New Year's Casserole
A bit of New Year's melange or olio here tonight. All politics - no food, travel, music, books, or other personal obsessions planned from what I can tell poised here at the gate. But who knows what flotsam might be stirred up before we are through?
I believe the Gerson person Digby is intent on here is the former Bush speechwriter who chose to act out a brief revelatory encounter with reality and resulting semi-transformation shortly after departing the administration a while back. I don't recall the specific form that kismet took, e.g., confessional articles/posts/blogs, but in hindsight it does seem to have been more in the playacting category rather than actual dialogue with conscience (assuming same exists):
I normally find Michael Gerson to be one of the most sanctimonious jackasses in the Republican Party and always loathed the smarmy speeches he wrote for Junior that made the villagers swoon in breathless delight. But I have to give credit where credit is due for this felicitous turn of phrase:
He should have listened to his own advice, however, because let's face it, stuff like this makes it a little bit difficult to take any Bush supporter's criticism of starry eyed, hero worship seriously:
(This is the kind of puerile drivel that turns people into cynics.)
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I have to agree that there is a certain catchy quality or possibly even kitschy charm to the phrase "nymphomaniacs on the honeymoon." But this is clearly projection by Gerson. What has the last eight years been other than on MG's terms nymphomania and multitudinous other far-worse psychopathies engaged in by Gerson himself, the national press and major networks, and a horrifying number of the American public, many now perhaps stumbling desperately towards the end of that scary tunnel of their own making? Or, at least, like Gerson, looking for anything even vaguely resembling a fig leaf (at this point, given anxiety level, bay leaves, readily available at corner mart, might suffice) to avert attention from their concocted cacophony that resembles nothing less than the darkest aspects of Hieronymous Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. If you can't find clear images of w, dick, rummie, rice, addington, fredo, yoo, miers, ashcroft, at least four supreme court justices, abramoff and his personal axis-of-evil pack of lobbyists and slavery-promoters and Native American-corrupters and exploiters, and the whole rest of that pack of lying, sniveling scoundrel swine as well as the certain justice due them in this pic, I swear you must be either watching too much tv, toying with addictive substances, or disturbingly infatuated with someone in the Martha Stewart category. Old Hieronymus foresaw this whole pack of woebegotten narcissistic war-criminals way back in the 15th Century, and the vividness with which he captures the Cheney/Rove cabal puts Nostradamus to shame.
Filling in some of the details on these perps is Glenn Greenwald. This is, as usual for GG, a thorough-going slam-bang, meaning among other things that excerpting is both painful and potentially misleading. Since you obviously care about these things, I encourage you to pursue link and consider regular reading of GG:
Befitting an administration that has spent eight years obliterating America's core political values, its final year in power -- 2008 -- was yet another grim one for civil liberties and constitutional protections. Unlike the early years of the administration, when liberty-abridging policies were conceived of in secret and unilaterally implemented by the executive branch, many of the erosions of 2008 were the dirty work of the U.S. Congress, fueled by the passive fear or active complicity of the Democratic Party that controlled it. The one silver lining is that the last 12 months have been brightly clarifying: It is clearer than ever what the Obama administration can and must do in order to arrest and reverse the decade-long war on the Constitution waged by our own government.
The most intensely fought civil liberties battle of 2008 -- the one waged over FISA and telecom immunity -- ended the way most similar battles of the last eight years have: with total defeat for civil libertarians. Even before Democrats were handed control of Congress at the beginning of 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding legislation to legalize its illegal warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to retroactively immunize the telecom industry for its participation in those programs. Yet even with Bill Frist and Denny Hastert in control of the Congress, the administration couldn't get its way.
Not even the most cynical political observer would have believed that it was the ascension of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that would be the necessary catalyst for satisfying Bush's most audacious demands, concerning his most brazenly illegal actions. If anything, hopes were high that Democratic control of Congress would entail a legislative halt to warrantless eavesdropping or, at the very least, some meaningful investigation and disclosure -- what we once charmingly called "oversight" -- regarding what Bush's domestic spying had really entailed. After all, the NSA program was the purified embodiment of the most radical attributes of a radical regime -- pure lawlessness, absolute secrecy, a Stasi-like fixation on domestic surveillance. It was widely assumed, even among embittered cynics, that the new Democratic leadership in Congress would not use their newfound control to protect and endorse these abuses.
Yet in July 2008, there stood Pelosi and Reid, leading their caucuses as they stamped their imprimatur of approval on Bush's spying programs. The so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed with virtually unanimous GOP and substantial Democratic support, including the entire top level of the House Democratic leadership. It legalized vast new categories of warrantless eavesdropping and endowed telecoms with full immunity for prior surveillance lawbreaking. Most important, it ensured a permanent and harmless end to what appeared to be the devastating scandal that exploded in 2005 when the New York Times revealed to the country that the Bush administration was spying on Americans illegally, without warrants of any kind.
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Adding the final insult to this constitutional injury, Barack Obama infamously violated his emphatic pledge, made during the Democratic primary, to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity. With the Democratic nomination fully secured, Obama blithely tossed that commitment aside, instead joining his party's leadership in voting for cloture on the bill -- the opposite of a filibuster -- and then in favor of the bill itself. The photographs of the celebratory, bipartisan signing ceremony that followed at the White House -- where an understandably jubilant George Bush and Dick Cheney were joined by a grinning Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer -- was the vivid, wretched symbol of what, in 2008, became the fully bipartisan assault on America's basic constitutional guarantees and form of government.
-clip-
The fate of civil liberties in the judiciary was much more mixed, punctuated with several significant victories. Undoubtedly the most important win was the Supreme Court's June decision in the Boumediene case, which struck down as unconstitutional one of the worst constitutional assaults of the Bush era: Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act, which had purported to abolish habeas corpus for Guantánamo detainees and prohibited them from challenging their detention in a federal court.
-clip-
For the last seven years, Democrats have repeatedly cited GOP political dominance to excuse their wholesale failures to limit, let alone reverse, the devastating war waged by the Bush administration on America's core liberties and form of government. With a new Democratic president and large majorities in both Congressional houses, those excuses will no longer be so expedient. As dark and depressing as these last seven years have been for civil libertarians, culminating in an almost entirely grim 2008, there is no question that the Obama administration and the Democrats generally now possess the power to reverse these abuses and restore our national political values. But as the events of the last 12 months conclusively demonstrate, there are substantial questions as to whether they have the will to do so.
Speaking of Abramoff, this is just the merest snippet of great synopsis of the status of the possible comings-and-goings in complex investigation of that case. It may have fallen off the front page (hell, the former media magisteria barely noted it in the first place), but fortunately it appears that not all the law-breaking is going to be totally ignored:
For many the Jack Abramoff scandal is old news, ancient history and in the past. As the corrupt Bush Administration winds down many of his corrupt fellow travelers are hoping that the Abramoff scandal is dead and buried—and that their involvement will never bubble to the surface. These Corruptionists hope that the Abramoff scandal is over, but they are just whistling past the graveyard. As Faulkner said:
Quietly, the professionals at the Department of Justice have been working this massive scandal—that is complex by design—to build cases that move from the outer edges to the heart of political corruption in Washington DC. Abramoff is just a doorway in—not an endpoint—and prosecutors are zeroing in on some big fish in a corrupt stream.
The investigation was very active in 2008 and expanded its scope. More shoes are dropping. More details are being exposed. This is why the GOP fears the future, Obama and Eric Holder.
-clip-
Of course the sentient among us (hi you, so good to have you with us!) might find more than a little to quibble with, as I do, in that line about the pros at the DOJ. I.e., the D salted with sycophantic, incompetent, inexperienced, Federalist Society-sanctioned folks no longer burdened by the eight or nine DAs who wouldn't stick their head in a stinky spot on behalf of the non-president who-never-served, recruited from the local Hooters. I'm not going overboard with joy yet, but at least there is some indication that it is not just burial of the evidence going on.
And just offstage we have our closing act, the Nobel economist, ever ready to calmly ungreenspan things for us and otherwise tell it as it is (in this case you get the whole macaroon - no extra charge):
As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.
Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?
But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.
The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.
If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.
So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.
That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.
The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.
But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.
Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.
Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.
Good night, Chet. Good night, David.
I believe the Gerson person Digby is intent on here is the former Bush speechwriter who chose to act out a brief revelatory encounter with reality and resulting semi-transformation shortly after departing the administration a while back. I don't recall the specific form that kismet took, e.g., confessional articles/posts/blogs, but in hindsight it does seem to have been more in the playacting category rather than actual dialogue with conscience (assuming same exists):
I normally find Michael Gerson to be one of the most sanctimonious jackasses in the Republican Party and always loathed the smarmy speeches he wrote for Junior that made the villagers swoon in breathless delight. But I have to give credit where credit is due for this felicitous turn of phrase:
So far, Obama is attempting to be a unifying national figure -- in spite of his most insufferable supporters. "Indeed," explains Joe Klein of Time magazine, "as the weeks have passed since the election, I've felt -- as an urban creature myself -- less restricted, less defensive. Empowered, almost. Is it possible that, as a nation, we're shedding our childlike, rural innocence and becoming more mature, urban, urbane . . . dare I say it, sophisticated?"(I don't know why he wouldn't want a nympho on the honeymoon, actually, but this is Michael Gerson and he's very straightlaced so maybe he thinks too much pleasure is automatically a bad thing, I don't know. But it is an evocative phrase until you think too much about it.)
Indeed. Is it possible for a pundit to be more like a college freshman who has just discovered the pleasures of wine, co-ed dorms and Nietzsche -- shedding the primitivism of his parents and becoming, dare I say it, an annoying adolescent?
Obama does not need the service of nymphomaniacs on his honeymoon. In 2009, he will require sober supporters -- and loyal critics -- to get through challenges that will not yield to charm.
He should have listened to his own advice, however, because let's face it, stuff like this makes it a little bit difficult to take any Bush supporter's criticism of starry eyed, hero worship seriously:
Nothing since Reagan has been as good in presidential oratory. The president’s speech writers crafted a luminescent call to arms. It was measured without being weak; it was moving without a trace of melodrama; it was stirring without being jingoist. And there was something about the president’s demeanor that suggested to me at last that he knows why he got this office. To speak of his growth at this point would be to condescend. He gets it. He means it. He knows what this war is fundamentally about. My cherished moment was when he rightly described this threat - and its twisted ideology - with the other great evils that have threatened freedom in the last century and before. "The unmarked grave of discarded lies" is a phrase that resonates deeply and truly. God bless the man and the country he finally indisputably leads.
(This is the kind of puerile drivel that turns people into cynics.)
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I have to agree that there is a certain catchy quality or possibly even kitschy charm to the phrase "nymphomaniacs on the honeymoon." But this is clearly projection by Gerson. What has the last eight years been other than on MG's terms nymphomania and multitudinous other far-worse psychopathies engaged in by Gerson himself, the national press and major networks, and a horrifying number of the American public, many now perhaps stumbling desperately towards the end of that scary tunnel of their own making? Or, at least, like Gerson, looking for anything even vaguely resembling a fig leaf (at this point, given anxiety level, bay leaves, readily available at corner mart, might suffice) to avert attention from their concocted cacophony that resembles nothing less than the darkest aspects of Hieronymous Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. If you can't find clear images of w, dick, rummie, rice, addington, fredo, yoo, miers, ashcroft, at least four supreme court justices, abramoff and his personal axis-of-evil pack of lobbyists and slavery-promoters and Native American-corrupters and exploiters, and the whole rest of that pack of lying, sniveling scoundrel swine as well as the certain justice due them in this pic, I swear you must be either watching too much tv, toying with addictive substances, or disturbingly infatuated with someone in the Martha Stewart category. Old Hieronymus foresaw this whole pack of woebegotten narcissistic war-criminals way back in the 15th Century, and the vividness with which he captures the Cheney/Rove cabal puts Nostradamus to shame.
Filling in some of the details on these perps is Glenn Greenwald. This is, as usual for GG, a thorough-going slam-bang, meaning among other things that excerpting is both painful and potentially misleading. Since you obviously care about these things, I encourage you to pursue link and consider regular reading of GG:
Befitting an administration that has spent eight years obliterating America's core political values, its final year in power -- 2008 -- was yet another grim one for civil liberties and constitutional protections. Unlike the early years of the administration, when liberty-abridging policies were conceived of in secret and unilaterally implemented by the executive branch, many of the erosions of 2008 were the dirty work of the U.S. Congress, fueled by the passive fear or active complicity of the Democratic Party that controlled it. The one silver lining is that the last 12 months have been brightly clarifying: It is clearer than ever what the Obama administration can and must do in order to arrest and reverse the decade-long war on the Constitution waged by our own government.
The most intensely fought civil liberties battle of 2008 -- the one waged over FISA and telecom immunity -- ended the way most similar battles of the last eight years have: with total defeat for civil libertarians. Even before Democrats were handed control of Congress at the beginning of 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding legislation to legalize its illegal warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to retroactively immunize the telecom industry for its participation in those programs. Yet even with Bill Frist and Denny Hastert in control of the Congress, the administration couldn't get its way.
Not even the most cynical political observer would have believed that it was the ascension of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that would be the necessary catalyst for satisfying Bush's most audacious demands, concerning his most brazenly illegal actions. If anything, hopes were high that Democratic control of Congress would entail a legislative halt to warrantless eavesdropping or, at the very least, some meaningful investigation and disclosure -- what we once charmingly called "oversight" -- regarding what Bush's domestic spying had really entailed. After all, the NSA program was the purified embodiment of the most radical attributes of a radical regime -- pure lawlessness, absolute secrecy, a Stasi-like fixation on domestic surveillance. It was widely assumed, even among embittered cynics, that the new Democratic leadership in Congress would not use their newfound control to protect and endorse these abuses.
Yet in July 2008, there stood Pelosi and Reid, leading their caucuses as they stamped their imprimatur of approval on Bush's spying programs. The so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed with virtually unanimous GOP and substantial Democratic support, including the entire top level of the House Democratic leadership. It legalized vast new categories of warrantless eavesdropping and endowed telecoms with full immunity for prior surveillance lawbreaking. Most important, it ensured a permanent and harmless end to what appeared to be the devastating scandal that exploded in 2005 when the New York Times revealed to the country that the Bush administration was spying on Americans illegally, without warrants of any kind.
-clip-
Adding the final insult to this constitutional injury, Barack Obama infamously violated his emphatic pledge, made during the Democratic primary, to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity. With the Democratic nomination fully secured, Obama blithely tossed that commitment aside, instead joining his party's leadership in voting for cloture on the bill -- the opposite of a filibuster -- and then in favor of the bill itself. The photographs of the celebratory, bipartisan signing ceremony that followed at the White House -- where an understandably jubilant George Bush and Dick Cheney were joined by a grinning Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer -- was the vivid, wretched symbol of what, in 2008, became the fully bipartisan assault on America's basic constitutional guarantees and form of government.
-clip-
The fate of civil liberties in the judiciary was much more mixed, punctuated with several significant victories. Undoubtedly the most important win was the Supreme Court's June decision in the Boumediene case, which struck down as unconstitutional one of the worst constitutional assaults of the Bush era: Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act, which had purported to abolish habeas corpus for Guantánamo detainees and prohibited them from challenging their detention in a federal court.
-clip-
For the last seven years, Democrats have repeatedly cited GOP political dominance to excuse their wholesale failures to limit, let alone reverse, the devastating war waged by the Bush administration on America's core liberties and form of government. With a new Democratic president and large majorities in both Congressional houses, those excuses will no longer be so expedient. As dark and depressing as these last seven years have been for civil libertarians, culminating in an almost entirely grim 2008, there is no question that the Obama administration and the Democrats generally now possess the power to reverse these abuses and restore our national political values. But as the events of the last 12 months conclusively demonstrate, there are substantial questions as to whether they have the will to do so.
Speaking of Abramoff, this is just the merest snippet of great synopsis of the status of the possible comings-and-goings in complex investigation of that case. It may have fallen off the front page (hell, the former media magisteria barely noted it in the first place), but fortunately it appears that not all the law-breaking is going to be totally ignored:
For many the Jack Abramoff scandal is old news, ancient history and in the past. As the corrupt Bush Administration winds down many of his corrupt fellow travelers are hoping that the Abramoff scandal is dead and buried—and that their involvement will never bubble to the surface. These Corruptionists hope that the Abramoff scandal is over, but they are just whistling past the graveyard. As Faulkner said:
"The past is never dead. It’s not even past."
Quietly, the professionals at the Department of Justice have been working this massive scandal—that is complex by design—to build cases that move from the outer edges to the heart of political corruption in Washington DC. Abramoff is just a doorway in—not an endpoint—and prosecutors are zeroing in on some big fish in a corrupt stream.
The investigation was very active in 2008 and expanded its scope. More shoes are dropping. More details are being exposed. This is why the GOP fears the future, Obama and Eric Holder.
-clip-
Of course the sentient among us (hi you, so good to have you with us!) might find more than a little to quibble with, as I do, in that line about the pros at the DOJ. I.e., the D salted with sycophantic, incompetent, inexperienced, Federalist Society-sanctioned folks no longer burdened by the eight or nine DAs who wouldn't stick their head in a stinky spot on behalf of the non-president who-never-served, recruited from the local Hooters. I'm not going overboard with joy yet, but at least there is some indication that it is not just burial of the evidence going on.
And just offstage we have our closing act, the Nobel economist, ever ready to calmly ungreenspan things for us and otherwise tell it as it is (in this case you get the whole macaroon - no extra charge):
As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.
Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?
But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.
The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.
If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.
So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.
That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.
The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.
But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.
Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.
Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.
Good night, Chet. Good night, David.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:15 PM
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