The Republican fantasy world has collapsed.
Back during Reagan, I found myself in a continuous debate with friends who aggressively defended the Iran Contra situation. It was the first time I really had to study up before a discussion. The studying wasn’t simply to allow myself the opportunity to grasp details and facts quicker in the heat of argument, but to actually HAVE facts and defend them.
You see, most of my friends on the conservative side, as now, react to issues based purely on emotion. What I’ve always found disheartening is that the conservative politicians feed into this. My earliest memories of Nixon was his sometimes not so subtle attacks on the counter-culture and his call for the “silent majority” to speak up through his candidacy. Reagan, on the other hand, was an optimistic minimalist - he saw little sense in trying to get the electorate to understand even some of the complexities of the issues of the day and would rather sell them a simple idea - tax cuts and trickle down economics, Kadafi as the new Hitler, Granada as the new battleground for freedom.
Bush has been a multiplication of all the worst aspects of Reagan and Nixon. He fed us fear as a motivator, simplified complex economic tools such as tax cuts into across-the-board disasters that have enriched that top 1 percent, trickled very little down, and left the rest of us holding the financial bag. He asked for no sacrifices during war, and instead prodded us to do what he’s been doing his entire life - spend, spend, spend, don’t worry about the debt (daddy will help you out) and forget about personal financial responsibility in any area of your life. Wars are black and white, you have enemies and friends and nothing in between. Saddam isn’t the new Hitler, all Muslims are. Believe what I tell you because you can trust me. Science and complex thinking are for wimps. Go with your gut.
Well, here we are 8 years later. This compassionate conservative has divided the country so severely we are on the verge of ruin emotionally, economically, militarily and ethically. Obama has a tough hill to climb to get us out.
Unfortunately for him, the dead-enders still think they have a place in this process, demands they can make. Well, as far as I’m concerned, when you screw everything up as much as you have you deserve no place at the table until you can learn to get along with everyone else. Neocons live today in a fantasy world where time has stood still and our current President is just another Jimmy Carter with a slightly darker complexion. They STILL feel they are right in all areas (despite the fact that the entire Bush agenda has lead to multi-pronged failures), that McCain would have won had it not been for the media, and the Democrats haven’t changed one iota since the 1960s. What they don’t know and can’t understand is that the country has moved past them, that they are the relics of a different time and the old way of politics has no place in the future.
Sure, things change little in the short term, but at least now we can see the horizon past the moral and ethical wasteland given to us by the Bush-Cheney-DeLay-Boehner-Frist crew. So necons - stay where you are at your own peril. We really don’t care anymore about your ideas. They are bankrupt.
