May 29, 2009
Push Back
The knee jerk, “Oppose anything Obama does!,” response to Sotomayor by some on the right has been so insane that even the Wall Street Journal is telling Republicans to grow up:
The New York Post’s front page the day after her announcement said it all: “Suprema!” with a picture of the radiant nominee. New York is proud of her; I’m proud of our country and grateful at its insistence, in a time when some say the American dream is dead, that it most certainly is not. The dream is: You can come from any place or condition, any walk of life, and rise to the top, taking your people with you, in your heart and theirs. (Maybe that’s what they mean by empathy: Where you come from enters you, and you bring it with you as you rise. But if that’s what they mean, then we’re all empathetic. We’re the most fluid society in human history, but no one ever leaves their zip code in America, we all take it with us. It’s part of our pride. And it’s not bad, it’s good.
Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, “We need to brand her.” Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base.
Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren’t already on your side?
The base is plenty excited already, as you know if you’ve ever read a comment thread on a conservative blog. Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left (”Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!”) are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged.
“…perpetually agitated, permanently enraged,” well if that doesn’t describe some of the douchebags who comment [at Comments From Left Field], I don’t know what does. These special type of crazies might want to listen to the WSJ — and Senator John Cornyn, too.
“I think it’s terrible,” Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NPR’s “All Things Considered” Thursday. “This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent.”
Thank the flying spaghetti monster there are some Republicans out there telling elements of their side to grow the fuck up. There may yet be hope for politics in this country.
