There are times when I wonder what it might have been like to have lived through some of the most egregious moral failures of our history. What would I say to my grandchildren when they asked me about America under Jim Crow, or the days before women's suffrage, or indeed any era in which an institutional fact of our national life would in hindsight be exposed as a brazen and incontrovertible injustice? Had I been there, living it, would I have felt that something wasn't right? Would a sinister normal have seemed somehow acceptable? I wonder, because I only have this era to live in, and here I am, and something feels terribly wrong.
When I heard Newt Gingrich chide the president recently for what he described (borrowing a term from the imbecilic conspiracist Dinesh D'Souza) as "Kenyan, anticolonial behavior," my first thought was that it sounded exactly like something a racist person might say. Gingrich, fresh from the set of his recent documentary detailing the impending Islamic attack on America, is arguably the most successful Republican politician of the last twenty years. He is also an unapologetic parasite on our great national conversation, the note-perfect embodiment of the malignant tumor on political discourse his party has opted to become since the election of President Obama.
I have come to the conclusion that the Republican Party no longer has any interest whatsoever in making the lives of Americans better. It brings me no joy to say it, but it is too horrific a fact to ignore. On every issue that touches our lives -- economic recovery, health care, financial reform, taxes, deficits, civil rights -- the GOP has winnowed their strategy to this: bamboozle and terrify their countrymen. Lie to them and enrage them, prey on their worst fears, on their ignorances, on their hard times. Your taxes are going up! Your freedom is going away! Muslims are coming to kill you! The president is Hitler, is Stalin, is Marx, is the very incarnation of a Luo tribesman, a philandering, inebriated African socialist; the president is not like us!
Of course, none of it is remotely true. Taxes have gone down, American freedom is, as of press time, still intact, the death panels and concentration camps never materialized, and the Constitution has yet to give way to Sharia law. Fear, lies, abject racism, and xenophobia are nothing new to our political history, but the difference today seems to be that those inhuman cudgels are not being deployed in the service of a political cause: they are the cause themselves. Every debate that could be had and every gain that could be made for our country has been sabotaged by a small group of hucksters -- and a large group of those too terrified or ineffectual to stand up to them -- who hold the same position on each issue. Make every effort to rehabilitate our distraught economy versus hurt the president. Try to devise a system that gives all Americans access to health care when they get sick versus hurt the president. Implement rules that keep bankers from taking absurd gambles at the rest of the country's expense versus hurt the president. Try to solve a problem -- try even to talk about how to solve a problem -- versus no. No, we won't. Just hurt the president.
Moments critical to our history probably don't feel so important at the time, and it would be fair of you to think of today as nothing more than an economic dip, a nondescript era of information filling time between major historical events -- World War I becomes World War II becomes the Sixties becomes 9/11 becomes something else down the road. I believe that we are in that moment now, however, standing halfway across the Rubicon that was the value we once placed on truth and a fair debate. When the present tense of this moment gives way -- when the "I am" settles foggily into the "I was" -- what will you tell your grandchildren? That you stood with the men and women who annihilated our economy with their craven obsession for making the rich richer and the rest of us poorer, who deceived us into a war that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, who then had the gall to blame the next administration for the havoc they wreaked, who fought for banks and insurance companies and not for the middle class, who decried science and education, who denied equal rights for all Americans, who looked at the good Earth and said "drill, baby, drill," who turned our children's textbooks into fundamentalist tracts, who turned us against each other, who saw the major problems of our day and refused to engage, who picked "the president is a Muslim" over "I have a better idea," every single time?
The Democratic Party is, to be sure, a trembling mass of political impotence, wholly unequipped to respond with the force of reason to the barrage of putridity with which they have been confronted of late. But I will tell my grandchildren that I stood with those who tried, however pitifully, to keep us healthy, educated, financially solvent, safe, and, above all, logical when so many others had fallen victim to charlatans promising easy solutions and comforting exclusions, the great shame of our nation. What will you tell yours?
Follow Daniel Cluchey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dancluchey
"Had I been there, living it, would I have felt that something wasn't right?" To be honest, until the debate about Health Care Reform (or "Health CONTROL" as the TP now refers to it) I didn't give a hoot about American politics. I am an active gamer on FB and have about 1900 "friends". The statuses and "like" pages I were seeing time and time again began to really alarm me. As someone not afraid to add my 2 cents, I did and have. The discussions and general consensus I see, especially as the TP grew in strength and/or loudness, has really honestly frightened me. I didn't even know who Beck or Hannity or O'Reilly were and had never heard of HuffPo. What I see and hear are people who seemingly are ready for nothing short of a civil war. Selfish, divisive, angry bigots.... as someone else pointed out "racism" is OK again. The country has regressed 40-50 years.
That being said, I make a game out of trying to empathize with conservatives. I wonder if they view an increase in taxes, government interference in healthcare, finance and housing, just as egregiously as liberals view the Iraq war, the unsupported tax cuts and the wiretapping scandals of Bush.
I worry that, in an objective sense, the left forgets how vitriolic it was with Bush. I remember Bush with extreme negativity, but at our height of protest, were we any more rational or justified than conservatives are today? Do the back-to-back crisis of the Obama and Bush presidencies - bonafide economic and social calamity aside - represent actual existential threats to our future, or were both manufactured of political convenience?
I will copy and paste this article and email it to everyone I know and ask them to forward it on to everyone they know! Regardless of be you a conservative or democrat, (unless you're one of the craven spoken of in this piece), we all want the same thing, a healthy and prosperous nation that will be here for our kids and for theirs. Does it really matter how we get there or who gets credit?
Well I guess I did have a penny's worth to add... lol
Again, great piece!
Thing about discourse: it's like democracy in the raw; one you open things up, you no longer have control. Now really, what successful operative would support such a tactic?
We're citizens engaged in the emancipation project or we aren't. Let's get post-modern: if the aim of the game is feather your own nest then it's just some variation of "business as usual". And nothing blunts idealism more drastically than that sort of plausibly deniable self-serving cynicism.
google "participatory deliberation"
side say, what, how long, in what way????, would have McCain and Sarah Palin had they won, bring
back $18.00 an hour jobs back to the United States, stop them from leaving in the "first place, fixed"
not keep pumping", from the gulf oil spill?, end the on-going wars and not keep them going, for a non
listed or mentionable number of years?, eradicate health insurance companies from their current
legal perk of discrimmination of people with pre-existing health condition, stop people from resorting
to going to the hospital emergency room for treatment? I know everybody is chomping at the bit,
to put republicans back in office, no matter come" hell or high water" or regardless of whether or
not they have any intention what-so-ever, of giving an unemployed man, standing on a street
intersection with a sign", a glass of water", let alone a decent livable wage job, what is it that
folks in need of so much, see the republicans as bringing just a little bit of relief, to common
middle and lower income working people.? Even if you like the fact that Republicans "hate people
of color, especially blacks, and consider and blame them for everything under the sun, how does
that" help a unemployed white male married with kids, pay for food, rent, electricity, ? Signs under
rain, soggy"
==Can't say we didn't see this coming. Obama's presidential campaign signalled very loudly that conservatives were waging war. Sean Hannity was hell bent on destroying Obama's candidacy all by himself. He couldn't stop parroting "Bill Ayers," "Jeremiah Wright" and showing Wright's "damn America" video piece night after night on his Fox News show. Then Palin got in the act with the obsessive rant of "paling around w/ terrorists."
Not to mention all the incendiary attacks on talk radio. I listened to those shows throughout the campaign -- even called in a couple of times. Mike Savage, Mike Gallagher, Rush Limbaugh and many others -- including Hannity's double whammy on talk radio -- one right after the other, were bashing Obama every single day of the campaign.
After the election, I tuned in and heard more of the same. It was obvious at that point that nothing Obama did would satisfy these folks. They simply did not wish him to be president and would do all in their power to impede, obstruct and destroy his presidency.
The mere fact that an American president would be so vehemently disrespected and opposed is indicative that the will of the people is of little interest to Republicans. It's all about their personal agenda of self-wealth preservation and nothing more.
the buck" anology mind-set, and just flatly admit with open eyes", the truth of fact not fiction when it
comes to racial justice, tolerance, right vs wrong, bigotry and refusal to deny the obvious" as is how
this article was written against that norm. As a african american female, after Glen Becks comment
about Obama being a racist, and has a "problem" with White Culture, I began doing alot of research
reading up on "white culture", where it began,? what's included in it,? where does it fit in with today?
I came away feeling very depressed, because of what I read and from reparable sites, that white
americans, have never reguarded blacks as human beings, and only 3/4th of a person, due to the
original intent of being forever considered servituded property to be owned, when brought here to
this country, 266 years ago. White americans like Gingrich, Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and so many
many white americans from generation to generation, have never, even before the all the stereo-
typing negative lies were made up about blacks to justify any and everything from lynching to the narative,
blacks are lazy, violent, "welfare this and that", yet make up for only 12% population, cannot allow
themselves to even respect" blacks and consider their feelings as real human beings, and not still as
servents and property, they can no longer ever own!
The Democrats, God bless 'em, are not big on utterly destroying politicians on the other side - there is not, to my knowledge, a Democratic political machine that systematically plots ways of creating fear and disseminating misinformation at the expense of the nation with the sole goal of controlling the two houses of Congress. But on the other side, we have Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich and countless others, dedicated to that very task - apparently oblivious, or perhaps just in spite of the damage they're inflicting on this confused nation of ours. Despicable.
Obama: Fox News is ‘destructive’ to America
http://t.co/G4M47W5
Fox News pushes "a point of view that I disagree with. It's a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world," Obama said.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/christine-odonnell-flashback-evolution-is-a-myth.php
This guy is not good for our country, no matter what your beliefs are.
http://jdrourke.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/partial-written-transcript-from-an-introduction-between-sarah-palin-dr-laura-schlessinger-by-newt-gingrich/