"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin
THE CYCLE OF CYNICISM AND BITTERNESS IS,...
THE CYCLE OF CYNICISM AND BITTERNESS IS,...
OF COURSE, BEST OBSERVED IN WASHINGTON. In days long gone, the genius of the American system had been its ability to compromise. We learned from the butchery of the Civil War that failure to compromise could unleash the darkest, bloodiest impulses of the American character. Over the years, we developed in Washington a non ideological style that helped us avoid direct conflict. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost; politics was a long season like baseball, in which even the greatest hitters failed six times out of ten. Most of the time, the system worked. Slowly. Wearily. But in the end, it did work. The struggling process created the American political style, which brought into being leaders who were effective - Sam Rayburn, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Taft, and Tip O'Neill - who employed a basic courtesy when dealing with their opponents. They disagreed on many issues. They were capable of immense vanity. But they didn't think it necessary to destroy the enemy.
This only began as we inched our way into the Twenty-first Century, trod through the immense sludge and muck of the always eager for a photo op and illegitimately elected Bush Administration, and on into the ooze and slime of the Tea Party, that the names of Santorum and Cain and Cruz and Paul popped-up and took root like growing weeds; men who, in the past, would never have risen to higher office because the American people would not have tolerated them. They were cheap, vulgar, ignorant, parochial and cynical. The men who truly changed this country, who moved it along, who made it better, men with clarity and vision and a certain amount of grace had been replaced by the birdbrained-buffoons of the Right, interested only in getting reelected no matter what it cost to the average American's way-of-life. Those who had come before them had been Americans before they were Texans or Kentuckians, or Democrats or Republicans. They respected the contract. They respected the Presidency. They did not think it necessary to destroy the enemy. We now had those who swung broadswords of racism or ideology at other Americans because the the American people had the audacity to elect a man-of-color into the office of The President of the United States. Twice!
I am not certain whether or not Barack Obama is the greatest president we have ever had. But I know he is certainly not the worst. This is a country, after all, that elected Warren G. Harding once and Richard Milhous Nixon twice. But from the moment of his election, Mitch and Newt and others began the sustained campaign of personal abuse of any president in memory. No rumor, no allegation, goes unprinted and is aired on the radio by Limbaugh and Beck and on the television set by Hannity and O'Reilly on Fox News. An alleged man of God, Mike Huckabee, peddles accusations of treason accusing Obama of anything that will bring Mike more attention and more money. The Republicans linked arms in a spirit of mindless obstruction, led by the Tea Party, somehow managed to get an enormous economic plan through Karl Rove and his buddies, along with the Koch brothers and their cohorts, cutting through the theoretical non-biased Supreme Court, and were then on their way to an unending political witch hunt against both Obama and Hillary Clinton on Benghazi led by another idiot, an almost convicted felon turned California Congressman by the name of Darrell Issa.
Meanwhile, reporters began entertaining themselves in the new political circus, even though Obama was actually accomplishing a few things as president. He established the Lilly Ledbetter Act, won on health-care reform with the Affordable Care Act, rid the world of Bin Laden, established new Veteran's Care Services, and began supporting same sex marriage, in spite of being overwhelmed by the Tea Party who spent millions on attack ads and refused to join the process of compromise He could not overcome the Republican refusal to pass legislation in the Congress, but in some real ways the country was in better shaped than it had been on the day he took office. Unemployment was down. The economy grew stronger. And yet Obama remains the most hated president in memory.
Journalists are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain an adversarial stance on politicians. But the vehemence of the attacks against Obama seems more a reflex than thought and analysis. These days, most members of the Washington press corps wear a self-absorbed sneer. They sneer at any expression of idealism, they sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies. They sneer at weakness. They sneer at those who work too hard or do not work hard enough. They fill columns moralizing about Obama and then attack others for moralizing. The assumption is that everyone has a dirty little secret, and the journalist's duty is to sniff it out. Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for the great American art of compromise. Give us the whole loaf or nothing, comes the intolerant call. What chance does Obama have?
Domestically, he's indicted for being too liberal or not quite liberal enough, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to pubic opinion or too desirous of consensus. In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics remain in the of Ronald Regan's Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory of foreign engagement, or using naked power to get your way by killing 100 thousand innocent foreigners and 4 thousand of our own soldiers with icy dispatch just like training-school pilot George and draft-dodger Dick did, in a war based upon a lie. We need only to listen to John McCain or take a peek at Lindsey Graham to hear that rhetoric spewed forth over-and-over again...
...And if this goes on, if we continue to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level, escalating the horror by the hour, the country is doomed, and I can only repeat what I have said before as I recall, once again, what the great cartoonist Walt Kelly said so long ago: "We have met the enemy and he is us..."
This only began as we inched our way into the Twenty-first Century, trod through the immense sludge and muck of the always eager for a photo op and illegitimately elected Bush Administration, and on into the ooze and slime of the Tea Party, that the names of Santorum and Cain and Cruz and Paul popped-up and took root like growing weeds; men who, in the past, would never have risen to higher office because the American people would not have tolerated them. They were cheap, vulgar, ignorant, parochial and cynical. The men who truly changed this country, who moved it along, who made it better, men with clarity and vision and a certain amount of grace had been replaced by the birdbrained-buffoons of the Right, interested only in getting reelected no matter what it cost to the average American's way-of-life. Those who had come before them had been Americans before they were Texans or Kentuckians, or Democrats or Republicans. They respected the contract. They respected the Presidency. They did not think it necessary to destroy the enemy. We now had those who swung broadswords of racism or ideology at other Americans because the the American people had the audacity to elect a man-of-color into the office of The President of the United States. Twice!
I am not certain whether or not Barack Obama is the greatest president we have ever had. But I know he is certainly not the worst. This is a country, after all, that elected Warren G. Harding once and Richard Milhous Nixon twice. But from the moment of his election, Mitch and Newt and others began the sustained campaign of personal abuse of any president in memory. No rumor, no allegation, goes unprinted and is aired on the radio by Limbaugh and Beck and on the television set by Hannity and O'Reilly on Fox News. An alleged man of God, Mike Huckabee, peddles accusations of treason accusing Obama of anything that will bring Mike more attention and more money. The Republicans linked arms in a spirit of mindless obstruction, led by the Tea Party, somehow managed to get an enormous economic plan through Karl Rove and his buddies, along with the Koch brothers and their cohorts, cutting through the theoretical non-biased Supreme Court, and were then on their way to an unending political witch hunt against both Obama and Hillary Clinton on Benghazi led by another idiot, an almost convicted felon turned California Congressman by the name of Darrell Issa.
Meanwhile, reporters began entertaining themselves in the new political circus, even though Obama was actually accomplishing a few things as president. He established the Lilly Ledbetter Act, won on health-care reform with the Affordable Care Act, rid the world of Bin Laden, established new Veteran's Care Services, and began supporting same sex marriage, in spite of being overwhelmed by the Tea Party who spent millions on attack ads and refused to join the process of compromise He could not overcome the Republican refusal to pass legislation in the Congress, but in some real ways the country was in better shaped than it had been on the day he took office. Unemployment was down. The economy grew stronger. And yet Obama remains the most hated president in memory.
Journalists are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain an adversarial stance on politicians. But the vehemence of the attacks against Obama seems more a reflex than thought and analysis. These days, most members of the Washington press corps wear a self-absorbed sneer. They sneer at any expression of idealism, they sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies. They sneer at weakness. They sneer at those who work too hard or do not work hard enough. They fill columns moralizing about Obama and then attack others for moralizing. The assumption is that everyone has a dirty little secret, and the journalist's duty is to sniff it out. Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for the great American art of compromise. Give us the whole loaf or nothing, comes the intolerant call. What chance does Obama have?
Domestically, he's indicted for being too liberal or not quite liberal enough, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to pubic opinion or too desirous of consensus. In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics remain in the of Ronald Regan's Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory of foreign engagement, or using naked power to get your way by killing 100 thousand innocent foreigners and 4 thousand of our own soldiers with icy dispatch just like training-school pilot George and draft-dodger Dick did, in a war based upon a lie. We need only to listen to John McCain or take a peek at Lindsey Graham to hear that rhetoric spewed forth over-and-over again...
...And if this goes on, if we continue to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level, escalating the horror by the hour, the country is doomed, and I can only repeat what I have said before as I recall, once again, what the great cartoonist Walt Kelly said so long ago: "We have met the enemy and he is us..."
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