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| the President's offending 'holiday' greeting. mostly the GOP yawned. |
Two days ago MoveOn.org put up
a post about the Republican reaction to the 2011 White House Christmas card.
The headline read, 'Republicans
Are Furious About Obama's Christmas Card? Wait Till They See
Reagan's'. Those who thought to comment were mostly incensed that
conservative pundits, GOP luminaries, and Tea Party Hacks were so
petty that they would actually be furious about something as
innocuous as a greeting card. What seemed to escape many of those
commenting is the irony of being themselves so petty that they would
get incensed over something that didn't really happen.
According to the article the
only Republican who expressed any reservations about the card was
Sarah Palin. She made her comments on Fox Radio. What she said was
that she found it 'odd' that the President's Christmas card would
highlight the family dog rather than traditional Christmas
values like 'family, faith, and freedom'. Palin was clearly not
furious. She was not even very judgmental...at least not compared to
her usual standards. MoveOn's headline, in other words, was inflammatory,
divisive, and untrue—the very charges that so many leveled against
the GOP leadership, who apparently remain blissfully unaware that
they are embroiled in a flap.
Personally I don't think that
Christmas is a very good time to be sowing the seeds of hate and
recrimination. I know that both sides do it, but the fact is that
there are a lot of Democrats who think that only Republicans are
capable of this kind of duplicity. Clearly this is not the case, and
clearly many liberal believers are ready to be seduced into making
the same kinds of unthinking blanket indictments of which they accuse
the conservatives. I'm not letting conservatives off the hook here.
They are not only just as guilty of this kind of flimflammery, they
practically invented it.
Wouldn't it be great if we
could get back to actually discussing real issues with logic and
civility? Wouldn't it be useful if politicians and hacks would lay
out their positions so that we voters could make informed decisions
from a substantive array of facts? Wouldn't it be interesting if the
media would delve into the meat of differing political positions
instead of focusing on who changed their mind about what or who had a
bad hair day or who left Jesus off their Christmas card? Wouldn't it
be a 'Wonderful Life', if politics could actually make a difference?
That's what I want from Santa—a
great big bag of political relevance. We could all use a little. Even a little would be a sea change...but oh, so welcome.
2 comments:
I probably should have said a little about MoveOn.Org. For those who are not familiar, they are a progressive (liberal) political advocacy group and political action committee (PAC). I actually agree with many of their policy stances, but they have many other positions that I do not agree with. I am also uncomfortable with much of their published calls to action because they impart a lot of unnecessary top-spin to the things they say that make it really difficult to trust where they are coming from. I'm not saying they are bad people. Much of what they do is mirrored by conservative advocacy groups, and certainly a lot of spin is the nature of the beast. I just think that all the ideological semantics of recent politics has not served us very well as a nation. We need a return to rational civility and truthfulness. We're not getting it from either side.
Good post, I actually liked the Obama's card this year, and the fact that Sarah Palin disliked it just adds to that for me... why are we giving her any attention at all?
The card is warm and fuzzy as it should be... what's wrong with that?
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