I’m surely talking to myself here, but this just might fit for others, too. JA
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The Radical Right provides enough material in a single sentence of extremism than can be corrected in a 750-word response. I’ve heard as many as three fictional facts in a single short sentence. Let them go on for two minutes and it’s such a dizzying array of fantasy that it’s impossible to know where to begin to correct the falsities. Those guys know how to spray incendiary, divisive and destructive language. They’re really good at demanding that everything be decided their way and insisting that that they never make mistakes.
For example, don’t you just hate it when the far righties tell us how safe George W. Bush kept us? Try telling that to the kids whose mother or father was crushed to death in the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.
Those far righties want to end Medicare and Social Security and they have concocted fatuous, misleading names for the programs they designed to do just that. Then they have had the gall to tell us that they don’t want to end those programs.
When 20 little kids were gunned down in Newtown, CT the far righties made sure that we didn’t do anything to begin to limit access to the kinds of weapons that make it easy for violent people to do such things. They insist with self-righteous fervor that they have the one true interpretation of the Second Amendment and they ignore the demands of the rest of us, as they pursue campaign cash to support their careers.
So we call these people crazy. They are hateful and mean. They are dishonest in sixteen different ways. Our guts snarl and our spittle flies as we yell at our windshields.
To pull a Columbo, there’s just one more thing.
What is it that you were saying as President Obama worked toward compromise with congressional Republicans during all those iterations of budget and debt issues? What was it you were saying as he failed to press for universal health care? Now he’s offered chained CPI as a negotiating chip. I’ll bet you had serious juice about those issues and your words for him might have sounded a lot like your comments about crazy righties.
Obama let the Republicans kill his jobs bill, even as they were telling us it was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. You pilloried the Republicans, but did you also lambast Obama for his lack of leadership on the issue?
How many times did you wail that Obama gave up his negotiating leverage by caving in at the beginning of discussions with Republicans? It seems that President Obama just won’t be the absolutist leftie some want him to be. Maybe you’ve sprayed a coating on the inside of your windshield over that.
We can keep strolling down the path of all the ways Obama and the Democrats have failed – surely that has happened. Yet here’s the key point: governing is compromising and nobody gets all of what they want all of the time.
The Radical Righties have done a really good job of strong-arming America for over a decade. Their demand that everything be decided in the far righty way is incomprehensible to many; just get that a similar demand from the far left is just as incomprehensible.
For those who get off on anger, who feel powerful by living in their disparagement of anything and anyone who disagrees with them, I have a news flash: You are a lot like those whom you pillory.
Fight for what you believe in. Oppose what you disagree with. Just don’t be so certain that you have the one and only true vision of what is best, lest you become a yet another ideological roadblock and put the inside of still more windshields at risk.
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
