I've actually been rather looking forward to today.
Not so much because I've been running low on wispy promises of hope. I do have plenty of that lying around as it is. But more because I have for a few weeks sensed that George Bush was done, that he had done all he could do, and that frankly as he sought to leave town with his head held as high as the last eight years of partisan whippings would allow, he wanted to be done as well.
And who could blame him? We live in tumultuous times and his has been a momentous presidency. There remains ample time for post-mortem analysis of the last eight years; in summary let's say for now that on the two biggest issues he faced--war and the fundamental role of government in a free society--he gets a passing grade on one, no matter the howls of the moveon.org jackals.
Apparently the least sensible 51% of our nation's electorate deplore George Bush, everything he has done or hasn't done, and everyone who has voted for him. Since leftists have no manners--is it still impolite to discuss politics or religion in mixed company, or does that only apply to conservatives?--one feels bombarded by the noise, the shouts of treason! lies!, the contentious acrimony of our political landscape, everywhere one goes. It's tiresome enough that like an exasperated parent, I'm willing to give the tyrant child their way just so as to have a bit of peace. And because Republicans tend to be older and less petulant than the Youth Movement, not to mention better employed, there tends to be far less preposterous and unhinged braying from the opposition party when the donkeys are in power. So the donkeys' collectively grotesque overreaction to the last eight years is about to be improperly rewarded by catapulting them to power with a relatively compliant--at least lucid--opposition party.
I have managed to remain neither impressed nor horrified by the new president's transition to power since the election, the neutrality of which sentiment I suppose is far superior to the likeliest alternative. I have heard a few pronouncements from our handsome new ruler that acknowledge the difficulty of real decisions made by grownups with real responsibility--buckling on closing Guantanamo comes to mind as merely the most obvious--which one might regard as a good thing in fair comparison to the juvenile and duplicitous (but deliciously persuasive) assurances he offered during the campaign that there Are No Hard Choices. My reassurance at hearing his modestly more responsible post-election remarks was tempered by my parental instinct to punish the child who lies and certainly not to reward such bad behavior, which after all only encourages its repetition. The last thing we should do is collectively encourage our political betters to lie to us with the assurance that it lies which are sufficiently comely will not be closely examined, yet here we are.
I think, as we embark upon what may be a long period of leftist ascendancy, that this analogy of the petulant and ill-disciplined child neatly encapsulates my thinking on the matter. Leftists today are, to a great extent, leftists because they lack the courage to make hard choices. They have used their ferociously superior intellectual prowess to convince themselves that the path of least resistance always coincides with the path of virtue--which is convenient enough to discover, once you've stipulated that the only path you'll consider is the path of least resistance. There's a childlike naivete to the whole thing which would be charming if it weren't so pernicious. I don't mean the courage to speak truth to power by writing snotty letters to the editor of the New York Times about how the teh Evil Chimpy McBushHitler has shredded the bill of rights (or at least the portions thereof receiving of leftist approbation).
Why is it the leftists are never the ones willing to stand up for our nation's heritage if that might offend some foreigner? Or support any war, over any principle, without pusillanimous cries that War is Never the Answer? If you can't think of any principle that would be worth fighting a war over, it's a sad little existence you have on your little planet. The idea of owning a gun to defend yourself? Deploying Pershing missiles in Germany to stare down the Soviets? Developing missile defense systems? (The word "defense" is right there in the phrase itself! Yet this is aggressive warmongering.)
Taking responsibility for the consequences of your own actions and bad decisions? How about acknowledging that the government can't actually tax and spend our way to national prosperity and that one must learn to compete in a scary world where--shudder--one might not succeed.
Why was it sexy in the 1980s and 1990s to wear Free Tibet t-shirts and flaunt the cynical and undemocratic realpolitik which supposedly prized stability over democracy and human rights, but when faced with an actual opportunity to remove an actual real-life brutal dictator from power, leftists immediately shat out Quagmire! No Blood for Oil! I suspect that the moment supporting freedom and human rights against dictators and all that stopped being sexy was when George Bush had the stones to actually do it, as the least worst option available, and the inconvenient and damnable unpleasantness of actually fighting for a principle instead of simply waxing philosophic about it promptly made it too much for the infantile Left to bear.
No, it's pretty obvious that any political position requiring a little steel in the spine will likely be exactly the opposite of what the donkey wants. My biggest hope for our new benevolent ruler is that his ambition to succeed tempers his ideological predisposition to genuflect before Nancy Pelosi and Ron Gettelfinger and the Sierra Club. If it does, there is a hope that only some, and not necessarily the worst, of our fears will be realized.
