the country on into bloody, useless wars while flaying the Democrats as latte/chardonnay/Perrier-sipping fairies afraid to fight for their country—Ann Coulter with a shave. I must admit that I was surprised to discover that there was a limit to what you would swallow—that you actually gagged on Sarah Palin, who was simply recycling the same identity politics that made you rich. What made you madder, her appalling lack of fitness for the presidency, or the fact that she was infringing on your copyright?
Even after taking a walk from the Republican Party, you spent the first three years of the Obama presidency bemoaning the fact that the President wouldn’t meet the Republicans half-way, despite the obvious fact that he was dying to meet them half-way, while the Republicans were determined to acquiesce in nothing but the President’s complete and utter destruction. The mess you see around you is your bed, Dave. That’s why you’re lying in it.
Afterwords
Naturally, Dave says nothing at all about foreign policy, pretending that he doesn’t know how he and his right-wing buddies lied this country into the disastrous war in Iraq and now are doing all they can to lie us into an even more disastrous war in Iran. O the powers of omission!
