Comrades!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l46t_nrySg4

We have abandoned … respect for our political opponents

sometime after 10:18 p.m.

Bashing someone for being an idiot hurt your feelings, asshole?

It must be tomorrow already.

Anyway, I never said you called anyone a traitor. I reread my post and think I worded it correctly. I trust you occasionally watched tv or listened to the radio once in a while? Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t part of the reason for your post about the political discourse that has allowed words like this to be thrown around like candy?

Your original post was brilliant. I will leave it at that.

Yours,
“Sonny”

We have been careless and stupid in choosing our leaders. We have been lax in holding them accountable. We have not paid attention to what they were doing – here or abroad – and we have failed to demand that the government lift the veil of secrecy on too many enterprises. We have failed to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. We have failed to take responsibility for our own mistakes. We have abandoned self reliance, family and community values, respect for our political opponents, and the American idea that neighbor helping neighbor is far preferable to asking government to do it for us.

I wish I could believe your sincerity. I do believe your words. They are exactly right. I wish more people understood this.

Tomorrow is another day, however and politics is now what it has become. People will bash opponents in government and on this blog for being idiots, traitors or worse. Once trust (or at least rapport) is breached, it is lost. Who is to blame? In the end it becomes irrelevant and the results disasterous.

Bashing someone for being an idiot hurt your feelings, asshole? Calling me a liar is not the way to win friends and influence people on this site, sonny. The difference between calling someone like you an idiot and calling them a traitor is several orders of magnitude. I do not call liberals traitors on this site - or unpatriotic. In fact, I have defended the patriotism of the left and tried to explain it (it is vastly different than the patriotism on the right as many have pointed out).

The left’s problem - as Obama demonstrates on a regular basis - is that any criticism at all cannot be tolerated. It is to be shouted down, or intimidated, or dismissed as “racist” or fascist or some other ridiculous notion. I will happily, gleefully, continue to call liberals - and conservatives - who deserve it idiots, boobs, nincompoops, and any other name that fits. To equate that with questioning your patriotism is bizarre and reveals something of a guilty conscience, methinks.

ed.

It’s been awhile since I’ve taken a day to look through my entire blogroll, seing what all my friends are up to, but that’s what I’m doing for the 90 minutes or so. I will update this with links to……

I think what needs to happen is that America needs to intermingle again. Soon everyone of us will be brothers and sisters in misery. 9/11 was a dramatic shattering of that illusion of security and faith, but it was quickly rebuilt for the Iraq War, as almost everyone was swept up in the excitement of fighting a just, moral war against a deserving enemy. But so much of it was political theater as Bush and many, many Democrats in Congress told us to eat all the bread and watch all the circuses we wanted while many fine young men and women were cut down randomly and haphazardly.

I think this economic crisis will wake America up.

A cynic is someone who believes that all people are motivated by selfishness. What part of my post do you regard as cynical? The fight between Hamilton and Jefferson-Madison is a fight to embrace–not shun because it’s combative. I mean for Pete’s sake, would we be better off if Hamilton sat back and said “you know, were both wrong…let’s talk about those things on which we agree!”

You say we have lost [something?] handed down to us, which we should preserve as if it were a relic of the Catholic Church “lovingly preserved and cared for by parishioners of all time.” As a student of early Christian history, I’ve learned that we have something called the Nicene Creed preserved for over 1600 years because fights and disunity within the church were brought to a point of crisis. Those fights resulted in an understanding that we did not have before that crisis. What we call orthodoxy was born out of heresy, and it resulted in a great understanding for the faithful.

This is cynicism?

My point is that there is no umbrella faith (and I hate using this word since faith is an inept word for the mundane) for which we should embrace all those who came before us. This country has always been in a fight with itself, and THAT, more than a big group hug is what made us great.

Sheesh…and I thought I was a cynic.

ed.