This is awful.
Talk about never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups…
The celebration of ugliness, hate and stupidity that the Republican party has become under McCain and especially Palin really is breathtaking. I hope all we’re seeing are the last throes of a dying beast, but even if they are this is not good. John McCain, at least, should be better than this.
If Obama wins (please please please let that happen) these people will dog him with the line that he’s a terrorist, a socialist, unAmerican. Of course these are the people who still like Bush. The guy who’s bringing us closer to socialism than we’ve ever been, but still, that’s different, though I don’t see how.
Fortunately, a few Republicans still have a modicum of sanity left. David Brooks:
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
How did we become a society that so easily and willingly throws out the very idea of deliberation in favor of acting solely on impulse in the manner of teenagers?
McCain and Palin are running on nothing more than fear, feeding its flames with their insistence that there’s just something not quite American about Obama. Something insidious about the man who will most likely be our next president.
If Obama is elected he will have to face this over-the-top hatred the entire time he is in office. Should John McCain somehow win in this way, how in hell does he expect to bring the country together or get a Democratic congress to work with him?
Country first, indeed.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
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