What was the charming little phrase that conservatives would say to those of us disappointed when George W. Bush became president? It's hard to believe that it has receded down the rabbit hole of memory. It was so wonderfully pithy.
Ah yes, I remember now. "Get over it!" This was considered the height of conservative wit back in 2000 and 2004 and all the long years after. You might call it almost Oscar Wilde-like in its cleverness -- that is, if Oscar had not been gay.
Hey, Mr. Liberal, you think the election was stolen because the public was bamboozled by the voting machines? Get over it!
Hey, Mrs. Liberal, you think it unfair that the public was bamboozled by gay marriage amendments and the like? Get over it!
So we did get over it, sort of, because we didn't think we had a choice. It never occurred to us to behave like spoiled children who didn't get their way, pouting and stamping our feet.
Oh, there was mumbling and grumbling, some crying in our beer, but most liberals aren't much interested in being in a permanent state of agitation. They weren't interested then in forming tea parties for any purpose other than sharing cupcakes. They weren't interested in wearing guns to public events, and not only because they looked odd when worn with kaftans and Birkenstocks.
Most liberals care about other people more than they care about hating other people, and hence they do not like living with a permanent political wedgie. This explains why most don't find it entertaining to have their brains pickled by talk-radio vinegar, something that inevitably filters down and knots the underpants.
Most, not all. On the circle of political opinion, the far left and the far right sit uncomfortably next to each other and both are certifiably nuts. But the reality is that the far left has been a small sliver for the past 30 years while the far right is such a large cohort that it now represents mainstream opinion in the Republican Party. Really.
The so-called health care debate is the perfect example. The claims made about its passage -- death panels! government takeover! socialism! Marxism! -- came straight and unfiltered from extreme political fantasy land. Never mind that the legislation has no public option and lets the highwaymen (you know them as the insurance companies) continue to ply their trade, but just in a way that does not leave travelers on life's troubled roads so robbed of coverage as to be completely naked.
To the nation's shame, the rage over the legislation has no equal in recent history. Some have suggested that the Democrats are co-conspirators in the lack of bipartisanship. The Democrats are not without fault -- hey, they are the Democrats, a party that could not organize a booze-up in a brewery -- but the basic suggestion is ridiculous.
Not a single Republican voted for the reform package, a display of like mind that would have been the envy of the Supreme Soviet. It was amazing how they recycled their "Country First" slogan from the presidential election to the more workable "Politics First."
In truth, they set out to be supreme obstructionists in the hope of besting President Obama. Health care was to be his Waterloo. Who knew he would play the part of the victorious Duke of Wellington and not the beaten Napoleon?
All the while, the Republicans insisted that they really wanted health care reform and just wanted to start over to get it right. Well, as they used to say in the old country, pull my other leg -- it's got a bell on it. Anybody half awake knew that "just start over" was their code for doing nothing ever.
They speak as if insuring 32 million more people is a special horror, not something that some of us crazy idealists think is an imperative of the Gospels. (Funny that the GOP, which used to be God's Own Party, seems to have sided with mammon in the health care debate.) And what a fuss about procedure! The Democrats rammed it through due to the dastardly advantage of majority rule. Can you believe it?
Now various conservative state attorneys general will sue to subvert the will of the people as expressed in the last presidential election, the sort of tactic that the conservative columnist George F. Will used to flay liberals for trying. This effort may well succeed -- judicial activism now being an equal opportunity employer and George Bush having made the Supreme Court his gift that keeps on giving.
But it would be better for the nation if conservatives heed their own advice before the rage and madness spread. Elections have consequences. Get over it.
"A Method to Republican 'Madness' " by Robert Parry, Consortiumnews
Excerpt
Washington’s conventional wisdom for explaining the intensity of Republican obstructionism toward President Barack Obama breaks down one of two ways: either it’s a philosophical disagreement over the role of government or a desperate need to stay in line with a radicalized right-wing base.
But there is another way to view the GOP political strategy, as neither principled nor reactive to the rantings of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers. It is that the Republicans are following a playbook that has evolved over more than four decades, to regain power by sabotaging Democratic presidents.
In this analysis, the Republicans believe they can reclaim the lucrative levers of national authority by making the country as ungovernable as possible while a Democrat is in the White House, essentially holding governance hostage until they are restored to power. Then, the Democrats are expected to behave as a docile opposition “for the good of the country” (and usually do).
The “destroy Obama” game plan tracks most closely with Newt Gingrich’s strategy for undermining Bill Clinton 16 years ago. But today’s strategy also traces back to Richard Nixon’s sabotage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s October Surprise gambit against President Jimmy Carter’s Iran hostage negotiations in 1980.
In all four cases – covering the last four Democratic presidencies – the Republicans did not behave as a loyal opposition but rather as a single-minded political enemy that viewed the White House as its birthright and Democratic control of the Executive Branch as illegitimate.
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