I was on the wrong side when Clinton became President. I listened to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy. I thought Newt Gingrich was smart. They are not stupid people. Their arguments aren’t dumb. My worldview was limited to thinking Ayn Rand was the best thing since sliced bread. As a former libertarian, I thought if only people had the facts I did, they’d come around. The problem was my facts were cherry picked and did not reflect the wider world, it’s history or human nature. I was trying to fit the facts to my world view and not the other way around.
Newt sounds smart and reasonable for about the first two minutes and then you come to realize he’s batshit crazy. Limbaugh was very entertaining. I really enjoyed Paul Shanklin’s conservative parody songs, though I must confess some of them were borderline racist and misogynistic. I should have known better, I was glad to see that someone was making fun of the Democrats and not just Republicans. As for Liddy. He’s someone I could still respectfully disagree with, despite how reactionary he is. He’s by far more educated than most conservative pundits with the possible exception of Michael Wiener (aka Michael Savage).
It feels good for once to be on the right side with the right people at the right time. How do I know I’m on the right side this time? I don’t. Only time will tell. I never felt I could adequately defend my views when I was of a libertarian bent or persuade others with evidence they’d accept. This time I do feel I can adequately defend those views. I know that some would not accept the evidence I’d present but this time I don’t fucking care. If they won’t examine it, that’s their fucking problem.
Winning the election was the easy part for Obama. Now comes the hard part. Bush & Cheney still have 70+ days to screw things up even more. Their supporters, and most especially the pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and Michael Savage will continue to be major fuckheads. These people and their ilk will not stop being fuckheads. In fact their fuckheadedness is just beginning. Obama isn’t Clinton 2.0. There will be no Monica 2.0, no Troopergate 2.0, no Whitewater 2.0, no pick your Clinton scandal 2.0, real or manufactured. Their attacks on ACORN and questioning small donations over the Internet will only get louder and shriller. Who knows where else they will attack? Probably they’ll make complaints of voter suppression and stolen elections. They’ll pretend that didn’t happen in 2000 or 2004. They are not interested in working with us. They are not interested in bipartisanship. They only know how to do one thing, attack.
It looks like the Democrats will be 3 seats shy of a supermajority in the Senate. That will be the Republican’s line in the sand, where we can expect the most obstruction. We cannot be like them. Just because they want to be fuckheads doesn’t mean we can’t reach out to them. We have to show them we can be decent human beings. Isn’t my calling the fuckheads being counterproductive? No. I want them to know how I really feel, but that I’m capable of moving past that. I’ll have to demonstrate that after all this namecalling.
If those on the conservative side of the aisle don’t want to give Obama a chance and work with the progressives, then they deserve to be miserable for the next four years. I will not let them screw this up. There’s too much at stake.