Goodbye to All That

Andrew sullivan is a Reagan conservative who has been moving towards the democratic side - he crossed to the dark side- hehehehe. Anyway, he endorsed barack Obama in the Atlantic. the Article is a powerful social commentary about the problems of our country and how he thinks we got to the non violent civil war (his words) we are experiencing now in the country.
Whether or not you support Obama is not the point. and if you don't like Obama, skip over the parts that are about him. I just urge you to read the article and think.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama/2

The professionalization of the battle, and the emergence of an array of well-funded interest groups dedicated to continuing it, can be traced most proximately to the bitter confirmation fights over Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, in 1987 and 1991 respectively. The presidency of Bill Clinton, who was elected with only 43 percent of the vote in 1992, crystallized the new reality. As soon as the Baby Boomers hit the commanding heights, the Vietnam power struggle rebooted. The facts mattered little in the face of such a divide. While Clinton was substantively a moderate conservative in policy, his countercultural origins led to the drama, ultimately, of religious warfare and even impeachment. Clinton clearly tried to bridge the Boomer split. But he was trapped on one side of it—and his personal foibles only reignited his generation’s agonies over sex and love and marriage. Even the failed impeachment didn’t bring the two sides to their senses, and the election of 2000 only made matters worse: Gore and Bush were almost designed to reflect the Boomers’ and the country’s divide, which deepened further.

The trauma of 9/11 has tended to obscure the memory of that unprecedentedly bitter election, and its nail- biting aftermath, which verged on a constitutional crisis. But its legacy is very much still with us, made far worse by President Bush’s approach to dealing with it. Despite losing the popular vote, Bush governed as if he had won Reagan’s 49 states. Instead of cementing a coalition of the center-right, Bush and Rove set out to ensure that the new evangelical base of the Republicans would turn out more reliably in 2004. Instead of seeing the post-’60s divide as a wound to be healed, they poured acid on it.

With 9/11, Bush had a reset moment—a chance to reunite the country in a way that would marginalize the extreme haters on both sides and forge a national consensus. He chose not to do so. It wasn’t entirely his fault. On the left, the truest believers were unprepared to give the president the benefit of any doubt in the wake of the 2000 election, and they even judged the 9/11 attacks to be a legitimate response to decades of U.S. foreign policy. Some could not support the war in Afghanistan, let alone the adventure in Iraq. As the Iraq War faltered, the polarization intensified. In 2004, the Vietnam argument returned with a new energy, with the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry’s Vietnam War record and CBS’s misbegotten report on Bush’s record in the Texas Air National Guard. These were the stories that touched the collective nerve of the political classes—because they parsed once again along the fault lines of the Boomer divide that had come to define all of us.

The way Obama flip flops he's bound to endorse McCain any day now...

Nice of you to promote McCain for president on a Democratic forum!:eyes:

"What the Catholic Church 'really' thinks"--if only it weren't for those interfering men in dresses running things!

It only took him, what--four years or so--to get off the Bush Is God train?

That's a problematic endorsement for BO, I think---kinda in the "Don't do me any favors" region....

Sullivan can turn on a dime, too, when he feels slighted. And he'll beat that slight like a rented mule.

rant about how Bush had betrayed the American people -it was very powerful.

I always learn something from him - and always am exposed to a different view of a situation, whether I agree with him or not.

Thanks for posting this.