Centerfield

Baloney To Give Us All Heart That Those Mean Republicans Are Going Away

Here's a widely-blogged New Yorker story that touches four of my hot buttons, even though I'm a leftie.

The biggest annoyance is people coming up with excuses to think thinking, oh, those annoying OTHER people (Conservatives, Liberals, French, religious, whatever), are doomed and will go away any day now. Especially when they've failed to vanish in a cloud of logic for hundreds or even thousands of years.

The second use is the overuse of the term "movement." I don't think the word means what they think it does. Feminism was a movement. Ending slavery was a movement. The various kinds of organizations that want you to stop having that annoying fun stuff are movements. Conservative and liberal politics aren't movements. They're part of all healthy democracies, past, present, and future. No, I don't care if Buckley or the New (really??) Left movement used the word, either. They were just as wrong as those who wrote this article.

There is a reality behind this, of political coalitions, as organized by different officeholders, and changing (usually shrinking), the longer the particular pol's in office. It's utterly normal for people to be tired of second-term Presidents, and for their brand and coalitions to be suffering. It gets even worse when the president in question is avoiding accountability. But there's nothing permanent about it. If Obama wins twice and gets eight years, we'll be tired of him, too, and the GOP will have the advantage. Although I doubt he'll be quite as amazingly corrupt as Bush II, so it won't be as bad as it is today for the GOP.

Another annoyances are how journalists have a way of coming up with theories that sell newspapers rather than likely ones. The final one is headlines. "The Fall of Conservatism: Have the Republicans run out of ideas?" Er, yeah, whatever, man. "But I've got papers to sell!"