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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2009-05-12

To Be A Liberal Means . . . 

to have no need for internal consistencies.

Otherwise applying the same formula as "Once more, with no sense of irony."

Obama: "We need to resist the temptation to fall back on the same bitter partisanship of the past; we need to avoid the same immature extreme partisan responses . . . " blah blah blah

Wanda Sykes: "I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight . . . Rush Limbaugh — I hope the country fails. I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?“He needs a waterboarding, that’s what he needs.”

White House response: [crickets . . crickets . .]

If the President was ACTUALLY interested in avoiding partisanship, he would avoid bitter personal partisan attacks like this:

Obama: "Dick Cheney was supposed to be here but he is very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled 'How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People,'"

Cheney: "Well, at the heart of what we did with the terrorist surveillance program and the enhanced interrogation techniques for Al Qaida terrorists and so forth was collect information. It was about intelligence. It was about finding out what Al Qaida was going to do, what their capabilities and plans were. It was discovering all those things we needed in order to be able to go defeat Al Qaida.

And in effect, what’s happening here, when you get rid of enhanced interrogation techniques, for example, or the terrorist surveillance program, you reduce the intelligence flow to the intelligence community upon which we based those policies that were so successful."


So you have Dick Cheney making a substantive, serious point about policy issues; and you have the President taking a cheap, immature, personal shot at a private citizen.

And, by the way, the President is, apparantly, on tape somewhere laughing at Wanda Sykes.

So, exactly HOW is the President making an effort to change the tone and raise the level of discourse?

Oh, but wait . . . it's still so early in the administration. He can do all that whenever he wants to, it's just that he's letting his supporters have their moment in the sun. Right?

Sure. And Lyndsey Lohan can get her life in order at any time--she's just enjoying stardom for a while.

The problem, as I argued before the election, is NOT Barack Obama, though he's bad enough. He actually talks like a moderate when he wants to, and may actually have an instinct for broad-based solutions.

The problem is the true believers who are now in charge of Congress and the mid- to high-level jobs in government. THEY actually make policies, implement policies, and enforce policies. And they are who we should be scared of . .

Because I guarantee you they were laughing at Wanda Sykes Saturday night.
Posted by: Michael / 5/12/2009 12:26:00 AM

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