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Polar bear with carrot

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Reach out and hug a Republican


You know it's got to be tough for these people. Why just a year or two ago, Karl Rove was talking about a new permanent majority. Now their empire is in tatters. Sad, really. I just got off the phone with a close friend who's really bummed. He's not exactly on the ledge but he can sure see it from where he's sitting. But Millard, you guys had a great run - for eight years, we were the minority party but we held our head up and bore our pain gracefully, knowing that with the good lord's help we would live to see another day in the hallowed corridors of power. This week you're sushi grade hamachi, next week you're somebody's leftover tuna helper.

"But you guys vilified good men like Tom Delay and Newt Gingrich", he tells me, "there was a guy in the house whose sole job was to demonize them". You mean Newt, the same guy who told his wife that he was divorcing her while she was in her hospital bed suffering from cancer? The family values guy? See, he wailed, you're doing it again...Michael Savage said that you liberals were a social disease. Or mental disorder. Or something like that.

It's got to be hard. Hey, George Bush says that it takes twenty or thirty years before you can properly judge a presidency. Who knows, maybe they will have to get rid of one of the old guys on Mount Rushmore and replace it with Bush's Alfred E. Newmanesque profile.

William Kristol says that Bush policies can't have been that bad because Obama is all set to continue most of them. Rove said last night that no way was Bush the worst president we have had in the last fifty years. And I agree, because in terms of venality Nixon would give him a Texas size whoopin'. Stupidity has it's own unique frame of reference.

So please don't get pouty. Karl Rove once said that a 51% majority was big enough if you could keep the troops in line and by god, that's how you guys governed. And he almost pulled it off. We are going to include you in the discussion and show you how civilized bipartisan people act. So let us all play nice.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gates=Iran Contra Scandals/Noriega/Ollie North/CIA Cocaine/Bush Un Constitutional Government/Illegal war in Iran/Patriot Act wiretapping/
Republican right wing absurdity.
You don't have to go too far to reach out and hug a Republican.

island guy said...

Civility in governance has taken a big pounding for years. Of course, that old fashioned stuff in the US Senate worked fine when a bunch of players could divvy up taxpayers money without much effective scrutiny. Still, without some semblance of shared purpose, we'll destroy each other before (or maybe in the American way until) our external enemies can. So yes, give a Republican you know a hug. Maybe even fly to Florida and thank them for voting for somebody younger than them.