When I was a kid in the 70s, my folks read
The New Republic regularly. It was a great magazine offering a thoughtful, progressive analysis of the whys behind all the great policy questions of the day. The magazine then taught me to look beyond the arguments that politicians throw out and think about the practical consequences of how a social or governmental program will affect people's lives and opportunities.
Today,
TNR is less than a shadow of its former self. From idolizing Joe Lieberman to mimicking right wing smearing points against traditional liberals (we're naive and batty and wear tie-dyed shirts and hate Jews and blah, blah, blah) to rationalizing their rah-rah support for Mr Bush's adventure in Iraq (it's the right thing to do; Bush just managed it poorly), the shrinking circulation numbers of
TNR attest to why a once vital forum for political ideas is now utterly irrelevent to the public debate. I disagree with close to every single sentence uttered on Fox News, but at least they matter.
TNR seems determined to show that they don't.
Case in point is
TNR blogger Jonathan Chait's latest entry about Mitt Romney, taking former
TNR staffer and fellow Iraq War dupe
Josh Marshall to task for
just not trusting Romney that much.
Josh Marshall has a take on the GOP field that, atypically, I find to be the complete opposite of mine. He writes, first, that the current field looks "feeble, dispirited and generally languid."
Really? Two of the leading candidates, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, do far better than a generic Republican in trial heats. While polls show that the public strongly prefers a Democratic president in 2008, those two consistently hold their own. That's the definition of a strong candidate, to me.
Aha! The crowds love 'em! They must be good. That, by the way, is the definition of strong candidate if by "strong" you mean
can win rather than
can do the job without getting several thousand more Americans needlessly killed or even
has the backbone to tell the fundy hardcases their love of Bush and his wars are based on delusions.
But wait, Mr Chait isn't finished removing himself from the intelligencia yet (emphasis added)....
Next Josh writes about his strong aversion to Mitt Romney. He writes of Romney's phoniness and "the terror of a Romney presidency." To me, Romney's phoniness is exactly why I'm not terrified of the prospect of him as president. I see him as a competent, moderate-minded manager who has decided his only chance of being elected is to masquerade as a whacko.
And Josh details his visceral aversion to Romney, "I feel it to an extent with Bush, though nothing like I do with Romney." Wow, hating Romney more than Bush? There are plenty of people I hate more than Bush, but most of them are mass murders. Romney certainly doesn't qualify.
See, quite unlike 2000, this time the well marketed, corporate approved GOP candidate who's mugging for the fundamentalist base can be entirely trusted to ignore his base once elected and only do sane things as president. After all, unlike 2000 also, this time the Republican who governed his state as a moderate really really will govern the country as a moderate. Really. Why? Well, can't you just feel it in your bones? This one this time is really different. Really.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
