When I say the GOP doesn’t need to change a single thing in order to turn things around in ’10 and ’12, this is exactly what I’m talking about. The terrible, terrible anger the Democratic Underground posters have for…Jenny Sanford, the betrayed Governor’s-wife?? Liberals, you see, have just as much anger as conservatives, plus a whole lot more — and the anger they have makes very little sense.
Now, it is my opinion, and that of many others as well, that Jenny Sanford has handled herself remarkably well. Unlike most political wives, she has not stood by her man in public as a show of support and solidarity. Most political wives mindlessly stand by in press conferences as their husbands blabber on about how sorry they are. Jenny Sanford did not. Kudos to her. She’s managed to retain some dignity and self-respect in this humiliating affair.
Of course, that means nothing to the DUmmies. Across multiple posts, she is being smeared and insulted.
The democrat party had this huge rout last year because they were able to convince the typical voter to stop caring about policy, and start caring about personalities. Promote not just the idea that There’s Something About Barry, and that our new iPresident is a godlike being, and “Nobody messes with Joe” and that the Delaware Dimbulb is some wonderful wise Supreme Elder Statesman…but that the lowliest democrat is a better person than the most esteemed Republican. They promoted their party as a sure cure for Goodperson Fever.
We must have some folks in the electorate who don’t feel terribly good about themselves. Because they fell for this in November, and it should be clear now that not a single thirst has been quenched.
How could it be? It should be obvious to anyone who uses his head as something besides a hat-hanger. There’s nothing about being a left-winger that can make anybody a better person. The quotes that Blogsister Cassy has rounded up here, are from hardcore types that are not only unfulfilled and unhappy — but angry, pissy, petulant, acrid, shrill, nasty and, worst of all, frenzied. Just like sharks at a feeding frenzy. The more blood they get the more they want. And if Cas wanted to make her list twice, three times, ten times as long, you know she’d be able to do it. She’d find the quotes. They’d be there. These people have the venom, and the need to spew it.
Republican campaign strategy: Just stop helping the enemy to keep all this bile a secret. People don’t want to talk about policy? People don’t want to talk about issues? People don’t want to talk about cause-and-effect? They’d rather be thinking about which political party makes you a Good PersonTM? Hey…don’t lick ’em, join ’em. Let’s have a nationwide debate about which ideology makes you a better person. Just stop cherry-picking the evidence.
I really wondered as I read these posts… how did these people get this way? I’m serious. How do you get so angry, deranged, and hate-filled? What happened to them? There must have been something.
I’ve got a few years on Cas and I have no curiosity about this whatsoever. But if you’ve been reading her pages for awhile you’ll understand my reluctance to conclude I’ve figured out something she hasn’t; this is a wise young lady with a wonderful head on her shoulders who has a lot going on upstairs. If she’s still asking questions and I’m not, it’s probably because she’s trying to figure out something I’m not.
But I know the answer to her question. It isn’t pretty.
In life, we have a lot of Proper Things To Do that offer us a only a delayed reward, or no reward whatsoever. Push the grocery cart someone left in the parking lot back to where it belongs; offer your seat on the bus to the pregnant woman; ask your stuffy old great-granduncle about the good-old-days, even though you don’t really want to know (yet) about them; help the lost child find her Mommy; open the door for the lady; donate your money to help soldiers who are coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan with some limbs missing; show your support for invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place; go to church; do your homework; say “excuse me”…the list goes on and on.
It’s not easy to teach a child to do these things, and so parents have picked up a lot of ways to get it done. The easiest way is to teach them this stuff while they’re still in toddlerhood, while the personality is still forming, at an age when they’re most accepting of the taboo. Obviously that doesn’t work for everything. Unfortunately, as kids get older, they become fascinated in their own growing understanding of cause-and-effect, and start to want to figure things out that way…the unreasonable little bastards. So some parents wait until the pre-teen years and have conversations with their children about cause-and-effect. But cause-and-effect is an advanced topic. As I said, above, many among us opted not to think about it at all in the last election. Many among them opted out simply because they don’t know how to think about it, and many among them, unfortunately, are parents. And so a lot of them skip this stuff altogether. Their unfortunate children grow up to be hardcore left-wing secularist liberals.
Now here’s the ugly part that smears all of us whether we’re liberals or not. When you know deep down inside that you really ought to be doing something, and you decide, for whatever reason, not to do it — deep down inside, what’s going to happen to you is you conceive the rage that has no home. You become bitterly angry, already, in that moment, but you don’t know it yet because your anger hasn’t yet found a target. When someone else comes along and does the thing you know darn well you should have done, just like an electrical storm finding a lightning rod, your anger finds the target. Think about the guy in Irreversible watching the woman being assaulted. Imagine the feelings he’s feeling, the thoughts going through his head. Now imagine some Dudley Doright jumping in and, well, doing right. Imagine how this would change the social-acceptance issues involved in ducking-and-covering. Imagine how angry that cowardly fellow would become, being shown-up like that.
That is exactly what we saw on the left wing just before we invaded Iraq, lasting all the way up to the 2004 elections and beyond. Anchorless rage finally finding an anchor. The craven isolationist looking upon, not quite so much an Adonis of perfection, or a Perseus, or a Hercules, or a Superman, or even any kind of hero — just someone else who made a better decision, and did what everyone else knows damn well needed to be done.
Call it what you will. Call it the product of lazy parenting. Call it a “If I Don’t Help Put Out The Fire, You Can’t Either” instinct. Once aroused, it arrives with a white-hot rage that knows no equal. And we all have it, or at least, the ingredients of it…
It is extraordinarily damaging to our implied social compact. Left unchecked, it turns otherwise decent people in to extremist liberals. It also is caused by being an extremist liberal. It feeds itself, feeding on itself, and makes itself bigger and hungrier.
Go on, read some of the comments Cassy found and tell me I’m wrong.
Republicans have the next election sown up. Really, they had the last one sown up, they just chose not to go for the kill. Just stop keeping secrets for the benefit of the enemy. Stop keeping secrets about the tremendous harm liberalism does to people’s souls.