Reversal of Field

Posted by Michael at 7:02 pm on November 10, 2008 in Politics

Election time is always at least a little bit unsettling when you’re an independent who doesn’t really identify with either major party, but it’s been doubly so this year with the volume of mouth-frothing, fervent devotion shown for two pretty miserable candidates.  Fortunately we can now put what has been an exceptionally long election cycle behind us and move on to my favorite part of any election: comic relief.

In the past week following the election the left has begun to roll out a “Divided We Fall” Movement which essentially preaches the idea that even if we don’t agree with the President he is our leader and we should respect him.  Right.  Pay no mind to the fact that the same people now parroting that stupid talking point called the same position insipid (and rightly so) when it was parroted by the Republicans the past eight years.

Criticism of the President is an important part of our representative democracy, and it’s something that none of us should shy away from no matter how insignificant our ability to actually impact the system is.  My problem the past eight years was never that people criticized Bush (I didn’t vote for him in 2000 or 2004), it was that the anti-Bush movement became a self-perpetuating wave of unfettered, rollicking and frequently irrational hatred.  At first I’m sure it was a coping method to get past the disappointment of unfavorable results in two hotly contested Presidential elections, but as time game on the histrionics grew to such a degree that it drowned out much of the legitimate, well-founded criticisms of the administration.

It would have been nice if the NO BLOOD FOR OIL crowd could have shut the fuck up for a few minutes so we could have had a rational debate on for instance the merits of extending government oversight in the wake of September 11th, the costs of funding a new agency like the Department of Homeland Security and whether or not nationalizing airport security was really a good idea.  It was kind of hard to get past the 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB crew to air any of that though.

Only slightly less wearying are the people who want some sort of honeymoon to celebrate the coming change in administrations, or as one person I know said with no sense of irony the end of the darkest chapter in American history. As if they extended the same courtesy to Bush supporters following the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Republicans would be well-advised to learn from this experience.  Over the past eight years Democrats have allowed themselves to be so fully and completely absorbed in emotion and hate it actually helped provide cover for the aspects of Bush’s administration that really did deserve scrutiny.  The last thing they can afford to do is give into the temptation to create their own little angry cottage industry generating not particularly clever pun based bumper stickers and instead focus on making fair, honest and rational criticisms of administration policy. And then snicker when Democrats call them unpatriotic as a result.

I know it will be hard but don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of practice.  I’m not anticipating any great shortage of policies to criticize under the coming administration.

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